LOTR Movie "analogies" ?

[pegkerr]

An "interpretation" of the Lord of the Rings movies which is, perhaps, not surprising, but intensely gag-producing. For me, at least.

Okay, why mince words? Probably the most incredibly offensive I've ever seen. I would hope it would have been for Tolkien, too, who loathed allegory.

*Choke*

Comments

[minnehaha.livejournal.com]

It's been days, and I haven't been able to get this out of my head. Forget the idiotic LOTR parallels, and think about what she's saying, what she believes. In my head she's a normal woman, with a family, and maybe with a job. She's not a radical. She's not traditionally political. Maybe she's religious, but not overly so.

How in the world have we gotten ourselves into a world where this person, and the millions like her, believe this kind of crap? And how to we get outselves out of it?

Solve this question, and you'll have done society a great goodness.

B

[pegkerr.livejournal.com]

Yeah, it's been rankling with me, too. Absolutely, I agree with you. I look at an entry like this, and like K., I start to feel real despair for my country. How can people believe stuff like this?

On the other hand, I can't entirely ignore the LOTR parallels (I agree they are idiotic), because I think she's doing exactly what George Bush is doing, and thus providing a great working example of why Tolkien loathed allegory.

It's so tempting to mangle a story like Tolkien's to fit the Procrustean bed of your favored interpretation, but in doing so, you miss the really challenging and complex examination Tolkien was making of the subject of evil.

Now George W. Bush loves to talk about evil. He sees himself as the cowboy facing down the outlaws in the dusty street at high noon, as the shining knight, defending America against the hoardes of darkness. To George W. Bush, the scary Other is always an orc--subhuman, obviously a minion of the forces of darkness, and they hate us, because, well, that's what orcs do. It's their very nature. They're evil.

What he fails to grasp--and what this woman's "interpretation" illustrates so--well, not beautifully, but thoroughly--is that Tolkien's story is totally corrupted if you don't understand that the greatest threat to the mission to destroy the Ring came from within the hero himself. The threat is not the Ring as liberalism and socialism, dammit. It's that Frodo carries his own destruction within himself in the temptation to give into it. He would take the step in the wrong direction, Gandalf says, "from the desire to do good," reasoning that the end justifies the means. (Think of the Patriot Act.)

Understand, now, I'm not one of those who believes that American's deserved September 11 or brought it upon themselves. In no way could we ever have deserved what happened to us. But I balk at doing what this woman and George Bush want to do--to insist that all the darkness is outside us and none of it is within us. George W. Bush recognizes no darkness within himself. He is absolutely unable to see it.

And he wonders why the rest of the world hates us for all the "good" we have done in Iraq.

[Upon re-reading this comment, I'm not sure that I made my point at all. I was perhaps a little too tired to drink that wine at dinner, and filling out pages and pages of those stupid school forms has made me cranky. But I'll still send this on its way and hope you will be tolerant enough of me to forgive if this comment seems hopelessly muddled.]

[minnehaha.livejournal.com]

This is the line I can't get out of my head: "...Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hanity fighting little battles along the way with humor and courage."

I simply can't fathom how anyone can have that opinion of those people. Even if you believe in traditional Republican, or even Conservative, values, those two are nothing more than bile-spewing hate mongers.

I agree with Daid Neiwert that they are the people most responsible for the mainstreaming of the new American facist movement.

B

[pegkerr.livejournal.com]

Fascinating. Thanks for the link!