Cracker: Wallywood
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With this
Oh, burn! :) Good as McSweeney's used to be, though, these days if I want primary sources, I tend to go straight to Stormfront ...
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Orcs, in the mythology of the book, are clearly not indigenous - they were created in mockery of or from humans by an envious demigod. It's hard to integrate that with European racist mythology.
Elves actually. Not even humans. Orcs are a mockery of Fairy people. They are meant to be earthly demons of some kind.
The LOTR-is-racist trope is rather dull. It's a European story, certainly. If you want to see the orcs, trolls, dragons, spiders, balrogs, Nazgul, etc as other races, go for it. It stretches the metaphor, IMHO. I'm pretty sure they're really meant to be metaphors for the outcomes of the main underlying theme of the story, the loss of a beautiful natural past to an ugly industrial future, and a fantasy alternate future in which the natural past somehow wins through a built in weakness in the technological model. It's not really meant to be an allegory, but rather a fantasy. Something we might like to see, the mighty overthrown by the small. The indigenous fighting off invaders. The nobody from nowhere saving the world. Women beating men in a sword fight. The broken fixed. The lost found. The forgotten remembered. The foolish learning wisdom. The tree smashing the lumber mill down. The most valuable and dangerous thing in the world destroyed.
Massive inversions of reality, carefully designed and built in.
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With the help of large numbers of local bullyboys, if my teenage recall is correct.
It is not correct. The bullyboys are entirely foreign imported half-orcs and humans. There are some Hobbits who are working with them, more out of fear of the consequences.
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indigene pool satire...?
that did seem like a kind of nasty parody of indigeneity.
or an ingenuous indignity?
or a muddling dig amid ingenuity?This parody is dead!
dare I say a polygone...
(if you get my angle...) -
With this.
Heh, some funny stuff in there. People see what they want to see. An old friend of mine who is entirely into his own pipe-weed thought the entire thing was really about that. I'd even go along with the argument that Saruman was bitter on Gandalf's access to the halfling's leaf. Certainly he was a secret toker, caught red-handed when Merry and Pippin find copious stores of Longbottom Leaf in his storeroom.
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And isn't it interesting that Jackson and his team chose to cast Maori and Pasifika actors in those roles, almost the only place in the films where a non-Anglo-Saxon face could be found
Holy fuck --If Belich is calling Jackson a racist perhaps he'd like to 1) remove the weasel word qualifiers, 2) bother fact-checking his assertion and 3) recast the passage without the post hoc ergo propter hoc.
I certainly hope Professor Belich expects a slightly more rigorous and careful style in his students essays.
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On the subject of Pakeha who don't see race, I heartily commend Reading the Maps' latest.
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Craig - Belich doesn't go anywhere near there, IIRC. Reforging Paradise was published not long before FOTR came out, and had some throwaway line in about NZ being seen as a utopian Britain-substitute when the old one was looking a bit worn out. I don't have my copy at hand but there was a nice line about NZ playing The Shire to the rest of the world's Middle Earth. Being stuck in immense fangirl anticipation at the time, it stood out.
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Holy fuck --If Belich is calling Jackson a racist perhaps he'd like to 1) remove the weasel word qualifiers, 2) bother fact-checking his assertion and 3) recast the passage without the post hoc ergo propter hoc.
I certainly hope Professor Belich expects a slightly more rigorous and careful style in his students essays.
The bit you quoted above is actually from Caleb's comment a page or so back, not from James Belich (whose line about NZ as Shire in Reforging Paradise can be found referenced here).
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Sam:
I blush and stand corrected. Thought it was a damn strange thing for Belich to say, considering that -- whether you agree with his conclusions or not -- he tends to argue his case very carefully.
Think I've earned myself a good hard smack in the head with the heaviest academic style book Belich has access to. :)
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On the subject of Pakeha who don't see race, I heartily commend Reading the Maps' latest.
And if I read this I'll learn how to 'see race' in the Wellywood sign? I just want to know before I commit.
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No, we were talking about Peter Jackson. Do try to keep up, Danyl.
Meantime, thanks for the link, Sam, we can certainly include Mr Downie amongst the overthinkers and, how shall I put it, general idiots. Look at him go:
So, at the end as from the beginning, there is nothing to say about The Return of the King, just as there is nothing to say about Lord of the Rings. Just as there is nothing to say about a cyclone. It is a huge investment of energy, ingenuity, and managerial skill, but in the end, sound and fury signifying nothing very much at all. Tumultuous, accelerating images amidst seismic and saturating din. We are so used to these blitzes, these weather systems of technologically enhanced spectacle passing through, spinning us around thrice, and leaving us dazed amongst commodification’s detritus, immediately hunkering down for the next one, that we have long ago forgotten what it takes to dare to think. What do we dare to think about this film and its surrounding events? What is its connection with a world that we still just about experience on a daily basis? That there is a crisis in the world that we can call evil, sure. But what else is new? It might take a lot more to get to grips with than swords and yelling. There’s nothing in Jackson’s film version that wasn’t apparent in the original epic novels fifty years ago, and even then, Tolkien was hardly a man who welcomed in the twentieth century and all its works. In our sense of what the Cinema is still capable of offering, is bang, flash and flare the only way we want to engage with the bafflingly complex 21st?
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And if I read this I'll learn how to 'see race' in the Wellywood sign? I just want to know before I commit.
Read it, dude. It's especially surreal after the McSweeney satire.
Not to mention it's quite interesting. Definitely as an urban latte-sipping middle class Pakeha, I don't spend any minutes at all most days thinking about anything that goes on out in the countryside. I don't get the spiritual attachment to land much, and I certainly don't have much empathy for house-burning, in any cause.
It does rather sound like the rock that got blown up was a bit of a travesty, though.
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There’s nothing in Jackson’s film version that wasn’t apparent in the original epic novels fifty years ago, and even then, Tolkien was hardly a man who welcomed in the twentieth century and all its works.
Um, yes... I'm no stranger to stating the bleeding obvious, but that's a considerable understatement. Long before you reach the 'Scourging of the Shire' it's not subtext but flashing neon text that you're reading a book by a profoundly conservative child of the Victorian age who regarded the 20th century with slack-jawed horror. But if you're going to stuff everyone who doesn't rub modern liberal sensibilities up the right way, then I think you're disposing of too much I'd rather not give up. Thanks.
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we can certainly include Mr Downie amongst the overthinkers and, how shall I put it, general idiots.
Dunno. He seems to have thought about the book far longer than most people would take to read it. Good on him for hating on it so deeply, someone's got to do it. His casting of Jackson as New Zealand's Saruman follows a dramatic arc strangely similar to the movie he deconstructs, however. I hope when he writes his own masterpiece, it isn't so derivative, and uses less turgid prose, more dialog, less two dimensional characterizations, and gains the zero audience he so reveres.
flashing neon text that you're reading a book by a profoundly conservative child of the Victorian age who regarded the 20th century with slack-jawed horror
Well, I don't think it was humanity's finest century myself, but slack-jawed horror is perhaps overstating things. Some aspects of the 20th century horrified him, much as they horrify others, and they still horrify me. I find it almost hard to believe a lot of the shit that happened, and I hope I don't have to live through anything like it.
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I hope when he writes his own masterpiece, it isn't so derivative, and uses less turgid prose, more dialog, less two dimensional characterizations, and gains the zero audience he so reveres.
Dear Lord. The hostility to criticism in this thread is reaching truly heroic proportions.
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The hostility to criticism in this thread is reaching truly heroic proportions.
Too critical?
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If only.
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The hostility to criticism in this thread is reaching truly heroic proportions.
I am a servant of the Secret Fire, wielder of the Flame of Anor. The dark fire will not avail you, Flame of Udun! Go back to the shadow. YOU SHALL NOT CRITICISE!
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I'll get me cloak... -
Dear Lord. The hostility to criticism in this thread is reaching truly heroic proportions.
Not at all. I'm merely criticizing the critic. Don't be so hostile. Oh, hang on, you're criticizing the critic's critic, right? That's all right then.
YOU SHALL NOT CRITICISE!
I can feel the thongs of some whippy wit pulling me into the pointless chasm of literary rebuttal as I type...."Fly, you fools!"
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Oh, hang on, you're criticizing the critic's critic, right? That's all right then.
If only you had offered meaningful criticism beyond "he can't do, therefore he criticises", which I think we can all agree is best left to children.
The trend in the avatar discussion and here has been not that criticism is unfounded, but that criticism is illegitimate, or "pseud", or "idiotic" and your dismissal of Downie's piece ("he seems to have thought about the book far longer than most people would take to read it") speaks directly to that. Curse the people who think too much! Really? FFS.
I just thought of another argument against the Wellywood sign. I fear that the powerful cultural cringe might interfere with the aircraft navigation systems.
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I just thought of another argument against the Wellywood sign. I fear that the powerful cultural cringe might interfere with the aircraft navigation systems.
Personally, I was very disappointed at the scratching of that fishhook statue around SH1 on Wellington harbour. The idea was to have two giant columns, looking like the sides of a giant fishhook embedded in the ground, as a reference to the legend of Maui fishing up the land. The finishing touch was to be the "line" going up into the stars, as a laser light. It got canned when someone pointed out that this would potentially cause problems for aircraft coming in on the northern approach. Pity.
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But the scene in that really disturbed me was the one showing orcs being born -- literally -- out of mud. Pseudo-autochthones, if you will. That did seem like a nasty parody of indigeneity.
I understood that to be an oblique critique of genetic engineering (creating Uruks out of Orcs and Men) rather than any reference to any explicitly racist ideology. There are elements of miscegenation to the original which don't stand up well to modern eyes, but I think with that scene they were trying to distance themselves from more obvious and problematic ways of creating new species (anyone notice any female Orcs?).
BenWilson: any other candidates for finest century? I'm tempted to balance the odd bout of industrialised mass homicide with antibiotics, civil rights, reproductive freedom and plummetting infant mortality.
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I understood that to be an oblique critique of genetic engineering (creating Uruks out of Orcs and Men) rather than any reference to any explicitly racist ideology. There are elements of miscegenation to the original which don't stand up well to modern eyes, but I think with that scene they were trying to distance themselves from more obvious and problematic ways of creating new species (anyone notice any female Orcs?).
I think it was a pretty clever way of explaining how Saruman "made" the Uruk-hai. Prior to that there was no real explanation for how they appeared-after all, Orcs were supposed to be corrupted Elves from the First Age, and were effectively immune to aging. Tolkein was fairly explicit in stating that the "creations" of Morgoth weren't natural, and couldn't grow or change in the same way as natural beings, which suggests Orcs weren't bred in a normal way anyway. PJ's scene captured the unnaturalness of the Uruk-hai (and thus how far Saruman had fallen) extremely well. It was a dramatic and thematic choice, not a political one.
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any other candidates for finest century?
For some reason, that question makes me think of this great poem by Billy Collins, "Nostalgia":
Remember the 1340's? We were doing a dance called the Catapult.
You always wore brown, the color craze of the decade,
and I was draped in one of those capes that were popular,
the ones with unicorns and pomegranates in needlework.
Everyone would pause for beer and onions in the afternoon,
and at night we would play a game called "Find the Cow."
Everything was hand-lettered then, not like today.Where has the summer of 1572 gone? Brocade and sonnet
marathons were the rage. We used to dress up in the flags
of rival baronies and conquer one another in cold rooms of stone.
Out on the dance floor we were all doing the Struggle
while your sister practiced the Daphne all alone in her room.
We borrowed the jargon of farriers for our slang.
These days language seems transparent a badly broken code.The 1790's will never come again. Childhood was big.
People would take walks to the very tops of hills
and write down what they saw in their journals without speaking.
Our collars were high and our hats were extremely soft.
We would surprise each other with alphabets made of twigs.
It was a wonderful time to be alive, or even dead.I am very fond of the period between 1815 and 1821.
Europe trembled while we sat still for our portraits.
And I would love to return to 1901 if only for a moment,
time enough to wind up a music box and do a few dance steps,
or shoot me back to 1922 or 1941, or at least let me
recapture the serenity of last month when we picked
berries and glided through afternoons in a canoe.Even this morning would be an improvement over the present.
I was in the garden then, surrounded by the hum of bees
and the Latin names of flowers, watching the early light
flash off the slanted windows of the greenhouse
and silver the limbs on the rows of dark hemlocks.As usual, I was thinking about the moments of the past,
letting my memory rush over them like water
rushing over the stones on the bottom of a stream.
I was even thinking a little about the future, that place
where people are doing a dance we cannot imagine,
a dance whose name we can only guess.
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