Never one to bypass a viral topic, this week’s Saturday Night Live took aim at HBO’s Harry Potter reboot series to reveal (an exaggerated take on) the issue with Snape’s recasting. After the trailer’s release (actually before last week’s SNL slot, which was skipped), “Black Snape” quickly became a meme, powered mostly by X, with Paapa Essiedu’s casting the focal point of both humor and disheartening racism. The crushing inevitability of the latter – and SNL‘s gleeful willingness to jump on the meme bandwagon – actually does highlight a problem for the series. Which largely comes down to how the original book was written to be so anti-Snape.
In the SNL Black Snape skit, Kam Patterson was asked by Weekend Update co-host Colin Jost how his week had been: “Not great. We got this new kid. His name is Harry Potter, and he’s racist as hell. Harry Potter — or, the Proud Boy Who Lived — spent the whole year telling everybody that the school’s only Black teacher was secretly evil.” When Jost replied, “I think he’s just worried because he knows someone’s trying to steal the Sorcerer’s Stone,” Patterson’s response pointed to what’s powering a lot of the memes: “So somebody stole something, and the number one suspect is Black Snape? They didn’t even look at the white guy in the turban. So offensive. He’s got a wizard on the back of his head.”
The skit also lampooned JK Rowling’s much-criticized naming convention, questioning the fact that the only prominent black wizard in the Wizarding Bolt is called “Kingsley Shacklebolt”, as well as mocking how the Wizarding World still sanctions slavery through House Elves. Here’s the full skit:
Harry Potter’s Reboot Requires Carefully Considered Changes To Avoid Issues
Say what you want about the skit, and SNL‘s apparent comfort with feeding into the bad faith conversation around Paapa Essidu’s casting, the show has to face up to the fact that the books write Snape as an immediate target of derision, who Harry mistrusts because Snape treats him with open disdain. The nuance of that was partly lost by the original movies, because Alan Rickman played a far softer version of Snape than the books, where Snape is supposed to be hated. The idea that Harry will suspect Snape of stealing the Philosopher’s Stone (“Sorceror’s Stone” in the skit, but the series has gone back to the original British book title) based on only being black is a bad-faith read that ignores literally all of the context of the book.
But that’s not what matters: what matters is that outrage economy is a real thing, and SNL has nailed exactly the issue the show will face. People turn an actor being cast on merit into a joke, because of his ethnicity, while proclaiming their supposed concern for the optics, and then further attention turns that into a rolling rock. Does the Harry Potter reboot need to rewrite JK Rowling’s books for the new adaptation to get around this? Probably, because it’s already too much of a talking point. The idea that Snape could just be unlikable because of his actions and treatment of Harry now seems impossible because of the attention given to the fact that he’s the “only black teacher at Hogwarts”. Media literacy isn’t exactly at its peak: the problem isn’t what Snape looks like, it’s that people wilfully ignore context. And at the same time, optics – and more importantly, sensitivity – are both a genuine concern that HBO probably has to make some adjustment for.
