> http://www.opendemocracy.net/debates/article-1-67-1653.jsp
> K.A. Dilday wrote:
> Tolkien’s physical descriptions are spare and therefore liberating for a
> director, yet Peter Jackson has cast the film according to codes of East vs
> West and black vs white. The evil creatures have darker skin and flat
> broad features, some wear turbans, others ride atop elephants in flat
> gazebos reminiscent of those that carried Indian maharajas. It resonates in
> a war-charged world where the rules of war have changed. States are no
> longer enemies so people must be.
By no means. Jackson cleverly deleted Tolkien's egregiously reactionary gender ideologies -- his orcs are nonhuman demons, zombies mass-manufactured for Total War. The Nazgul and Saruman are depicted in shining white, but they're evil as hell. And all the epic battles don't save Middle-Earth -- everything hinges on the power of an insignificant hobbit to resist his own worst impulses. The Ring movies take a bunch of pretty obnoxious neo-national forms, and do something genuinely multinational -- and subversive -- with them. Frodo lives!
-- DRR