A review of Amazon’s The Rings of Power

 

I was in high school when I read The Lord of the Rings for the first and only time. According to my memory—distorted now, over twenty years later, faded and compressed, fragmentary, a sample of a sample, eroding as it repeats, like The Disintegration Loops—it was a joyous and glacial experience: a chapter a night (or maybe less, maybe just a page or two) read slowly, before sleep, tucking the book back into the space between my mattress and the bedframe¹ whenever imagination overwhelmed me and my brain, feverish from escapist overstimulation, fled from Tolkien’s manufactured world into one of my own (derivative) construction. It wasn’t the birth of my love of fantasy or the genesis of my (pathological) story-telling impulse—I had already begun subjecting my sisters (and later friends) to my homebrew Dungeons & Dragons campaigns²—but it was formative, catalytic; it triggered an [al]chemical reaction that transformed insubstantial, foggy juvenile tastes and compulsions into a concrete obsession that would color³ the rest of my life.⁴ 

 

And, more urgently, it was palliative care for my freshly discovered fear of death, which started as an innocent adolescent doubt (“What if the things I’ve been taught are wrong there’s no heaven, or anything, after we die?”),  evolved into a phobia of falling asleep (because I was terrified by the possibility that I could die in my sleep and that the short-term loss of the self could become permanent), and terminated in my other lifelong fixations: anxiety, neurosis, despair. Fantasy provided me an alternative to terror, even if it was ultimately outmaneuvered and outived by its resourceful enemy, who had all of reality at its command, no scruples to restrain its strategies, and a lifetime to wage its war of attrition.⁵  Fantasy was the only path to sleep.

 

In some other universe, I would go back and reread the trilogy in preparation for this review. I would check my nostalgic priors against my matured (read: jaded) tastes. I would confront my past love, unromantic, sober, and clear-sighted, ready to be disappointed and disenchanted.⁶ But in this universe, I’m tired. I’m back living with my parents,⁷ sleeping in a bed that is not quite my childhood bed, in a room that is not quite my childhood bedroom, but that’s decorated (without my knowledge, against my will) with crayon drawings and scholastic ribbons,⁸ the detritus of my childhood. I haven’t had a quote-unquote “real job” in two years. I haven’t finished a piece of writing, of any length, in more than six months. I’ve barely tried. I’m single. I’m sad. I’ve amounted to nothing. I’m afflicted with the increasingly universal delusion, the global folie à deux, that we are on the cusp of some great systemic societal collapse. (When you’re sufficiently disillusioned, the apocalyptic becomes the only strain of fantasy that you can indulge in without feeling like a fool or a tool.) I’m so tired that I cannot imagine an unexhausted world. So: I cannot be fucked. 

 

And there is more than simple exhaustion holding me back: I’m afraid. My nostalgic memories of Tolkien’s novels are among the last remnants of my lost childhood wonder, the wispy contrails of a pre-cynical age. I don’t dare attempt a close reading; I don’t dare to get close, breathing, lest they evaporate from exposure to the hot air of my open mouth. I can’t take the risk; I will trust memory, which only lies.

 

So here is what my memory, the liar, tells me: The Lord of the Rings is a high fantasy road trip novel, a panorama flipbook of imaginary landscapes, a gentle journey into beautiful and dangerous territory, the hazy outline of that moment when Sam and Frodo navigate the will-o’-wisp haunted swamp, a few short sword fights, thinly described, the tragedy of missing Entwives expressed in Treebeard’s languid speech, Denethor self-immolating on his funeral pyre, the scouring of the Shire, a poetry collection interrupted by prose, Gandalf being dragged into darkness and hellfire and rising again like Christ in white, not a religious allegory, an elven riddle even a twelve year old could solve, Bill the pony being tearfully sent back to Bree, Bilbo’s vengeful birthday party, giant eagles on the horizon, and, above all, beautiful places rendered in beautiful words.

 

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Peter Jackson’s film adaptations were released during my transition from high school to college.⁹ My feelings about the films are hard to separate from my feelings about that time. If I say that I entered The Fellowship of the Ring full of honest hype and youthful enthusiasm and exited The Return of the King with snickering contempt and an ironic sneer, that tells you a bit about my growing dissatisfaction with the movies and a lot about the corrosive effect of the intervening years on my soul.  College was hard. It was an alienating and lonely experience. I lost my faith and gained no friends, connections, or marketable skills in the exchange. All I got of value was greater self-awareness and a passion for “real”¹⁰ literature.¹¹ And even these came at the cost of the loss of my (already meager) self-confidence and my ability to love reading simply, unpretentiously, to be enraptured by pure plot and to root unequivocally for characters I liked without considering abstract bullshit like aesthetics or meaning or subversion, to read for adventure alone and feel no shame.¹² But causality is complicated. Maybe my rejection of fantasy was caused (at least in some small part) by watching Jackson’s movies, and not the reverse. I can’t be sure. I’ll leave that knot tangled.

 

Whatever the reason,¹³ I grew to hate the film adaptations. I remember them being oppressive and loud, an abuse of the privilege of theatrical surround sound. And they only became louder and more oppressive as they went along. Some of the early scenes in The Shire perfectly matched the gentle, romantic residue the books had left in my imagination. The casting, the costuming, the pastoral landscapes, the bittersweet promise of travel into the unknown and accompanying homesickness, all of it felt roughly right. But somehow each progressive scene was more dimly lit and abrasively scored than its predecessor, more full of overcoreographed violence presented at a more traumatic volume; each movie had more tedious bombast: more and longer battle sequences, more screeching and whizzing and banging and wailing, less tranquility, less beauty, less, fuck me for saying it, magic.  And, ultimately, on the screen and in my heart, a pervasive and growing ugliness and darkness.

 

And yet Jackson cut the Scouring of the Shire,¹⁴ arguably the darkest and ugliest moment in the original novels, perhaps because it was dark in the wrong way; the desolate bleakness of The Shire (temporarily) being reduced to a despoiled wasteland by opportunistic industrialists and war profiteers may have been too outside of the template of epic fantasy sandpapered smooth by Tolkien’s simpering successors, too stark in its portrayal of the consequences of war and too unsparing in its unwillingness to place even the most idyllic and beloved of homelands beyond desolation’s reach,¹⁵ or maybe it was simply too small in its scale and its stakes and too slapstick in its tone¹⁶ to serve as a proper conclusion for Jackson’s overwrought epic.¹⁷ 

 

If it was dropped for pacing, that’s ironic, since it would have addressed one of the grievances that even many fans of the films have with the trilogy: the protracted, lethargic epilogue. The original novels actually have superior pacing, since the conflict in The Shire happens after the journey home and before all the damn elves (and Frodo and Gandalf) get on a boat and (finally) sail out of Middle Earth for good, it proves a vital moment of tension and conflict in the midst of the series’ otherwise peaceful denouement. The final twenty minutes of the films feel so fucking long not because of what was left in, but because of what was cut!

 

Maybe the Scouring of the Shire is a necessary moment of nasty, clarifying reality, without which fantasy cannot be cathartic or transformative, and must instead settle for being diversionary, a novel perpetual motion machine that we can abstractly admire for the ingenuity of its construction but that we can only watch spin in one direction for so long before our attention lapses or before the noise of its hidden gears becomes unbearable and we start to think that it would be better if, like the mechanical turk, the whole apparatus was an elaborate hoax, because then at least there might be something human concealed inside.

 

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And now, finally, we get to the putative topic of this review, after the passage of ten paragraphs and twenty years. Amazon is in the midst of releasing their long-gestating and obscenely expensive Lord of the Rings prequel series The Rings of Power. I’ve watched the first six¹⁸ episodes, numbly. They’re bad. Worse, they’re joyless.

 

Even before the appearance of the first episode’s title card, we’re subjected to a battle with an ice troll that has all of the silly excess of Jackson’s films without their (vacant) style or basic cinematographic competence. At one point the flat-affected elven warrior woman Galadriel makes a running leap off the blade of another elf’s sword in order to … stab the troll slightly higher than she would have otherwise. There’s no real sense of the impact or importance of this attack. Watching the scene again, muted, as I type this, I’m not even totally sure if it connects. It’s simply, flatly delivering on the expectation set by Jackson’s movies that elves must be superhuman combat acrobrats. And that would be fine if the acrobatics in question were elegantly choreographed or skillfully shot. I’m not some wargamer nerd who evaluates fantasy action sequences by the standard of historical or tactical accuracy. I just want to be thrilled and enthralled, rather than incredulous and bored. I want my eyes to pop, not roll.

 

Though, honestly, I eventually started to yearn for the goofiness of elven sword gymnastics, as most of the battles later in the series are so gruesome and dour that they can’t even be enjoyed as camp. The sixth episode is almost completely consumed by a protracted orc-on-man battle—clearly inspired by setpiece episodes of Game of Thrones like “Blackwater” and “Battle of the Bastards” but nowhere near as impressive, even as pure spectacle—and is so full of grisly dismemberment, extralegal civilian executions, and bloody uncauterized wounds that it probably only secured its TV-14 rating by being so poorly lit throughout that most of the violence is completely incomprehensible and the fact that orcs bleed black instead of red.¹⁹ Tonally and philosophically, it felt more like I was watching an adaptation of Hobbes than Tolkien. If only the episode had completed the trifecta and been short²⁰ in addition to being nasty and brutish.

 

The non-violent scenes fare no better, consisting mostly of static, artless shots of actors with prosthetic ears or feet or noses standing in front of bland digital concept art, reciting agonizingly bad dialogue. And the dialogue is not simply one fixed kind of bad, but rather a grab bag of every variety of bad that dialogue can be.²¹ Of course you have entire scenes where characters engage in dry plot exposition. That’s a given. And obviously the magical thermodynamics and/or arcane history underlying every stupid fucking shimmering orb and glowing dwarven rock is going to be explained to us, stripping them of their intrinsic wonder. And, yes, everything has a stupid multisllaybic name full of “L”s and “Y”s. And, yes, we are given a lot of those names: the names of men, the names of elves, the names of dwarves, the names of kingdoms, the names of dead kings and heroes, the names of trees, and on and on and on. Those are just the essentials of worldbuilding. Grizzled veterans of fantasy bullshit know what they’re getting into.

 

And then there are the clichés. Characters truly (and unironically!) say things like “There is no harsher master than the sea” and “You vex me, elf.”²² But just as you begin to wonder if perhaps the show went so monstrously over budget on IP acquisition and computer-generated cave trolls that scripting duties were offloaded to GPT-3, you get ponderous exchanges that are bad in such an unfathomably unique way, so full of linguistic Dunning–Kruger, that they could only have come from an authentic human mind. Here’s a representative sample: “To what port do we sail?” “See for yourself. We’re nearly there.” “Nearly where?” “Home.” Think about that for too long, try too hard to understand what is being said and why, and you’re liable to reach a level of thought-annihilating un-knowledge previously achievable only by mediating on Buddhist kōans. Almost every spoken word is unbearable.

 

Much of the time, it’s impossible for me to see the series itself through the fog of the countless other books and films and series that it “draws inspiration”²³ from. There are no truly original scenes. Everything is pilfered. Everything is something I’ve seen before, sometimes many times before. It’s a collage of recycled plot points and framing devices. Except that collage implies transformation, an original whole made from appropriated parts. Here it’s as if someone cut up a print of a famous painting and also a bunch of reproductions of that painting by unskilled amateurs and glued the pieces together into the closest facsimile of the original work that their  trembling hands could manage. So all you notice are the seams, the flaws. Everything has been stolen not so much from Tolkien but from his generations and generations of imitators, and reincorporated awkwardly into the subject of their imitations. A whole genre of derivative works have been swallowed back up by their source, digested, pulped, excreted in shades of brown. Saturn devouring his son; a calculated lens flare obscuring the sun.

 

Even the title sequence has been bungled.²⁴ It has no sense of the grandeur of the world, no promise of adventure or discovery, nothing wonderful or wild, magical or mystical.²⁵ Instead, we get … vibrating pebbles? I’ve seen the sequence half a dozen times, and I’m still unsure of what it’s depicting and why. It’s all particles, glyphs, abstraction. I’m guessing that the symbols formed by the dancing dust have some significance within the world of Middle Earth and/or Tolkien’s writing, but they mean nothing to me. The show has done nothing to give them context or meaning. They’re empty, dead. The only connection I can ascertain between the title sequence and the series it prefaces is that both make me feel nothing. Well, alright, not quite nothing. I feel impatient. I feel bored. I wait for the intro to be over, so I can start waiting for the show to end. When the show does end, the credits are a relief, the soft music playing behind the scrolling names offers more enjoyable stimulation than anything that came before, but even that is ruined after ten seconds as I search desperately for the remote to prevent the Amazon app from autoplaying the trailer for the next episode. I do not want to have to watch any scene from this series more than once.

 

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If the series is a string of offenses against taste and patience, the elves are the most unrepentant sinners. Everything they say is mannered and bland. Everything they do is [super]heroic and obnoxious.  This isn’t new. The Lord of the Rings has long had an elven problem. Before the trilogy was published, Tolkien used to read from his work-in-progress to The Inklings, an Oxford-based literary society²⁶ that he was a prominent member of. During one of these readings, while Tolkien was in the midst of sharing an excerpt from what would become the seminal, genre-defining work of epic fantasy, Hugo Dyson, another member of the group, interrupted Tolkien midsentence by rising to his feet and yelling, “Oh no, not another fucking elf.”²⁷ Hugo, I hear you, man. Even now I hear you.

 

Some of the non-elven races fare better. The dwarves and the harfoots²⁸ (harfeet?), with their rustic accents and lives revolving around food and drink and work, are the most grounded in something resembling relatable reality, feel the most human. This isn’t ironic, or, at least, it’s not a fresh irony. Tolkien chose his hobbits, and not his men (who are only incrementally less aloof than his fucking elves²⁹) to be the reader’s point of entry, the point of departure from our world to his. He must have understood that we see ourselves most clearly reflected in characters that are small and vulnerable, petty and provincial, hungry and scared, and that more idealized human forms have to be rationed, or at least introduced later in the narrative, after the audience has already been won over. The Rings of Power has been made by people who lack this understanding, and so we don’t get acclimated to the world through a single consistent, sympathetic perspective but instead get jerked disorientingly between the low and the high, tossed recklessly between midgets and giants until we barf. 

 

That said, the Harfoot sections are imperfect. They’re certainly easier to bear than tedious trials of elves and men, but they’re also deeply derivative, heavily and obviously influenced by Jackson’s “second breakfast” Shirese banter, another wan imitation of an imitation: empty, depressing, sad. There are moments of promise though, scenes that evoke the general feel of Tolkien’s hobbits without being rigidly shackled to past iterations and adaptations of his world. One of the best is a speech given by a harefoot elder on the eve of their annual migration³⁰ that briefly teases us with the memory of Bilbo’s comic birthday address, only to take a sudden dark turn and become a memorial to the dead (“left behind” is the harfoot euphemism of choice) who were lost or abandoned during past journeys.³¹ It’s surprisingly poignant and somber without being demoralizing, unexpected while still seeming entirely at place within the traditions of Middle Earth.

 

The dwarves, meanwhile, are downright fun. They’re industrious workaholics. They hold grudges. They shit-talk the elves. They miss their friends and bicker with their wives. They even have one or two authentic-feeling relationships. It’s glorious to behold. It makes you wish the show was about them. It makes you wonder why the rest of the series makes these simple pleasures seem so impossibly hard to capture. It makes you hate the elves so much more.

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Of course, there has been discourse about the series. Apparently, the fact that non-white actors³² have been cast as elves and dwarves and hobbits has sparked a backlash against the show, with the now bog-standard accompanying accusations of performative wokeness and advancing progressive cultural politics at the expense of the source material. Note that there are no links in the previous sentence. That’s because I’ve never actually seen anyone seriously condemn the show’s multiracial casting. I’ve seen people condemning the (hypothetical) people who (hypothetically) condemned the casting, and I’ve of course seen jokes and memes about about the casting and about the (still hypothetical) backlash to the casting, but the original outrage is elusive and possibly imaginary,³³ like one of those phantom islands that cartographers confidently add to generations of maps until someone bothers to sail out to them and finds only empty sea or, perhaps, a tiny sandbar occupied by a few combative crabs, warped into bizarre forms by generations of genetic isolation; there’s often no safe harbor for our biases except imagination.

 

But let’s take the existence of a large and vocal anti-black-hobbit bloc as a given, if only so I can pose the following question to someone, since it’s already written: Is this casting something that childhood you, the iteration of yourself who first encountered (and loved) Middle Earth, would have cared about, or even noticed? Or has the wellspring of your joy been poisoned by the dual discursive toxins of fandom pedantry and the culture wars? Is that racial purity of elves and dwarves fundamental to your immersion in Tolkien’s world, or have you been bamboozled, and, in fact, it’s the existence of this polarizing, meta-textual conversation itself, in which you’ve become gleefully complicit, that is the actual barrier that separates you from childlike wonder and joy? What if it’s your inability (or unwillingness) to stop talking and thinking in terms of the culture and politics that you purportedly hate that walls you out of the wilderness of pure fascination and prevents your escape from dreary reality? 

 

And, of course, all of this goes for those relentlessly pointing out the foolishness of melanated hobbit paranoia too; don’t think the apparent rightness of your position means you haven’t had something fundamental stolen from you. Has your obsession with dunking on the silliness of your ideological enemies driven you beyond the reach of simple passion? When was the last time you thought you caught a glimpse of the thing itself, beautiful and disinterested in your pursuit of attention? This applies doubly to all the memetic ironists, vacant of principle, who see only opportunities to be seen. Even passive voyeurs can be corrupted if they stare too long, too hard.³⁴

 

If you don’t give a shit about abstractions like the slow erosion of your human soul, there’s another, more pragmatic reason to dismiss the racial casting debate: The cast is the only area where the show succeeds (almost) unequivocally. The gap in quality between the performances and everything else in the series is tremendous. If the actors were even slightly less persuasive, even the patina of prestige TV would be annihilated and you would be left with Xena: Warrior Princess or Hercules tier camp, the sort of show that would air in syndication on a Saturday afternoon in the ’90s, filling space between cartoons and Dateline, straddling the line between adolescent and adult audiences; only those shows didn’t cost hundreds of millions of dollars. Any moment that you look at the screen and see the lives of elves and dwarves and hobbits and men rather than CGI and prosthetics and concept art and the smoke rising from the monetary funeral pyre burning just off camera is a testament to the talent of the cast, who spontaneously generate real emotion from nothing, even while sealed in the airtight jar of a transparently fake world and while enduring transparently fake scenarios and reciting transparently fake dialogue.

 

And this credit very much extends to the non-white members of the cast, who do far more to enrich immersion than break it, regardless of their violation of Middle Earth’s supposed pigmentary canon. Perhaps the most cruelly misjudged is Sophia Nomvete, who had been memed into a belligerent, ebonics-spouting DMV clerk before the show even dropped, but who gives one of the series’ most endearing and gently charismatic performances as the dwarven princess Disa. Likewise, Lenny Henry’s Sadoc Burrows is exactly what you would want from a hobbit harfoot elder statesman. He vacillates between gregarious and dignified in a way that foregrounds the tension between his stature and his stature.  Ismael Cruz Córdova is stiff and cold as Arondir, but he’s playing a fucking elf, so what do you expect? 

 

Though, admittedly, the series’ most enjoyable performance is one of its most conventionally cast: As Durin, Owain Arthur is exactly as stout and loud and Welsh as you’d expect from a dwarf, and it’s wonderful. It’s not wonderful just because he owns the stereotype—Galadriel is as stereotypically elven as an elf could be and she’s insufferable—but rather because he takes the stereotype as a starting point and transcends it through self-deprecation, humor, and, some-fucking-how, actual pathos. Perhaps The Rings of Power is too fundamentally, conceptually flawed to have ever been great, but when Arthur is on screen—and especially when he and Nomvete are playing off each other—you get glimpses at what the good version of the series might have looked like: gleeful, funny, sincere, and, most importantly, totally uncynical.

 

The racially indifferent ensemble casting feels fundamentally theatrical, what you would expect from a stage performance, where the audience understands that a certain level of suspension of disbelief regarding menial details is simply part of the experience, and that trading fidelity to petty logistical details for high quality performances is always worthwhile. If this approach is good enough for Shakespeare, why should Tolkien’s spectre turn up his nose? If Denzel Washington can be nominated for an Oscar for playing Macbeth, who could possibly object to Larry Henry as a cavehobbit? I suspect that what’s being objected to is less that the integrity of the fantasy has been somehow broken, than that the casting evokes one of the great bipartisan bugaboos of social media grifterdom: true racial invisibility

 

That’s not to say that the series is totally raceblind. At time of writing, it prominently features one elf/human romance—the only truly scandalous and dangerous variety of interracial relationship within the borders of Middle Earth—and has hinted at another. The mixed-ear couple even features Arondir, the show’s only prominent black elf. It’s hard to imagine this was fully accidental. Meanwhile, human/elf tensions are central to the subplot set on Númenor, a Greco-Roman-inspired isle where elves, who we’re told originally gifted the island to men, are now barred from setting foot. The nativist³⁵ sentiment in these scenes is garishly (almost hilariously) conveyed. There’s talk about elves stealing jobs from human craftsmen. At one point, an enraged mob actually chants, “Elf lover! Elf lover!”³⁶ It’s … blatant.

 

Does this layer of real world racial subtext add nuance or texture to the series or is it a grating distraction? Certainly this is an area where Tolkien, who was notoriously critical of fantasy as allegory, would likely have raised objections. Personally, I was just happy to have anything at all to think about, any reason for my enervated neurons to keep firing, during these scenes, which were otherwise as wooden,³⁷ uninspired, and predictable as the rest of the show. While it’s true that, as Galadriel didactically proclaims, “[o]ne cannot satisfy thirst by drinking seawater;”³⁸ sometimes, when all of your other options are sufficiently flavorless, you’ll endure a mouthful of brine just for a taste of salt.

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As critical as I’ve been of the series, I have to admit that there were moments in The Rings of Power that caused me to feel the vague, intangible tinge of something, the nervous twitching of the phantom limb of authentic emotion:

 

The first was the melodic monastic chanting that accompanied the elves sailing into Valinor at the end of the premiere episode. Yes, this scene was obscenely over-the-top, with its cascade of doves and the parting curtain of sky revealing only intense light beyond the edges of the visible world. It’s an almost too-Christian image of entry into heaven. But, motherfucker, that’s what got me. Here, momentarily, Tolkien’s lifelong Catholic devotion and my residual lapsed Catholicism intersected. I caught a hint of his passion and my lost grace, a trace of spiritual transcendence amidst this fallen universe of crass IP exploitation.

 

The second came when Arondir was coerced into cutting down an ancient tree in the midst of an orc-ravaged wasteland. Yes, this scene also touched on one of Tolkien’s personal hobbyhorses, the industrial blight consuming the idyllic countryside of his youth,³⁹ but that’s not what got me. No, in my imagination it evoked a different Waste Land, one that Tolkien was far more reluctant to discuss than the one created by industrialization: No man’s land. Trench warfare. World War I. Where Tolkien served and was wounded. Where most of his friends died. Perhaps the actual birthplace of epic fantasy. The horror that necessitated a lifetime of traumatized creative evasions. The broken world that Tolkien tried to mend through fantasy. Or am I just resorting to hollow psychoanalysis? Have I lost sight of the mythic ideal that Tolkien was straining towards and replaced it with, as I bitched about only a few paragraphs ago, “ugliness and darkness.” I don’t know. But, regardless, when that tree fell, I felt something.

 

My third and final moment of authentic human emotion came during the (admittedly cheesy) traveling montage of the harfoot migration. The catalysts: fantasy landscapes, celtic folk music, the illusion of a journey into a virgin world. I won’t overthink this one. I choked up a little. Maybe my eyes got damp. Lord forgive me, I’m a sucker. 

 

The refrain of that song that might have brought me perilously close to tears features Tolkien’s enduring regurgitated platitude, his involuntary tribute to the peddlers of inspirational plaques and gift shop tchotchkes, his “I have measured out my life with coffee spoons”: “[n]ot all those who wander are lost.”⁴⁰ I am sedentary; I am lost. I have no escape. I’m sick of the subversive, weary of transgression. I crave the pure feeling of adolescence, the prospect of adventure, the believable hope of a future with some purpose, some beauty. I’m desperate for wonder, hungry for joy. I need to be born again. But instead all I’ve been given are these fucking elves.

 

 

1. Somehow this wording makes it seem like an illicit (or outright pornographic) text to my posioned adult brain, but there was no such subtext in the moment. This was just a convenient spot; wedged between wakefulness and sleep; besides the mattress, not below.
2. I was going to feign shame about this, but then I had a realization: statistically, reader, not only do your teenage years hold secrets an order of magnitude more shameful than this, but you’re probably doing something more embarrassing right now in the private darkness of your apartment or your heart. Speaking in silly voices about made-up worlds is a venial sin, at worst.
3. First gold, then green, then black; now gray.
4. This sounds like fetish formation. My jaded adult mind cannot approach this topic directly and sincerely without corrupting it; it replaces the juvenile [pure] with the juvenile [puerile].
5. Two decades on and its victory is near complete. See the pale, bloody hand of escapism, too weak to raise a white flag, waiting years for the coup de grâce that its foe is too sadistic to deliver.
6. In all possible senses of the term.
7. Sorry, I let the mask slip. I’m living in an abandoned plantation house in [redacted], Mississippi, with a group of literary misfits, surrounded by rotting Americana, culture’s corpse propped in a threadbare La-Z-Boy, below a tattered and vandalized confederate flag, a different constructed fantasy world, no less a work of wish fulfillment, just paler, sadder.
8. Perversely they’ve pinned up a couple of my academic awards from college next to a “Math Award” from first or second grade and a garish drawing of a brightly colored, lopsided house that, honestly, is of no poorer artistic quality than the picture of an Octopus with Obama’s face that I drew in MS Paint to illustrate today’s Misery Tourism content. My parents have flattened time with thumbtacks and tape, collapsed continuity through interior decoration. Whatever. The ultimate impact of my university achievements was no greater than that of my kindergarten finger-paintings, except in debt. And even that is on the verge of being wiped away. Thanks, Obama Joe.
9. The twin towers fell on 9/11/2001; The Fellowship of the Ring was released 12/10/2001; I started college on 8/??/2002; The Two Towers premiered on 12/5/2002; The Return of the King opened on 12/1/2003; this footnote exists only so the words “twin towers” and The Two Towers can occupy the same sentence.
10. Thank the lord for scare quotes, the ultimate cheat for when you want to say things that you do not understand without being held responsible. I have no clue what real literature is, but within the context of this article, you should imagine bleak, existential works that foreground psychological agony and doubt. You should do this even though these works account for only a fraction of even my own literary favorites. Cling to this false dichotomy (joyful fantasy vs. the true literature of despair) for the next 2k words or so, as a personal favor to me, and then discard it and never think about it again.
11. What a lame t-shirt slogan this would make.
12. “Their eyes were opened and they realized that they were naked.” It was shame, and not guilt, that immediately followed the first sin. Imagine that the Knowledge of Good and Evil dispensed by the eponymous tree was knowledge of taste, not morality. You catch sight of your own reflection in a moment of uninhibited, child-like joy, and you cringe. You are driven from the garden forever with only your belief in your own refinement and your awareness of death’s inevitability as comforts. Would you turn to art, or murder? I respect Abel, but I can see where Cain was coming from.
13. As I type this, I have an intrusive thought: “his heart or his shoes.”
14. This tangent was originally going to be confined to a footnote, but it became so long and tortured that it now needs its own footnotes. So, it has been promoted. The Peter principle strikes again.
15. This was perhaps influenced by Tolkien’s own experiences serving in the trenches of the first World War and living through the blitz of the second.
16. Caution: This footnote spoils three very different creative works and one historical event. Wormtongue’s murder of Saruman in particular is shocking in its petty suddenness, not at all how you would expect a powerful wizard and one of the trilogy’s primary antagonists to go out. Thinking back on it now, the first comparison that pops into my head is Beria’s murder/execution in The Death of Stalin. (If Rudy was writing this, he would probably reference a certain scene in Ralph Bakshi’s Wizards instead.) The natural response to any tonal shift so dramatic and unexpected is laughter. I don’t think this was a mistake on Tolkien’s part. I think he understood that the natural endstate of evil isn’t high drama but banal comedy.
17. Wikipedia claims that Jackson opted not to include the sequence because he felt it was “anticlimactic.” I want to believe that this was his reason, because it confirms my prior that Jackson has a superficial, hollow understanding of the books, rooted completely in escapist fantasy and attention deficit wish fulfillment, but the Wikipedia article cites a print source and I couldn’t find external proof that Jackson actually said this in a few minutes of disordered googling, so who knows (a more patient and diligent researcher, I suppose).
18. I don’t know what number will be here when you read this. It was “two” when I started writing. It increases by one every week that this review goes unfinished. I can’t stop watching the series until it goes to print. Finally, an incentive to write that moves me.
19. One of the great scandals of my adolescence was when Nintendo forced Midway to recolor all the blood in the Super Nintendo port of Mortal Kombat green. The eternal corporate dilemma remains how to pander to the primordial lusts of teens without triggering parents’ latent (justified) fears that their children are born psychopaths.
20. All of the episodes are like 75 fucking minutes long! It’s unbelievable! There’s so much they could have cut! (I say in my 20th footnote.)
21. One small blessing: the audio mixing was often so clumsy, showing such extreme preferential treatment to noise (even inconsequential ambient noise) over words, that I missed a lot of the dialogue.
22. Here, at least, I can relate.
23. Read: steals.
24. Stu loves the title sequence, because of course he fucking does.
25. Contrast this again with Game of Thrones, which, while largely a clusterfuck of clashing tones and aborted plot threads, at least had an absolutely stellar title sequence that gave an immediate sense of the scope and otherworldliness of the setting.
26. Think Misery Loves Company, but replace the degenerate NEETS and recovering addicts with devoutly Christian, shellshocked British World War I veterans and replace Zoom with the most prestigious university on Earth.
27. Some tellings of this anecdote soften Dyson’s curse (“not another bloody elf”) or omit it altogether (simply, tragically, lamely: “not another elf”). Others offer longtime Tolkien frenemy C. S. Lewis as the speaker, though that seems unlikely given that Lewis reportedly loved Middle Earth, even as Tolkien loathed Narnia.
28. Basically gypsy hobbits.
29. Or so my poisoned, lying memory tells me. Maybe this has more to do with the adaptations than the books themselves; maybe Peter Jackson and Viggo Mortenson are more to blame then the author (dead).
30. Even the concept of migratory hobbits is a cool subversion of our expectations, if only the tension between their sedentary natures and the need to travel to survive was more richly explored.
31. Rudy weighs in on the Harfeet: “one thing i like about the hobbit dudes is how they’re constantly migrating to shittier land. that seems counterintuitive, but i’m no geostrategist.”
32. I almost flatly said “black” here. Going off memory, it seems like all of the non-white actors on the show who have been cast in non-human roles are black, but that seems odd to me and I can’t be sure if it’s a pecularity in casting or if my only perception is distorted by [pick only one: internalized racial bias, innocent disinterest].
33. I think I’ve seen some vague “keep politics out of my fantasy!” discourse around the series, though even here I cannot provide sources to support my claim.
34. Just ask Saruman.
35. Maybe nativism is the wrong term to use here, since, as I said, Númenor was apparently given to its human residents by the elves, but then Bill the Butcher didn’t cross the Bering Strait either.
36. Call me a bigot, but I get it. Given the opportunity, I would enthusiastically vote “yes” on the “Exile All Elves” ballot proposition. Though, honestly, this seems like a hypocritical position coming from the men of Númenor, who are equally tedious company.
37. My initial adjective of choice was “leaden,” but I changed it out of respect to the elves.
38. She’s talking about revenge, but, lord, I do not care.
39. An intrusive thought: What would Tolkien have thought about the opioid epidemic? How would he respond to the sight of a Dollar General?
40. Although the line that precedes it in its original context, “[a]ll that is gold does not glitter,” offers close competition in the contest of plundered banalities.