Semi-Literate Nerdstalgic Gets it all Wrong on Scouring of the Shire

Nerdstalgic is one of those YouTube channels where at first it’s hard to tell if this is one of those AI content farms or just an annoying collection of things that you thought you would like but naaah.  Then the narrator/writer/bqhatevwr goes on to make mistakes that only a person would, such as saying that a thing was hotly “debated over” rather than “debated”, and referring to LOTR Trilogy director Peter Jackson’s colleagues as his “cohorts” rather than his cohort; a use which already stretches acceptability.  This sort of thing keeps up, and then he gets the topic all wrong as well, that being why Jackson infamously omitted the key chapter “The Scouring of The Shire” from the end of his movie trilogy.

Nevermind most of his bad reasoning, some of which is based on what Jackson says and is therefore at least accurately reported, but every time the Nerdstalgic guy gets into his own analysis, he is wrong — even when defending Jackson.  Jackson may have said that the multiple endings were already growing long in the tooth, and a colleague may have said that you “just can’t re-start the story after so many near-endings”, but that does not make them right.

Near the end of the video, Nerdstalgic dude gets on about veterans, and homecoming, and what Jackson wanted to say about vets returning to an oblovious homefront, where only the returnees know what it has cost and the civilians were all at the mall.  Couple of issues with this:

First, this business of “I went to war while America went shopping” is new, and is a function of our completely inept new way of war, which will soon be replaced by a more effective way of war — either ours or somebody else’s.  I wrote about this here: https://ricochet.com/1076972/failing-to-learn-from-the-century-of-fake-wars/

side note: That post is, at time of this writing, only visibile to logged-in R> members — they’ve explained that it’s a site issue and expect resolution at some point.

Second, the civilians may not have experienced things that the veterans did, but up until recently, their lot was hard in total war.  That may be an extension of the first point, but there’s a different emphasis.

Third, Jackson speaks of Tolkien returning from the war and experiencing various things, and how most people will never know, and wanting to capture that returned veteran’s feeling of homelessness even in his own home after the war.  But Jackson trips himself up by defying Tolkien’s judgment, substituting his own supposedly in an effort to portray what Tolkien clearly expressed!  I get it, they’re Jackson’s movies and movies must differ from books or suffer, but he errs (and so does Nerdstalgic) in trying to defend the decision to outsmart Tolkien about the returnee experience.

The fourth point is for me the transcendent one, the one which I understood upon reading as a teenager (more than Nerdstalgic and apparently Jackson anyway).  This only became ever more true as I returned from deployments and no-kidding combat tours (where I happily/miserably REMF’d most of the time).  You can go have the grand adventure, slay the dragon, defeat evil restore hope and justice and so forth, but then you come home and the whole place has been spoiled while you were gone.  Granted, whenever I came home to my actual hometown after various Navy hitches, the place wasn’t a smoking ruin, and when I came back to my old job after Afghanistan combat tours, eldritch forces had not upheaved the land and so forth, but coming back to my hometown, there was a lot that had soured and a lot of that was not just me recognizing things with new eyes.

A lot of the difference was just factual ruin.  My actual friends and acquaintances had largely turned into screw-ups and deadbeats, with some notable try-hards and a few successes.  Much of that may simply be the passage of time, but when I left, they were all more or less like me — I was like them.

And when I returned to my job after various Afghanistan tours, both times, the place was an alien and hostile environment, dutifully welcoming but foul in execution, with new and ever-more petty regimes in place.  This was not just my percepton, no matter what the case.  People who had been there throughout said “Dude, it’s not like how it was when you left — things have gone downhill.  I’m ready to go.”

There is an anecdote about the decorated hero returned from the war who enjoys a week or so back at home, then trips over the cord to the toaster, hits his head, and dies.  Check me if that’s a literary reference.  It’s trivial and comic (in its tragedy), but the fact is the forces of darkness are always gnawing, gnawing away at your life and at society and at the connections therebetween.  Take your eye off the ball for even a little while and you run a serious risk of coming unhitched.  Yet it’s not only the individual thus hazarded.

America sends her best to war.  And some of the middle of the pack (hey!).  Heck, the worst don’t even make it through boot camp even if they do slither on in.  Bill Cosby spoke of returning from the war being unemployable as a veteran because the dropouts and the shirkers had all the jobs.  Tolkien examined not only the cost to the warrior of going to war and coming back home (but you can never come home, really) — he also examined the cost to society of sending a slice of the best and the middle off to go engage in entirely destructive activity.  Granted, in the context of defending from greater destruction, defensive or even preventive war is an asset, but outside of that narrowly-constructed analytical lens, all war is just waste.  Only worse war can make any war seem worthwhile.  Only the prospect of losing makes the victory worth having at all.  We would all have been better off minding our business, our literal business as a nation of shopkeepers, as well as some rebel colonial scum who turned out to be even better shopkeepers.

The Scouring of The Shire is the only moment in all the three books in which the actual stakes are something other than a bunch of mystical nonsense.  I loved the books, I liked the movies, and my belated adoration of Game of Thrones marks me as no prude who is too good for genre fiction, not even fantasy — I dig it.  I can still recite the inscription on the ring from memory, but I will not speak it here.

The Scouring of The Shire can be seen as the only real payload of that entire trilogy.  Tolkien can despise allegory all he likes, but a man does not for nothing put pen to paper for literally a half a million words at publication, nevermind the profusion of PhD-level linguistic and mythic background, unpublished ancillary work, and no doubt just as many edited-away supporting words.  Tolkien did it for a reason, and that reason is found in the penultimate chapter of the entire trilogy, The Scouring of The Shire.  Yes, he absolutely had something to say, and you don’t have to look too hard to find it.  It’s right before the hero of the book literally decides to simply lie down and die.

As far as movie-making, a man and a team as talented as Jackson’s could have figured out the rhythm required to hit the right emotional beats, the right way to spoil the anticipated anticlimactic joyous homecoming, the movie magic to portray the awful and unsuspected truth of what happens not only to a man but to his country when he goes to war.  Jackson simply did not understand Tolkien if his meager justifications are in fact his reasons.  Nerdstalgic certainly understood none of it when he said “… they were right to cut The Scouring of The Shire in favor of the scenes we ultimately got…”.

Hate-watch here:

Remind me to tell you some day why Luke’s arc in the Star Wars sequels was almost perfect, but was mishandled so badly that it joins the rest of that trash in deserved ignominy.

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