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Fantasy Challenges Status Quo
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Introduction Film, literature, and many other forms of art offer human audiences an interpretation of social concepts that are otherwise confusing and complex. Fantasy film, and indeed other forms of fantasy work provide an escape from our often prosaic existences (Fabrizzi, 1). The concept of esc...

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  • May 4, 2021
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  • 2020/2021
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Fantasy Challenges Status Quo

Introduction

Film, literature, and many other forms of art offer human audiences an interpretation of

social concepts that are otherwise confusing and complex. Fantasy film, and indeed other forms

of fantasy work provide an escape from our often prosaic existences (Fabrizzi, 1). The concept of

escape through the complex, oblique, and thought provoking story telling in fantasy films is a

vital element of the genre. Recently, however, fantasy film has picked up a stronger and

empowering characteristic: challenging status quo. Over the years, society has organized itself in

patterns and sections that left parts of it vulnerable and oppressed. A representation of this aspect

of social organization in art has often been through mimesis. Mimesis is the imitation of reality

and is directly opposed to fantasy. Thus the role of fantasy is social criticism has been

overlooked throughout. Fantasy film, however, is disproving this theory of the unimportance of

art that deviates from direct representation of reality as will be shown in this paper. Fantasy has

the potential to challenge the status quo because it explores what is otherwise repressed.

Fantasy films circumvent social barriers that repress subjects in support of status quo by

changing the ground rules. According to Rosemary Jackson, by confounding aspects and

characteristic of the marvelous and mimetic, fantastic narrations assert what the audience holds

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to be objective reality then proceed to deconstruct reality with manifest unreality (23). The

common narrative of fantasies as narratives and representations of human characters occupying

non-human narratives is incorrect. As Jackson notes, fantasies use inversion of elements of the

real world to create and imaginary reality; “recombining its features in new relations to produce

something strange, unfamiliar, and apparently ‘new’ and different (8). This reconstruction of

reality allows fantasies to surpass and drastically stretch the limits of storytelling and in these

case film narrations. Contemporary art and film in recreating reality and interpreting social

contexts is wont to make invisible the unwanted and unnecessary. The fantastic, however, finds

this unsaid and unseen of culture and what the status quo has silenced and makes it visible and

heard (Fawkes, 32).

Harry Porter

Adapted from the fantasy literature work of J.K Rowling, Harry porter is the story of a

teenage boy who attends a witchcraft school. The school is located in a magical world containing

characteristics of contemporary Britain and a magical realm only accessible through a magical

platform in a London station. It’s main character is an outlandish teenage boy with unpopular

characteristics that gets peddled to heroism in a fantastic fashion. Presenting a magical world

situated between the real and the unreal offers the film a golden opportunity to use unreal

elements of the magical world to criticize the real world. The established status quo of the

western world revolves around a consumer and pop culture that has segmented society, at least

for young people, into the cool and the uncool. By elevating the uncool Harry and his uncool

friends into heroism, the film uses fantastic elements to call into question an important part of the

status quo.

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