I was struck, rereading The Fellowship of the Ring sophomore year for the ninth time (the first since junior high school,) by the racialized language Evan notes in his blog today. I had initially felt upon seeing Peter Jackson's adaptation of the first book in the saga, with Galadriel's opening admonition that "The World Is Changed," striking something of a chord only three months after Spetember 11th, that Jackson exagerated already extant imperial constructions of "The West", "The East," and "The South" portraying the struggle of "Men" against the enemy as one of civilization against barbarism, of "christian" against "arab" or "muslim." Jackson's take on "The Two Towers," released as the Bush administration stood poised to invade Iraq, and in particular i'm thinking of the jarring scene, full of sharp cuts and camera angles, in which "Theoden-king" (and i am not fully convinced by Evan's argument that the Rohirrim constitute the everyman - Tolkien repeatedly references their lineage and Jackson depicts them as Aryan gods on horseback raining death upon infidels and interlopers,) dons his armor and prepares to meet Saruman's army of threatening transnational multiracial hybrids, seemed to make matters even worse. Even if we accept Frank Rich's argument that Jackson's LoTR represented a call for a multilateral declaration of war - you can't win without the tree-hugging old-world "green" ents, after all, the contours of an imperial Europe remain plainly visible. Jackson's the Two Towers made matters worse with its demonic Oliphants, and turbanned haradrim brought down by Faramir and his merry men. Present in the original text, these images become somehow more pernicious, more alluring, and more powerful when rendered in the visual field.



Return of The King has its moments of Subversion - Denethor's stagnation and demise strike one as a call for new, progressive leadership which does not send the young to futile destruction, but the terms of this subversion and progress are written entirely within the matrices of imperial power and conquest. (Not to mention a masculinist construction of the nation, no matter how gratifying it is to see Eowyn and Merry chop up the Lord of the Nine.)



If there is the sort of common hero here that Evan attempts to locate in the Rohirrim, i'd argue, however predicatbly, that it lies in the hobbits - especially Sean Astin's thoroughly proletarian Sam. Nevertheless this is a heroism which again performs and makes visible the logics of war and empire, and we might ask what is subtracted from Tolkien's narrative by Jackson's excision of "The Scouring of The Shire" from his narrative.



EDIT: See also Marcus Rediker and Peter Linebaugh's discussion of Blake's Orc in the final chapter of The Many-Headed Hydra for why we need to further problematize the Tolkien-Jackson representation of barbarism and difference.