Harry Potter

Originally posted on my old blog, Get Up Eight, which died when I didn't renew the domain. Reposting entries I enjoyed.
 
Last night I went to the last ever midnight premier for a Harry Potter movie. It was what I’d come to expect from these experiences – long lines of people waiting to get in, chatting about our excitement with new faces who’d be our new best friends for the brief hours where we wait, rushes to get the best seat, then more waiting. Invariably, people will be decked out in full costume. A Mad Eye Moody will try to get the whole theater to do the wave, which we will and the closer we get, someone will start calling out the minutes left until it starts to which everyone else will cheer.

There’s a lot of pent up energy. This time, more than usual because we all have a sense that this is the final time we’ll be in a group like this, sharing our love for a group of people that we’ve come to know as family and a story we’ve come to feel as our own.

It’s never a quiet group, but I have to say that last night’s premier was different. Instead of a din throughout the whole movie, it was as if the whole crowd acted as a single entity. We all laughed at the same moments, cheered at the same moments, clapped at the same moments, and cried together at the same moments.

This is the world and the culture JK Rowling created. We knew what was going to happen. We read every word that was written. We’d already seen Snape’s true colors and discovered what Harry didn’t know about his fate. And yet? We sat there in dead silence while Harry watched Snape’s memories and made his way out to the forbidden forest, resolved to do what we already had accepted that he must. The only sound in the crowd of hundreds was that of muffled sighs and sniffling from everyone, male and female, young and old.

I’m truly sad that this whole experience, the books and now their movie adaptations, are over, and as we all shuffled off to our cars at 2:30am this morning I couldn’t help but feel overwhelmed with a gratitude at being able to be a part of it at all.

I came to know this world later than a lot of people did. I was too cool to read books about witches and wizards when they first starting coming out. It was baby stuff and I rolled my eyes at it, truth be told. But when I finally gave in and got sucked into this world, things changed. It was vast, complex and compelling. There were no black and white personalities – people were good AND bad; they were heroes and villains at the same time; they second-guessed themselves and they made mistakes – some terrible – in their histories. They were human, flawed, and perfect. And I’m going to miss every one of them.