[ SECRET POST #3158 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #3158 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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[Raedus]


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[American Odyssey]


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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 01 pages, 009 secrets from Secret Submission Post #451.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

3/3

[(Anonymous)]

Tolkien, of course, would have been disgusted at this crap. He knew exactly what he was doing when he made Gollum talk like Eliot's Londoners. He hated our world -- hated it advisedly.

That's what's most deeply wrong with Jackson: he reconciles Middle Earth with this world. This is wrong; the two worlds are enemies, and should remain so. Most of us are so slackly accretive in aesthetics and ideology that the rigor of Tolkien's counter-earth is hard for us even to imagine.

Tolkien was not only a genius but a man of honor, ttwo traits which distinguish him from C. S. Lewis, the canting prig who is often and wrongly associated with Tolkien. Tolkien was a brilliant poor boy from nowhere, from a genteel failed Catholic family -- a pariah with a huge mind, from a steely generation that walked into machine-gun fire without complaint. They were unlike us; they kept their word. He married without love simply because he had made a promise. He and his wife treated each other decently, without love. They raised a large family, in something like domestic happiness. He survived as a Catholic in a deeply anti-Catholic university culture, and kept the faith as a living oxymoron: an English-nationalist Papist. On retirement he moved to a dull seaside town he hated, again because he had promised his wife he would.

And in his spare time -- when not translating, lecturing, editing, tutoring or learning roughly a dozen languages on his own, he quietly started writing layer after layer of lore, inventing whole languages, sanding away at his stories so that they would age and blur as real lore does, and even sketching key scenes from his new world -- sketches which remain the only decent illustrations of LOTR.

Now you see why Jackson's shrinklit version of this giant's life work is so very popular: because it tells us this cold, superior being was a weepy, sly, ignorant schemer, just like us. And he was not.

Jackson's deep, unconscious hostility to Tolkien's tale is the product of envy.

Tolkien's generation was so far superior to us that even now we feel it, and hate them for it. If you saw Cameron's film, Titanic, you saw a work very close in tone to Jackson's Tolkien. Pope, another English Papist Prometheus, actually predicted Cameron's film almost 300 years ago in his essay, "Peri Bathous, or the Art of Sinking," forecasting that future epics would pander to base middleclass tastes by "sinking" the high poetry of Epic to the mob's level.

And Cameron, never having read Pope, rang in the new millennium by doing so -- very literally creating an "art of sinking." And those who sink, in this vile film, are the European elite of Tolkien's generation. Cameron's script first vilifies them as cowards -- our vice, not theirs; in fact, the one vice of which they were demonstrable not guilty -- then gloats over the Supermen's slow drowning.

The heroine is a survivor, in our trademark Gollum style: she says, "I'll never let go," just as she lets go of the hero's hand, letting him sink into the deep. She shows up as a 100-year-old populist crone with a cute habit of telling sexually explicit stories, effectively assuring the audience that the colder and higher world that died in Flanders never really existed. Titanic is one long gloating savor of our betters' extinction. It's a very happy film.

What Cameron did in that record-breaking hit film, Jackson does in his anti-Tolkien trilogy: stroking the mob's sullen envy, assuring us that Middle Earth is full of regular people.

At the end, when Frodona and the Matrix Guy show up at the Gray Havens, the true Middle Earth loyalist will be in pain, suffering something like the bends in aesthetic terms as he zooms up to our shallows from Tolkien's chilly profundis.

You may tell yourself that the worst is over...but you would be wrong. Jackson gives his fans their full vindictive money's worth. Not even in this last scene does he fail to kick the nobler world on our behalf. All is reduced, one more time, to farce without humor. In Jackson's staging of this saddest of all Tolkien's scenes, the ship in which the elves are to depart appears to be one of those swan-prowed boats one can rent in some park ponds. I'm not sure whether it actually had foot-paddles or not, but it looks like it would go for about $5/hr, with a bag of duck-feed thrown in. Beyond it lies a painted ocean. I mean, obviously painted. Unmistakably fake. You wince, thinking, damn, why so bad? Then you remember: Jackson wants it to fail. He isn't making these movies for you, you stupid Tolkien nerd. He's making it for the hundreds of millions of anti-Tolkien viewers out there. It's their inoculation against Middle Earth. And if it cures you too, against your will...too bad for you, loser. Jackson may be a fat, fuzzy nerd on the outside, but inside, hey, the man's as slick as that Lakers coach guy.

The final scene maunders on and on as Win-Frodo takes his leave of every...single...damn...character...in...the...movie. Not only does the scene resemble Judy Garland's goodbye to the Tin Man et al., Frod-wina actually manages to look and sound creepily like Garland, with his Anime eyes glistening.

But Jackson's preferred world is, after all, the quaint little Shire. So we fade to black on an image of Sam, Frodo's servant and, er, "friend," cuddling his wife and children in a surprising display of latent heterosexuality. The little is true; the big is false. The ordinary is good; the alien is silly. That's what you take away with you from this nine-hour conditioning session. If you always disliked and avoided Tolkien, you're probably feeling amiable, relieved; you've seen the damn thing, you can talk about it if somebody brings it up, and it wasn't too bad. If you're a believer, you're crushed. And you probably don't even realize what's been done to you. After all, it was a "faithful" adaptation, wasn't it?

It's such gratuitous cruelty, toward people who have so little in the first place...it keeps reminding me of that Bible verse, the only one that ever rang true: "To him who has much, more shall be given; to him who has little, it shall be taken away." You may not realize it for months, but Middle Earth has been taken from you.

One question must be asked, if only for the appearance of fairness: could anybody have made LOTR into movies without ruining it? Tolkien didn't think so; though he took the money Hollywood offered for the film rights, he said over and over that LOTR couldn't be filmed, period. And he was probably right. Still, it's kind of fun to imagine LOTR by various other directors.

Take Sam Raimi. With somebody like Milnius doing the script, Raimi might have done the battle-scenes better...but he'd have messed up the elves even worse than Jackson did. A populist gung-ho type like Raimi would probably have slopped in some hamhanded anti-terrorism allegory, some smartass quips as the heroes decapitate an orc -- Aragorn sneering, "Hey, don't lose your head" Ugh. Let's not even think about that one

So who could have done it right? Maybe Eisenstein. You'd have to slap the Soviet cant out of him -- put a sack over his head, lock him in a motel room in Idaho for a week, and smack him around till he drops the proletarian babble. Then read him LOTR. He'd get the elves, perhaps. And God knows he'd ace the battle-scenes.

Living directors? Ridley Scott, maybe -- back when he was good. He has a feel for the noble and the dying, so maybe he could do the elves justice. In fact, his Nexus-6's in Blade Runner are very close to Tolkien's elves: superior to men in strength, agility, intellect and honor; full of a grief-tinged, teasing tone in addressing their inferiors; and doomed. Think of Rutger Hauer in Blade Runner and you have some notion of how Tolkien's elves should be brought to the screen.

If you're a Tolkien loyalist who's reading this before seeing the films, just stay away from them. They will nuke your Middle Earth before you even understand what's happening to you.

If you're one of the real-world types who never read Tolkien, by all means see all three flicks pronto. You're just the customer Jackson's got in mind.