This piece of writing would not be possible without the courageous work of American standup comic John Mulaney who, in 2012, delivered a damning, blistering review of 1990 children’s Christmas movie Home Alone in the style of a Def Jam comic in his comedy special New In Town. (“It’s a grid system, ya simple bitch!”)
So, in honour of this occasion, a decade ago, I am going to write a blistering, inexplicably urgent takedown of a twenty year-old movie nobody is really interested in talking about anymore.
I will never forget viewing The Two Towers from the front row of Vancouver’s old Capitol Six movie theatre on opening night in 2002. Next to me was the person with whom I had most wanted to watch the film, my dear friend Alannah. Better yet, Ian McKellen, who played Gandalf made a spontaneous appearance to introduce the movie, because he happened to be in town filming an X-Men movie and decided to give his fans an extra treat by introducing the film.
Following writer-director Peter Jackson’s risky, audacious yet successful changes to JRR Tolkien’s original narrative of Fellowship of the Ring, the first film in the trilogy, we were ready to see the definitive cinematic adaptation of the most dramatic and profound of Tolkien’s novels, trusting that whatever changes he made would only serve to amplify the big ideas and themes of the book.
Three hours later, we exited the theatre, ashen-faced, feeling like we had been repeatedly been beaten in the stomach with cricket bats. Every single change Jackson had made to the second book had made it worse, and yet the awfulness was not experienced as a death of a thousand cuts but as a single, massive, fatal gaping wound in the original story.
And that is because I do not think that the Peter Jackson and the audience to whom he was playing had any sense of what hope really was in the grand vision of JRR Tolkien. I have attempted to write this piece before but didn’t quite get it right, the way that progressive consciousness is especially corrosive to it, as is one’s whiteness. But I will go further today in stating that the second and third Lord of the Rings adaptations that Jackson filmed were a profound harbinger of the death of hope as a twenty-first century progressive idea and the rise of post-politics.
It took me a few weeks to even figure out why I hated the movie so much (as I still do, despite loving the first). But I figured it out. But also, here I must digress into the lateness of this post. I was posting with a decent momentum for a while, there but, following some additional real life developments, I found myself blocked in my efforts to write this piece. Not only could I not write it, I felt it was a betrayal or an admission of defeat I refused to make to write something in its place. But, after a month of wrestling the Devil, here it is.
What I found striking, twenty years ago, was that whether people saw Jackson’s changes as inconsequential or improvements or whether they shared my intense dislike of them, we lacked a language for describing what Jackson had done in adapting the books’ plot to film, something I will briefly describe here:
In the second book of Lord of the Rings, there are three polities that must act against Sauron, the Enemy, and the allies he has gathered to prevent the world plunging into an eternal darkness under his control. While the Enemy’s undoing is to be carried out primarily by a small number of people carrying out an absurdly improbable plan, these last great forces must spring into action on the side of good but are, instead succumbing to evil.
Rohan, led by King Theoden, has continued to defend itself but has made no move to counter the evil forces encroaching on it and its allies; instead, its fighting men have been under strict orders not to venture outside its borders for any reason. The reason for this is that, having lost his son in battle, the king has sunk into a depression and, bereft of his son, has lost hope. This loss of hope has been reinforced by his corrupt advisor who shields the king from any news and from the light of day, which the king has come to fear, for the news it might bring.
Isengard, led by Saruman the Wizard, is a fortification near an important crossroads. Instead of it being a sanctuary and rally point for the armies of good, Saruman has turned it into a rally point for orcs and evil men. He is attempting to carve out his own, superior faction in Sauron’s armies to seize a share of his dominion. The reason for this is that, Saruman became the heir to the Orthanc Stone, an oracular stone permitting its user to see across time and space. And, over time, Saruman ceased to be able to see a future in which Sauron had not won and so, he lost hope. He came to believe that with the victory of evil certain, things would only improve were he to join with it.
Gondor, led by Denethor the Steward, has continued to lead the forces opposing Sauron but, as its forces have dwindled, and its allies as well, its military moves have grown more resigned, more predictable, more of a staged retreat. Like Sauruman, Denethor has become ensnared by a palantir, a seeing stone like the Orthanc Stone and, he too has lost the ability to see a future in which Gondor has not fallen and will not inevitably fall. Believing the breach of its last citadel is imminent, Denethor attempts to murder his last surviving heir in a murder-suicide self-immolation.
JRR Tolkien is a didactic, moralistic writer. And his point about hope is never far from the main text of his writing. But while Jackson faithfully reports our hero Gandalf’s description of his plan for vanquishing Sauron as “a fool’s hope,” it is as though he is unable to see where hope structures Tolkien’s narrative unless it is so-named.
From the dialogue taken from Tolkien’s original text and that added by Jackson and his team, it is clear that Jackson didn’t understand how the loss of hope could, in and of itself, transform a person from being a powerful force for good to one of evil.
It is my view that this is because Jackson and most of contemporary Anglo American society has completely lost track of what hope is and by losing track of the idea’s meaning, lost hope, itself.
Growing up in a black family, and a well-connected one at that, I had the good fortune to grow up around people like Leon Bibb who is pictured on the cover of a 1965 Life Magazine singing a duet of Joe Hill with Joan Baez at the Second March on Selma. I understood that I was part of a struggle that stretched centuries back into the past and in all likelihood would stretch centuries into the future. And I knew from stories of the antebellum period and the Fugitive Slave Law, of Jim Crow, legal segregation and disenfranchisement that the struggle included a lot of losing, often for generations on end.
Our sense of hope was not attached to what victories we might expect see in our lifetimes; it did not live in a probabilistic assessment of the chances of the Freedom Struggle in vanquishing racist policies and people. Hope is not for the times we can see a victory ahead. It is not for the times we can calculate our chance of success.
Hope is for the other times, the times when we cannot see any path to victory, the times when it seems that darkness has fallen around us, when our powers of reason can no longer, on their own, chart a path forward. It is an ember that keeps burning, when the fire has gone out.
Hope is not, as we define it today, a reasonable belief that the things we desire can be achieved by us; rather, it is the thing we use to keep fighting for or believing in those things when their future occurrence has ceased to be a reasonable belief.
When we give up hope, when we lose the ability to see good in our future, a very particular kind of evil enters us, an evil our society is losing the ability to describe and to recognize. As a result, we have lost our ability to challenge that evil.
In the original Two Towers, King Theoden is presented as a man, old and beaten before his time. Deeply bereft of his son, Theodred, he has closed and shuttered all the windows in his throne room and sits in darkness all day, grieving for the death of his son. His grief has caused him to collapse into despair and, as a consequence, he refuses to hear news of his kingdom and the larger war gathering around it because he believes no good news will come.
Because he has lost hope, he has ceased to believe that his actions and decisions can make any difference in the larger war and so he has ordered that his soldiers not leave the kingdom’s borders but stay in a grim defense, awaiting its ultimate end, knowing it to be inevitable. And his only trusted advisor is an enemy agent, Grima, because he consistently confirms Theoden’s hopeless worldview.
In Jackson’s reimagining, Theoden is controlled by Grima and his master Saruman by way of some kind of spell that changes the king’s behaviour and appearance, controlling his mind through magic. In the film version, Theoden is suddenly restored to youth and vigour because Gandalf dispels Saruman’s evil magic.
In the original telling, there is a magical duel but the moment of transformation is when Gandalf opens the window and lets the sun into the throne room. When Theoden sees the sun, the horses, the plains of his kingdom, he is able to rekindle his hope and summon the riders of Rohan, not because his perception of his chances has changed but because he has remembered how much there is to hope not about but for.
In the original story, Saruman assembles his own armies of orcs and savage men to join Sauron’s alliance because he has seen, via the palantir, that its victory is both inevitable and total. And so he attempts to persuade Gandalf to join with Sauron so that they might hollow out some portion of the future in which they can do some good within the evil empire, in which their subjects might appreciate being ruled with a lighter hand.
Because Saruman can no longer hope for the defeat of Sauron, he joins with him, not out of loyalty or submission but as an act of mitigation. By creating a more orderly, humane, intelligent tribe of orcs, by tactically seizing as much territory as he can before Sauron takes it in his own name, Saruman understands his acts of murder and war not as acts of evil, themselves, but as the mitigation of evil.
Because Saruman has lost hope, his metric for evil has changed. If a good outcome, i.e. the defeat of Sauron, is impossible, then one should not compare his burning of Fangorn Forest or his attack on Helm’s Deep to the actions of the forest’s and fortress’s defenders but rather to what Sauron would have done in his place.
Denethor, similarly in the thrall of the visions shown him by the palantir, is plagued by visions of his kingdom’s capital, Minas Tirith, being destroyed by fire. Believing that this destruction is inevitable, he loses hope for his kingdom. Although Denethor continues fighting every day for his kingdom and ordering his armies to engage in an endless series of sorties and strategic retreats, the despair in his heart causes him to cease fighting, to cease giving orders when the Enemy finally breaches the gates of Minas Tirith. Instead, he orders the construction of a great pyre at the centre of the city where he plans to allow himself and his son to burn to death—thereby controlling the only thing his despair permits him to control: the cause of the fire that destroys him. If he cannot vanquish Sauron, he will deprive him of the satisfaction of burning himself and his heir to death by doing this himself.
In Jackson’s narration, Theoden, Saruman and Denethor serve Sauron directly; they become his stooges, his agents, his flunkies. In the original story, none of these men likes, admires or serves Sauron. They do things that help him, not because they support him but because their loss of hope has so altered their horizon of expectation that they become agents for evil, in and of themselves, often engaging in depraved or violent acts motivated by hatred of Sauron, not allegiance to him.
Most of the evil I see around me is of this variety. Are John Horgan and Justin Trudeau furiously approving more and more fracking sites, oil wells, pipelines and fossil fuel subsidies because they want to incinerate the planet? No. They are just men who have lost hope that we can do any better. Or, to quote my old pal David Lewis, “they have lost the faith that humanity will rise to the occasion.”
Hope may be an intangible, almost mystical force but it is also an absolute bread-and-butter necessity for human survival. Hopeless people do not have to embrace evil in order to carry out monstrous acts; they just have to embrace despair.
That is what lurks at the centre of the Woke and alt-right movements: the loss of hope, the idea that the window for working together for a better world is closed and all that is left are recriminations, revenge and grandstanding.
But because we understand the politics of hope and despair so poorly, we knoiw little about keeping the ember of hope alive within ourselves. But we must get better, and soon. Because more than greed or cruelty, what powers the evil we face today is hopelessness. And more importantly, we need to grow more skilled at making sure others do not lose hope and in building aspects of our community that can make that ember burn brighter in others.
And I realize that I have, to an extent, fallen victim to this. I have not exactly lost hope but I have become so overwhelmed by the betrayals, the madness, the despair around me that I have not put forward a positive political alternative in a long time. So, in the next post, I will.
