Parents react to violence in final ‘Harry Potter’ film

By Neal Justin

Star Tribune (Minneapolis)

How dare Hollywood

churn out a children’s film that drives its audience to tears when heartless outsiders murder a beloved character?

How dare they kill Bambi’s mom?

In 1942, many worried that the Disney cartoon would be too emotionally wrenching for kids. That concern resonates with parents nearly 70 years later as “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2,” the final and most violent installment in cinema’s most popular franchise ever, opens Friday in movie theaters worldwide.

Angie Andresen hasn’t decided whether she’ll take her 9-year-old, Maggie, to see it, even though her daughter can’t get enough of the J.K. Rowling series. She’s seen only the first two movies, but started devouring the seven books in March and is so eager to finish the last one that she stayed up until the ripe ol’ time of 10 o’clock one night last week.

Maggie admits that she was affected by the deaths of two major characters, but conversations with Mom while biking or being tucked in proved helpful.

“I was sad about parts, but we talked about it and I got over it,” she said.

Maggie has seen the new movie’s trailer, a loud, frantic affair with ominous music and bodies spiraling into fire. It looks “pretty spooky,” she said, but she really wants to see the entire PG-13 film.

Mom’s not on board. Yet.

“I’m not so concerned about death as a topic, because it’s something we’ve dealt with as a family, but I am concerned about the violence,” said Andresen, a vice president at the marketing firm Fleishman-Hillard. “It’s just so visual when it’s on a big screen, and I’m worried about — this may sound silly — bad dreams. I remember when I was 12, my dad took me to see ’Poltergeist.’ I had some nightmares after that.”

Movies also gave a young Pete Hautman his fair share of sleepless nights.

The Minnesota author who’s written several acclaimed young-adult novels, including “Godless,” Hautman remembers being terrorized at age 4 by “Bambi” and, strangely enough, “The Nutcracker.”

“It was that ’Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy.’ I just started hysterically crying,” he said. “It still freaks me out when I hear the music.”

But Hautman doesn’t have any regrets. He thinks being scared from time to time is a critical part of growing up.

“There’s this fanatical protection of society, particularly in America and Europe, that’s gotten to the point where kids aren’t being allowed to develop a healthy psychology,” he said. “I’ve got a friend who works with Outward Bound and he says they have more injuries every year, because the kids don’t know what it’s like to get hurt. They don’t climb trees, they don’t jump trains, so when they go out there and leap over a chasm and it doesn’t work out, they think they can just hit the reset button. Better to find out where the line is in a movie theater or a book.”

Hautman has a personal stake in the debate. As a writer of fiction in which young teens confront adult issues, he faces critics who think today’s literature is too graphic for its audience.

In a recent essay for the Wall Street Journal, Meghan Cox Gurdon argued that “books focusing on pathologies help normalize them and, in the case of self-harm, may even spread their plausibility and likelihood to young people who might otherwise never have imagined such extreme measures.”

But literature aimed at young ones didn’t become gruesome overnight.

In 1952, literary scholar Geoffrey Handley-Taylor studied 200 traditional nursery rhymes and found eight references to murder, three drownings, nine cases of missing children and a decapitation.

Pioneering child psychologist Bruno Bettelheim defended ghastly fairy tales in his 1976 book “The Uses of Enchantment.” Children learn to cope with their own fears, he argued, when they confront horrors at arm’s length on the printed page.