Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1 – Memory Erasal
There are many claims that Harry Potter continually demonstrates dodgy ethics. These don’t just come from religious groups either (who are quite well known for their dislike of the Potter stories); Harry and co’s constant rule breaking and so on has caused lot of people grave concern…. I’m going to take a punt here, and say that – in the light of what has become a bit of theme to us that sometimes a bad action is justified if it is done for the sake of preventing a worse one – given that Harry’s aim was to prevent evil from taking over the world, I think we can excuse them a few occasions of being out of bed after lights out.
But it is true that as things get darker, more drastic measures are taken. One of the worst of these is Hermione having to modify her parents’ memories in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, in order to remove herself from their knowledge. Her main reason for doing this is to protect her parents from questioning by the Death Eaters, but it is also possibly so that if Hermione doesn’t come back from the war, they won’t have to mourn her.
There’s something fundamentally horrible about parents having their child – their only child – removed from their lives, even if it is for their own good and they won’t know anything about it. But of course when it comes to this moment in the movie adaptation of the book, it wasn’t director David Yates’ idea.
Or was it?
In the book, Hermione uses a different sort of memory charm, which her herself states she will lift if it ever becomes safe for her parents to return to their old life. As regrettable as the situation is, there is from the start a good chance that Hermione’s parents will be given back their memories, and they will all be reunited. In the movie, however, Hermione uses Obliviate, a far more powerful spell that does quite literally wipe either a section or the whole of a persons’ mind, usually irreparably. A moment that was then in the book just sad, becomes in the movie absolutely catastrophic; the most important thing in Hermione’s parents’ lives is not just taken away from them without their knowledge and consent – but the situation is absolutely permanent. They are robbed of their daughter forever. Forever.
Having said that, however, book-to-film adaptations are almost always going to be more dramatic – not least because the movie only has a limited amount of time in which to cover everything. We can probably forgive Yates then for not consulting all seven volumes of The Standard Book of Spells in order to find the exact memory charm that Hermione would have originally used, especially as in the wider scheme of the whole film these sorts of details aren’t particularly important.
His only real mistake? Underestimating the advanced magic observational skills of the Harry Potter fanbase.