I. I never heard of the Thin White Duke before this week. I mean Ziggy Stardust yes; the brilliant creator of Space Oddity and heroes yes; one of very few Boomer musicians who was still making good new music by the time I was in high school yes (pause here to regret John Lennon; assassinated on the heels of the release of Double Fantasy, just as he seemed to be coming back to us); Bowie the actor yes; husband of Iman and therefore half of a couple who was always going to look cooler than anyone else around. Yes.
But somehow I missed out on the Thin White Duke persona and to be completely honest, it doesn’t sound like I really missed much.
II. I kind of wish Alan Rickman had never played Severus Snape, in a way. Because I am so much more a book person than a movie person I am always going to make my judgements based on what’s there in print, and Alan Rickman was such a glorious actor that he seduced hordes of HP fans into falling in love with a villain – and not only a villain that you love anyway because he’s sexy – I can understand that, though book-Snape is anything but – but a redeemed villain who had a core of truth all along. Because Snape isn’t that, really.
Rowling didn’t write the series as black and white good vs evil. THe only major character who is truly cartoon-evil throughout is Voldemort himself; everyone else is good or bad only in how far they are from him. Snape saves Harry’s life (though without revealing Quirrell as Voldemort’s host) in the very first book; Sirius is obsessed with revenge in book 3; Umbridge is revealed in book 5 as no better than many of the Death Eaters she’s reviling; Harry himself is a jerk about as often as you’d expect from an adolescent boy; Dumbledore’s moral ambiguities are revealed in books 6 and 7. Snape doesn’t kill anyone (except Dumbledore, who asked him to) or turn anyone over to Voldemort himself, so you can argue about how evil he is, but what he is, is an asshole. He picks on an 11-year-old boy because of decades-old quarrels with that boy’s dead father. He plays favorites in class. He cannot bear any sort of contradiction or argument. And yes, he turns out to be the Order’s man in the end, but it’s not because his love for Lily kept him pure or helped him see they were in the right; it’s because his obsession with her kept him from going against her side and allowed the Order to use him. There’s no real indication that he valued the Order’s principles or opposed Voldemort’s for any other reason than his fixation on a dead woman. That reads to me less like romantic and more like creepy.
So there’s book-Snape: an unwashed obsessive asshole. And then they go and cast a brilliant and accomplished actor in the role, and suddenly he’s a romantic hero. Oops.
(Some day I really ought to get around to watching more of Rickman’s work, so I can fall in love with him without compromising my literary prejudices. Sense & Sensibility, maybe; Col. Brandon really is a nice guy.)