Almost The Whole Lord Of The Rings...

 In my lifetime, I do not expect to see another treatment of the Lord of the Rings books.  Jackson's version was impressive, but many adults who find the series with an adult outlook overlook the core that Tolkien was trying to convey.

Yes, I know, he understood well the threat of the mechanical age we embarked upon after World War I, and very nearly perfected to extinction in World War II.  But the core of the story was still a bit beyond Jackson's vision.  And for that, I hold him responsible for the failure.

I first stumbled across the Lord of the Rings as a Catholic School student at the age of 11.  My friends were fairly flat, between thin or thick cardboard, and fairly robustly developed - because I read a hell of a lot.  My daily bus ride started at the end of the driveway, with two of my sisters, and took perhaps 15 minutes to go the mile and a half to the school in the small town of Sartell.  On the way home at the end of the day, the ride was much longer as we dashed out the doors of the school at 3:15, no later, and got onto the bus.  And I did 4 days a week.  That middle day of the week I got to hop into a car and ride into St. Cloud for the weekly band practice.  I was a drummer.

But those days on the school bus were often spent with my nose in a book.  And I'd come home and reinsert said nose most days, as it made my mother feel like I was doing homework.  My sisters had homework, I usually finished mine during school, and had learned that it took too much energy to explain and show that.  Mind you, I was rarely engaged by the slightly larger projects, you know, papers and the like, because they took time away from my other guilty pleasure.

And Tolkien's world beckoned me in with the Hobbit, first.  I got that one because someone else had the Fellowship of the Ring checked out.  And after tearing through that in less than a week, FOTR wasn't back in yet.  Eventually, though, I read all of the books.  Repeatedly.

That is where my disgust with Jackson was born.  It rose to it's peak during the second movie - which he called The Two Towers, but should have been called Jackson's Flawed Interpretation of Tolkien's The Two Towers.  For you see, when Gandalf returns from the dead and stops by Isengard in that movie, Saruman, the other evil wizard, falls from a high spot onto some device which ends his story, in Jackson's version.

And that's the terrible turn which destroyed the movies for me.  Yes, Jackson tells a cracking tale, but at the same time, he, as an adult, completely missed the point of the whole freaking story.

You see, back in the Hobbit, you learn about these people - these short people who are dominated by the greater, outside world, and therefore choose to remain close to their bucolic homes, in peace and relative quiet, aside from the taverns and ... well, their enjoyment of feasts and parties.  Then this odd fellow, Bilbo, is approached and disappears with a group of Dwarves, and goes off for some unseemly adventuring.  I mean, no sane Hobbit does this, he stays home in his hole under the hill and does what Hobbits do to remain good, decent Hobbit-folk.  

Bilbo suffers terrible adventures and changes of fortune, and manages to return just in time to throw his greedy relatives out of his house, shortly after they pilfer all the good silver.  And then he sets to work writing his memoirs, as the other folks in his village look upon him as an odd bloke who'd gone off into the world.  And you know good and well there's nothing good out there for them to see.  Just ... adventures.

Bilbo reappears at the beginning of the Fellowship of the Ring.  He's about to retire, because, well, you know, the difficult life of being the subject of malicious village gossip, a wise old Hobbit who has an excellent stock of stories, and throws wonderful parties, well, he's also got a bit of a medical problem.  It's connected to a bit of jewelry he had managed to snag on his adventure, but it was a minor bit of jewelry, nothing anyone else would be interested in, because it wasn't bejeweled, a sword, armor, a shield, a helm, or ... well, anything useful, really, unless one thought to sneak away.  

Which is what saved Bilbo's life several times over, earlier, but the rather rare - one might say exceptional - side effects of his ability to disappear when wearing the ring ate at his soul.  So as all good well-meaning uncles do who haven't got children of their own, he planned to leave the ring and his relative wealth to his nephew, while he rode off into the land of the sunset, to live with the Elves as they helped him to complete the writing of his memoirs.

And this party that starts the whole series of events is the equivalent of Frodo's eighteenth.  In human years, that is.  Because Hobbits lived longer than us, and Bilbo was 110 as he planned his party, Frodo was about to hit 33 - or the equivalent, in our society, of eighteen.  That is, I chose 18 because we look upon 18 year old people as nearly adults.  For some reason we've determined they're old enough to choose their leaders, die for their country, but not drink alcohol, yet.  So it's a sort of "Adult but with training wheels because we sure as hell can't trust you with anything important."  (yes, that's dripping with sarcasm because if a young man or woman is prepared to put their lives on the line for us and our country, they should damned well be mature enough to get a beer.  If that's a problem for you, then I suggest you look hard at those numbers and responsibilities, and think about what we're telling those people.  Old enough to die for your country, but my God, don't touch the demon rum, you punk!  THAT Soapbox removed, for the moment)  

And so as the Fellowship of the Ring opens, Frodo, and his friend Sam, decide they need to listen to that old coot who kept hanging around his uncle that there's something that needs to be done about his uncle's old jewelry collection.  Because that ring?  It's a bit creepy.  So they send this roughly 18 year old kid and one of his buddies to deal with this minor problem they've inherited.  And then, as they're heading out, they run into a couple of cousins who are also pretty much in the same age range, but have lacked the slightly more substantial foundation that their friends got - because these kooks are stealing food from a local farmer.  It's never clear if it's from a sort of need, or if it was just for the fun.  I feel fairly certain it was the second option, because they were bored, but it takes a special kind of stupid to become that sort of thief.  And it also tells you very clearly what their relative standing in their community was, as well.  

So in the beginning of this vast world-spanning and shattering story, you got a couple of almost-adults partnered up with a couple of ... well, rapscallions is a good term.  They weren't thugs, they didn't steal from the farmer at sword point, and they certainly weren't doing it from a position of strength or power.  They were doing it because they were bored and maybe a bit peckish, having missed second breakfast, or third lunch, whatever.

And then, according to Tolkien, they're all dragged through a pretty hellish series of experiences, captured by enemies who may have intended to eat them, or at the very least kill them slowly.  They face situations that are so far beyond their experience back in the Shire that they're ... well, there's out of your depth and then there's utterly wholly completely thoroughly overwhelmed.  These nobodies from a small out-of-area rural land come to deal with and find themselves at the table of great, or formerly great, leaders.  People who can affect the entire world with their whispers, screams, or inactivity.  And they see how the world can be shaped by just doing the job you were asked to do.  

It's very educational for young people to see the Hobbits rise from almost nobodies to world-shaping forces.  And yet the true climax of the story isn't the ring falling into the lava pits of Mount Doom with Frodo's finger and Gollum/Smeagol.  No where near that.  In fact, the cast of characters that assembled, broke apart, two died, one was resurrected, and then they reassembled, they again break apart, and they all go their separate ways.  And Frodo and Sam get to go Home to the Shire.

Which, in Tolkien's work, is gone.  The peaceful, quiet, pleasant villages with the rolling hills and the happy Hobbits have disappeared under the rough hand of Sharkey.  Mister Sharkey.  Who is what Saruman had become, with Wormtongue.  In the Two Towers, when Gandalf does banish Saruman from his tower, and strip from him his wizardly powers, Saruman chooses to focus his ire and rage on the fact that Merry and Pippin happened to encourage the Ents to tear down the massive mass-production pits Saruman had built to create his own army to aid Sauron, the true evil.  

While diminished, the evil that Saruman and Wormtongue do does not affect the entire world, just the one small land that was so far removed from the whole battle and center of the events that no one ever noticed.

Walking right down the road and into the villages they hoped would be just the same come these kids - they were kids when they left their lands, they were small, unnoticed, hoodlums, or there was that odd bloke with the whacky uncle who threw that great party then disappeared - so did the kid.  

In that world where they were still viewed with suspicion, derision, or just simply a joke, they went to the other people who knew them.  Knew them as kids, as people who were more often a problem.  They convinced their friends, the parents of their friends, and many others to join them and drive the terror out. 

In Jackson's movies, the whole story ends just like Tolkien's - they hop on a ship and sail away.  Some of them.  But it's in the denouement that the pieces differ.  Instead of coming home, plonking down, and writing a book while his gardener gets married, Frodo instead becomes a rallying flag to his neighbors.  Sam helps inflame the rage they all feel after he finds out what happens to his Grandfather - Gaffer.  Merry and Pippin become military generals, raising the citizenry, who together confront the humans - not Hobbits, but bad men - who came to profit from this little land, this small space that had for so long gone ignored, they could now take it from those people who didn't properly use it to absolutely wring out every spare bit of profit and resource that could be found - to hell with conservation or the future, we need those profits right now - and instead, the Hobbits return their land to their control, and they destroy the evil old influence who was still there.

Jackson probably missed the point because, well, it's not all that obvious as an adult.  I mean, we're all looking at the effects of the most profitable quarters for about a hundred and fifty or so years, now.  Sure, we never had a Shire, I mean, not everyone, or, well, if not everyone could have it, then screw it, why should anyone get it?  We're just here for the profits, right?

Or, I mean, just think about what might happen if we decided to stop pursuing profit to the point where we could buy one another and everything, and instead, just focus on having enough.  Enough for us to have full bellies, enough for us to be able to invite friends over to sit, have a chat, swap a few stories, find out how they're doing, and then head on home.  

I know, I'm certain someone out there is screaming "anti-capitalist!  communist!  Crank!"  Yeah.  Because, I mean, just look around.  We've done such a bang-up job of cleaning up after ourselves, of insuring that we've all got enough to eat, safe food and water, and for the love of all you hold dear, why bother getting vaccinated from a disease that could kill you damned quick, because it's all fake, right?  

The bottom line, my friends, is that Jackson did what most of our world has done over the years.  He ignored the central theme of Tolkien - use what you need, share the excess you may have, and hey, let's make sure our friends and family are all doing well.  And let's avoid sticking our noses into EVERYONE's business because we don't know their priorities, their lives, or their needs.  But if we can help, let's do that.  Let's be helpful, and move on.

Or I suppose I should just shut up as one of those privileged folk who has a whole lot of stuff and stop trying to preach to people who won't listen.  Yeah, maybe if I shut up all of our problems will go away.  

Look, I was a child in the 1960s, I became fairly aware of the world in the early 1970s, and I've got a pretty fucked up sense of priorities.  I mean, I think the world would be a much better place if we realized that the fellow over there was just like we were, not some evil force.  But it sure seems to be human nature that we need an enemy.  It sure as hell does NOT surprise me when the enemy of the entire species turns out to be an illness, we can't even agree that the illness is a threat.  Although I can hope that in the long run, those who do not see the illness as a danger will continue to avoid any sort of vaccination until they all die out.  Then we will have done the future species a great service by killing off all of those who believe they know best, that experts do not provide good advice, and, well, at that point, move on.  If nothing else, I can say that if the COVID-19 Pandemic does remove from our gene pool the idiots who would gleefully allow this horrid disease to continue to mutate in their bodies and kill them and their loved ones, it may have done us all a great service.  Thin the herd.