Tag Archives: Harry Potter

Ron Weasley plays great chess, better than Voldemort.

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Every now and again a book or movie includes a chess game. Generally, it’s in a story where death is on the line. It’s a literary device used to indicate high mental acumen of the people involved, particularly the one who wins. As an example, in “Sherlock Holmes, A Game of Shadows”, 2011, Holmes plays Moriarty, each calling out moves far advanced for the 1800s. It emphasizes these individuals’ super-smarts. Holmes wins at the end, of course. The Ingrid Berman film, “The Seventh Seal” is similar, with the chess game played against death himself. The knight shows himself a more-than-worth opponent. And that brings us to Ron Weasley in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, book 1 of the series, and movie, Ron Weasley is presented as a sort-of fool throughout the series. He’s mostly as source of background information about wizarding, but in one episode standout, he plays brilliantly with giant-size chess men against a magical intelligence, and wins. After the game, one that is described as one of the best ever, Ron goes back to being the goof-ball he was throughout. His chess skills don’t come up again, or do they. It’s a well written series, so what’s the point of including the game?

Position of pieces in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s stone (movie).

To see how brilliant Ron’s play is, recall that Ron is eleven years old in book 1. He, Harry, and Hermione enter a mysterious room filled with menacing statues. Ron immediately realizes it’s a chess board, and infers that they must win as black to pass through. He further infers that the piece representing Harry must make the checkmate. Two or three pieces are missing, and Ron infers that Harry’s character must replace one of these and become the mating piece. If you’ve ever played a decent computer, you know it’s very hard to win as white (in the 90s you could still win). This ghost intelligence plays quite well, and it’s almost impossible to win if you need to have a particular minor piece make the mate. In the movie, Ron plays as black and reaches the position shown with Harry as the king’s bishop and Hermione as a rook. He is down in material, but has laid a very good trap. The white queen captures the “free pawn” on d3, violently threatening the Harry-bishop. Ron interposes the rook to c3 forcing the white queen to take the rook. At this point, Ron could win by B-c5+, QxB, N-h3 mate, but that would sacrifice Harry and leave Ron as the winning piece. Both Ron and Hermione realize this, and Ron causes Harry to make the checkmate by N-h3+, QxN, B-c5+, Q-f3, BxQ mate. Ron is injured when QxN — a sacrifice in both senses of the word.

Death plays chess, painting by Albertus Pictor, 1480

It’s an impressive display of chess skill, and Dumbledore is right in saying it’s one of the best games. No normal player could manage a game like that, certainly no eleven year old. Normally such a display would be used to present Ron as the group brain, or at least as a very deep thinker. If so, why does the author have Ron revert to his care-free, stupid persona with chess never showing up.

We see that Voldemort, the arch villain, won his game too, and only lost a few pieces doing it. That Voldemort is good at chess is no surprise; it goes with his deep-thinking persona. We don’t see Voldemort’s game, but I can infer that he won via the Trailer gambit. It’s a fairly tricky win, but the only way that I know where you win as black losing only a kings bishop, a rook, and a knight, the pieces that Ron and his friends replaced. The Queen is the winning piece, though, and that’s a lot simpler than winning with a bishop. Ron’s win is far more sophisticated, a surprise given Ron’s behavior and how he is treated.

Perhaps it’s just bad writing, or an effort to show Ron is good at something, but I thought to do a quick re-read of Ron’s early appearance in book 2. Here I find that Ron is bright and motivated, but overshadowed. Early in the book, we find 12 year old Ron picking a lock using a hat pin, and driving a flying car reasonably well. We don’t think this is exceptional because his brothers do all this first, but it is exceptional: imagine tryin to drive a regular car with no instruction at 12. Later we find that Ron learns the fine points of Quidditch without native skill or a coach, just using a book, and we find that Dumbledore picks him to prefect, instead of Harry, a job he does well. Finally, we find that Hermione prefers Ron to Harry. It’s a somewhat surprising turn because she’s supposed to be the brains of the trio. How could she stand to be with Ron? Perhaps she is one of the few people who sees that Ron is bright. Dumbledore is too.

Viewed this way, the chess game becomes the first of the examples of Ron’s brainpower, and becomes an important foreshadowing to a surprise at the end of the last book/movie, to the final battle against Voldemort. In that battle, while everyone else is throwing hexes, Ron is the one who realizes that, to win the war, he must go to the basement chamber and collect basilisk teeth. It’s chess thinking: he’s focused on the king, on Voldemort, while everyone else is dealing with side threats. In a sense, it’s Ron who defeats Voldemort. The chess game is a foreshadowing, and fits with Hermione’s choice of Ron over Harry.

Robert Buxbaum, August 26, 2022. If you like chess puzzles, find some here. And in “Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey,” 1991, the brilliance idea is sort-of reversed. Bill and Ted play against death in battleship, twister, and clue, and win. It’s used to show that death is sort of random, and sort of stupid.

Dark Academia, the new mood.

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Old libraries and old books play a big part in the aesthetic.

For years academia the movie version of academia was trees and deep intellectual discussions. It was the bright city on the hill, the happy paradise where the young and talented bloom to greatness (after first convincing their well-meaning, buddy-duddy teachers), or where the oppressed middle-ager goes returns to, to complete their journey of self -discovery. But there is a new mood in town, one where academia is a darker, more dangerous place, both for the body and for the soul. The last few years have seen movies and books that follow a talented person without any particular view or direction. The person arrives, looking to make friends or looking to become special. This literature of “Dark Academia”, the students end up damaged or killed, and the friendships they get are fairly sinister, and often exploitive.

An early dark academia movie was Hitchcock’s “Rope,” based on the Leopold Loeb case of the 1920s. Several students get excited by ideas of Nietzsche and kill one of their fellows because they feel special, and come to decide that he isn’t, quite. Another early version was Frankenstein, a book whose early chapters are filled with imagery of crazed collegians pushing the limits in a dark laboratory and library settings. Still, in these earlier versions, the crushing pressure was from inside the student, not so much from ill intent of the the institution, the faculty, or the classmates, and there is no discussion of drugs, sex, architecture, or fashion.

Harry Potter and friends in dark academic garb. Casual, clean, active, hip-academic.

The modern versions begin, in my opinion, with Harry Potter, the books and the movies. From the beginning, the main character finds that the school itself is both helpful and hurtful. The building tries to trip you, but provides slave labor, several professors are sadists, and a few turn out to be murderers or “death eaters.” There are friends too, and fire-whiskey, or butter-beer, and an intense desire to excel at ones craft, in this case magic. Harry Potter’s round glasses and the school neckties became classics too, but Potter is still pretty chaste where sex is concerned.

In the most recent examples alcohol and sex play a more central role, along with murder and clothes. A popular book, “The Secret History” by Donna Tartt has a cultish professor, named morrow, and students who dress in tweeds, for the most part. All of them wear round glasses, like Harry Potter’s, but in this case with metal rims. All are rich. As in rope, they conspire to murder the least special of the group in the goal of understanding the ancient Greeks. Unlike in Rope, they get away with it.

Another recent example is “Kill your darlings”. It takes place in Columbia University in 1943-46 and stars Daniel Radcliffe who played Harry Potter of the movies. He plays the young Alan Ginsberg. He enters school not quite knowing what sort of poetry he’d like to write, or if he’ll write poetry. In the movie, as in real life, he meets Jack Kerouac, William Burrows and a few others who introduce him into gay sex, wanton destruction Benzedrine and Heroin (no bad effects). He tries suicide and one of his group goes on to murder another — the one who is least special. and he gets away with it. The end is that the others become special. Ginsberg writes a great “absurdist” essay that even his professors admire and goes on to become.a great poet.

Danna Tartt, author models the Dark Academic look. Notice the cigarette.

The mood of dark academia is a mix of repressed anger and innocence. People stare into space like Oscar Wilde with heartburn, or a longshoreman on break. The architecture includes vast dining halls, gothic bell towers and forbidding libraries (see picture at top). The devoted student searches here for hidden light but finds only darkness. Murder follows.

The clothes of Dark Academic novels are important. Browns, black or grays mostly. Clothes are casual and active, but clean. The look says, “I’m sexually active and criminally active; I do drugs and don’t do my homework, and I might perhaps murder, but I plan to submit a killer final project. Murder is a sign of really getting into it. “Genuine beauty is always quite alarming.” It’s a line from “The secret History,” but the same line, nearly, appears in Hitchcock’s “Rope.” It’s part of the tremendous desire to be special, great, and in the race for greatness there must be a destruction of the ordinary. That’s the dark academic mood: an aesthetic where murder is a creative act.

Robert Buxbaum, April 2-5, 2021.