Month: January 2021

A Lament For Fictional Heroes

For many, many years I eagerly awaited the new season of Doctor Who. Back in the day, I watch the “Golden Age” Doctors several times, and was at first a bit skeptical of the reboot of the show this century, but of course, that reboot has provided me (and so many others) some of the most memorable Doctor Who moments ever, as well as some of the finest writing and acting, not to mention special effects finally commensurate with the state of the art. The Golden Age special effects were, well, to be honest, nobody watched for the special effects.

And when I learned that the latest Doctor was to be regenerated into a woman, I was very keen on the idea. About time, I thought (see what I did there? 🙂). Unfortunately, the show also got a new show-runner (the person responsible for the arc of the series), and a new team of writers. And it was apparent to me, from the very first episode, that the writing and story arcs, such as they were, were simply not very good. I really liked the new Doctor, and I hated that she did not enjoy the same level of creative teamwork that had been the show’s backbone for so many years. The new show runner, a man named Chris Chibnall, apparently decided to basically ignore the decades that had preceded him. Continuity has always been a challenge in a show that spans five decades (and deals with time travel!), but it still deserves at least a modicum of effort. I haven’t watched any of the latest season, and feel no strong need to. And apparently the most recent holiday episode (used to be Christmas, now it’s New Years for some reason) completely destroyed the basic assumptions and origins of the show. Why would I care to see that?

The man who ran the show all through the David Tennant, Matt Jones and Peter Capaldi years, a man named Steven Moffat, left the show (so I hear) to concentrate on the most excellent Benedict Cumberbatch Sherlock Holmes show. The irony is that that show seems to have disappeared. Cumberbatch is off doing a million other things now, including becoming a part of the Marvel Character Universe (MCU) as Doctor Strange. So we lost Sherlock Holmes, too.

And speaking of the MCU, look what happened there: Iron Man & Captain America are both gone, not to mention the others who perished in the fight against Thanos. Iron Man & Captain America pretty much formed the central core of the whole MCU, by virtue of movie seniority (Iron Man) and historical credentials (Captain America). Not to mention the iconic and magnetic personality of Robert Downey, Jr., whose constant wit was like a perpetual motion machine in the Avengers movies. There will be more MCU movies, but that’s a HUGE loss.

On television, the extremely excellent (IMO) Agents of Shield has dissolved. Yes, the stories had ranged further and further out, convoluted and Ouroborean in their complexity. But they still held together, and the characters had become real (not always true in science fiction) and we cared about them, and their conflicts and their hidden facets. I also really liked the Agent Carter series, and hated to see it pulled, though Agents of Shield managed to even wrap up that story line in their last few episodes.

I wish I could like the DC super hero movies, but let’s face it: they never had the mojo that the Stan Lee movies did. I suspect that’s because, even in the deeps of comic book time, DC heroes were never complicated. It was always super goodness vs super evil, end of story. Sure, in “modern” comic novel times, they’ve tried to add internal character conflict, but it’s really sort of painted on, not inherent. I believe I foresaw this, even as a kid, when Batman kept adding Bat-things to his arsenal, and Superman had a new superpower seemingly every issue. I think the writing was on the wall when Superman started using his super-ventriloquism. Across interplanetary space. Yeah. Super-ventriloquism. Sure, Aquaman and Wonder Woman are cool, but I think that’s more due to the actors, not the stories. And I understand WW84 is kind of a bust, which I hate.

Contrast to the MCU heroes who were ALWAYS conflicted, from the gitgo. Spider-man was an actual teenager, with teenage problems, and living with his aunt, a widow. His boss was a jerk, he had girl friend problems. Ironman was a spoiled rich guy. Hell, the Hulk was a rampaging, mindless monster. Captain America was about as close to one-dimensional as they portrayed, but don’t forget he started out as a 98 pound weakling. So there’s stuff there, too. Thor was an actual GOD, so that added a whole new dimension (literally). And that naturally leads to Doctor Strange, and the unreality HE represents. Like I said, a pantheon of characters with deep character wells from which to draw.

As for the X-Men, who apparently live in a completely separate MCU, they’ve pretty much played that story out into ultimate entropy and the heat death of the (MC) Universe (2). There’s nothing left to do now.

Star Wars? God we can only hope there’s no more there to come. The Mandolorean has obvious promise, but the most common thread I’ve seen in Season 1 and the first few episodes of Season 2 (like Jethro Tull, I’m “Living In the Past” 🎶 ) is: Mandolorean goes to a planet, some person or group there enlists his help on some local problem, he helps, he and Baby Yoda leave. I understand there’s some big plot Reveal at the end of Season 2. I hope it’s not just a contrivance.

Star Trek? They were forced to not only reboot the franchise, they went so far as to shift it into an alternate universe with alternate basis and history. Entertaining as far as it has gone, I hope it can go further. That remains to be seen.

Peter Jackson has squeezed every drop of cinematic juice out of Middle Earth there was to squeeze, more actually. Three full length movies for the Hobbit? Everybody KNEW that was not right. I guess he might assail the Silmarillion, but that is NOT a cinematically oriented tale. And the characters are impossible to bring down to human stature.

So, the cinematic (and small screen) hero world is not as much fun anymore. I guess it could just be me, and the result of “getting on” as I am so obviously doing. But these playful bits of heroic story-telling have been with me for so long, I find it a bit sad to see the more iconic and central parts departing. Like Samwise Gamgee said, they are going into the West, they are leaving us.

(c) 2021 Chuck Puckett

Why Does Tolkien Resonate So Profoundly?

I am by far not the first to note this: It is almost impossible to overstate the magnitude of the accomplishment that JRR Tolkien achieved in a lifetime of effort.

Almost everyone comes to the world of Middle Earth via The Hobbit and the LOTR trilogy, easily some of the finest examples of pure story-telling in the English language. Taken together, The Red Book of the Westmarch will undoubtedly take its place among the true and lasting classics of literature, revered for many, many years into the future.

But the Red Book was, after all, only the most visible culmination of a work of breath-taking scope. I re-opened the Silmarillion last night, and was once again reminded of just how wide and deep was the task Tolkien took on. Though likely somewhat organic and even accidental in its genesis, the construction of this mythology, this history, was a thing so complete and far-ranging, that it almost defies categorization. 

Whole cultural mythologies that form the fabric upon which our shared Jungian subconscious floats, these required centuries of tale-telling and evolution by 100’s and even 1000’s of bards and scops. Tolkien, by nature and by education, lived and breathed those examples. As a philologist of the first rank, he also understood how the structure of a language colored and constrained the stories that are told in that language. 

And then he, in one lifetime, as an individual, built an entire mythology, disguised, as he liked to say, as a history. True, there are still gaps, and some inevitable inconsistency (though it feels remarkably consistent to my eyes). And the language of his recounting of that vast tale changes as he tells it. The components of The Silmarillion read and sound like the myths we all learned as children: the style is elevated, the characters and beings are impossibly larger than life, sometimes hard to relate to, standing as they do for themes that are archetypal and not necessarily breathing and bleeding.

But then, with that framework largely a fait accompli (though he continued to expand and refine it his whole life), he chose to “try his hand” at writing a really long tale, one that would hold a reader’s attention in a way that the myths, as fascinating and necessary as they were, might never do.

And thus we have The Lord Of the Rings. A story painted against a massive backdrop of history and myth, a backdrop often hinted at, although never detailed. But it is primarily a story of people whom we know. And especially if the people we know happen to live in the English countryside, though really, they are from Everywhere. They are brave when they need to be, but they are also afraid. They make jokes, they get angry, they have plans. The landscape through which they journey is full of fantastic beings and events, but it is also one we can see, see plainly in our mind’s eye. It is full of detailed images that remain indelibly etched in us. 

It begins in that least fantastic place imaginable, the Shire, then walks into the Old Forest and meets Bombadil, then encounters the Barrows. Then it’s into Bree and a sort of normalcy, but it’s hobbits and Men now, and some bumble, and some sneer, and one is mysterious. And so it continues, on to larger and larger vistas and a view of an increasingly wider world, a world in which so much more is at stake than hobbits from the Shire ever imagined possible. The style in which Tolkien tells this epic focuses our attention on these individuals, their foibles and their simple nobility. All the while revealing the larger history against which everything plays out.

“Fantasy” writing has been with us for a long time. But LOTR is not fantasy, though it is found in that section of the bookstore. Tolkien single-handedly created the genre which so many have attempted to imitate. And though there have been many very good, and even excellent, works produced that try to match his achievement, we know, or at least sense, that they all lack some essential element. And of course, when you think about it, it is Tolkien’s decades of deep consideration and creation of the material that comprises the Silmarillion that separates LOTR from all that came after. The construction of whole languages, with their rules and grammar*, of whole continents, with their landmarks and geography, and of a history and Creation myth, that formed a panorama against which the events in LOTR played out, these all made the world of Middle Earth ring “true” in a way that could never be so without the concomitant years of immersion and dedication.

Everyone who reads the works of JRR Tolkien benefits from his lifetime of work, even if they are not consciously aware of it. 


* Just for example, consider how Elvish names are so consistent, and then compare that to (as a REALLY bad example) how sci-fi writers used to come up with the personal names of the aliens they introduced us to. Names which often were simply nonsensical syllables and letters, meant to convey “weirdness”. Fantasy writing is replete with such examples.

(c) 2021 Chuck Puckett