Wordplay Attempts to Get It Together

Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve reviewed several books and TV series related to the themes of Dark Academia and “kids doing magic.” Now you may be wondering what significance all of this has and why so many TV shows, books, and movies using these ideas keep cropping up. What are we really responding to when we’re attracted to plots and characters centered on wizardry and magic, and what is academia doing mixed up in this? There’s a lot to ponder here. Interest in magic is nothing new, but the sheer number of entertainment offerings involving magical schools and/or occult activities at schools points to something in the collective psyche that keeps circling, as if caught in a whirlpool, around the archetypes of Magician and Scholar.

When I was young, amateur detectives and sleuthing were popular themes in many books and TV series. The Nancy Drews and Hardy Boys of the day used their intellects and detecting skills to solve mysteries. There was little or no magic involved: everything was based on making observations, gathering evidence, and drawing conclusions—all very scientific and logical. Spooky happenings abounded, but they always had an explanation that diligent searching could uncover. It’s tempting to say that maybe this reflected a simpler time, or a more optimistic time, when it seemed that the march of 20th century scientific progress was carrying us all forward, and technology would finally solve many intractable problems. Respect for scientific methods and powers of deduction are at the heart of these stories.

Could it be that the world has gotten so complex (and troubling in its complexity) that simply restoring order by finding “the villain” or solving “the mystery” doesn’t satisfy in the way that it used to? There are so many villains, and in some cases, they’re also our heroes. Contradictions run through many of our cherished institutions and beliefs that can’t be denied any more; we often find we’re standing on shaky ground that we used to think was solid. We assume we’re doing the right thing, as a society and as individuals, only to be questioned by others who have different ideas. Our country is big and diverse, full of contending parties, and although that’s supposed to be our strength, all the opposing voices make it difficult to see our way forward. Not only that, but the world is transforming rapidly around us, climate change bringing about fresh disasters at every turn, and even nuclear war being spoken of as a possibility.

I think the interest in magical schools may point to a deep-seated response to the complex and overwhelming world we’re facing. What is magic but the ability to overcome the laws of physics, the strictures that bind us, and make things happen, things that we want to happen. Magic is a way of breaking through complications and exerting one’s will on the world, instead of being at the world’s mercy. It’s an intense form of psychological agency, reflecting a need to have influence and control over events when we actually fear we may have neither.

Meanwhile, the theme of “Dark Academia” points to a concern, perhaps more accurately an anxiety, about secret knowledge, knowledge that most people don’t have. There is a pervasive feeling, especially in a work like Leigh Bardugo’s Ninth House, that venerable institutions intimately bound up with power structures harbor secrets that make the rest of us vulnerable. These are only penetrated at great risk. What you don’t know can hurt you, but what you do know can also hurt you. There’s a preoccupation with long-buried secrets trying to come to light only to be pushed down again, things too disturbing to really look at in the sober light of day. Trauma is tied to hidden connections running beneath things, like a dark underground river. This theme is also present in Naomi Novik’s Scholomance books, in which enclaves for the powerful are built, quite literally, on top of trauma.

Themes of secret knowledge and agency may not be present in every work related to magical schools, and there could be other reasons for the genre’s popularity. In particular, I think of a program like Legacies, in which all of the students at the Salvatore School are actually freaks of one kind or another. They are in the one place where they have a chance of being understood and accepted. In some ways, this might reflect the unwillingness of some formerly marginalized groups in our society to remain marginalized. It’s a demand for recognition and acceptance of one’s authentic self, with plenty of heavy-duty spell-casting underlining the need for personal agency. In a gentler way, the same thing happens in The Bureau of Magical Things, in which magical races of fairies and elves go from co-existing with humans but hiding who they really are to letting others see them, gradually forming relationships based on trust.

If there’s one way to sum up the psychological underpinning of the current popularity of magical schools and occult happenings it would be that they are a response to rapid and extreme change affecting our physical, social, and political environment. Most of these works have dark overtones that reflect with some seriousness real-life issues related to change, instability, and uncertainty. There is defiance, certainly, and some hope, but there are no guarantees of a better world in progress.

More About ‘Dark Academia’

I mentioned in last week’s post that “Dark Academia” is having a cultural moment; I decided a while back to plunge into the genre and see what it was all about. You may have noticed a lot of storylines about kids going to magical schools in books, television series, and movies, but in my opinion it takes more than that to qualify as Dark Academia. The Bureau of Magical Things, an Australian program on Netflix, features students at a select (and secret) school of magic hidden behind a bookshop, but the kids are wholesome, and the mood is generally upbeat and sunny. You might call it “Magical Academia,” and its audience is young children.

A truer example of Dark Academia is Legacies, (a CW Network series now on Netflix) about a K-12 school for kids who happen to be vampires, werewolves, and witches, with other magical beings occasionally thrown in (one kid is actually a phoenix, though you wouldn’t know it to look at him). They all attend the Salvatore School, a private institution in Mystic Falls, Virginia, which greatly resembles many a private or prep school that regular mortals may have attended. There are the plaid skirts, the school crest, the gated grounds, the polished wooden floors, and all the other accoutrements of a well-heeled and decorous institution. Some of the characters are so likable that you almost forget they’re dangerous, until the fangs and claws come out or someone casts an especially evil spell.

The school has been established to create a safe haven, protecting the students from the world and the world from them. Attempts are made to school them into controlling their proclivities, although it’s a little unclear how successful Salvatore is in doing this. Every effort is made to present the school to outsiders as simply a private academy; there is an annual football match with the local public high school that Salvatore students are encouraged to lose, the more to cement their reputation as a bunch of harmless preps. While this sounds dark enough, the real kicker is that the magical powers the kids have at the tips of their fingers attract all kinds of monsters, so that not only are they constantly contending with themselves, each other, and the world at large but also with a variety of evil beings that inevitably come calling. One week it might be a Golem; the next week, it’s an evil Cupid.

Another series that I quite enjoyed was The Magicians, a program originally shown on SYFY and based on Lev Grossman’s Magicians novels. At the beginning of this series, a young man who thinks he’s bound for the Ivy League finds that he’s been invited instead to interview at Brakebills, a college of magic in upstate New York that can be reached by various hidden portals, though no one outside the school seems to know it’s there. While Legacies is aimed at a younger audience, The Magicians has adult content; there’s the occasional wild party, some truly terrifying supernatural beings, regular trips to the Underworld (usually one-way), and unforeseen consequences of the use of magic. Unlike the Salvatore kids, who seem to wield their powers with total panache, as if they were in a music video, the students at Brakebills often seem to be spitting into the wind, achieving everything except what they set out to do and breaking things more than they end up fixing them.

What I liked about this series was its total unpredictability; you can never tell where the characters are going to go or what will happen next. The mix of quirky personalities is occasionally grating, but all the characters are memorable, often funny, and sometimes tragic: imagine a group of hip, smart young urbanites with a lot of competitive qualities and neuroses trying to learn how to be magicians while grappling with the usual problems of college life. A magical world called Fillory looms large in the plot, though I found it tedious, as it seems more a child’s fantasy world in which Brakebills students get stuck than the Utopia it first appears to be. That’s probably somehow the point. This fantasy world is more a trap, or perhaps an extended test, than it is an escape; growing into their abilities often means the characters have to figure out how to transcend Fillory. It turns out being a magician is much more than just being able to do cool things all the time.

Perhaps the best exemplar of Dark Academia that I’ve yet come across (this list is not exhaustive) is Leigh Bardugo’s novel Ninth House. When I first heard of Dark Academia, I was imagining something like this and wasn’t much interested in exploring the genre. After the first chapter or two I wasn’t sure I’d finish the book, but if you can get past a fairly stomach-turning beginning, the novel rewards you with a gruesome but fascinating fictional take on Yale’s secret societies. Ms. Bardugo, who was a member of a society at Yale, has said that she was attempting to “hyper-mystify” the societies rather than write a tell-all. I think she means by that that the fascination anything secret has for outsiders simply provided too golden an opportunity for fictional fodder to be passed up, and she’s right.

The Ninth House, in this novel, is the society with the job of keeping the others within bounds and making sure that their rituals and magic are used “responsibly.”  When it appears to the newest initiate of Lethe House that its protocols mainly lean toward covering up wrongdoing rather than policing it, she discovers that the job means more to her than just an escape from an extremely troubled past. As she learns more about the activities of the societies and Yale’s relationship to the town at large, she begins to see the disconnect between what she’s been led to expect and the way things actually are and decides to investigate further.

The book would have been too morbid for me if it were not for the characters, who only reveal themselves slowly; they, too, are keeping a lot of things under wraps. It’s almost as difficult to believe in the beginning that a street kid like Alex will manage to survive a single semester at Yale as it is to imagine her mentor, Darlington, turning out to be deeper than the stuffed shirt and Yale traditionalist he appears to be. I liked the characters better the more I got to know them, and that includes some of their supporting players, the diffident Dawes, always preoccupied with her dissertation, and the skeptical police detective, Turner. In this world of privilege and power, a strategy of keeping motives and means hidden is simply the way things are done.

While one hopes that the actual doings of Yales’s secret societies don’t include using the most marginalized townies as subjects in such activities as the reading of entrails to predict the stock market, you suspect there is some form of truth in the theme of “might makes right” that runs through the novel. Most of the truly bizarre activities Ms. Bardugo depicts are clearly fictional, but there’s a ring of uncomfortable truth in her portrait of a closed society of wealth and power exerting its will over the town and other institutions, and respectable appearances covering up even the foulest of deeds. This is another novel that includes trips to the Underworld and portals to hell dimensions, though these are even more chilling than those depicted in The Magicians. Sometimes, people in The Magicians break into light-hearted, spontaneous song; it’s difficult to imagine anyone in Bardugo’s oppressive Yale environment doing so, unless it were part of a drunken revel.

So which school would I choose to attend, if I had to make a choice? It would clearly be Brakebills for me. Salvatore School seems too dangerous a proposition for a mere human, as does Yale as Bardugo depicts it. Brakebills is kind of a port in the storm. I could imagine settling in there as a campus librarian and trying to stay out of the way of the more wayward spells and trips to the Neitherlands. Maybe I could even come up with a library circulation system that magically extracts wayward books from the desks of patrons who refuse to return them and gives them an invisible rap on the knuckles that leaves them unable to pinpoint the source. That would be fun.