The Secrets of Dumbledore and Storytelling via Mashed Potatoes

This Wandering contains spoilers for the movie The Secrets of Dumbledore.

Much like cooking, storytelling is more art than science.  There are some universal basics like plot, character, and setting, but each storyteller can mix ingredients in new ways that please or excite the palate.  In the Secrets of Dumbledore movie, the storytelling team took an order for three baked potatoes, then chose to burn them beyond recognition before mashing them into a pulp and throwing the resulting mass against the wall in the hopes something might stick.  Unfortunately, not much did.

Potato one in this increasingly stretched metaphor: multiple character and plot arcs with little to no development.  Despite how describing one such issue naturally leads into another, I’ll try and limit myself to the highlights.  First, awkward Tiger King for magical creatures has no purpose beyond acquiring a deer with whiskers and shoving it in his suitcase.  We are led to believe at the end of the last movie that Tiger King will be integral to whatever plan Dumbledore has to defeat Wizard Hitler, but in the end, his nameless assistant ends up being far more useful.  Perhaps this whole movie is a subtle dig on how big name professionals are useless without their secretaries.  In the first seven hours of the movie, Tiger King and his team accomplish exactly two things that have any relevance to the climax, and he wasn’t there for either of them. 

Second—and most grating to me—is the utter insignificance of Tiger King’s brother, Overhyped Mall Cop.  Earlier movies establish him as a war hero and one of the world’s preeminent dark wizard hunters, along with his strained relationship with Tiger King.  These are spicy and savory ingredients to play with!  The skills someone would need to thrive on a wizard battlefield or to investigate magical criminal activity would be perfect in a back alley war against Wizard Hitler’s rise, but instead we get…nothing.   Mall Cop is captured twice (saved by Tiger King’s scorpion-crab dance and a suitcase of multiplying pastries, respectively), fails to achieve anything against Wizard Hitler, and adds no salient input towards the plot or other character arcs.  Which is a shame, because an arc where the two brothers can learn to appreciate each other’s skills and perspectives could have added so much depth to both of their otherwise shallow characters.

I won’t continue to harp on this point, but here’s the lightning round of other examples that still come to mind two weeks later: repressed love assistant; Wizard Hitler’s appeaser-in-chief; Wizard Hitler’s deer blood visions; wizard international voting processes in a pre-digital world; the double agent who only succeeded in letting Wizard Hitler erase his memories of his sister; references to fantastic beasts and the finding thereof.  The list is virtually endless.

The second potato: lack of carryover from previous movies.  The previous movie had its own dripping, soggy mess to clean up from where it was thrown against a wall, but it did leave a few specific lines for the follow-on movie to pick up.  Secrets of Dumbledore chooses to ignore the majority of these in favor of creating new and impressively pointless items to focus on instead.  Awkward love story between Tiger King and Long Distance Girlfriend developed over two movies?  Slap a picture on his suitcase and call it a day.  Literal ball of teenage angst recruited and primed by Wizard Hitler to kill Dumbledore (again over two movies)?  Two-minutes of conversation will clear all that up.  Basing the entire prequel series around Magical Beasts?  Here’s your mustachioed deer—it lives in a suitcase and glows twice. 

The counterpart to a lack of carryover is what did make the transition that arguably should not have.  Tiger King has been mostly irrelevant since the first movie, as the need for beasts of a fantastic nature became a dangling appendage for McGuffin production.  While his awkwardness provides some much-needed levity, cut him and focus on someone with more depth.  This can be easily accomplished by cutting the whole theme of magical creatures since the storytellers have already done so in all but the technical sense.  You could safely lose Token Muggle as well, since the only reason he comes along is because why not?  Each story arc from the previous movies should have been forced to validate the purpose of its existence on pain of liquidation.

Finally, potato the third: Dumbledore’s lack of secrets.  You would think with a title like, I don’t know, The Secrets of Dumbledore, the titular secret keeper would have some doozies to share.  As far as I can tell from the roughly thirteen-hour movie, the only secret Dumbledore reveals apart from a suitcase shell game is what a terrible person he is.  After Embodiment of Teenage Angst tries to kill him, Dumbledore spends roughly thirty seconds patting him on the head.  He says the only authority figure that’s ever shown Teenage Angst attention is a liar, admits to being an actual relative, then abandons him in a puddle on a dreary Berlin street with exactly zero answers or closure.  On the other hand, his treatment of Harry now makes more sense.

Yet Dumbledore has further abuse for the poor child!  Towards the supposed climax, Teenage Angst has a moment where he truly needs emotional support.  When his birth father—Dumbledore’s brother—tries to go to him, Dumbledore stops him because why not let that wound fester a bit more if it provides a mild inconvenience for Wizard Hitler?  But all of this is washed away when the magic deer bows to Dumbledore and reveals to the whole wizarding world that he is pure of heart.  I take a small solace in how the deer then goes on to bow to some random politician the audience knows nothing about, which allows me to assume it bows based on whether or not someone has snacks in their pocket or something instead.

Side note: how could the storytellers not have the goodness detecting deer bow to the Token Muggle?  They spend the whole movie talking up how he’s a righteous man that always does the right thing, a man whose heart is full and loyal, and then put him right there in prime deer-bowing range.  He is the one person that can completely invalidate Wizard Hitler’s platform of “Muggles Bad” if the magical deer bows to him, and they do nothing with it.  Obviously, the nameless politician was a better choice.

This particular Wandering only scratched the surface of my disdain for the movie, and I admit some of it draws from a frustration of squandered nostalgic potential.  But as my wife and I discussed on the way back from seeing it, it does have two pluses.  First, the special effects were fun.  Whoever worked the CGI for the movie deserves a round of applause, because they made a bunch of neat effects that helped distract from everything else.  Second, a bad movie is better than an alright movie.  Let me explain. 

When you finish watching an alright movie, you shrug your shoulders and then move on with your life, never thinking about it again.  When you leave a bad movie, however, you get to eviscerate it with whoever agrees with you on it.  Often the enjoyment from that can trump whatever you’d get from watching an alright movie, and sometimes even a good one!  So far all your flaws, Secrets of Dumbledore, thank you for the ammunition.