I want to like Lord of the Rings. I really do.

The book is not great literature. It’s pulp. It doesn’t have the thematic and symbolic resonance of C.S. Lewis’s Narnia series. It’s filled with all too many phrases like “said Gandalf.” On the other hand, it is important for transforming fantasy, for expanding magical realism into the expectation that fantasy worlds have elaborate backstories, geographies, and even their own languages. Such is the accomplishment of an anal compulsive, and I am not without sympathy. Still, it is alltogether too fantastical, in the worst sense, too filled with nonsensical names, with monsters appearing out of nowhere. All its detail has a piling effect rather than a layering one, and it is no coincidence that it so well resembles role playing games which can go on for years, piling plot upon plot.

It is the imagination of a child put into exacting adult form without being a clever child’s tale like Narnia or, much better, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. It gives the fairy tale flesh, a continuity of history, a geography, a sense of language, and all the trappings of reality, as if taking the genre far too seriously in the worst way, but fails to have the resonance, the deep and haunting symbolic meaning, at which the best fairy tales excel. In this confusion of the trappings of realism for the adult world of meaning, it strikes me as having a remarkable adolescent capacity -- capacity because it was written by a man in his fourties - rather than the flowering of adult consciousness. It reminds me of the science fiction I wrote as a child, telling of sweeping change with maps after maps at each stage, no adult resonance granted the art. It is a children’s story written for adults, while the best fairy tales or the Alice books are adult stories written for children.

Nonetheless, the book (I say book because the Lord of the Rings trilogy was intended as a single book and broken into a trilogy at the request of the publisher) looks subtle next to the movies.

I have rarely had a more painful experience in my life than watching Lord of the Rings in theatres. In a season of bad cinema, they outclass all rivals. The Star Wars prequels elicit pain, to be sure, but more a sense of “what were they thinking?” scene after scene, a kind of disgust at the sheer incompetence of the pandering. Spirited Away (Sen to Chihiro no kamikakushi), the acclaimed Japanese animated film by Hayao Miyazaki (of Princess Mononoke fame), left me shell-shocked in much the same way as Lord of the Rings, though its series of event after event, none of which make one care about any of the characters or find more than the most superficial of meaning, at least does not bind its loose imagination through a preposterous and ultimately failed attempt at realism, leaving one at least to admire the artwork as one suffers. Such films merely feel like lengthy water torture. Lord of the Rings, clocking in at three hours a film, feels more like a concentration camp.

Never have I seen so many special effects, having seen exclusive demonstrations by special effects companies on the creation of those effects and thus entirely aware of the millions going into the dozen seconds being projected before my eyes, and felt myself glad if I merely yawned rather than desperately wanted to leave my party, quit the film I thought I should see if only to be aware of popular culture, and go down a Manhattan or a dozen.

Here we have all the phony, neatly packaged morality of not abusing power or giving in to evil. Good wizard confronts bad wizard, both lacking more than the most cardboard of motivation, and when a character turns evil, he or she acquires the obligatory low-tone, digitized voice. At least The Wizard of Oz didn’t take itself so seriously. Awesome towers stand without explanation, yet beg us to see them as ancient and somehow communicative. This I got from Masters of the Universe without the pomposity. Here we have the characters, wandering without direction through a bog, confronted by a monster lacking origin or purpose, and forced to seal themselves off in a cave. Gee, I’ve never seen that before. Then the cave is filled with gargantuan ruins, which might mean something if we knew how the primitive civilization that created them could possibly defy gravity, find the materials, or even begin to construct them -- prior, of course, to disappearing without a trace or convincing explanation. The cave comes complete with the obligatory bottomless ravines, again without explanation.

Then, of course, there is the coup de grace: the good wizard Gandalf, the only character that might interest anyone over fifteen, decides to bravely hold off some enormous monster, thereby supposedly saving the others as they cross a bridge over a bottomless pit. While a cliché, this sacrifice might have some emotive or rational power -- if, that is, he didn’t decide to do so when he could have stepped thirty feet onto the other side of a bridge and let the weight of the monster collapse that bridge, thus killing it without his loss, which seems to effectively neuter the mission to save the world, given his phenomenal wisdom in this troop of pre-teenage personalities. No, our wise wizard chooses to stand right in the center of the bridge, thereby ensuring that he will fall to his death along with the monster. This is a suicide, a choice to end a long life though it jeopardizes all the world -- which risks making the movie intensely interesting for a time, if we did not know that we were supposed to read this not as suicide or shocking stupidity but a noble sacrifice. Exhausted from the abuse, I laughed spontaneously in the theatre as our idiotic characters cried over this loss, apparently unable to recognize the suicide. This could hardly be worse.

I knew I was in trouble in the opening narration, which make that of Dune look utterly logical by comparison.

It makes me feel old, so very old, to be so utterly bored and offended by the stupidity foisted upon me with such presumption while watching a film that cost -- and looks as if it did - enough to save a continent from easily curable disease.

Now, by itself this cinematic abortion would be awful enough, even given its over $200 million price tag. The promotional blitz, the toys, the books with photo covers, the legions of fannish idiots: all of that has happened before. No, what is really intolerable is the praise of Lord of the Rings has received by people who should know better. The media asks in interviews why J.R.R. Tolkien never won a Nobel Prize, for gods’ sake, and the response is always a claim of anti-fantasy bias. Lewis Carroll deserved a Nobel Prize, but Tolkien? Hollywood nominates Lord of the Rings not only for its special effects but for, of all things, best picture. Documentaries are produced celebrating Lord of the Rings’s genius. Critics who know better debase themselves and perform intellectual acrobatics to justify the film as deep or artful. And the annual release schedule of the trilogy of movies promises that a deluge of such nonsense, along with Star Wars and Harry Potter and stupid animated family movie after stupid animated family movie, will dominate the world’s movie theatres for the length of a Presidential administration.

I want to like the movies because of the sheer ambition of the project. The filming of three movies simultaneously, the financial commitment, the choice to hire actors who were not stars: all of this appeals. If it were only done for art -- or perhaps by discerning artists. If it were only Homer being filmed, or the Trojan epic cycle, or Virgil, or Dante, or Milton, Alice, or even fucking Joyce. Lord of the Rings would be a fantastic movie were it but not Lord of the Rings. Adrian Lyne’s utterly brilliant and moving cinematic adaptation of Lolita goes straight to cable in our intensely paranoid and repressive climate, since it might appeal to adults with the deepest of artistic sensibilities, while childish literature masked as worthy of adults dominates the market and garners praise. Lord of the Rings is ultimately not only offensive towards its audience, offering clichés and outright stupidity as serious artistic endeavor, but undermining of our already anti-artistic and anti-intellectual culture, not to mention our artistic patrimony. The future’s gaze can be felt upon matters of art and culture, and if one has the fineness to listen one can already hear its scornful laughter.

YOUR ASSIGNMENT

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