HARRY POTTER AND THE DEATHLY HALLOWS (PART 1)

Matt Longabucco

"I'll take a small popcorn." "Would you like to make that a medium for just fifty cents more?" The origin of surplus--which is to say, jouissance--is bound up in this extortion, the way that what threatens to disappear is exactly what cannot be refused. As the poet said, nature is a language, can't you read? The world wants hearing in the ear of you, it winks your eye. Don't you agree that to call an orgasm a "little death" only perpetuates the fiction of its singularity, and thus simple exchangeability in the marketplace of satisfactions? As if it doesn't have parts: the spotting of it, like seeing a man on horseback from miles off, the presentiment, like the one that signals a flock of birds to all take flight at once, the clarion-call of inevitability, the point of no return, like boarding the subway with a half-eaten apple, the rearing-up, like Secretariat, the flex, the break, like a cable snapping free of a tentpole in a gale, the rolling palpitation, like a python swallowing a pig, but speeded-up and in reverse, the final tugging loose, the ontological crisis typified by that question of questions, "Did you come?", the primal grasp typified by that childish gesture of looking for just a little bit more jelly at the bottom of the jar, and a rush of thought returning like a dam breaking upon an unsuspecting town an hour after lunchtime. Thought replacing the grunts, as endearments will replace the thought. What's that neat spell she does? "Obliviate."

I read somewhere that this popular media platform for children was dreamt up by a homeless English lady. People in the audience are dressed in costumes and talking a bunch, as are the people on the screen, which is disconcerting as the film itself is disconcerting, meaning it has an avant-garde quality, meaning I have no idea what the fuck is going on. But I've never been more moved, both by and through the awesome. At the same time, it's basically another internet fable: there's a world inside this one, right, where one makes things happen by incanting words, where newspapers boast videos instead of photos, where teenagers learn to use their "wands" or "bottomless purses." And where, isn't it true, one fights with slithering death by testing one's own tolerance for impermanence, for the part of life (all of it) that can be neither held nor even sniffed. Death's avatar has no nose but a snout. I wonder who The Quibbler has published? That Luna Lovegood is something else. And how have the principals fared? Radcliffe's gone ratty, Grint broad, Watson hard. Why oh why must England age? Helena Bonham Carter, remember Room With a View, when he makes that question mark out of the leftover veg on his plate and tilts it up for her to spy?