January 3, 2004

'Rings' movies oversimplify in black and white

I'm probably one of the few people on the planet who didn't care for "The Lord of the Rings," especially the last one, the "Return of the King." Although the special effects were spectacular and compelling, the message was unfortunate, even pernicious. As a friend of mine said, "Good and evil, good and evil, over and over again."

This is not the way I experience the world. There have been, and are, despicable people in our world: Stalin, Hitler, Pinochet, Kim Jong Il, but if you look deeply at yourself, you'll see that under the right circumstances, many of us are capable of committing terrible acts. In fact, the United States had a hand in assassinating Salvador Allende and putting Augusto Pinochet into power. The world is not black and white. At a time when extraordinarily destructive weapons are being used it is especially dangerous to view the world in such stark terms. We have a habit of demonizing the enemy in order to give ourselves permission to remorselessly kill them in large numbers.

Let's look at the movie. The simple, even backward, Hobbits stumble upon an astounding and powerful weapon that came from a large super powerful country. The Hobbits are tempted to use it but vow to destroy it instead. Meanwhile the large country is planning to attack smaller countries. They have mighty weapons, monsters really, that no one else has. If we were to transpose this scenario to modern times, the U.S. would be the super powerful bad guys. I'm sure this idea would make all Americans uncomfortable. It would be easy for almost any less technologically advanced, and weaker, country to cast themselves as the good guys.

But, of course, the world is more complex than that. Even now debate continues about just how much ordinary Germans knew about the Holocaust and how complicit they were. It's not so simple. And yet the movie portrays the good guys as sweet or innocent or pretty, or even dressed in white (a variation on old westerns where the bad guys wore black hats and the good guys wore white hats). The bad guys wear dark clothes, live in a dark country, and are hideously ugly and dirty. This gives the fiIm's heroes the freedom to spout pieties and then go hack them to death. We all know, however, that bad people can be clean, handsome, charming, etc., and good people the opposite.

Many in this country view the world in such simplistic terms: from the President, to Congress, to citizens, right down to the dregs of society, talk-show hosts (public radio ones excepted). Perhaps this is why the movie is so popular; it reinforces this facile interpretation of society and the world.

Five days after "The Return of the King," I went to a film called "The Station Agent." This little movie had more humanity in it than all three Lord of the Rings pictures, and with a total budget that would be eaten up in five minutes of said blockbuster. The lead characters are complex and flawed, even unpleasant at times, but they struggle through their personal difficulties to let others into their hearts. While there is indeed some tenderness in the Rings film, it is overwhelmed by special effects bombast and endless savagery.

The playwright Arthur Miller once said that the final defense against tyranny is culture. By that standard, we Americans are in danger of becoming that which we, in principle, have always fought against.

David Kennedy
Ashland