Steven Harper Piziks--Obligatory Return of the King Musings

Okay, most of you have seen it and read the reviews. "Spectacular" and "powerful" and "amazing" and "whoa!" don't begin to cover it. Since it's all been said, however, I don't feel a need to repeat it. What follows is instead less a review and more my musings on the entire Lord of the Rings phenomenon.

We've been waiting for this for =decades,= you know. At last Hollywood has the technology to make fantasy films that don't look cheesy, that have more than just people running around in weird makeup and strange clothes. And someone has finally taken the genre seriously. Hooray!

Besides the well-done writing, the extraordinary acting, and the non-pareil special effects, we also have a team of moviemakers who have taken the fantasy genre seriously. In this film it's patently obvious that Jackson and company don't see hobbits and elves and dwarves as something out of a baby book but as something that touches everyone. Fantasy is a powerful story vehicle that deserves equal treatment with other powerful genres and shouldn't be relegated to cutesy cartoons or sugary live-action with cheesy effects. Wake up, world! Fantasy isn't just for kids anymore!

And yet I find myself agreeing with Jason in Bill Amend's Foxtrot comic strip:

http://www.ucomics.com/foxtrot/2003/12/19/ and http://www.ucomics.com/foxtrot/2003/12/20/

"The 'Lord of the Rings' films are for people like me to love!" Jason rails to his sister Paige. "We memorized the books. We made the web sites. We drew the detailed maps of Osgiliath on our binders." Later he complains to his mother, "What if everyone thinks it's great? What if 'Lord of the Rings' becomes, you know . . . mainstream?"

For a long time, the F&SF community owned Lord of the Rings. We and we alone knew how powerful a story it was. We were the dragons with the treasure, Gollum with his Precious And we liked this. We could curl a lip at people who said they didn't read that fantasy stuff because it was for kids or because they didn't get it or because they just weren't interested.

"What do they know?" we said knowingly to others like ourselves. "Poor shlubs. They don't have the mental capacity to understand."

Jackson, however, has shown the world that LotR isn't just for geeks anymore. His movie has rightfully blasted to the top of everyone's entertainment list. The rest of the world has discovered fantasy, and we have no choice but to let everyone play in what used to be our backyard.

And eventually we'll get used to sharing our Precious.

--Steven Harper Piziks

Comments

[Catherine]

So true, and in proof we have a whole breed of sf/f fans/geeks/true believers who in fact reject this movie trilogy because it doesn't exactly match their personal vision of the story. You knew they were going to before the first film made its debut. They were just looking for the right reason. They showed up just waiting for Jackson to make a slip. It's maybe a way of keeping that old ownership, rather than recognizing that book and movie are always two separate entities and the one does not lessen the other, and each can be judged and enjoyed by the standards of its own media.

[Erica]

Steven -

Very astute observation. I don't think I have much to add to it, except that I have the ironic experience that most of the people I have known who were Tolkein scholars (knew runes, Elven, had read the Silmarillion multiple times for fun) did not self-identify as SF/F fans. So, while I don't disagree with you at all, it might do the people who feel 'invaded' good to remember that our backyard was maybe not so much ours as we supposed.