Like half the world (that’s a made-up statistic) I went to see Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1 on opening weekend. Like half the people who saw it (see previous parenthetical) I got online afterward to see how other people’s opinions of the movie compared to mine. Mostly, I found we agreed. Like most fans of the book series, I was excited about the way the movie captured the essential feeling of the books, a feeling that has largely been lacking in the previous movies.
The rest of this article contains spoilers, so if that bothers you, stop reading.
In one area, my opinion varied dramatically from most other fans’. I was surprised by the rabid hatred most fans had for the scene in which Ron destroys the locket horcrux. Harry uses parseltongue to open the locket, but before Ron can destroy it with the Sword of Gryffindor, the bit of Voldemort’s soul in the horcrux gives Ron a test by presenting him with an aural and visual representation of his worst fears. Spiders pour out toward him. He hears that he’s the least loved of his family. Harry and Hermione appear, and Harry tells Ron that Mrs. Weasley would have preferred Harry as a son. Hermione tells Ron she could never fall in love with him while Harry’s around. Then Harry and Hermione kiss. And they are naked.
Fans seem to be offended by two things about this–the fact that they’re naked, and the fact that it’s a passionate kiss. I’ve pulled out my copy of the book to re-read that scene, and as far as I can tell, the way it happened in the movie was very faithful to the book. There is no mention of them being naked, but there’s also no mention of what they might have been wearing. They’re described as side-by-side trees with a common root, and J.K. Rowling described the kiss as Hermione entwining herself around Harry in a close embrace while they kiss. The passion was definitely there in the book, though perhaps people found it easier to skip over.
People seem to forget this scene is supposed to represent Ron’s worst fear. If a teen-age boy’s worst fear is that the girl he loves is secretly in love with his best friend, he’s not going to envision that as a friendly peck on the cheek. The three of them are at the most passionate time of their lives. We are seeing what Ron has pictured and feared happening while he was away from them, and it’s full of the passion he himself feels for Hermione and fears Harry feels as well. That torments him. Perhaps while reading the book it was possible to imagine the scene as more sanitized. The movie version, however, was more realistic.
Bluntly, despite people trying to fit the whole Harry Potter canon into the world of children’s literature, Harry, Ron and Hermione are not children anymore. They’re at an age when many of their peers (at least in the muggle world) have already had teen-age pregnancies. They are seventeen. For fans who grew up with the series, seeing Harry and Hermione embracing naked presented a shocking reminder of the way time has moved on and the fact that they themselves are not children anymore. Parents of children who grew up with the series may have seen a reminder of what their own children may be getting up to.
Perhaps fans wanted Harry, Ron and Hermione to stay the age they were at the beginning of the series, or at least to retain the feelings of that age, for their own peace of mind. It’s not possible, though. Children become adults, and there’s nothing anyone can do to stop it. The horcrux scene in Deathly Hallows brought that fact home with more force than some fans were ready to handle.
