"LORD OF THE RINGS" AND THE MORAL QUANDARY OF GOOD VS. EVIL

That the movies’ uninteresting and unambiguous treatment of absolute good vs. absolute evil is being hailed as “the greatest showdown of good vs. evil in all of English literary fiction” (from a forum at Movie-Vault.com) is irritating.  It breaks down like this:  a moral quandary is only a moral quandary if we can see ourselves doing bad—if we are tempted to choose evil.  Henry VIII chose to behead his wives, Michael Corleone chose to have Fredo killed, and Anakin Skywalker chose to become Darth Vader before ultimately choosing to come back again.  Yet the universe of “Lord of the Rings” seems to be carefully constructed to actually deprive its characters of the ability to choose between right and wrong.

Yes, yes, the Ring is always being called the embodiment of the corruptive power of, well, power.  But think of it this way:  if your best friend tried to kill you because you had the Ring, would you still be afraid of him after you tossed the Ring into the Volcano At The End Of The Movie?  No, because you’d look at him and say “it wasn’t your fault, it was the power of the Ring.”  These are not temptations and choices to do evil, but a force that acts as a narcotic, that turns us into zombies—it’s not your fault when the Ring makes you do it!  It’s not anything inside Gollum or Boromir that causes them to sin, but the Ring itself.  That Frodo is partly immune to the Ring is more because he has been chosen from on high, if not by God than by the god in the machine.

James O’Ehley of the Sci-Fi Movie Page has this to say: 

“The movie made obvious what I disliked about Tolkien's novels, namely their…insistence that evil is an external force that can almost be traced in the same way one does weather patterns.”

(My wife points out that the movie even associates the Forces of Evil with ominous thunderclouds and unnatural darkness, not to mention the Giant Eye living like an Evil Cloud in the sky.  Maybe the orcs wouldn’t be so cranky if they got some sun.)

Well, what about the War of the Ring itself?  As I mention in “‘The Lord of the Rings’ as Pure Adventure” “the great moral battle of “Lord of the Rings” is “do we fight here, or do we fight over there?”  We are shown no alternatives to Middle-Earth and since all of Middle-Earth is threatened, no one has the ability to run away and hide.  Their choices to stay and fight are not choices at all, not the result of bravery or cowardice.  The films do not present any world outside of Middle-Earth, and if all of Middle-Earth is threatened, then there is nowhere you can go that is not threatened.  There is no safe haven where you can flee and stick your head in the sand like an ostrich while the Shire is burned and all the castles are knocked down.  Unlike in “Star Wars,” in the “LOTR” universe there is nowhere Han Solo can fly to avoid attacking or being attacked by the Death Star.  While one could argue that the Shire itself is a haven from conflict in the course of the films—it is untouched by war when our heroes return at the end—it should be noted that no one in the film bothers to tell the residents of the Shire that there’s a war on.  Again, characters are not given any choice.  Also, if the battles we see—and see and see and see—did not go well for the humans and elves, then wouldn’t the battle be taken to the Shire eventually anyway?

The characters do not chose to fight, but self-defense is thrust on them.  Certainly there is nobility in self-defense, in defending your home and your family, and it’s valiant of the Hobbits to set off on their quest and the soldiers of the Big White Tower to head off and sacrifice themselves.  These sequences are moderately inspiring, but also cheesy and mostly devoid of suspense.  As always, music and Jackson’s heavy hand strangles potential emotions by telling us what to feel instead of letting us feel for ourselves.  But the trilogy would essentially run the same, and perhaps be more interesting, if all the humans, elves, and other friendly white people races were replaced by creatures just as evil and vicious as the orcs, the only difference being that they have no interest in serving Sauron.

Except for ominous and fun performances by Christopher Lee and Brad Dourif, “Lord of the Rings” denies us any opportunity to put a human face on our aggressors.  (Remember Lesson #1 of Robert S. McNamara:  empathize with your enemy.)  This touches on the larger problem of how the trilogy is structured to keep us from identifying with more than just our happy clique of heroes, with whom I didn’t much identify anyway.  By denying us access to the evil characters or much opportunity to choose between good and evil, the movies are “telling us what we want to hear:”  that we are good people not responsible for immoral decisions.  The trilogy is not challenging us at all.  It’s just the weather.

Nathan puts the matter of identification like this:
“Our psychological identification with what we see on film is ambiguous. That’s why horror films work, because we can identify with both the victim and the pursuer (hence the cliché of the handheld camera circling outside the house, peeking in through the windows). As such, film capitalizes on our shared psychological mechanisms. For instance, the most common dramatic conflicts in movies tend to be more or less Oedipal, meaning that they involve bisexual relations. In the traditional psychological formulation of that conflict, an individual feels aggression towards the father while simultaneously experiencing an erotic desire for that masculinity. It’s an ambiguous sense of identity gained through relating with and simultaneously differentiating oneself from another person. Similarly, the erotic desire for the mother is matched by the repulsion of her demystified body.

“Films operate on that same level of identification, investment, and narcissism. That is why unquestionably ‘heroic’ movies like ‘The Lord of the Rings’ are only able to create a curiously unambiguous opposition of absolute good and absolute evil by denying evil a face by which we might have otherwise have identified with it. After all, it’s tough to see the humanity within legions and throngs of nameless, faceless hordes. The Gollum character captured the fancy of so many viewers precisely because he is perhaps the only individual [good or bad—F&SN] who literally embodies an ambiguous conflict of desires. [Or is he simply under the control of a force greater than himself, and therefore blameless?]

“In denying a reality to the so-called evil elements, this movie falls in line with Hollywood’s longstanding tradition of wartime movies (with examples as recent as the ‘kill the skinnies’ exercise of ‘Black Hawk Down’), ‘jungle’ flicks, and all the rest of the xenophobic rigmarole. It just so happens that many of the ‘Lord of the Rings’ movies were finding their peak of mass appeal at a time when the nation’s president was swaying public opinion concerning a questionable war by using the same breed of vacuous platitudes about absolute good and absolute evil. I could never tell whether life was imitating art or if it was the other way around.”

If there is any “ambiguous conflict of desires” in “The Lord of the Rings,” it is between the trilogy’s stated themes of pastoral longing for the good old days of pre-industrial agrarian villages, and the underlying theme of glorifying technology apparent in the non-stop use of special and computer effects.  Certainly this could be a valid description of the duality of mankind—the way we want two things that are mutually exclusive, in the way we want trees but we also want everything that comes from cutting trees down—but “LOTR” for the most part actually seems oblivious to this conflict and takes no steps to examine it.  The films of David Gordon Green (“All the Real Girls” and “George Washington”) might be a better place to look.

Next: "It is a breathtaking visual feast of sweeping vistas, deep valleys, lush trees, soaring clouds, stunning castles, and the massive scope of armies—both human and four-legged—marching across wide open fields. But on the level of interesting, sympathetic characters, which is just as crucial to making a successful adventure?