I return to Ebert’s comment,
“One feels at the end that nothing actual and human has been at stake; cartoon characters in a fantasy world have been brought along about as far as it is possible for them to come, and while we applaud the achievement, the trilogy is more a work for adolescents (of all ages) than for those hungering for truthful emotion thoughtfully paid for.”
The phrase “adolescents of all ages” sounds more derogatory than “children of all ages,” but maybe it shouldn’t. Calling “Star Wars” child-like implies, accurately, its aura of whimsy. Calling “Lord of the Rings” adolescent implies, also accurately, those days when we still acted as children but expected to be treated as adults, or as the trilogy’s defenders will say, behaved as adults but were regarded as children. “Lord of the Rings” moves with its head down, seriously, as if it is filled with portentous secrets and deep thoughts. And what do we get when we finally ask it what it’s thinking? “Power corrupts.” No kidding. I hadn’t thought of that. Yet perhaps the best possible reading of Jackson’s “The Lord of the Rings” as having any subtext is as an allegory for male adolescence itself. Whether or not Tolkien intended this or not is absolutely immaterial; we’re talking about Jackson’s films, not Tolkien’s novels.
Let’s just make a quick list of how the movie encapsulates the ages of about 8 thru 15:
1) Juvenile idea of war (see “Lord of the Rings” as War) as a video game: the Beautiful Elf Guy and the Fat Dwarf are competing to see how many kills they can make, just like the score in a video game.
2) Girls as honorary boys: the Princess of the Blonde People joins all the boys in battle.
3) Girls (and sex) as scary: Nathan says “by the end of ‘Return of the King,’ we get two hobbits cowering together in fear of that big flaming vagina above the mountain, having just run in horror out of a dark, sticky, musty tunnel.” Dr. Clayton says “‘Fellowship of the Ring’ exploits…the revulsion from adult sexuality…as if sexual predators were lurking around every corner. Still early on, when Frodo and his sidekicks from the Shire go into an inn where they are supposed to meet Gandalf, they find the place filled with leering, bearded older males, like a lecherous motorcycle gang out in search of hot boy ass. A later episode in which Boromir (Sean Bean) and Frodo are alone together in the woods and Boromir tries to take the ring from the boy has equally obvious connotations of sexual assault when the older male approaches the younger seductively and then attacks him after Frodo proves wary of his intentions. But what attracts him more, taking the ring or the boy's cherry?”
4) Girls as untouchable: Dave Clayton says “neither adult sexuality nor anything else adult penetrates into the chastely cloistered world of the movie. Although the film allows a bit of discrete courtship between Aragorn (Viggo Mortensen) and Arwen (Liv Tyler), all the feminine figures in ‘Fellowship of the Ring’ appear garbed in white as if they were luminous embodiments of purity.”
5) Intimidation at the sight of the older boy: again, Dr. Clayton says “in a sequence that takes place towards the end [of ‘Fellowship’], when the boys are boating down a river…they encounter gigantic statues of the ancient kings, carven out of stone, before passing into a lake. Directly ahead lies a phallic pinnacle, and behind them a suspiciously narrow strait they have just navigated…But those statues deserve a closer look. The effigies are depicted with their hands raised, apparently to ward off intruders. As the boys drift by, silently staring in astonishment, the film cuts to an incredibly ugly shot of the boat going past the huge sandaled foot of one of the kings…The keynote is the discrepancy in size…what is the awe the boys feel towards these images except the admiration younger males feel for the superior physical endowments of older ones?”
6) Gloom and doom sense of seriousness: the entire trilogy—from direction to music to acting to cinematography—carries itself like a teenager with his head down.
7) No financial or domestic concerns. O’Ehley says “thirteen is…the best age at which to have read Tolkien’s books. Writer Brian Aldiss mentions in ‘Trillion Year Spree’ (his excellent history of science fiction) that the success of fantasy novels is due to the absence of the one thing that their adolescent readers are always short of: money. You never see Lord Sauron struggling to make the mortgage payments on any of his huge castles. Or even the dashing Aragorn slapping down a few pence for his drink of ale at the local tavern. Or how about Frodo and Sam never having to pay any toll road fees? Money just never figures in any of these tales, Aldiss says.”
8) Enormous teenage appeal: the trilogy revels in elements of video games, long-haired rock bands, perfectly-coiffed boy bands (“this ‘fellowship’ looks like a pubescent boy band in medieval drag” says Clayton), Renaissance fairs, loud music, and the serial, repetitive format of comic books, Nancy Drew, Encyclopedia Brown, and giant science-fiction sagas that come in 20 volumes.
Clayton’s conclusion is that “‘Fellowship of the Ring’ wants to pass off a teenager's limited vision of the world as myth.” He finds this notion of backwards progress as dangerous, or at least a kind of opiate that makes audiences feel they are thinking when in truth they are only being placated. When the teenager’s world ends, the movie ends, as if there’s nothing all that interesting left to do, and while we may live on, we’ll only spend that time in a kind of living death in which the best we can do is recapture days gone by. Try seeing things from the 40-year-old’s perspective and you’ll see how insulting it is. Isn’t the multiplex already cluttered with enough films that glorify All Things Teenage? Is “LOTR” an examination of all this, or merely the most purely 13-Year-Old-Boy-Movie ever made? In his Great Movies review of “Star Wars,” Roger Ebert says “In one way or another all the big studios have been trying to make another ‘Star Wars’ ever since…it located Hollywood's center of gravity at the intellectual and emotional level of a bright teenager.”
Page two of "'Lord of the Rings' as Adolescent Allegory."
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