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If you ever want to see just how far down the rabbit hole Media Imprints go, you need to hear about the Harry Potter mania here in Korea.

I may be overexaggerating with the word "mania": mania implies wild-eyed merchandise looting and fierce broomstick battles between elderly gentlemen for the last cinema ticket. Mania is babies with witch hats. And I haven't really seen anything like that. In Korea, it's more along the lines of a docile but rabid consumption of what the citizenry is convinced is the hottest Western media property known to man. Hah-ruh-ee Pot-tuh!

The movie broke about a month ago (yes, yes, the release dates of pig-dog American yango movies here are way behind your privileged schedule). I'm still hearing about it. I've been hearing about it for weeks. The last kids at school are crossing the finish line now, and it's still: "Teacher, teacher! I see the Pot-tuh!" And then the other kids chime in: "Teacher, teacher, I see the Hah-ruh-ee Pot-tuh THREE TIME!" I have lost the ability to do long division because my brain has had to make room for all these valuable 'How Many Times Has Each Child Seen Harry Potter?!?!' statistics.

We have several classes eagerly devouring Harry Potter books as part of their English lessons, and a movie class that recently watched - you guessed it - Freaky Friday. Man that's a quality flick. But the next movie they watched was Harry Potter & the Chamber of Secrets due to popular demand.

Sometimes the parents will write to me to assure me that they, too, have seen Harry Potter. This confuses me. Are they asking for my blessing? Am I supposed to give them a big shit-eating thumbs up for their obedience? Am I an acting emissary for Western Media, making a list and checking it twice to ensure every Korean has fallen under Potter's spell? Usually I just assume that must be the case and send their kid home with a construction-paper certificate I drafted up in Photoshop, assuring Mrs. Kim or Mrs. Park that their Harry Potter obligations to the J. K. Rowling MegaCorp have been fulfilled, and that an Official Harry Potter Fan Club Forehead Tattoo Kit will be in the mail shortly. 6-8 weeks.

I don't know about back home, but the Harry Potter movie posters here are quite hilarious. Most of them feature Harry and those other wizard guys sitting around in drab clothing, looking morose and for all the world like a teenaged goth-core band. Harry is growing up, they seem to say, and now it's time for some fucking angst! The darkness in his roiling, tormented heart can only be expressed through a poem about flying his broomstick into Cho Chang's eye, and then she shatters into a thousand pieces of glass and the Hogwarts towers will fall out of the sky but magic will hold us together, baby, because without magic what's left to live for in this world of technotronic madness?

So yeah, I saw the movie too. It was pretty okay, and none of the Koreans in the theaters laughed at the funny parts, like "they only drink single-malt whiskey" and something about pumpkin juice. Fuck, it was a while ago, I really don't remember.

But I watched the subtitles, jammed vertically against the right side of the screen, and I wondered whether the Koreans were really watching the same movie as we were. I wondered where the lines of translation divide an audience. I thought about all the Korean movies I've seen with English subtitles and whether I was really watching the same movie that the writer intended, because I'm not equipped with the knowledge of social and cultural conventions to really understand what I'm seeing. I don't have the language abilities to pick up on subtle jokes or emotion in dialogue - all I read is "I am love to you!" on the bottom of the screen.

However, there are still universal constants. I find it hard to believe that Ron's tuxedo... ruffle... thing for the Magical Wizard's Magic Ball of Magic could appear anything but stupid in any society. We laughed in unison, the Koreans and the whiteys, and it was nice to see that something can transcend language every once in a while.

Ha-ruh-ee Pot-tuh, building a uniform world through sight gags.

Posted by Chris at 10:11 PM >> Commentations (1)