I was all prepared to give my rambling, stream-of-consciousness thoughts on “Return of the King” today, but I’m gonna hold off on that until the weekend. For starters, I’ll have more time (I’ve got a lot of thoughts. “Blog on the Tracks" length thoughts.) Secondly, I won’t be writing on 4 hours sleep, as I am right now. (Too many images in my head from the movie. Too much adrenaline that wouldn’t escape. And lord, if I ever, ever get attacked by an eight-story woolly mammoth, I want Legolas on my side.) Thirdly, it’ll give me a chance to mentally process so many thoughts which are now buzzing like flies around my head.
And most important, very few of you have probably even seen it yet. So you’d skip over today’s entry, and forget I ever wrote one in the first place by the time you saw it, and then you’d be thinking, “Ryan’s a LOTR dork, why didn’t he write an article about it?” and somewhere, a kitten would die.
And who wants that, really?
I will say this much, though, since every once in a while it needs to be said.
Some folks who love, love, love “Return of the King”, love the entire series, counted down the days to each and every release, own both versions of both “Fellowship” and “Two Towers” on DVD, and manage to slip in lines from the movie in everyday conversation…some of these folks, well, they are offended when people say, “Oh, that movie? Eh. It was OK. Not my bag.” Those who are non-plussed by these movies become second-class citizens in the eyes of the faithful, and those who are enthralled by the actions of pointy-eared, hairy-footed hobbits seems like an alien species to those who don’t get the obsession.
Both sides are antagonistic towards the other. Both sides need to stick a sock on it.
It really doesn’t matter to me if you like, love, or hate “Lord of the Rings”. At least to me. It matters to be in that I know whether to bother to engage you in a conversation regarding the movies. I wouldn’t want to waste your time, have eyes rolled at me, or be derided for my affection simply because you think they are silly. You can think they are silly all you won’t. I won’t pity you for that. I won’t pray for your immortal soul to be touched by these movies the way that mine has been touched. Really don’t care, in the end.
Because the way these films touch me has nothing to do with anything but the relationship between these movies and myself.
This holds true for any particular piece of pop culture, as I’ve repeatedly stressed over the last year on this site. To argue the relative merits of certain pieces of art will always reach a finite point of common sense: in the end, you either like it or you don’t. But to assign relative worth to one’s passions…well, that’s an industry in and of itself, but I for one don’t like “Lord of the Rings” or “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” or The White Stripes due to anything than a singular emotional response to these objects once exposed to them.
Get passionate about your passions, by all means. There’s something incredible democratic about the ability to try and “sell”, for a lack of a better word, your passions to others. Tell them about movies. Hand them a copy of a compact disc. Lend them a book. These are all good and noble things, in that they attempt to proliferate an emotional experience to a particular piece of culture. There’s nothing wrong with that.
There’s also nothing wrong with said person hating what you’ve shared. That’s their democratic right, as well.
What is implicit in all of this, I believe, is a fundamentally good impulse to want others to be as emotionally fulfilled by a particular piece of pop culture as you are. What trips many people up, I believe, is the specificity of it all. That is to say: what we should be encouraging in others is not love of a particular thing, but a love of any thing.
Anything at all. A piece of music. A painting. A particular frame of a particular movie. Whatever touches you can’t be a bad thing. This is what we should be doing. Not engaging in a “Star Wars”/”Lord of the Rings” debate in Internet chat rooms which inevitably devolve into the argumentative equivalent of, “Your momma!” “No, YOUR momma!” Everyone thinks their mother is the best. The attachment there is both pre- and post-intellectual. And a certain point, rationality ceases to be useful, and all you’ve got left is a type of umbilical-like instinct. And this paragraph really derailed itself, so I’m going to start a new one and hopefully get back on track.
The tendency toward assigning relative worth to these works is in the end one of the more futile things you can do. I mean, I can hope you like “Return of the King”, because I’d really like to share my experiences with others who felt as strongly as myself. Not here I same “strongly”, not “similarly”. You can’t find someone who felt exactly the same way you did, which is a good thing. Such similarities would imply automation in the production of our emotional makeup, and I for one am glad to be singular in my affections. In a perfect world, these differences amount to “Oh, I liked this scene more than you did,” and in the worst case scenario, you’ve inspired the cultural equivalent of a hate crime by declaring that you liked “Agent Cody Banks.”
I mean, I think “Return of the King” is better than “Agent Cody Banks.” But there’s a 12-year old in Illinois who now wants to have a word with me after making that statement. You could side with myself or little Jimmy Wilson, but rather than take sides, just side that, if one could find an objective barometer for passion towards these respective films, we’d balance out the see-saw quite well. And that’s all that matters, in the end. Pluralism might be trite, but it’s clichéd nature doesn’t negate it’s applicability here.
I have these movies in my heart. I have dozens of other films in my heart, filed next to a few hundred songs and a couple dozen television shows. These things make up part of me, but they do not make up the sum of me. I’m not better than you, you, or you. OK, maybe you, but you killed that kitten. Really now. That wasn’t very nice.
My ownership is singular in that it’s unique. But it’s not better than your ownership over those things you hold near and dear. I own them so you don’t have to. They are mine…my own…my precious. Don’t think less of me for quoting Gollum, and I won’t think less of you for those things that cause the sparkle in your eye to shine brightly.
To have anything that makes you feel is a blessing in and of itself. We should be celebrating, not decrying, our different sources of pleasure. There’s enough real conflict in the world…let’s not bring that into this particular fray here.
Here. Not at the end, but at the beginning of all things.