Over-analyzation and Harry Potter

Trust me, they are related. Kind of.

So I was watching some HP movies this week in my extremely successful attempt to get pumped up for the release of the final installment of the eight movie franchise, starting with Half-Blood Prince, following it up with Order of the Phoenix, and I plan to watch Deathly Hallows pt.1 this afternoon.
But I started to notice some things, or more like think about some things about HP and some of the implications that were drawn from it. I noticed that the two main houses are male (Godric/Salazar) while the two houses that nobody really cares about are female (Rowena/Helga) and thought about the message that this sends to our youth. The obvious one, I suppose, is that while it is great to be a woman, and you will do just fine, the battle for good and evil, the battles that really matter, are fought by the male side of the equation. But then I thought about it some more - clearly HP is not a misogynistic series, there are powerful women all over the place, and the fact that Dumbledore was supposedly gay leads me to doubt that the whole construction of the houses is sexist.
So I looked at it some more and posed a hypothetical to myself - what if it were switched, what if the houses were Glinda, Rowan, Harold, and Stephanie? What would the message be there - again, the obvious one is that women are the real power in the world, and that men pretend to matter, but when it comes down to the nitty gritty end, it is the women who power through and fight the final battle. But again, this isn't really a "girl power" series.
What if they were mixed? What if Gryffindor were male and Slytherin female? Oh the horror! Courageous men triumphing over the snake-like women, trying to corrupt them (cite your misogynistic bible verse of choice for this one, and you'll see where this is going) just like it was said to be, that women are corruptors, and more easily corrupted by the forces of evil (see Salem Witch Trials). Or you could take that one the other way, and that women are simply inferior, and men triumph over them. More obvious, but less interesting.
And the other way around? That the red and gold belong to the female and the green and black to the male, that men are insidious and evil and women are moral and pure and need to put them in their place.

But seriously - lets think about it. There is an art form known as "dadaism" that focused on ridiculing what society thought to be meaningless. In other words, dada aimed at creating art that had no meaning - and yet society still placed heavy societal and cultural importance on the significance of the works. Yeah - have you seen the upside down urinal? That upside-down urinal was a piece by Michael Buchamp entitled Fountain and you would not believe how much fuss was made over this thing. We have this thing called numerology - the study of a link (either mathematical or mystical or both) between numbers found in the natural world and our lives. If you've seen "the number 23" that's what I'm talking about. Or if you look at the math behind the rapture, you can see a high prevalence of people taking these numbers and making them fit into their scheme of life. We as a society hate meaninglessness - we must have meaning, we must have purpose. Some would argue that our need for meaning is what caused us to invent God in the first place (of course, I have no proof that there is no God, but at most, only one religion can be right, which means that the other n-1 religions invented a God/Gods). We search for meaning within the stars in the form of horoscopes, we search for meaning within the mathematical (and beautiful, I might add) patterns and numbers given to us by the natural world (the digits of pi put on a musical scale are quite beautiful to our ears for some reason) and we ascribe meaning to art and music. Yes, it is true, some art and music is significant in it's message, and mathematics is beautiful, but it can't all be as meaningful as you want it to be. At some point, we have to look at the universe and ask ourselves "what if none of it means a damned thing?" would that be so bad? We get to live our lives, and enjoy ourselves, and give ourselves our own meaning, without it being defined by God, or the stars, or art, or anyone else. How cool would that be.

So when someone looks at a story and draws conclusions about what the book or piece of art is trying to say to you, look closer. Look at the houses of HP and realize that no matter what the combination is, someone could draw conclusions about what the author is trying to say about men and women in the grand scheme of life. And I would venture that it is possible that they are pulling meaning out of their ass - the gender of the originators of the houses is arbitrary. If you go ascribing meaning to every little thing, you are going to either drive yourself mad finding meaning everywhere, or you are going to delude yourself into believing in falsehoods (like the God/Gods thing) and unless you enjoy lying to yourself - I am going to assume that the majority of people would like to know the truth and not a lie about life - then you should take a look at how many things you unnecessarily atribute significance to. Can we not just admire the beauty of a piece of art, or awe-inspiring mathematical precision that governs the orbits of the planets and stars, or the simplicity and usefulness of integers, without changing our lives or our beliefs because someone decided that these things mean more than they do. An art piece can be beautiful, and you can take a lesson from it, but that doesn't mean that this painting "means" that thing or that an upside down urinal is culturally significant. The stars paint a wonderful picture on our night sky, and some people look at them and see that they are more alone than they thought - some look up and feel more connected than ever before. Some people (rightly) see patterns, but what they are seeing is not God or the universe speaking to them through the stars, or predictions for their lives, they are seeing Kepler's three laws, they are seeing newtonian mechanics, they are seeing large masses exerting gravitational force on them.
And in the words of Tim Minchin

"Isn't this enough? Just, this world? Just this, beautiful, complex, wonderfully unfathomable, natural world? How does it so fail to hold our attention that we have to diminish it with the invention of cheap man-made myths and monsters? But, here's what gives me a hard-on, I'm a tiny, insignificant ignorant bit of carbon. I have one life, and it is short and unimportant, but thanks to recent scientific advances... I get to live twice as long, as my great-great-great-great uncleses and auntses. Twice as long! To live this life of mine, twice as long, to love this wife of mine. Twice as many years, of friends, of wine."

Tim Minchin, excerpt (slightly edited) from Storm


So next time, instead of looking to God, or to your horoscope, or to some piece of art that you think is beautiful, just accept these things as beautiful - they don't have to have significance beyond that, because beauty should be enough for us.
"Isn't this enough?"