http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/...?oneclick=true
One movie to bind them all in justifying their rationale of evil and war
January 6 2003
Tolkien's text defies simplistic parallels to modern war, such as between orcs and terrorists, writes Chris Mooney.
Early in the new film of Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, the heroes happen upon a pile of burning carcasses, the smouldering remains of a party of orcs bred by the evil wizard Saruman. These orcs were ambushed and slaughtered by horsemen from the kingdom of Rohan, the heroes' allies in the great war enveloping Tolkien's fantasy world. Despite their military advantage, the riders took no prisoners. As a memento, the horsemen left behind an orc head gruesomely spitted on a spear.
In the real world, the horsemen's wanton slaughter - no matter how evil - would probably qualify as a war crime. In its gorily violent film incarnation, however, it is just one episode in a rousing tale of good versus evil.
For supporters of the war on terrorism and war with Iraq, the relative moral clarity of its narrative is one of the chief attractions of The Lord of the Rings. It's a topical connection that Peter Jackson, the director of the cinematic version of J.R.R. Tolkien's fantasy epic, seems to be inviting. In The Two Towers, Jackson improvises upon Tolkien's text by introducing an orc suicide bomber at the battle of Helm's Deep.
Yet as a commentary on contemporary conflicts, Jackson's film has serious limitations. The massacre of the orcs glosses over, rather than explores, questions about the limits of behaviour in warfare. The orcs in Jackson's films are too evil, too irredeemable. That makes killing them too easy. In real life, we simply aren't going to encounter baddies who would literally devour women and children or cannibalise their own kind the way orcs do.
The analogy with the war on terrorism is hardly what Tolkien had in mind when he wrote his novel more than half a century ago. A veteran of World War I, Tolkien once wrote that "by 1918 all but one of my close friends were dead". For all the moral purpose of his vision, there is also this constant drumbeat: "War is hell."
Readers have adapted Tolkien's trilogy to their own circumstances ever since it was first published in the 1950s. The novel was written in part during World War II, and many saw it as a commentary on that struggle. Its author, however, was quick to point out that his own psyche had been more deeply scarred by the battle against the Kaiser than the battle against Hitler.
Later generations embraced The Lord of the Rings as an anti-nuclear, anti-industrialisation or pro-environment tract. In recent years, however, Tolkien has been as influential with the right as with the left. When the first film hit cinemas just months after the World Trade Centre attacks, conservatives saw it as an allegory of America's new struggle against terrorism. According to a former Boston Herald columnist, Don Feder, Tolkien's newfound popularity signified nothing less than a "ringing affirmation of a moral universe" - one in which hobbits are like New York City firefighters and Osama bin Laden bears more than a passing resemblance to Tolkien's villainous Sauron. This interpretation has triggered its own backlash. Recently Viggo Mortensen, who plays Aragorn, said, "I don't think that The Two Towers ... has anything to do with the United States's foreign ventures at this time."
Perhaps we should look more closely at Tolkien's text. Consider the orcs, the foot soldiers of evil. They're depicted in Jackson's film as hopelessly savage beasts, but a passage from the novel at least makes them more complex, multidimensional characters. Near the end of The Two Towers, Tolkien lets us listen in on a lengthy conversation between two orcs named Shagrat and Gorbag. The passage is revealing. For one thing, the orcs complain about their fear of the undead Ringwraiths in terms very similar to the hobbits' own. ("Grrr! Those Nazgul give me the creeps.") They also gripe about having to work for the Dark Lord and his ilk; Gorbag says, "I'd like to try somewhere where there's none of 'em. But the war's on now, and when that's over things may be easier."
Most surprisingly of all, the orcs frown upon the hobbit Sam's abandonment of his master Frodo, whom he takes to be dead (actually Frodo is merely paralysed). "Just left him lying," says Gorbag. "Regular elvish trick." One can imagine a similar conversation among lower-level al-Qaeda henchmen or Iraqi troops. If anything, the message here would seem to be that even one's most bitter and murderous enemies can act like ordinary Joes sometimes.
We should also consider what the curmudgeonly Oxford don would have thought of today's US. Tolkien probably wouldn't have had much trouble with the labelling of our al-Qaeda enemies as "evildoers". They are indeed totalitarian fanatics who have destroyed the peace of the world and forced its "free peoples" to respond.
But at the same time, Tolkien would have been leery of the immense power wielded by the US in international affairs. If he were alive and scouring Earth for the bearer of the Ring of Power, he would need to look no further than President George Bush. That isn't meant as a criticism of Bush. Rather, Tolkien simply believed that those possessing the most power are the most vulnerable to corruption - sometimes through deceptive appeals to their best intentions. As the powerful wizard Gandalf explains to Frodo, "The way of the Ring to my heart is by pity. Pity for weakness and the desire of strength to do good. Do not tempt me!"
When it comes to the current discussion over Iraq, there's something in Tolkien for the pro-war side and the anti-war side. But if we're going to use The Lord of the Rings as a heuristic device to debate the gravest matters of international politics, we should remember: the enemy across the field from us is definitely not a monstrous orc. And even orcs are living creatures - just not ones possessing rights under the Geneva Conventions.
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