From Downton Abbey, Great Gatsby and Boardwalk Empire to the new Harry Potter prequel Fantastic Beasts, fans are flying back to the 1920s. But what's the appeal? How does 20s culture reflect our own and what does it reveal about history and its cycles? (Presented at Clockwork Alchemy, May 29 2016, San Jose, CA)

1. Fantastic Beasts and
20s Culture
History Repeats…

2. Setting
• Newt’s story takes place in 1926.
• This was the jazz age, a time of hedonism and fun
• The start of the modern era, as everything changed.

3. A New World
• This seems a sudden shift in Potter’s world, but
it actually fits well into recent culture.

4. • “The 1920s were a time of social change and wild financial
speculation, and the entire world seemed gripped with futurist fever.
German auteur Fritz Lang's science fiction epic, Metropolis, was in
theaters. Czech writer Karel Čapek invented the word "robot," and
group of amateur fiction writers in the U.S. founded influential pulp
magazine Weird Tales, which started publishing dark, bizarre stories
of undersea aliens by a young man named H.P. Lovecraft.” (Newitz)
• 1920s style science fiction like Andrew Niccol's In Time, Woody
Allen's time-travel idyll Midnight in Paris, and Cloud Atlas was
blossoming.

5. The Great Gatsby
• Propriety over secret affairs
and frustrations
• Jay Gatsby remakes himself
with a fantastical backstory,
and a double life
• Newt’s friendship with a
Muggle shows him letting a
single person into his world,
battling the constant
pretense with a single
friendship, much as Gatsby
does with Nick.

6. Downton Abbey
• A new world, the old traditions passing
away.
• No one knows what the rules are now

7. Boardwalk Empire (2009-2014)
• Temperance lecturers, jazz, silent movies, and all the trappings of a world
long vanished.
• dual worlds – respectable politician vs gambling, smuggling and murder.
• Likewise, the Wizarding World have their own legal system under the public
one. Newt even smuggles forbidden goods into the US, though they’re
magical animals, not liquor.
• “Nucky” Thompson who ruled Atlantic City, during Prohibition introduces
fans to a world as celebratory as it is dangerous. Salon’s Heather Havrilesk
comments:
One of the unexpected joys of “Boardwalk
Empire,” though, lies in the way the show revels
in the oddities of its time, peeling back the
layers of polite society to reveal a giddy shadow
world of criminals and politicians collaborating
to keep the liquor flowing. As the old system
crumbles, it challenges the bonds between
rivals and friends, and new alliances are
formed as a more chaotic age dawns. Just as
you think you understand a particular character
or a situation, the ground shifts underneath
you.

8. Glamor

9. Nostalgia
• Years ago, some critics were positing that
this world of simpler times was part of Harry
Potter’s draw. ceremonial robes, candlelit
rooms, no cellphones or social media.
• There’s also modern kids loving modern
fandom and fashion.
•

10. Parallels to Now
• “In the 1920s, many people's lives had been destroyed
by World War I and the global disruptions of 1919. Then,
the decade ended with the Great Depression.”
• “The 2000s began with the 9/11 attacks and ended with
financial crisis and mortgage meltdown. Now, in the
teens, we are living in the aftermath of both events.”
• “Revisiting the 1920s could be a way of thinking through
the upheavals of the last decade.”
• “there's the wild popularity of the Hunger Games
franchise, which are a callback to the hungry years of the
1930s.” (Newitz)

11. Wizard Headlines

12. Class Gap
This year, big business is taking charge. It was the same in the 1920s under
the Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover administrations. Their Secretary of the
Treasury, banker and businessman Andrew J. Mellon, argued, for cutting the
rich’s taxes and decreasing regulations.
Sadly, his version of trickle-down economics didn’t work and workers and
farmers did not benefit from the upper class prosperity, widening the divide.

13. Age Gap
• 1920s youth culture and college hijinks
• The first stark generation gap
• “Kids who had grown up with technologies like
telephones, movies, and electric lights were accustomed
to a radically different world than people who grew up
with horse-drawn carriages and gas lamps. And so those
kids began to create their own culture.” (Newitz)

14. The Dark Undercurrent….
• Fear of immigrants led to a rise in the KKK
in the US and fascism abroad.

15. Prejudice
• Harry Potter: house-elves “treated like vermin” and werewolves denied work
• All echo Grindelwald’s wizard supremacist campaign of World War II.
Dumbledore describes “Muggles forced into subservience” and a revolution
“all for the greater good” (Rowling, Deathly Hallows 716).
• Anti-immigrant backlash against Jews, Poles, and other Eastern Europeans
including a new racial quota in 1924
• 4 million people joined the KKK in the 20s
• In this intolerant climate, those who seek alternate ways of life, like many
goblins and house-elves, go underground, hidden in dark corners like the
Blind Pig speakeasy. This represents a closeting not only of magical people,
but also of homosexuals, artists, and those who seek unusual paths.

16. Wizard Backlash
• MACUSA is as stifling as the New Salemers, brutally wiping the
memories of all who try bridging their two worlds.
• Metaphorically, this is a type of brainwashing, a thought police who
eliminate the progressives in their own world. A memory-based-
execution mirrors this imagery.
• They destroy Credence rather than redeeming him

17. Down with No-Majs
• Mutual fear: “Magical beasts are terrorizing No-Majs. When No-Majs are
afraid, they attack.”
• Eugenics’ US popularity peaked in the 1920s, responding to the massive
influx of immigrants. “By the end of the 1920s, 24 states had passed laws
permitting eugenic sterilizations, and about 12,000 sterilizations had been
performed” (Davis 256). Similar to forbidden intermarriage
• “Grindelwald preaches Wizarding Rule through racial superiority, a program
that clearly echoes Hitler’s agenda. The same time, the same country, the
same ideology, the same defeat in 1945: can we doubt they were partners?”
(Frankel 208).

18. Fundamentalism
• Scopes trial, jazz, hair-bobbing and short skirts worried people.
• Many reacted to 20s modernity with public campaigns and protests.
• The word “fundamentalist” appeared.
• Fundamentalists fought for creationism, temperance, modest dress, traditionalism,
and above all, the Bible. These are the anti-wizard Second Salemers.
• On the corner, they shout “We want a second Salem” and hold signs saying “No
Witchcraft in America.”
• “Heed my warning and laugh if you dare: Witches live among us!” Mary Lou Barebone
insists. “We have to fight together for the sake of our children—for the sake of
tomorrow!”

19. Mary Lou
• Barebone’s last name indicates her starkness
• Adopted children have Puritan “virtue names” Credence,
Modesty, and Chastity.
• The whole family has chilling, creepy stares, augmented by ominous music
and shadows. The world calls them old-fashioned and “freaks”
• Little Modesty embraces brainwashing, and sings chillingly about witch
burning.
• One child asks if another has “the witch’s mark,” eager to turn on his own
foster sibling.

20. Trump Copied the Style
• Campaigning, Trump used “the prophetic style—that speaks to
evangelical voters at a primal level. The prophetic style points to
decline—but also to a path toward salvation. It is defined by a
conviction that the faithful possess higher truths, sealed off from and
immune to critique from evidence-based sources of authority.”
• He campaigned on the “higher truth”—that white Christians
are being betrayed and targeted. (Anderson)
• In May 2017, VP Pence said that Christians are among the most persecuted
religion in the world.
• Christianity is “under siege,” as Trump said.
• Trump’s ‘School Choice’ Plan: Religious
Fundamentalism At Taxpayer Expense
• Global Gag Order

21. Shaw
• Senator Henry Shaw fights modernity on behalf of moral
values: “So just as the odious saloons have been
banished…so now the pool halls, and these private
parlors…”

22. Credence
• Credence’s plot is a metaphor: “When he is rejected, repressed, and his essence is
denied, what happens with him is a reflection of what can happen in greater society”
(Heyman). His swirling cloud of blackness echoes the cruelty and anger that have
filled his life but also echoes the mistrust building between the two communities.
• The obscurus, murdering the intolerant, represents all that is marginalized and
forbidden, created when a young wizard suppresses his power.
• Auror Percival Graves only flatters him to use him. “Credence” means belief or trust,
emphasizing his tragedy when he’s betrayed by all the series’ adults. Aurors, Mary
Lou, and Graves all try to control him to further their own agendas—only ostracized
Newt and Tina try to save him.
• Now he’s primed to be a Voldemort

23. Graves/Credence
• Graves charms Credence—whether his coaxing is that of a wizard
mentor or homosexual lover—thus he queers them both,
presenting them as society’s rebels and outcasts. Thus
Credence’s wizardry becomes a metaphor for the homosexuality
some fundamentalist parents make their children repress until it
turns into self-torture.
• Grindelwald is most likely gay, so his anger appears a demand for
equal rights as he rallies wizards to come out of the closet,
instead of pretending they don’t exist to let others feel more
comfortable.
• Producer David Heyman adds: “The thing about Grindelwald is, I
understand what he’s saying. When Grindelwald talks about living
in the shadows and why should we live in the shadows, I
understand that…So he has the ability to persuade, to seduce, to
make you come on the side of what he is thinking. That is scary”
(Han).

24. Grindelwald
• As Grindelwald and Credence struggle against
the restrictive society that can’t see the queered
wizards but persecutes them nonetheless, war is
indeed approaching.
• Likely it will be the marginalized misfits – the
four heroes as well as Dumbledore himself –
who will turn the tide when more virile heroes
fail. Together they can bring about a society of
tolerance and cooperation, even in a time of
prejudice and war.

25. Citations
• Anderson, Theo. “Why Evangelicals Are Flocking To Donald Trump” In These Times, 22 Feb 2016.
http://inthesetimes.com/article/18902/donald-trump-evangelicals
• Davis, Edward B. “Science and Religious Fundamentalism in the 1920s.” American Scientist, vol. 93, no. 3, 2005,
pp. 253-260, Academic Search Premier. Accessed 30 Nov. 2016.
• Dumenil, Lynn. The Modern Temper: American Culture and Society in the 1920s. HarperCollins, 1995.
• Frankel, Valerie Estelle. Harry Potter and Myth: The Legends behind Cursed Child, Fantastic Beasts, and all the
Hero’s Journeys. LitCrit Press, 2016.
• Grant, Abigail. “Harry Potter and a World of Words: Back to Basics in a Time of Advance” Harry Potter, Still
Recruiting: An Inner Look at Harry Potter Fandom, ed. Valerie Estelle Frankel, USA: Zossima Press, 2012, 5.
• Leinwand, Gerald. 1927: High Tide of the 1920s. Four Walls Eight Windows, 2001.
• Newitz, Annalee. “Why Is Pop Culture So Obsessed with the 1920s?” Io9, 13 Feb 2013
http://io9.gizmodo.com/5983062/obsessing-over-the-1920s.
• Reuters. “US Hate Crimes Up” NBC, 14 Mar 2017.
http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/u-s-hate-crimes-20-percent-2016-fueled-election-campaign-n733306.

26. Please visit VeFrankel.com or
Amazon for more works by
Valerie Estelle Frankel