[lbo-talk] more on why movies suck

Gar Lipow the.typo.boy at gmail.com
Fri Nov 20 19:32:13 PST 2009


On Fri, Nov 20, 2009 at 5:15 PM, Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu> wrote:
> Someone, I think one of Tokien's friends, claimed the background was WW
> 1.
>
> He himself always denied hotly that the work was allegorical. But one
> passage near the end sort of confuses things. The villains back in
> Hobbit-land describe their operations as "sharing." That's from some
> some mid-20thrt of paraphrase of some mid0cebtyry 'do-gooding' tendency
> confused in the mind of conservatives with social-democracy or even
> Stalinism.I think one of Wyndham Lewis's books took off on British
> Labourt in a similar way.
>
> The geography of it is disturbing. Evil is east and south; the good is
> north and west -- and the run-of-the mill villains all tend to be black.
>
> Carrol

Or yellow. Yes, very racist. Also very male dominant. Someone once commented that there were only three significant woman characters in the entire Lord of the Rings series (including The Hobbit) and one of them was a giant spider. His right wing Tory views naturally shaped how he portrayed characters and politics. He got most of the big issues wrong. If you look at his battle scenes from a big picture (strategic or tactical) point of view they are dreadful. The delight of Tolkien is in the details, in the home life and culture of the Hobbits (which is suspiciously similar to that of Oxford Dons). His battle scenes may be awful if seen from the air (so to speak) but I've had veterans tell me that the battle scene in the Hobbit captures the horror and confusion of being in a battle rather well. (Maybe not surprising. Wasn't he actually in a trench in WWI? Don't remember.) Similarly even the elves come into focus when portrayed at home actually serving food and running feasts. Even the Goblins become, not less evil, but with actual motivations and a way of life when looked at their own home in the Misty Mountains, or interacting and working together in the Dark Lord's armies.

My comparison to Pound was not made lightly. Tolkien may not have been a fascist, but his particular form of Tory Pastoralism was not that far from fascism. I'm not claiming Tolkien was a great a writer as Pound. But as I said he is one of those reactionaries I find worth reading. I suppose I could argue that he makes (as many reactionaries of his time did ) critiques of unbridled capitalism and unfettered industrialisation without concern for nature. But in truth anything of that sort in his work you can find better done elsewhere. My comparison to Pound is only in the politics. I don't pretend you can learn as much from Tolkien as from Pound. At bottom my main argument for reading Tolkien is sheer pleasure. The nature of that pleasure can be hinted by the fact that Tolkien invented Elvish and I think Dwarfish before he wrote the books, and believed that in some sense he had rediscovered real ancient languages rather than merely invented them. The novels and stories he wrote were explorations of what the nature of those languages implied to him. On the large issues, the nature of good and evil , the portrayal of pale kings and princes, Tolkien is quite uninteresting. It is the people who are not among The Great (capitalization Tolkiens) who are worth paying attention to in the novels (even the ordinary goblins and orcs are sometimes of interest). And when I talk of world building it is not the geography of the world as a whole the North, True West, Souuth or East that is interesting, but the patches of forest, the particular hills, the swamps , passes, particular mountains - Tolkiens portrayal of the particular rather than the general that is interesting.



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