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| The Return of the King |
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| and of a world wide shared moment |
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This is Dark Cloud on Wednesday, December 31, 2003. Inevitably, I suppose, we come to The Return of the King, the final third of the Lord of the Rings, and one of the great cinematic experiences. That’s not to make it out as better than it is, but if we go to movies to be removed from everyday life and to be moved, Tolkien and Peter Jackson did it. What is amazing about the three movies is that they are clearly one movie about thirteen hours long, and that it moves along briskly, and that despite the loss of Tom Bombadil and the Scouring of the Shire and the odd non-use of the best line in the book, it cooks. There has certainly been better acting – Elijah Woods and Kate Blanchett have some awful moments – but all in all, it’s hard to say there’s been a more fun and exciting movie. Ever. As a people, as a civilization, we have less and less common experience, fewer shared moments as we did in the early days of television with only three channels. Our music has become fragmented and pandered to communities rather than all of us. What we call best sellers in music may not have been even heard by most people. Lord of the Rings may be one of few things in our lives that virtually everybody will see and have an opinion on for decades to come, and this all over the world. Lord of the Rings had and has the distinction of being not only one of the best sellers of all time but probably the most popular pirated book of all time. Also, it was printed only for those who wanted to read it, unlike the Bible which is mostly printed to make others read it. It sold in the Soviet Union like hotcakes and vodka shots for decades, was translated into most languages spoken by more than four people. You could probably easily double the number of legal printings to get an idea of how many copies are around. Just like John Wayne, or Sherlock Holmes, Frodo and Gandalf are world icons. And despite the fact that Tolkien was at best a chauvinistic European and at worst borderline racist, the tale doesn’t offend or strike less of a chord in, say, Hanoi or Rwanda than it does in Shropshire. These are tales common to every culture, every hearth, and they don’t seem alien anywhere, just long ago. But here, in the former Middle Earth. Tolkien complained that his work was too short. Although the book was a half million words before appendices, I’d bet everybody who read it out of interest or at gunpoint, which was my case, ended it feeling the same way Tolkien did. I was therefore surprised to discover, having seen the extended versions of the first two episodes, that what criticism I had of the movies were generally absolved by the inclusions of new scenes. For example, the Fellowship of the Rings in the theater version was almost devoid of fellowship in its haste to move the action along, but the DVD includes the episodes that show it. The Two Towers has about forty five minutes of some funny and important scenes added to its DVD which greatly improve the whole. It is, perhaps, important to understand character motivation to know that Frodo is in his fifties, Aragorn is eighty-seven, and his love Arwen several thousand years in age. Elves can live forever, at least in Valinor, so when they go to war they risked far more than men do. Because in this pre-Christian world written by a devout Catholic, men do not have afterlife. My only major remaining objection is that the Elves were not fully fleshed out, and the missing sentence that underlies the entire saga from beginning to end when Frodo realizes he is not to enjoy the fruits of his labor comes in an offhand remark by one of the principles. “Together through the ages of the world, we have fought the long defeat.” When the Hobbits join that fight of Elves and Men and Dwarves against the descendent of Melkor, they doom themselves to the obscurity they supposedly have today; but it was the right thing to do, still enough. Not bad sentiments to accompany you out of a mere movie. Four years ago, we celebrated new Millennia. Four years ago we were inundated with predictions and scams to profit off of fear, both of death and world’s ending. It wasn’t just the militia groups of moronic survivalists in Montana and Idaho, or fanatic Christians waiting for death in the Holy Land, or the genuine con-men hoping to profit from Y2K computer jams with planes falling from the skies and chaos in the streets. It wasn’t just the salesmen targeting the elderly in their homes with scare tactics to sell insurance and software and protection. It was also the media that covered these scams as if they were real and meaningful, and did so for their own ratings. Four years ago, I promised I’d remind you all of that and engender some anger that these people still aren’t in prison for their shakedowns. I regret that most of their names and businesses have faded away into the great American short term memory hole. But I remember, and I hope some of you do as well, and that we put that memory to good use someday. Happy New Year! |
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