Why The Harry Potter Films Would Have Been Immeasurably Improved By Obscenities

Swear words are terrible things. They allow uneducated people to display emotional sincerity without going to the trouble of learning how to read or spell. But sometimes they're a necessary evil. Ostensibly, for providing a bit of cathartic relief. Letting loose a steaming barrage of the kind of choice curses that would make a sailor blush at the bedpost you just stubbed your toe on, or the cruel, sadistic god that put the fucking thing there, is, without a doubt, really goddamn satisfying. Script writers don't know this. No Hollywood hack has made the connection between their grizzled, any-means-necessary action hero saying 'fuck', and anything other than: 'that sounds really cool'. Swear words are either thrown around film scripts like pills at post-movie-premiere coke parties or absent entirely.Why? For the goddamn kids. That's why. But kids love swearing too. Probably even more than us, considering it's slightly fresher comic territory to them. Not that I'm advocating screaming obscenely at toddlers in supermarkets, they've got parents to do that. What I am saying, is that we could do with a little more realism in our fantastical wizarding adventures. Harry Potter needed swearing. And seeing as J.K. Rowling is a regular reader of blogs written like Tyler The Creator trying to get himself fired from a modelling agency, I'm in a unique position to get a few changes made.

By book four, The Goblet of Fire, Harry Potter has so much unbridled testosterone swimming around his body (I'd like to see you find a private moment in the Gryffindor dormitory for a bit of me time) that he starts flying into random fits of pitiful, impotent rage. Mostly at his friends. Because he knew they wouldn't fight back? Alright, I'm not going to insinuate that Harry Potter was a pussy on top of all the other heretical things I'm about to say. The point is, Harry was sexually frustrated to a degree most of us with our internet connections and lockable bedrooms couldn't even begin to empathise with.

What? Like you'd do any different if you were magic. 

He's not alone in this, yet, amazingly, he's the only one who really seems to show any signs of the crushing impact of puberty. This would have been easy to overlook, and maybe it was the director's fault, but Daniel Radcliffe played 'angry Harry' like someone complaining to their pharmacist that the oral pill didn't clear up their thrush. You'd think that that would be reason enough to give Radcliffe the liberty to give Felton the occasional 'eat a dick, Malfoy, you're dad's in prison I'm sure he could give you a few pointers'. You'd also be equally justified in thinking that 'joking about your dead parents' has got to be one of the top three reasons to scream profanely at someone before hitting them with a spell that produces some kind of extinction-level event for faces.

In the books, Rowling instead opts for craven bullshit like 'Ron swore loudly'. Obviously, as a reader you're able to construe whatever foul vocabulary you like from that. But in the films, there's nothing. The occasional 'bloody hell', true, but that phrase hasn't offended anyone since people stopped using rocks as cutlery. And if you showed them one of the films to test it, they'd just assume your DVD-player was magic. When the most offensive thing you can possibly call someone is 'mudblood', a term referring to the questionable nature of one's ancestry, you're uncivil-vocabulary is going to be pretty limited. Swearing is the major social infraction that all children start making at varying ages, everywhere. Yet at Hogwarts it's all very well-mannered indeed.

Student misdemeanors at Hogwarts in general are ridiculous. As a pupil, you seem to have a choice between the most benign forms of rebellion, or, joining a not-exactly-secret, necromantic cult slash terrorist cell, whose only discernible goals are inconveniencing school children with unfortunate facial scarring and bringing back conical hoods.

Also, hating on minority species. Which does beg the question, are there disenfranchised wizards out there who only tolerate goblins because their food's good? Or centaurs because they're good at maths?

Hogwarts isn't an unbelievable institution because it teaches children at the ages when they are most impulsive and irresponsible how to blow holes in walls or rear flesh-eating potted plants, it's unbelievable because these children aren't dicks about it in any kind of way anyone could empathise with. Never, at any point during the seven books does Jay-Kay describe kids sneaking out to the Three Broomsticks with the vain hope that Aberforth won't I.D. them, or smoking wizard weed behind the broomstick sheds before Herbology. It's not like it would have been hard to get away with anything like that, the teaching faculty is quite obviously brain dead, let alone responsible. For example, when Gilderoy Lockhart says he got lucky with a ten, that means another Hogwarts teacher left a Year 7 unattended. They're also all perfectly happy allowing a school house that churned out every evil human being to ever menacingly wave a piece of wood to continue, unsupervised. The Sorting Hat, if anything, would actually have made policing the wizarding world easier, via a thorough screening test. The second that obnoxious piece of felt uttered the word 'Slytherin', whoever was under it could have been conveniently escorted into a side room and humanely destroyed. But no, at some point someone must have said: 'nah it's fine, they can't all turn out to be xenophobic serial killers, right?' That's one fucked up PTA meeting. Although in fairness to all those present at it, when deciding on a new Defense Against The Dark Arts teacher they did take the moral high ground and decide not to discriminate against the suspicious-looking applicant wearing a turban. Not that that worked out well in the end.

By this point, you must be saying to yourself, 'but Will, surely an esteemed scholar of pop culture such as yourself would know that there is a least one case of swearing, in the Deathly Hallows to be exact. When Mrs Weasley is fighting Bellatrix she screams - "not my daughter, you bitch!" Also, what was the relevance of the last paragraph?' Well you'd be right hypothetical reader, although why you waited this long to bring that up is a mystery to me. All I'm saying is it seems amazing to me that there wasn't at least one character, among Rowling's horde that was a little more down to earth. A teacher maybe, that had the testicular fortitude to pipe up with: 'Dumbledore look, shouldn't social services be dealing with this shit?' Or 'Jesus Hermione, even that stick up your arse has a stick up its arse. Don't you ever get tired of being a passive-aggressive bitch?'

I'm glad that it's Mrs Weasley who finally let's loose a fraction though, casting Julie Walters for the scene in the Deathly Hallows Part 2 was genius, even though when she was first brought onto the project no-one had any idea. She's so convincingly hostile, I'm not even convinced she's acting. I think they just repeated the line to her a few times and opened the door of her cage with a barge hook. I hope they had a good plan to get her back inside after filming though, there aren't enough tranquiliser darts in the Jurassic Park Big Game Hunt to bring down a Julie Walters after it's made a fresh kill.

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