Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, a film which takes place in a fictionalized version of New York City circa 1962, premiered in current-day New York City on November 10th, 2016. Shortly thereafter, the ending of that film literally took place in the real world.

Literally, not figuratively.

Captain’s Log: January 2017. An undulating black mass of undisclosed origin but overtly pernicious intent is, as a point of editorial fact, intentionally released upon the unsuspecting masses of New York City. The black mass in question is called an Obscurus. In the film Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, a villain-to-be-discussed-later attempts to harness the brute malevolent force of an Obscurus to breach irreparably the discrete and to-that-point unbreached worlds of wizards and non-wizards. If you live in the Greater New York area, you may recall the Obscurus’ serpentine, licorice-like tentacles wreaking gyroscopic havoc on Manhattan’s infrastructure and populace alike — at times, burrowing underground like a demented shrew mole and then, at other times, taking to the city sky like a demented golf ball hit with a little underhand English.

It was on the news.

I’m not trying to say, here, that this is some sort of veiled metaphor- that the election of our-most-recent president presages an era of shadowy intent whose ramifications might be best represented by a chaotic flywheel with churning, charcoal-black flanges. Flanges that decimate everything which they touch with the tenderness and grace of a haunted table saw. I know what you’re thinking. The Obscurus is sort of like a nebulous and conceptual “evil” that, in the film, lays its figurative tentacles all over New York City and in doing so reorganizes both our (“our” here meaning American moviegoers’) fundamental understanding of ourselves as Americans and, more grossly, sours our country’s geopolitical standing and worldwide reputation as a peacekeeper nation and historically benevolent powerhouse. (Which, New York City, as the sort of synecdochical financial epicenter of America would seem the most obvious point-of-attack, if you were aiming for world-destabilizing.) But no, it’s nothing like that. There was, hand-to-heart, an actual whirring, polydactylic manifestation of dark energy on the loose in January, and it literally ran roughshod over most of the Financial District, leaving behind a splintery wake of art deco debris and a whole lot of what-in-the-world!? faces on all the frightened, fiscally-savvy passers-by.

What a time to be alive!

Back to the film.

The Niffler (one of the titular fantastic beasts), gets the action going in an early scene inside a bank due in part to its ravenous love of all things shiny. Banks in 1962 were filled with coins; a real fantastic beast in a candy shop situation unfolds. Anyway, the Niffler does not represent the much-referenced 1% of America’s wealthy who all, by exploiting loopholes in our tax system, seek to steal all that is figuratively “shiny” the same way a Niffler literally and inveterately does. (The US, after all, is now on the fiat standard which is unbacked by any physical asset. So that comparison is, frankly, ridiculous.)

Next there’s this bit about the Grand Dark Wizard Gellert Grindelwald (ha!), who spends most of the film masquerading as Director of Magical Security Percival Graves. This guy was the architect behind the entire Obscurus stratagem. Hatched it soup to nuts. Some have made the seemingly astute connection that current US President Donald Trump too is a double agent of sorts, with hands in the alluring honey pot of for-profit terrorism and espionage, and whose alleged ties with Russian president Vladimir Putin and his coterie of nefarious oligarchs is mirrored perfectly by the literal duplicity of Grindelwald. I mean, the Russian state backs the Syrians, and the Assad regime does know a thing or two about how bombastic overtures, conspicuously planned, can be an eye-catching way to divert attention away from one’s own dirty deeds and towards something else instead. Like the Obscurus from earlier! Well, I’m here to tell you: that all’s just a load of liberal bullshit and the truth, the real unalloyed truth, is that a guy who looks almost just like Colin Farrell really did morph before our very eyes into a dude who looks just like a blond Johnny Depp, and that guy’s fiendish little intentions have only to do with something called MACUSA and dovetail not-at-all with any real-world organizations whose real-world acronyms you’re probably more familiar with. You know: the CIA, the FBI, the KGB. Etcetera. Etcetera.

The film’s denouement involves what’s called a Thunderbird soaring over New York City’s famed skyline, dispensing a curative rain that brainwashes the citizenry. Complete tabula rasa — the memories of all recent happenings are erased from the brain of every single one of the eight-million-some-odd native New Yorkers. It’s like none of the transpirations from the film transpired at all! To be clear, though, this Thunderbird was not meant to be a stand-in for the Bald Eagle nor an avatar symbolizing some patriotic predilection towards revisionist history. That’d be a little on-the-nose, no? If the Thunderbird was some extended analog of the American PR machine which, empowered by a incessantly resetting 24-hour news cycle and a deeply-ingrained sense of American exceptionalism, allows us, as Americans to (at best) bear witness to and mistakenly abet or (at worst) subsidize and commit outright global atrocities and then in seemingly no time, shake it all off, clear of conscience. Free to go back to our summer barbecues and our air-conditioned Walmart megalopoli and our communal lamenting of subpar wireless internet access. Honestly, that’d be something, if the Thunderbird was meant to signify all that. But it wasn’t. Just some magical fucking rain, man, raining down from a golden, twin-tailed Thunderbird in real goddamned life.

Which is kind of crazy, when you think about it.

They say that “it is difficult to make predictions, especially about the future.”* But if that’s true, then someone might want to check to see to whether [famous author] J.K. Rowling and [director of the film] David Yates aren’t wizards themselves, because they got this one more or less square-on.

*Actually, they say “det er vanskeligt at spaa, især naar det gælder Fremtiden.” And then we translate it into English.