Thursday, August 28, 2003
The 'Alternative' Commentary to the Fellowship of the Ring DVD
Was searching around for Lord of the Rings material, and stumbled onto this hilarious and satirical commentary pupported to be by Left-Wing critic Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn. It brings contemporary politics to the Lord of the Rings in a way that would sure have made Tolkien (who hated obvious allegory) extremely mad. However, it 's a great read and an amusing satire and commentary on contemporary politics, if nothing else. It begins thus:
Was searching around for Lord of the Rings material, and stumbled onto this hilarious and satirical commentary pupported to be by Left-Wing critic Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn. It brings contemporary politics to the Lord of the Rings in a way that would sure have made Tolkien (who hated obvious allegory) extremely mad. However, it 's a great read and an amusing satire and commentary on contemporary politics, if nothing else. It begins thus:
Chomsky: The film opens with Galadriel speaking. "The world has changed," she tells us, "I can feel it in the water." She's actually stealing a line from the non-human Treebeard. He says this to Merry and Pippin in The Two Towers, the novel. Already we can see who is going to be privileged by this narrative and who is not.Read the rest of Part One and the Part Two. (And, yes, I realise Galadriel is an elf, not a human!)
Zinn: Of course. "The world has changed." I would argue that the main thing one learns when one watches this film is that the world hasn't changed. Not at all.
Chomsky: We should examine carefully what's being established here in the prologue. For one, the point is clearly made that the "master ring," the so-called "one ring to rule them all," is actually a rather elaborate justification for preemptive war on Mordor.
[Posted by Unknown] [12:34 am]
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