December 31, 2003

When I first read the Lord of the Rings as a child, I was moved beyond words. It was like entering a boyish fantasyland of adventure, danger, and romance. Tolkien painted Middle Earth with such poetic beauty that I wanted to unsheathe my sword and come to its rescue. His portrait of evil was captivating in its relentless malevolence.

Upon hearing that it was to be made into a movie trilogy, I was somewhat pessimistic. I doubted that any production could do the books justice. I was skeptical that the soul of the story could be captured on the big screen, and feared that the beloved tale would be butchered by Hollywood.

But I have to hand it to the makers of this series. By God, they did it. With each episode, they just kept getting better. The scenery is entrancing. The action is breathtaking. The characters blossom in their heroism, humanity, and beauty.

But now, decades after my first reading of the series, my perspective has changed. My "propaganda radar" is always on, and it picks up smuggled concepts and hidden political agendas like a tireless bloodhound. Decades of bombardment by the cultural Marxists have forced me to eat the apple of Eden. I see the good and evil and can no longer bask in that wonderful innocence of childhood.

As much as it genuinely pains me to say it, this movie trilogy is philosophically corrupt.

May old Tolkien forgive me, but the ideology embraced by the Ring trilogy is extremely harmful to those of us on the libertarian/paleoconservative right. It is more than harmful, it is downright dangerous.

I realize that this borders on sacrilege ... but before showering me with hoots of derision, hear me out.

Generally speaking, I see two politically-charged ideas advanced by this series.

First, and of lesser importance, is a strong anti-technology message that is plainly evident. The heroes are warm and fuzzy people who live in pastoral environs. The Hobbits farm peacefully in their delightful shires. The Elves live in their grand forests. The dwarves live in their rugged mountains and caves.

Cities and industry, on the other hand, are portrayed in the worst terms imaginable. Saruman's demesnes are downright Dickensian. Deformed orcs labor in satanic mills, mass-producing their evil progeny. The very Earth is despoiled as forests are mowed down, leaving behind barren moonscapes of poisoned soil and air.

This could have been written by Ralph Nader.

But luckily for Middle Earth, this industrial blight is erased by the righteous anger of the ancient Ents. They storm from the remaining forests like environmentalists attacking an SUV dealership. These leafy Luddites wreck the machinery, kill the disfigured orcish workers, and wash away the blight in a giant tidal wave.

Like it or not, the message is hard to miss. It is right out of the Earth First! ideological handbook.

While this Marxist/environmentalist propaganda is annoying, the more serious problem is the attack on "isolationism."

America, and much of the Western world, has had a long-running conflict between two irreconcilable views of the purpose of our civilization. One group, most aptly typified by the Jacobins of French Revolutionary fame, believes that society is an idealistic pursuit of utopia. This school of thinking holds that there must be a unifying goal which must be pursued relentlessly in order to justify society's collective existence. From the Crusades to the present Iraq War, the Jacobins believe that only by throwing our bodies (not their bodies, mind you ... but ours) into the maw of war for the "higher purpose" that currently enthralls them will we morally justify our existence.

The opposite pole, typified by the America First movement of 1930s fame, holds a position usually described as "conservative." This group believes that the purpose of society is to provide a framework of liberty so that the people can go about living their lives. It holds that the purpose of society is to permit the people to raise their children, work at their chosen career, and worship God with as little interference from distant authority as is possible. It is the belief in a Republic, not an Empire. It requires a military of minutemen, not centurions. It believes in "community building" at home, not "nation building" abroad.

The movie that the Ring trilogy most recalls in my mind is Casablanca. That too was a wonderfully made production with first-rate acting. But it too was a pot-shot at "isolationism." That movie revolved around a character who sulked about his own failed love life rather than lift a finger to enter the fray of world war. He was portrayed as a rather pathetic "man" who would rather cry in his drink than do anything concrete to save the world.

In the Ring, an implacable evil arises from distant lands. The Hobbits, (who one thinks are portrayed rather like our beltway elites view Americans in small-town USA), are content to live their myopic little lives instead of going off Crusading. But they can't just live their little lives. They cannot think that there is any moral righteousness in building a shire and enjoying their family. Not when there are orcs that need killing.

It is this Manichean view of reality, along with the futility of "isolationism," that is the real underlying message of the Lord of the Rings.

The psyche of our elites is essentially one endless loop of Lord of the Rings, with themselves starring as Gandalf (the wise one who must convince everyone else of the need for the Crusade). Their worldview, which in the American context I believe arose from the righteous fanaticism of New England Puritanism, focuses on a continuing series of Saurons. Southerners, Spaniards, Serbians, Muslims, etc., have each, in turn, served as the evil straw man against which the elites can release the grapes of wrath and swing their terrible swift sword.

Those who oppose their plans are either isolationist hobbits, cowardly human villagers, or Saruman-like turncoats.

The problem with this "Middle Earth" view of reality is that it does not accurately reflect the world around us. Arabs are not orcs. Milosovic is not Sauron. The Albanians are not elves. This philosophy of endless Crusading will leave us with mounds of corpses, a bankrupt treasury, and an Empire instead of a Republic.

So as much as we might enjoy swinging our make-believe sword at those imaginary orcs, adulthood beckons. Serbian nationalists and Muslim fanatics can never destroy our Constitution. But the ethos of endless war just might succeed where they fall short.

* * *

Steven LaTulippe is a physician currently practicing in Ohio. He was an officer in the United States Air Force for 13 years.

I hate to say it, but I really think that this poster has too much time on his hands.

...must agree with Meyer.

Will wonders never cease?

Interesting points made about the Ring trilogy. Tolkien wrote the original stories in letters to his son who was in the British Military during World War 2. He was in the RAF in North Africa fighting the Fascists and Nazis.

Tolkien was a scholar whose specialty was Norse Mythology. He wrote long letters to entertain his son and used a mixture of current affairs and his knowledge of Late Antiquity, Early and the High Medieval period as the fabric from which the eventual Trilogy was woven.

The creators of the movie threw in Pre-Rafaelite painting scenes from the 19th century, Arthurian chivalry legends, Walter Scott's tales of Ivanhoe and

our modern concerns for the environment and the new axis of evil created by the republican propaganda machines as flavoring for the pot. There also was a great digree of borowing from Star Wars changing machines into animals, such as the Olephants.

As for the philosphy, well I would hardly call the Feudal model to be a left wing concept. It really struck me as a neo fascist nostalgia for the days of lords and ladies, with the peasants providing background figures of no depth except the hobbits who represented British housholders in an idealized agricultural paradise. The Merchant classes were carefully expunged. In fact there were no merchants to speak of. The industry of Saurian was a parody of the rise of the 19th century factory system, but it was not seen from a marxian or anarchist social industrialist analysis but from the view of the old landed gentry wishing for a time before the capitalist and merchant classes had gotten them into debt from their wars, high living etc, and forced them to enclose the commons, kick the peasantry off the land to provide labor for the new factory system.

Trilogy land was a world in which the industrial age was crushed in its infancy and a rural world of gentry and peasantry and a few hobbits existed as perhaps the incipient pedeler classes but not threatening as Venitan or Genoan merchants would be to the feudal culture as it went to war in an equivalent to the real crusades. There were no transit fees, no gold required for the financing of the armies. No atttacks on a fellow human (read Christian) kingdoms as the attack on Constantinople in the Fourth Crusade proved to be in the real history as a way to pay off debt. The films idolize a culture with no capitalist exchange at all. On the surface this may seem to be a Communist or Anarchist rejection of monitarism, replaced with the potlach or gift exchange economy. But I do not see that. Instead I see a feudal insistance on a system of obligation to the liege lord, blood and chivalry with the wealth provided on the backs of a near invisible peasantry. Certainly the real world of exchange had no place in this world, but instead of a revolutionary model, we have it replaced with a reactionary model. This is a celebration of a bygone never never land for nostalgic conservatives. The environmentalism is that of a subsistiance or feudal economy, where things are produced by the magical invisible hand. Guess where that hand reaches for the magical gold? Not in the Alchemists transformation of this Merlin. Gandolf would make a great Bakunin, Lincoln or a Marx, to bad he is forced to play the stooge for Churchhills, Stalins and Roosevelts.

The Serach for the Grail by Monty Python offered a better view, certainly a way out. The dream is still over kids, lets Imagine a world with no countries, its easy if we try. - Gary Rumor

In the comments of the Return of the King, or the whole trilogy, the average person can be amused by the concept of a limpid frodo, who loves to stare as if there is a mirror which the viewer can't see, somewhere in front of him, and the concept of good winning over evil while the bad men are always allowed to return home to their bosses for one more slaughter.

The movie is rife with American style cliche's, things written into movies which fools watch without noting the failure of the logic, and the resulting pain and brutality that faulty or fake morality-logic create.

The brothers warn the king, just out of his grovelling trance, not to hurt the witch craft user and let him go, enough blood shed, yet it will be nothing compared to the blood shed that will be unleashed when he warns his boss of the retreating king's destination.

If the conservatives are concerned that faulty logic against technology is all they have to worry about, then they got something coming, because if there is one point that may be made in the movie it is the rebellion of nature against its destruction by man who cares not. The concept that this is some isolated event is wrong however, just as it is wrong that some end to one single evil eye in the sky, one single evil object will cure the world, and that man, hardly the carriers of evil, will pervail to the end, is foolish.

The world, the earth, as an environment will more than likely reject man completely, and evict him. This is the karma. Water spurned will be water polluted. Nature cut down will be nature vanished. And there will be no rain for the crops, manipulated or not.

Famine.

It will all out strip the spin doctors in the magnitude of its horror.

If there is an error in the trilogy it is that it was written back in the time when the script writers could keep making it look like the only fascists were nazis in Germany.

People could believe that good won over evil.

But from the perspective of living in the third world, fascism is anything but dead, and the world has been over run in the view of most of the indigenous by the industrial nations. However this is no movie. It is the end of their environments, their justice, their communties, their cultures, their language and their lives. For them, extinction rather than a happy ending, is their reality.

If people would fool themselves that the western fantasy industrialization as something that can be only modified to make it go on forever, chopping down the whole earth, then it will be more than a little bit of nature laughing at the eviction when it happens.

Matthew McDaniel

Thailand

...that they are simply unable to watch a movie and have a good time?

It's something fundamental. The lack of it makes them unable to laugh, to enjoy themselves, to take some measure of joy in the world. The lack of it forces them to see everything through the filter of politics, to imprint everything they see with the right/left dichotomy.

We've seen it in here repeatedly. The only thing these people seem to find amusing is a "Bush = Hitler" Photoshop.

Sad, really. It must be so incredibly boring to be these people.

nonanarchist

Does this fool even realise that LOTR was written in the 1940s??

It wasn't rushed out after 9/11 as a propaganda tool.

I just thought I might add a bit of fact to this "debate"...

Tolken lived outside of London in the 1920s on.

HE was wittnessing the massive expansion of a dirty (coal powered) industrial city rapidly consuming the fertile english country side he so loved. This rejection of industrial corruption is deeeply etched in his books, along with his male/male "Band of brothers" ideology which arises from his experiance fighting in world war one.

The Hobits clearly are the hippies, or more appropiatly they are permaculturalists who live sustainably. We could all live in the shire if the capitalists woudl stop cutting down all the trees, objectifiying the world, and comodifying everything.

There are clearly all types of class hierachy and oppresion in tolkens vission. Sam is based off of his personal man servent. The last movie is called "retern of the King"!

Tolken was not only a linguist but a mythologist. He is weaving together countless archtypes, to create a narative that will appeal to basic human emotions. Gandolfs retern fromt eh dead as the white rider amongst others show this bleanding of paleo-mythology.

The elves and dwarves come out of Viking myth, so unless you want to put the great Norase advintureses i the same bag as Earth First! (which is cool with me) then you shuold not point fingers and call this propaganda, but maybe rethink your environmental attitude and admit that there is somethign seriously fucked about the way we kill our world in order to have vast armies, castles, and cities of ivory and gold.



And lastly... take some basic critical theory courses.. read some derda... we can deconstruct any text in numourous ways.. we can read it taking into consideration Tolkens biography. We can read it anaylzing class implicatious using Marx. We can look for racial underpinnings. We cna give the text a feminist reading (not to many real female characers). We can read it in the light of the historic epoch from whcih it originated. Etc.... In fact tehre are to many ways to read a text to even mention. That is why the meaning of a text is fundamentally undetermined.

So try enjoying a grand epic narativethe like of whcih have rarely made it to the big screen, and recognize that what you see writen between the lines originates as much in your mind as it does in the script or novel. Yes Tolken disliked industrilization and that attitude can be seen in the movie, along with class issues, gender issues, war issues, religious issues, and so on. If you cannot let go and still enjoy a movie with all that kick ass photage of New Zeland then you should rethink your connection with your planet of birth.

Also, has anyone else ever seen a major block buster action movei spend as much time with closups of guys hugging eachother and crying? Think about the cultural depth of that.