This contribution originated as a lecture in November, 2003 and is excerpted from the forthcoming book by Greg Wright, Peter Jackson in Perspective: The Power Behind Cinema’s The Lord of the Rings. (Hollywood Jesus Books, August 2004, ISBN 0-9759577-0-8)
In the Ripley’s
Believe it Or Not category of entertainment news
was the apocryphal post-9/11 report that New Line Cinema was considering
alternative titles for their filmed version of Tolkien’s The Two Towers. Even harder to swallow was speculation that the World Trade Center
towers were specifically targeted by terrorists because of the titular
similarity: they were the symbol of Western values and cultural imperialism;
and what could be more Western than a billion-dollar grossing series of Hollywood
movies?
The connection is tenuous, of course, but significant—not
because of what The Two Towers
may
have represented prior to the destruction of the World Trade Center
towers, but because of what the movie suggests about the Western
response
following their destruction. Already, weekly—even daily—losses in Iraq
are causing the American public to lose its will in the “War Against
Terrorism;” but the first flush of lust for justice was strong enough
while it
lasted, and pushed us toward Baghdad.
Was it justified? Is it still?
The public’s response to the war in Iraq
is as instructive as the public’s response to war as depicted in The Two Towers—ironically so. While
Tolkien’s novels were substantially motivated by his own experience in the
trenches during World War I, Peter Jackson’s Towers presents a vision of war and its conduct strikingly
different from Tolkien’s.
Make no mistake—Tolkien did not stint in his portrayal of
the horrors of war. The battle sequences in The
Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings
were not only intended to mirror the grimness of battle in our world; their
terror was in fact, said Tolkien, “what gives this imagined world its
verisimilitude.” That is, war is hell, and always has been. But what is the
model for the conduct of war in Middle-earth? When Jackson’s
Aragorn declares, “Show them no mercy, for you shall receive none!” at Helm’s
Deep, is he speaking with Tolkien’s voice? Or is it a voice pandering to fear
and retribution in the wake of 9/11?
To start with, it’s important for us to understand that, for
Tolkien, war was a necessary part of our reality. We do live in a broken world.
Things aren’t perfect. Things like the destruction of the World Trade Center
do happen. Groups like al-Qaeda do exist. And, in a
practical sense, there has to be some response to that. Tolkien knows that, and
he wants to depict that. The Two Towers
and The Return of the King both
present gruesome scenes of battle. And Tolkien would be disappointed if that
did not affect us in some way. But how do we react to that?
We should also understand that war in Middle-earth is
conducted on different terms than in our own world. What are those
terms?
What’s the relevance? Well, we do have a problem with justice in our
society.
We don’t have to look very far to find injustice. We have the World
Trade Center, we have the Green River Killer, and we have, maybe, a
crack house down the
street. Well, what do we do about these things? How do we go about
securing
justice for these offenses, if justice is not being done in the world
around
us?
The conduct of war in Tolkien’s book and in Peter Jackson’s
movies may be contrasted to give us some insight into how we feel today about the
issue of social justice. In the movies, we have characters saying things that
Tolkien did not have them say. At the Battle of Helm’s Deep, Aragorn’s instruction for the defenders to show no mercy is
an interesting line to be sure, and we may have some sympathy with that. But
it’s not a line from Tolkien. In fact, in the novel Aragorn does something
quite different. The final morning of the battle, he goes out onto the parapet
and actually offers the Orcsa chance to surrender.
The contrast may be highlighted by comparing the difference between “Do to
others as you expect them to do to you,” and “Do to others what you would have
them do to you.” A model of war in which the enemy dictates the terms of the
conflict would not thrill Tolkien.
Again, in The Return
of the King, there is a scene in the
tower of Cirth Ungol in which Frodo is being threatened by an Orc who
says, “I’ll bleed you like a stuck pig.” Sam
replies with a sword thrust in the Orc’s back, and
the line, “Not if I stick you first!” What we see is an endorsement of
pre-emptive strikes, precisely the kind of foreign policy that the
United States has historically avoided on moral
grounds. We now react pre-emptively to threats, even
perceived threats, rather than waiting to be struck first. And again,
these
lines do not come from Tolkien. They are unique to the filmed version
of The Lord of the Rings, and originate
with Jackson and his writers.
And with the way things are in the world—and the United
States—right now, it’s natural to see
contemporary attitudes injected into The
Lord of the Rings. The audience is very much cognizant of the war on terror
and the war in Iraq,
and the terms under which those wars are being conducted.
But what Tolkien intended is something quite different. For
Tolkien, of course, the Orcs are evil. They are
enslaved by and driven by evil. There’s no question of that. But they
are not “Orc-ish,” if you will, simply because of who they are and
how they were made, but because of what they do. It’s behavior that is
important to Tolkien, not genes or heritage. Tolkien wrote, in
fact, in one of his letters that the way in which we wage war can have
an
effect on us. War may be a reality in our world, but we still control
the terms
under which we conduct it; and Tolkien said that the way in which we
conduct
ourselves can “breed new Saurons, and slowly turn Men
and Elves into Orcs.” So Tolkien really believed
that, in our own world, there were people who were the equivalent of
Orcs. But they weren’t designed that way or made that way;
they were turned into Orcs.
This brings us to the question of redeemability.
In a commentary on “The Debate of Finrod and Andreth,” one the later things that Tolkien wrote, he
talked about the nature of Men, the nature of Elves, and the nature of Orcs. And in this commentary, he expressed the idea that,
in his own mind, he wasn’t sure if Middle-earth’s Orcs
were redeemable or not. That’s significant, because “common sense,” by which we
guide our everyday lives, tells us that there are people in the world who are
not redeemable. If we didn’t believe that, we wouldn’t treat certain
people—Gary Ridgway or Saddam Hussein—in the way that
we do.
What does it mean to be redeemable? For Tolkien, the idea is
tied up with the idea of mercy. In battle, as Tolkien conceived it, an enemy
who sued for mercy was to be granted mercy, “even at cost.” What does that
mean, showing mercy “at cost?” In Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan,
we see the issue dramatized very explicitly
when a German is taken prisoner. Given the options of killing him or
setting
him free, the American soldiers debate the merits of showing him mercy.
They
decide to let him go, taking the chance that he will renege on his
promise not
to rejoin the battle. That’s showing mercy. And the cost? Well, that
same German solider is the one who ends up killing the Tom Hanks
character at the end of the movie. Showing mercy includes the
possibility that
the one to whom mercy is shown will abuse that trust and offend again.
And Saving Private Ryan argues that mercy
should not be shown, because the potential cost is too high.
Tolkien does not agree. We show mercy not because it’s
deserved, he says, but because of who we are. If mercy
is a valuable trait, we show mercy because mercy is inherently
valuable, not because
the object of mercy deserves mercy. So in the conduct of war in
Middle-earth,
Tolkien wrote, mercy should be shown to enemy combatants—Orcs
included—even at cost. The implication is that it’s beneath us, as
human
beings, to conduct war otherwise. Better to suffer—and even
die—honorably,
Tolkien says, than to live dishonorably.
If we care about justice in the world, it is important how
we think about ourselves, and how we think about our fellow human beings. We
must ask ourselves: are there unredeemable persons in this world? Is Osama bin Laden unredeemable? Is
Gary Ridgway, the Green River Killer, unredeemable?
Maybe that crack dealer down the street—is he unredeemable? These
are not idle questions, for if there are indeed people in this world who are unredeemable,
that opens up the possibility that we are unredeemable, too. Maybe the person
living next door is unredeemable. That should be an unsettling thought.
But if Tolkien is right, and maybe even Orcs are redeemable, that opens up other possibilities. Because if
even Orcs (or Gollum) can
be redeemed, then there is hope. Despair is not the only option in this
world. Maybe there is hope for us. Maybe there is hope for our next door neighbor,
or the crack dealer down the street.
Consider our next door neighbor, and ask: are we really
prepared to live in a world where there are unredeemable people? Isn’t that a
scary place to live?
Novelist Booth Tarkington said
that “egoistic instinct is subtle and glamorous. It can mistake itself for
authoritative judgment upon works of art.” So am I wrong in finding Tolkien’s
mercy to triumph over judgment? Do I read too much into what he intended? It’s
possible. I’m sure I bring my own unique baggage to Tolkien, just like everybody
else.
But it’s a question worth asking: Do we maybe expect too
little of ourselves, and think too poorly of our fellow human beings?