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Posts tagged: peter jackson

stoneandbloodandwater:
“ rachelraaaaage:
“ fangorn-f0rest:
“ “Tolkien has become a monster, devoured by his own popularity and absorbed into the absurdity of our time,” Christopher Tolkien observes sadly. “The chasm between the beauty and seriousness...

stoneandbloodandwater:

rachelraaaaage:

fangorn-f0rest:

“Tolkien has become a monster, devoured by his own popularity and absorbed into the absurdity of our time,” Christopher Tolkien observes sadly. “The chasm between the beauty and seriousness of the work, and what it has become, has overwhelmed me. The commercialization has reduced the aesthetic and philosophical impact of the creation to nothing. There is only one solution for me: to turn my head away.”

It is hard to say who has won this silent battle between popularity and respect for the text. Nor who, finally, has the Ring. One thing is certain: from father to son, a great part of the work of J.R.R. Tolkien has now emerged from its boxes, thanks to the infinite perseverance of his son.

Ok, seriously? You’re going to be that stuck-up about it? “Oh, TOO MANY people have been exposed to, and love his work today (probably because of the movies, when many people may not have *ever* been exposed to it otherwise). Now it means nothing because the mainstream has accepted it and dissected every bit of it to find meaning for themselves, when before it would’ve been something only studied in a literature class. It has lost it’s elitism.”

Nope, sorry. I don’t buy that Tolkien wouldn’t have loved his work being immortalized over and over again because of how great and complex his world is.

No, I don’t think that’s what he’s saying at all. In fact, I kind of agree with him. Not that I think it’s wrong to make film adaptations with merchandising options and push that stuff commercially as much as possible. But is that the whole of Tolkien’s work? Absolutely not and it insults his memory and his work every time people insinuate that. It’s some large part of Tolkien’s work as interpreted by Peter Jackson and it is a very specific interpretation. There are parts he skips (most specifically, imo, The Rape of the Shire and a large part of Faramir and Eowyn’s arc) and themes he does not emphasize or even actively de-emphasizes. They are beautiful films with many layers, layers that often correspond to those in the books, but they do not encompass the whole of the books themselves, nor do they take into account the other books. Tolkien had personal philosophical, religious, and literary beliefs that he wrote about extensively - they don’t enter into the movies much. Part of the reason for this is because those philosophies can’t really ever figure into a commercial, Hollywood enterprise - they are distinctly anti-industrial, anti-commercial I don’t think it’s elitist to say that Tolkien would be horrified that you can buy Anduril in SkyMall. It’s just a fact extrapolated from what he wrote. I don’t think it’s elitist to say that he would be upset that his work is always, always connected to a whole genre of that while similar in content is often thematically opposed to Tolkien’s body of work (think about how many fantasy books glorify the military and violence) and this connection is made for the academic and commercial benefit of those works and has frankly tarnished Tolkien’s reputation because the quality of those books is not up to his standard at all. Well, maybe that’s elitist, to say that most fantasy isn’t as complex, academically sound, or well-thought out as Tolkien, but I think that’s true. And, frankly, the juggernaut of the film franchise encourages the misconception that Tolkien is just D&D on steroids. I agree with Christopher Tolkien that this is an extreme disservice to his father’s work, which had academic and philosophical aspects which are just not touched on in this modern iterations.

Images: POC featured in shots from the crowd at Laketown in The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug. Exposure of images has been altered to compensate for the low saturation point of 3D movie shooting as well as generally crappy cinematography.

The second Hobbit movie was pretty terrible. I am not going to pretend otherwise. But this is not a post for me to talk about how Peter Jackson has ruined his reputation and thrown out everything that made the Lord of the Rings great. No, this is a post to point out the one good thing the movie did - better than the production team of the LotR movies and better than most fantasy movies I have seen.

For those of you who don’t know much about Tolkiens original mythos, it was pretty racist. The men of Middle Earth, which is not all of the whole of the world (arda), are white. There are other areas, whose people are described as ‘swarthy’ or 'having dark complexions’ and their military tactics and clothing are taken pretty much directly from East Asian, African, and South-Asian cultures. These races are all, at the time of LotR, sided with Sauron or Evil in some way. In the books, people with these ancestries are pretty universally no good. Here is a page with a good summery of all of the really problematic things as well as the common defenses you might here.

Now, someone could choose to take a very strict to canon approach and say that the population of Lake Town would not have been so diverse, based on Tolkien’s writings. If such a person has voiced such an opinion, though, they probably shouldn’t have gotten to this part of the film because this film was so far from the canon of the books that if this is what you are complaining about kindly rethink your life.

But even, theoretically, if Peter Jackson hadn’t decided to replace his brain with all the Oscars he won for The Return of the King and had made a Hobbit movie that was about as true as to Tolkien as the LotR movies were and even half as good, I still think there is absolutely no reason to choose to preserve that level of racism and racial exclusion in a fantasy work.

The choice to not only include POC in this crowd (however badly the crowd acting was directed), but have them front and center is important. Not that POC had any speaking roles, but they were there, in Middle Earth, playing everyday, non-evil people.

Visually, I personally was plenty represented by the likes of Aragorn, the people of Gondor or the Dwarves (though more female characters would have been nice), so I can’t say what this might mean to a fan of the movies, books, or world who was previously rather conspicuously missing, except under blatantly ethnic-coded costume battling against the heroes in the third film.

But seeing all of the things still going around about Frozen (a fantasy film set in a real-ish place at a ??? time with plenty of historical and geographic inaccuracy that has to reject actual history to not have POC) and Tangled (a fantasy film set in a make believe place at no set time with no canon to reject and no POC) I thought I would point this out, because I hadn’t seen anyone do this yet.

By the way, I think overall, both Tangled and Frozen were infinitely better films than this pile of horse poop. In like every way (this franchise is 5 movies running without passing the Bechdel Test). So it’s even more remarkable that it managed to outdo so many speculative fiction movies on racial representation.

(I will be happy to be proven wrong if someone can find a shot of POC in the LotR movies. There may be some amongst the heavily armored and hidden riders that are impossible to make out on a computer screen…)