Nancy Gibbs ends her August 3, Time magazine “Briefing” with a note on the impending 2011 releases of the final Harry Potter films based on The Deathly Hallows. After then, no more Harry Potter films. Oh, dear. She finishes her piece with the lingering thought: “After that, it will be up to fans to find their own excuses for making a summer night feel magical.”
While “briefings” must be just that, the further implications of this comment are curious, especially as Adam Gerik’s accompanying picture in Time’s print version shows smiling teenagers in a theatre lobby, all dolled up Hogwarts style, for a midnight screening of The Half-Blood Prince. In other words, the implication is that summer nights “feel magical” because you can dress up in beyond-the-ordinary clothes, be with friends, and experience an audio-visual creation. For those with some sensitivity to the workings of lived religion, the term ritual must come screaming forth.
There is something of a Freudian “return of the repressed” going on here. While Protestantism, and most every religious reformation movement throughout history, worked to eradicate ritual, we continue to find it re-emerging in the most peculiar of places. In recent renditions of Religion Dispatches, Gary Laderman has noted as much in relation to the worship of the band Wilco and Super Bowl Sunday, as Kathryn Lofton has explored the rituals of the wedding pages, and Kelly J. Baker has accordingly looked at the high school prom. Traditional, religiously-based rituals are now being re-interpreted, re-imagined, and re-experienced through the experiences based in popular cultural productions.
In the final chapter of my recent book, I argue about the “footprints of film” on American soil. Films are not just 2-D light projections, but actually take on physical form as they affect the daily behaviors of people who attend midnight screenings of The Rocky Horror Picture Show or have bar mitzvoth with Star Wars themes.
In the end, it is clear that we need ritual. Whether or not “God” is hardwired into the brain, certainly ritual must be.
