This is a review I wrote 18 years ago….seems such a long time…but as its no longer available on the Free Church website, where it was originally published – I republish it here. Still one of the greatest films of all time…
The Two Towers
Brilliant! Wonderful! Awesome! These were the words that best described the feeling as we returned from that latest Robertson family Christmas tradition – the visit to our nearest Odeon to see the current episode of Lord of the Rings. Admittedly it is only a two year old tradition and is likely to end after the third episode next year – but nonetheless Christmas would not be Christmas without it! And like many traditions there are so many questions.
How does one describe the Lord of the Rings to those who have no idea who Frodo, Gandalf, Merry, Pippin, Legolas, Aragorn, Gimli, Sam, Gollum et al are? Why does Tolkien’s trilogy have such a hold on the English speaking world – consistently voted the best book of the 20th Century? Is the whole fantasy genre, demonic escapism? Was Tolkien a racist white supremacist? Was it not insensitive and offensive to have a film called ‘The Two Towers’ just a year after the Twin Towers collapsed? And (here’s one for the FP ‘Protestant View’), does the fact that Tolkien was a devote Roman Catholic indicate a subtle Romanist plot?
Bigotry through Fantasy?
To Dr Stephen Shapirio, a self styled ‘expert in cultural studies, race and slavery’, the books and the films are dangerous because they glamorise bigotry through a fantasy world. According to our British Academic “Tolkien’s good guys are white and the bad guys are black, slant-eyed, unattractive, inarticulate and a psychologically undeveloped horde”. Tolkien was apparently concerned about mass immigration to Britain in the 1950’s and so he portrayed the Orcs as “a black mass that doesn’t speak the languages and are desecrating the cathedrals”.
Furthermore Tolkien was anti-Scottish – “the dwarves were his notion of what the Scots were like. It is like a southern England cliché of a dour, muscular race and that represents the Scots in the book”. Speaking of clichés I’m afraid that Dr Shapiro has become one – the stereotype of a PC liberal English academic who has little to do but generate self publicity by seeking racist demons under every stone. An academic whose knowledge of his subject is as limited as his ability to grasp different world views.
Tolkien wrote the Lord of the Rings long before the mid 1950’s. He was interested in the great Icelandic and Norse sagas and the Lord of the Rings was simply his attempt to tell his own story in that tradition. Shapirio does not seem to understand that that alliance against the dark Lord Sauron includes many different races (Human, Dwarf, Elf, Hobbit) and if anything, is much more a celebration of multi-culturalism than the desire to preserve a pure white race. Of course what Dr Shapirio has done, apart from holding self-respecting academics up to ridicule, is to give our white supremacists a reason to adopt the film and turn it into something evil.
Sexist and Beardist?
I wonder why he stopped at calling it racist. Why not sexist? After all it is mainly the men who do the fighting and the women who stay at home/retreat into the mountains/ provide the gentleness. What stereotyping! Didn’t Tolkien realise that women were just as capable of killing as men? And what about heightism/dwarfism/shortism? Why is Gimli, the only significant short person turned into a figure of fun? Why did we have to have the dwarf tossing joke again? Surely this indicates a lack of respect for short people? And whilst we are on this subject I feel I should sue the Odeon for trampling upon my civil rights – they ran an advert just before the film began which suggested that men with beards should be made illegal. This was beardist and deeply offensive. It’s no wonder that there is a desire to escape into a fantasy world which somehow seems more real than the surreality of what passes as modern life.
Demonic?
But leaving aside the fantasy world of Dr Shapirio, what about the reaction of Christians to the whole fantasy genre? Is it not demonic and linked with the occult? Is it not a distortion of reality and therefore not suitable for Christians who are concerned with the truth? Is it not escapism and therefore diverting the Christian from the very real spiritual battle that is going on in the world? These are important and large issues which would take up a lot more time than I have available in this column – but let’s have a go. Re the occult it does not necessarily follow that portraying means promoting. There are fantasy stories which are occultic but that does not mean that the whole genre should be condemned as demonic. Sometimes the fantasy genre is used to portray the battle between good and evil. Sometimes it portrays ideas of mystery and something beyond which can only be ultimately explained by the presence and power of God. Fantasy stores are not per se stories which promote evil and the occult.
Escapist?
The escapist argument is different. Maybe having some form of escapism is not a bad idea. We all have our escapist routes from our current realities. – some listen to music, others read fantasy. Some, like Martyn Lloyd Jones ‘escape into the 17th century’. It seems to me that whereas the fantasy genre is so obviously ‘fantastic’ that there is very little danger of it being mistaken for reality, so called docu-drams, soaps etc which deal with ‘reality’ are far more likely to lead to lead to a distorted and ‘fantastic’ view of the real world. Eastenders is much more influential and dangerous than The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe.
Anti-American?
As well as concerned English anti-racist academics, The Two Towers, has also attracted opposition from another unusual source. There has been a petition going round which asked to have the name of the film changed because it was ‘insensitive’ and offensive to those who had died in the Twin Towers tragedy on Sept 11th 2001. When I first saw this I thought it was a bad joke in very bad taste. However it turns out that the organisers of this petition were for real. And it has been widely reported that the director of the film, Peter Jackson, had actually thought about changing the name of the film, but did not do so because of fear of what Tolkien fans might do to him!
What can one say without further trivialising a serious issue? The mindset behind this petition is deeply disturbing. It has no depth and sees things only from the perspective of the ‘now’ and the ‘here’. The now being the year 2002 and the ‘here’ being the US. It is not even American nationalism – it is the Hollywood version of life. It is the ‘world of CNN and docu-soaps. In its own way it is more fantastic and more dangerous than any fantasy genre. A world in which Harrison Ford really is President and there are such things as evil empires. A world which demands that everything be changed to suit its agenda and which fails to perceive anything outside of its time and space. A world which has no sense of history, art, or transcendence.
The Real Story
Which brings us neatly back to Tolkien. He did create a world in which there was history and mystery. A world in which there were no easy answers and where there was real and confusing conflict between right and wrong. It is a fantasy world. But maybe it is more indicative of the truth than much of what we perceive as reality. The Lord of the Rings is not an allegory and Christians should not be looking for the hidden meaning within. It is just a cracking good story which affirms many of the biblical presuppositions in Tolkien’s own life. It deals with issues of temptation, industrialisation, redemption, good and bad etc. I for one sat in the Odeon thanking the Lord for the gift of cinema, good story telling, great acting, wonderful cinematography, New Zealand and the gospel.
An RC Plot?
As for The Lord of the Rings being an RC plot – what can I say? Certainly nothing to those who even contemplate taking such an accusation seriously. I will leave them to their own fantasy world.
Star Wars – The Force Awakens – Is it the New Lord of the Rings?
Saturday Review 17 – A Hidden Life – The Book of Job on Film
Am I the only one not to like the films or books?
The books were required reading for students of my generation. Read The Hobbit, but didn’t make it through Lord of the Rings. Am I a true Christian?
I doubt it!
Thought as much.
When the ultra conservative English author , Kingsley Amis , was a student at Oxford, Tolkien lectured on Anglo Saxon.
Amis and his drinking partner, the poet Philip Larkin, agreed that JRRT was, thankfully, both unintelligible and inaudible
Thought as much.
Humphrey Carpenter’s biography of Tolkien, and his book on The Inklings, are both helpful in the understanding of Tolkien’s imaginative hinterland. Interesting too that he came from the heart of the West Midlands, the cradle of Anglo-Saxon, and he took to his academic vocation almost by osmosis.
I agree totally that The Two Towers is the best of the Jackson movies, and maybe the best of the actual trilogy as well. The depiction of Helm’s Deep is awesome, but somehow Jackson manages to keep back from being too self-indulgent. Jackson’s Hobbit was dreadful.
While there are some things about Tolkien’s literary style that irritate me, I do think LOTR has a good claim to be the greatest novel of the last century, in so far as one is looking for Story and not labyrinthine psychological investigations. In my teenage days I would certainly have given it No. 1 spot.
However, please allow me to plead for the merits of another epic novel which for many years I ignored, as I assumed it was just chicklit. That is The Far Pavilions by MM Kaye. Her sequel, more of a prequel, Shadow of the Moon, doesn’t quite reach the same heights, but is in the ballpark as well. Kaye, like Tolkien, and like John Buchan (!) stands up admirably to the test of re-reading. Her murder mystery novels are perhaps a bit formulaic, but good in their own way too. She’s like an oasis of sanity in the mad world of the 20th century novel.
I am a John Buchan admirer .
When JB was Governor General of Canada ,he was taken by the Governor of The Hudson’s Bay Company ( a fellow Scot ) on a tour of some of the Company’s far flung trading posts.
Buchan noticed that many of the company’s Scottish managers had Eskimo wives while none of the English managers had made a mixed – marriage. On mentioning this to his host, JB was met with a hilarious answer : “Well, I suppose the Eskimos have to draw a line somewhere”.
Nice story. Sick Heart River is one of the great novels of the 20th century, set in the wilds of the NW Territories. . I suppose JB is prefiguring his own death and using Sir Edward Leithen as his spokesman. I’m constantly amazed by Buchan’s short stories. They reveal a dark, superstitious imagination lurking beneath the urbane nominally Christian but somewhat sceptical external crust: a bit like his own dictum about the crust of civilisation being pretty thin, when all is said and done. I wonder to what extent we’ll see that in the present crisis?
Hello Pastor
I am just a visitor passing by but I have a quick question: you are a Calvinist and you obviously have no problem with watching films.
I have read early Puritans who condemned the theatre and more recent Calvinists (up to circa the 1950s) who also condemned cinema but I’ve never been sure why. Why were dramatic arts considered sinful when there is nothing in the Bible about them? When and why did attitudes change among Calvinists?
Likewise, I know dancing was once condemned because people feared it would lead to sex. Surely this is legalism though since dancing itself is nowhere condemned in the Bible?
I would love answers to these questions that have been baffling me if yiu have a spare minute to reply.
Christ be with you.
Hi anonymous….its a bit more complex. There are of course problems, but I don’t think we should condemn what the Bible does not, or accept what the Bible does…Dancing is not condemned per se in the BIble..
That’s okay. I just found a detailed discussion about the issue on PuritanBoard:
https://www.puritanboard.com/threads/the-cinema-regarded-as-sin.72733/
It seems to be mostly an Anglo-Puritan thing. The French Higuenots apparently had no problem promoting the operas of Lully and a Huguenot named Samuel Chappuzeau was the leading theatre critic of the 1600s!
I love cinema as my user name indicates but I would give it up for the Lord if I had to. However, there is a bigger issue: I can understand a desire to avoid worldliness but my concern is if Christians today did shun cinema and theatre, they would become too insular at cultlike. There must be a fine balance somewhere between not being a part of the world and failing to engage with the culture at all. Besides, people clearly have God-given gifts in acting, producing, writing, etc, that they mustn’t squander so to some extent film and theatre must be good things of God.
Agreed. Discernment and discretion is needed though!
I understand what you mean since so many films – especially those from Hollywood – are filled with crudity, crassness, blasphemy and excessive, graphic violence.
I did some more research on this matter. Here is a very good academic paper:
https://escholarship.org/content/qt01h927nz/qt01h927nz_noSplash_bb298f87fa7a5ce1ad1c0f29879b94d1.pdf
Abstract:
“Over the course of eighteen months in 1756 and 1757, theatre crises, large-scale debates about the morality of the stage, erupted in both Edinburgh and Geneva. Traditionally, these debates have been explained away as examples of Calvinist anti-theatricality. This dissertation argues, however, that this understanding is inaccurate. Beyond the fact that there was no consistent tradition of Calvinist anti-theatricality in the early modern period, taking such a narrow view of the theatre crises undermines their importance. The theatre debates of 1756 and 1757 must be understood in the context of the Enlightenment and changing notions about the relationship between the Calvinist church and civil society. The theatre symbolized the birth of civil society and the end of a particular brand of Calvinism. When the eighteenth-century debates about the stage are understood only as examples of “Calvinist anti-theatricality,” though, this importance is lost. This project remedies the current gap in scholarship by demonstrating that these debates were not simply about the theatre; they were about the fate of Calvinism in an increasingly polite, enlightened society.”
Secondly, here is a good paper on the Huhuenots’ love of Lully’s operas:
https://escholarship.org/content/qt6ck4p872/qt6ck4p872_noSplash_15c9a17552ea5ae7ceedf4cfe49a92e9.pdf
They helped popularize them abroad, setting up their own theatre companies. It was a form of nostalgia for the Huguenots once they’d been exiled from France. Many Huguenots even performed in the woodwind section of Lully’s original orchestra.
I hope this information helps someone!