Bored of the Rings
I’m always ready for a new Lord of the Rings saga. Harry Potter never did it for me; I’ve only seen the first one. But LOTRs, I gobble them up. I haven’t read any of the books. I might jump in because the backstories of the LOTR world(s) interest me.
A new season of The Rings of Power dropped. I started watching it, by now all of what’s available actually, but didn’t get all the references to the first season. So I binged the entire first season. There are many points when a character lays down some eternal wisdom to a younger or less aware person. At one of these, I realized, “Holy shit! I’m watching a fairy tale for children!” But still I watch. I am rarely tempted to read any books after 8 p.m. One exception was the Steve Martin autobiography I recently wrote about. Another that can keep me going are any of the Le Carre spy novels.
One of my neuroses about fables is that if a character gets from point A to point B, I want to see how that happens, or at least acknowledged that some time was involved. You can’t have somebody pop up anywhere, anytime, just to keep a story moving. That’s a crappy story. This was an occasional problem in the first Game of Thrones series, otherwise a very good effort. Dragons could fly, but not as fast as jet planes.
There is a similar glitch in the new LOTR series that has a great impact on the story. It is founded on an event that, according to the story up to then, could not happen. Maybe I missed something.
Other examples of what I take to be bad story telling that annoy me. In bad zombie movies or bad TV shows like The Walking Dead “universe,” a zombie can just pop out of anywhere and menace somebody. Anybody with experience in a zombie apocalypse is going to be careful enough to avoid such hazards. Otherwise they would not have survived.
Then there is the gasoline thing. Gas degrades over time and becomes useable, I thought. After the collapse of everything, nobody is making more of it except in Gastown in the Mad Max films. But somebody always has access to more, even to fly across the Atlantic.
My other pet peeve involves characters, usually a headstrong adolescent or child, doing something stupid that puts themselves or others in danger. Saturday Night Live did a funny bit about this years ago, when there is a bogeyman in a dark basement. The characters in the skit realize, “Hey, let’s just not go down there.” So they don’t, and the police arrive to safely corral the demented killer lurking downstairs.
One thing about the LOTRs that intrigue me are what I perceive as racial and class subtexts. I keep thinking this has to do with the accents in the speech of the different categories of characters. For instance, the elves sound like upper class or “posh” Englishmen and women. The dwarves sound Scottish. Other lower orders may have what I guess are Cockney accents or just U.S. vernacular. The U.K. has a wealth of accents. Somebody familiar with them should write this up.
In the second movie of the first LOTR series, the dark, filthy orcs labor underground in a proletarian hellhole for Saruman, the evil wizard in the tower. The blonde and ginger pink-cheeked hobbits reside in a bucolic country setting. The elves are mostly blond. I don’t recall seeing a hobbit of color. Only in the latest LOTR is there an elf of color. It’s at least nice that aside from the patrician elves, the races among the humans and others are distributed randomly.
I won’t give much away to note something I had missed in my first viewing of the newest LOTR series: the orcs themselves get a backstory that renders them a touch less evil, even sympathetic. Just your benighted homicidal cannibals, struggling to find a home. It will turn out that they are not the worst thing to worry about.
