The first scene in Troll opens with a father teaching his child to see trolls in the mountains. She is skeptical, but he urges her to make an effort. To see them, he reassures her, she must first believe.
And she does!
Thus, another just-so narrative is born!
Or at least, a rather common just-so cliche gets another go at audiences.
The thing is, I could almost have gone along with it, if the movie-makers in this instance had only had the confidence to invite us to live in a world where a troll can just come out of the mountains and make himself a menace to humanity. They could have simply asked us to run with that premise. That’s what Troll Hunter did, and it was brilliant. But Troll wants to talk to us about it. They want to argue with us about it.
Or at least the characters in the film want to argue about it.
I just can’t imagine why?
At least I can’t imagine a good reason.
The movie’s main character, Professor Nora Tidemann (played by Ine Marie Wilmann) spends much of the first act trash-talking science and scientists. That she is a scientist herself could be an interesting paradox, if only she and her antagonists had anything interesting to say about the matter. It would also help if the scientific establishment in Troll was anything but a willfully obtuse little whipping boy.
For their own part, Tidemann’s skeptics have little to offer but their own refusal to believe the obvious facts of the universe they live in, that is the one in which a troll really does walk out of a mountain and start killing people and breaking things. So, it’s left to Tidemann to tell them what they are seeing, and the resulting debate is a string of arguments we’ve seen in countless B-grade fantasy and horror films going as far back as I can remember.
This isn’t good story telling.
The troll himself is good storytelling. He is interesting. Hell, he was awesome! He looked cool enough, and his behavior invites us to consider a whole range of much more interesting questions. He was menacing enough, true, but the Troll also showed traces of compassion. As the storyline developed, we even began to get a sense for how he could be approached, for what might make the difference between a violent encounter and a peaceful one. What made the difference in this instance was almost interesting, and it almost mattered.
Almost.
In any event, the troll in this movie was actually pretty cool.
It was the people that sucked.
The people sucked because they were using the troll to rehash an old and entirely contrived debate about the limitations of science and rationalism. Because that debate was hardly compelling as a storyline, I have to believe it wasn’t really there in the service of the story. The debate was there because someone behind the making of this movie thinks they have a point to make about the limitations of science. Someone believes that message – that you must believe in order to see – is a point worth making. So, when Tidemann’s father tells his daughter to do that in the opening scene, and when she later repeats that message to the rest of the scientists throughout the rest of the movie, that is someone behind the making of this movie speaking to the rest of us, telling us that we must believe in order to see.
If only the people telling us this had the courage of their own convictions, the story might have worked. Had they been willing to show us a world full of trolls and let the characters (along with their audience) run with it, the whole story might have worked. But they had to argue with us. They did so through the voices of their less-than-compelling human characters. The argument was never more than a childish exercise in special pleading, all quite unnecessary, because the story presents the existence of trolls as a fact. Those still reluctant to acknowledge their existence well into the second act come across, not so much as scientists or skeptics as outright fools. They do so because they are denying obvious facts, and because their denial is clearly unreasonable at that point in the story. And so we are left with the notion that a kind of blind faith has proven itself out, that it is the characters who choose to believe in order to see the troll that understood the assignment, that such faith and such faith alone was the only hope for handling the troll in this story. Science and skepticism failed in this instance because they were simply written that way. And because the movie invests so much time in the arguments between the skeptics and the believers, I do not think it unreasonable to suppose the movie-makers wanted us to take their arguments seriously.
Someone I know and love likes to say that Game of Thrones is all fake. It’s fantasy, so there is nothing realistic about it. This same individual (whom I know and love) eats up reality TV like it was candy. I think he knows as well as I do that those shows are often contrived, but that doesn’t stop him from getting really into the moment that alligator is on the hook and the second guy in the boat can’t seem to find his shot. I know as well as he does that Westeros ain’t real, but that doesn’t stop me from worrying about the fate of Jon Snow. Each mode of storytelling works for one of us and not the other.
But what does realism have to do with it? Or anything else for that matter?
***
It’s easier to see the connection for reality TV, not because it’s more real in an objective sense, but because the theme is more central to the genre. Reality television purports to be showing us something about how people in some part of this world really do live. That’s a claim that goes a bit beyond the story-line itself and reaches into the mess of life we sometimes call the real world. That claim constitutes a significant portion of the genre’s appeal. It’s a bit like porn, actually. The dialogue may be utter crap, but somehow the sense that you are seeing something real makes it a little more interesting. At least I think that’s the point, or at least part of it. For myself, I just can’t get into it. Knowing just how much manipulation goes into the stories told in reality television, constitutes a bit of deal-breaker for me. Perhaps I would enjoy it more if I could suspend disbelief and just enjoy the stories, but how does that suspension of disbelief work when a sense of veracity is central to the genre?
…also, there is the expository crutch!
Reality television leans very heavily on the use of exposition. Far too often, for me anyway, they break away from the action to have one of the characters explain events to the audience in their own words. Without these moments we would be missing a lot of the plot-line. Reality television uses these moments to fill in the gaps. It also uses them to tell us what’s at stake in the action, often playing up the drama well beyond any significance we could draw from the events ourselves. …if we don’t get this fish trap to work we’ll starve! We need to fix the oil leak in our car or we’ll freeze to death on this mountain top. That chef needs to change his recipe or the whole business will go under! …you get the idea. They’ll repeat these narratives a few times each episode, just to make sure you get caught up in the point. Maybe, I’m a hard sell, but most of the time I just don’t believe them. More importantly, I find the whole convention damned tedious. When did so much exposition become good writing? I’m guessing that moment in television history came during the early episodes of MTV’s Real World and that first season of Survivor.
Remember Survivor? Remember the hype leading up to the first episode? This was supposed to be about people surviving on their own under primitive conditions. Only they couldn’t! Those guys really couldn’t do much to feed themselves and contribute to their own survival. But they did get just enough food and water from the show producers to survive so long as they didn’t waste their energy trying to survive on their own. So they mostly sat around and bickered with each other. Somewhere in there, I imagine, the production team must have had a collective panic attack. …My God, the whole story just ain’t happening! What do we do? The answer turned out to be high school soap opera, and thus the master script was born for just about every reality television program made ever since.
That’s how I imagine it anyway. It may not be real, but if you had me and five of my friends telling you the story of this blog post, I’ll bet it would pass muster for reality TV.
“…this really is a must write blog post for Dan. He’s at his breaking point.”
“I knew, I had to do post something today. This post was like a dark cloud hanging over my head.”
“If Dan doesn’t finish this post today, I’m pretty sure he’ll be eaten by black bears.”
“I don’t see what the big deal is. Nobody reads blogs anymore anyway.”
I’m voting that last fucker of the island!
***
But let’s come back to the Game of Thrones! I get the concern. It’s fantasy. There are dragons. Magic works (except when it doesn’t), and well, hell, did I mention there are dragons? Clearly, some things about Game of Thrones are not real at all. Still, I think the show has two (maybe three) realisms lacking in many more ‘realistic’ genres.
First and foremost, it’s all the death, the gruesome terrible deaths, the ones that happen to central characters that we all know and love. Love it or hate it, George R.R. Martin’s penchant for killing off key protagonists has long since become the defining feature of the show. For myself, I love it, but there is a certain dwarf that better be in good health at the end of this coming season or I’ll, I’ll, …I don’t know what I’ll do.
Take that Martin!
People ask Martin about this all the time. I’m particularly fond of the answer he once gave The Independent:
“A writer, even a fantasy writer, has an obligation to tell the truth and the truth is, as we say in Game of Thrones, all men must die,” he told Galaxy’s Edge Magazine. “Particularly if you’re writing about war, which is certainly a central subject in Game of Thrones.”
He continued: “We’ve all read this story a million times when a bunch of heroes set out on an adventure and it’s the hero and his best friend and his girlfriend and they go through amazing hair-raising adventures and none of them die. The only ones who die are extras.
“That’s such a cheat. It doesn’t happen that way. They go into battle and their best friend dies or they get horribly wounded. They lose their leg or death comes at them unexpectedly.”
The author goes on to explain, slightly morbidly, that we’re all going to die at some stage as mortality is inevitable. “Once you’ve accepted that you have to include death then you should be honest about death and indicate it can strike down anybody at any time.
“You don’t get to live forever just because you are a cute kid or the hero’s best friend or the hero. Sometimes the hero dies, at least in my books.”
I take that to be a kind of realism. It’s not about authentic costumes or weaponry, or the details of some known historical event. It’s about the human cost of warfare. Martin is known to have patterned his fiction after some real historical conflicts (most notably the War of the Roses), but of course his work remains fiction. Hell, it remains fantasy-fiction. So, we have no baseline from which to compare his description of events to a known fact, at least not any he is obligated to render with accuracy. Still, Martin’s willingness to kill off the characters we care about tells us something about war that many more ‘realistic’ stories keep leaving out.
I would add that it isn’t just Martin’s willingness to kill important characters that sets his stories off from others. It’s his willingness to do it unexpectedly, suddenly, and often without any hint of heroics in the moment of death. Time and again, Game of Thrones invites us to identify with a character, to root for them, only to kill them in the end.
…only to leave us watching as the struggle goes on without those whose story arc had once defined the whole meaning of the show for us.
That is a kind of realism, one largely absent in a good deal of historical fiction.
***
None of this is exactly Italian neorealism. But each of these genres effects a kind of realism amidst a story-line saturated with fiction. Where one purports to show us something akin to lives of people in odd walks of life, another aims to show us how human beings struggle to deal with terrible events. For either to work, something in story-line must resonate for the viewer (or reader). Each in its own way speaks to a sense of reality, though each also weds that sense of reality to a fabricated universe of its own.
***
Historical accuracy might be thought to present another type of realism, but of course historical films (and even documentaries) are saturated with their own contrivances. The blog, An Historian Goes to the Movies presented a very thoughtful discussion of the subject here, here, and here (and really throughout his entire website). In one of the most interesting passages in this series, he talks about the public’s penchant for scrutinizing the accuracy of material culture and fighting techniques in film while ignoring the historical accuracy of plot points:
I find it very striking that audiences apparently want a sense of accuracy about violence, but not about plot. They cheerfully accept absurd plot developments (like Isabella being way too young and way too far way to have an affair with Wallace), but will complain if the sword fighting looks too fake. (Compare contemporary film violence to that from the 60s, for example, to see just how much effort Hollywood has put into improving the realism of its violence.)
Imagine for a moment a film in which the emphasis was on accuracy of the plot, but not on accuracy of the costuming or weaponry. Picture William Wallace running around in a 20th century British military uniform carrying an AK-47 but engaging in fairly accurate political maneuverings.
Most people would react to that poorly, I suspect, because Hollywood trains us that accuracy means specific things and generally excludes other things. But theatrical and cinematic adaptations of Shakespeare employ this device fairly frequently. Instead of setting his Richard III in the 1480s, like the historical Richard III, or in the 1590s, when the play was first performed, Ian McKellan set his version of the play in the 1930s, depicting Richard as a would-be fascist dictator. A particular favorite detail is the arrangement of 16th century poem “Come Live with Me and Be My Love” as a sort of Swing-era piece. The famous “Now is the winter of our discontent” speech becomes a political speech. It works beautifully, and while the setting isn’t faithful to the play as Shakespeare envisioned it, it works marvelously and offers a wonderful comment on the politics of both the 15th and the 20th centuries while still being true to the spirit of the play. This is a film making careful, clever use of its choices about historical inaccuracy.
Perhaps the most interesting part of this commentary lies in the comparison with Shakespearean theater. While it’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking that the kind of bias he exposes here is just to expected from viewers, the comparison with Shakespeare shows us that it isn’t. There is indeed at least one genre which reverses the emphasis, taking us out of the realm of period dress and sword techniques and inviting us to dwell on the plot-line.
I want to underscore at least one aspect of this question about accurate plot-lines, namely the sense of a character’s world view. Historical plot-lines can be inaccurate for any number of reasons, but one of the most interesting and common inaccuracies would seem to be a penchant for reading modern thought worlds into the motivations of historical characters. In this respect, Mel Gibson is the gift that keeps on giving. Whether it be a southern plantation owner who doesn’t own slaves, or William Wallace crying ‘freedom’ as he is about to die, his historical characters typically speak to the sensibilities of modern peoples more than those of the era in which they purportedly lived. Whatever the (in-)accuracy of his dress or battlefield depictions, Gibson’s characters are often living anachronisms, thinking and behaving in ways that have less to do with the period than the social order of the modern day.
Here is another respect in which I think Game of Thrones is particularly good. For those of us who live in a modern republic, the logic of an aristocracy can seem quite vicious, often unnecessarily so. Why all the fighting? Is it vain ambition? And if these characters must fight for control of their worlds, could they not at least spare the children of their enemies? Even the title of the series points to the answer, but I believe it was Cercei who explained it best.
Again, this is fiction. Hell, it’s fantasy fiction, but it’s fantasy fiction pointing at a kind of world that has existed in human history, one many of us have trouble grasping. It’s a world in which heredity defines power, and even a child with the wrong bloodline is a very real threat to the powers that be. This too is a kind of realism, one which reminds us people in other times and places may not be able to act as we would, even if they wanted to. I admired Eddard Stark’s efforts to show mercy in this scene, and I expect I’m not entirely alone in this. But of course we call know how that turned out. We are 6 seasons into the show, and thus far, I have every reason to believe Cersei was right about this. Not just Certei. Martin too. This is Martin telling us something about the social order of a certain kind of world. His world may be fiction, but others like it would not be, and his story does indeed help to illustrate how those worlds work. Is it realism? Not quite. But you could learn a lot about real worlds from this kind of story.
***
So it seems the attempt to show us how certain people live in certain times and places always reflect the priorities of those who produce them. Are they trying to show us how people dressed, how a certain series of events unfolded, or how people thought about their lives in the context of the times depicted? One could find other priorities in a film, to be sure, but it would be a rare story that didn’t have some serious blind spots.
The funny thing about such blind spots is they can be hard to see at first, but once you find them, they can be equally hard to ignore.
***
Okay, so one of the ways I am cheating my way through this topic, so far, is that I keep picking examples where one can arrive at a reasonably sure sense of what the facts would say about a given issue, what would count as real if we chose to care about it. What about when you don’t know? What is realism when we don’t exactly know what the fact is?
Take the film, Atanarjuat (Fast Runner). Better yet, take the film Reel Injun in which director, Zacharias Kunuk discusses one of the challenges he faced in making Atanarjuat. He wanted to shoot some love scenes, but that raised an interesting question. How would two Inuits living essentially in the pre-contact era have actually made love. He couldn’t very well just have them start sucking face for foreplay, as would be the case in most love scenes, because Inuit in the precontact era didn’t kiss the way people do now. Lots of people have heard of an ‘Eskimo kiss’, which is essentially rubbing noses, or so we are told, but how does that work? Past movies set in the arctic depict this in rather comic terms, which was definitely not what Kunuk was going for. He wanted to portray this as accurately as possible. So, he talked to the elders in his own community and based his own love scenes on their answers.
So, is the ‘Eskimo kiss’ in Atanarjuat accurate? Is it realistic?
It seems rather likely that the answer is ‘yes’, but that isn’t entirely obvious. The elders Kunuk spoke to, might have been wrong. It’s certainly possible. Historical information isn’t carried in the blood, and customs change a great deal over time while people’s ideas about tradition are often rooted in the eras of their own youth. So, it is possible that Kunuk’s elders might have been factually wrong about an Eskimo kiss.
So what if they were?
Worst case scenario, the love scene in Atanarjuat is still the best answer that an Inuit director could come up with after speaking with Inuit elders in preparation for a movie with an Inuit cast and made essentially with an Inuit audience in mind. I can manufacture (as I just did) an objective question that Kunuk might have gotten wrong, but his answer is still the most authoritative I know of. It is certainly the most authoritative answer most of his non-Inuit audience will ever see. Whatever the facts of this topic, Kunuk’s portrayal is still a thoughtful expression of an Inuit perspective about the subject. That has to count for something.
So if someone asks me what is an ‘Eskimo kiss’, how am I going to answer them? I’m going to point them right to Atanarjuat, or maybe to Reel Injun. Of course, I could also say that an ‘Eskimo kiss’ is a silly western caricature of what different Eskimo peoples actually did, but then I’m still going to point them to Fast Runner, because what happens in Fast Runner is STILL the most authoritative answer to that question that I know of, at least on film. In effect, it is the most realistic film portrayal that I’m aware of at present.
The point here in this overly-belabored sub-theme is that realism isn’t always about objective facts. Sometimes it’s about perspective, Sometimes, it’s about the most authentic voice(s) you can find on a subject, the ones whose values and priorities are most relevant to a subject. This is particularly true of movies about exotic peoples, whether they be past civilizations, foreign cultures, or just the guy who does that really odd job. An outsider might manage a perfectly accurate portrayal of the lives of such people, but without some insight into their thinking, what would that be worth? Such insights must involve a native voice at some point. Better still when that voice can actually shape the narrative!
We All know that the ring destroyed the kings of men. We know it haunted Bilbo all those years in the shire. The ring destroyed Boromir and he was never even a ring bearer. We all watched as Frodo waste away under the influence of the one ring. But my question is what has the ring done to Peter Jackson?(Warning – Spoilers to follow. And yes, I know. I’m a grumpy old grognard. It’s worse than you think.) Yeah, I finally saw The Battle of the Five Armies, so I guess now is as good a time as any to share my thoughts on it. I’m not angry really. I’m just disappointed. More than that, I am concerned, very concerned.
I think I read the hobbit around 6th grade or soon thereafter. What I remember of the book was an enjoyable light read. It was the sort of story you read when young and cherish well into adulthood. I could identify with it as a youth because it was the story of a child like character adrift in a world larger in every respect than he was. Bilbo learned to get along in the Hobbit, even to thrive in it, but he never quite got a handle on the larger forces at work in that story, and neither did we as its readers.
It was a fascinating world that Bilbo carried us into. It was a world of myth to be sure, but not just because of the elves and the dragons. It was also a story in which the quest for gold seemed a perfectly sufficient reason to undertake a dangerous adventure, and a world in which orcs and goblins attack, because frankly that’s what they do. It’s a just-so logic that guides The Hobbit, and that is just as any good mythic narrative would have it. a world in which great wars will happen. They will simply happen. No need for political complexities or struggles on which the fate of a whole world will hang. That sort of story will come later, but in the Hobbit, wars happen for simpler reasons, and that is all there is to it.
It is one of the charming features of The Hobbit that Bilbo never quite accepts the logic of that world, at least not its more violent features. His rejection is visceral, childlike. It isn’t a worldly critique of the Draco-gold standard or the perils of Dwarven real-politik. Bilbo just never quite understands the logic of the battle which serves as the focus of this last film, not that I remember anyway. One suspects that there is nothing really to understand; it is simply what these characters were born to do, how Thorin was born to die.
Tolkien does not unleash the complexities of Middle Earth on his readers until the Lord of the Rings. He did rewrite the Hobbit to put it more in sink with the larger work, but even then he let much of the larger scheme rest on the background of The Hobbit. We may even see hints of that larger scheme, even as we continue to see hints of material from the Silmarillion in the Lord of the Rings. But what isn’t explained in both stories is as essential to each as what is explained. We aren’t supposed to get all this, and we are certainly not supposed to get all of it when seeing the whole thing through the eyes of Bilbo. Tolkien understands this. If Jackson ever did understand it, he has almost certainly forgotten it by now.
Watching The Hobbit has been a lot like attending a play with someone who has read he script and wants to make sure we know it, along with everyone in the next three rows. Just as an annoying theater-troll will spout the next lines ahead of the actors, Jackson keeps turning The Hobbit into a chance to tell us about the Lord if the Rings. He simply will not let the Hobbit be the Hobbit. It must instead be a prequel to that later (larger) story.
Focused as he is on the grand scheme of things, Jackson has all but forgotten Bilbo. The epic narrative that Jackson insists on relating has little time for a simple hobbit and little place for a Hobbit’s point of view. Yes Bilbo does many of the same things in this trilogy that he does in the book, but his story is never really allowed to compete with that of Thorin’s quest for power, the rise of the bowman to leadership, the doomed love affair between a Dwarven romeo and his elven Juliette, or for that matter, Gandalf’s efforts to piece together the story of the Necromancer. How could Bilbo possibly compete with all that!
All that Bilbo can do is to play a bit part in a failed bid to avert a war. Yet, the problem isn’t that Bilbo is a minor player in the great scheme of things. Rather it is that this version of The Hobbit has forgotten the importance of bit players. It is too interested in the great heroes to give any real credence to those with humbler ambitions. In that respect, this version of The Hobbit couldn’t have wandered further away from its original source.
This Hobbit is a story that contains a hobbit, but it most certainly is not a story about a hobbit. It is too busy being a story about other things.
So what? If Jackson and his writing team want to tell a different story, there is no particular reason why they shouldn’t do just that. And yet The Hobbit remains unsatisfying (for me at any rate) because it can never really be what Jackson and his team want it to be, which is another Lord of the Rings. The story line simply doesn’t support the tone of an epic narrative; it’s characters have never been quite up to the task. The Dwarves are just a bit too foolish, the elves a bit too vain, and the men too reluctant to be anything at all. These are interesting characters for a story with less ambition than Jackson has brought to the story. For a grand epic, they simply will not do. So, The Hobbit trilogy remains overshadowed and upstaged by the epic narrative which is to follow, the one we’ve already seen, the one against which this story cannot help but pale in comparison.
Yes, Jackson and company can certainly tell us whatever story they like, but I cannot help thinking something a little closer to the original Hobbit would have been more valuable. I find myself wanting to say; we’ve seen this. You did it right the first time. Now show us something new.
But alas! This was not to happen.
For whatever reason, Jackson could not bring himself to let the hobbit be the hobbit, or even to fashion it into something altogether new and creative. So many of his interventions pull the story towards the Lord of the Rings, which is something it simply can never be. Jackson’s heart is set on the Lord if the rings. His mind is bent on it. And it is his master.
The final scenes of the Hobbit are filled with allusions to the coming trilogy, and truth be told, that is to be expected, even relished. Yet each of these references drags on a bit too long. We get the reference to Aragorn, and we get the moment Bilbo replies to a knock on his door, which is actually kind of clever, or at least it would have been if Jackson had been content to let a couple quick lines connect the two stories. But he can’t do that. Jackson has to make sure we get the point, and each of these references seems to carry on well after we get the point.
Spoiling it.
It seems as though Jackson just cannot let the coming epic go, and the urge to tell us about his precious Lord of the Rings won’t let him settle for a proper allusion, just as it would not let him simply tell us the story of the Hobbit in the first place. It’s as though the Lord of the Rings has hold of his spirit.
Which members of the Fellowship of the Ring are villainous? Almost all of them, if you ask me.
Just not Boromir though. He’s the one guy you can almost trust. Given a chance for power, he took it. Sounds like a straight-up kinda guy. He’s okay by me.
But those damned Halflings! They are just all bad.
We’ll save Frodo for later, but it’s short work to see that a couple of no-good thieves like Pippin and Merry are full-on bad guys, even if they are short and cheerful. Between starting fires, and raising false alarms, Pippin is a damned mess. I can almost understand his desire to steal the biggest marble in the known universe. That’s understandable. But with a petty offense like that, you gotta come clean when the jig is up. I mean, seriously, it’s Sauron’s marble. Pippin didn’t win it in a fair match. The least he can do is have a polite conversation with the man he’s cheated out of the coolest boulder on the playground. But no! Apparently, that was too much to ask. He has to cry to Gandolf and start a war over it, just so he can keep his prize. It wasn’t even a cleary, fer cryin’ out loud!
And then there is Merry stabbing the king of Angmar in the back during what would have been a perfectly honorable duel with an upstart Princess who has done nothing but disrespect her father, her brother, and every authority figure who tried to help her out in the course of the story. She was about to get taught a damned good lesson when that little runt goes and gets all 9th-level Rogue on her enemy. Absolutely disgraceful!
Don’t even get me started on that “faithful” toadie, Samwise Gamgee! Can there be any doubt that he is responsible for the terrible depression that befell poor Golem? I mean that guy is in the middle of a deep blue funk that lasts for well over a hundred years and this furry-footed bully goes around calling him names and picking on him constantly.
Plus, poor golem had lost his precious ring. Who the Hell can blame him for wanting it back? It was a damned good ring! And look who stole it? Hobbits. Hobbits, like the very two halfwits golem is now supposed to be helping, one of whom is flaunting his precious under the poor wretche’s very nose. This whole story-line is messed-up in a big morbid way, and there poor golem is on the edge of sanity. Leave it to the fricking henchman to push him off.
Then there is the Gimli and Legolas, with their friendly little competition over how many orcs they can kill. War is one thing folks, you gotta do what you gotta do, but this shit is way over the line! When did killing become fun, I ask you people? Just when did it become a contest? Apparently, when the killers became an elf and a dwarf. Oh look at the cute little creatures killing the ugly people! Let’s bet on who can kill the most!
And then of course there is Aragorn. I could go on and on about this geriatric black sheep of the royal family, but let’s just look at one thing here. Have you ever noticed Aragorn’s sword in the minutes before the final battle at the gates of Mordor? It’s got blood on it. Yeah that’s right, BEFORE the fight he has blood on his sword. Know why? Cause he killed a messenger from Sauron in a deleted scene.
That’s right!
No sooner had said messenger returned a lost mithril shirt that stupid Frodo lost somewhere in Mordor when Aragorn goes and repays this act of great kindness by killing the guy (in cold blood, and during a parlay, no less). Small wonder the director chose to cover that up. …but he couldn’t hide the blood.
No he couldn’t
Next time someone tries to tell you Aragorn is a hero, just keep asking him; “what about the blood?”
So, now we are down to the last two bad guys. Which is the worse? I know what you’re thinking; it’s Frodo right? After all, he is the one that destroys the most valuable piece of jewelry in all of Middle Earth, causing a great cataclysm which leads to the genocidal destruction of many of the world’s great kindreds. (Seriously do you not see all the orcs and goblins and trolls falling into a great pit at the end of this terrible tragedy? Are we supposed to cheer that shit on?) Yes, Frodo did that. All that destruction is Frodo’s claim to infamy, and it’s a damned good one. But it still doesn’t win him the prize for the most-hated villain at the Fellowship ball.
Before moving on though, I wonder if we need to say a thing or two about the little guy’s sappy buzz-kill attitude through just about the complete series? What do you do when you have the power to rule the entire world at your finger tips? Sulk and cry about it for three fricking over-long movies. Three of them, I tell you! That alone should get him an award for something.
Still!
Frodo is not the principal villain of this story. It’s Gandolf. What you have to ask yourself is why this big-ass powerful wizard uses his magic so sparingly. I know, I know, he’s only supposed to help and council people, not solve their problems for them. Right? He’s been sent by the powers that be to guide mankind in its struggles. Doing more than that would spoil the moral of the story for them and us. Yadayadayada! We’ve heard this yarn before.
That’s the excuse of every manipulative god-like being in all of history, real or imagined. Just what the Hell are people supposed to get out of all this anyway? Wisdom? A sense of accomplishment?
Tell that to the dead!
Gandolf could have ended the entire war with a bit of basic parlor-magic. He could have returned the ring to its rightful owner and all would have been right with the world of middle earth. Failing that, he could have gone wompy-stompy with his great powers and beat the crap out of his enemies in the first half of the first movie. Still the bad guys win that way, but at least it’s over with quickly. And that my friends is what makes Gandolf the ultimate villain. He doesn’t just want to kill Sauron, whose only crime was in gifting jewelry to the great leaders of the world. No, Gandolf wants to make sure a lot of people die unnecessarily along the way. If you ask me this villainous puppet-master is the worst of the bunch.
…which is saying a lot, because he has a real den of iniquity there in the Fellowship of the Ring. What’s the difference between the dirty dozen and these guys?
northierthanthou 