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.
\n<\/em><\/p>\nSecond, the civilians may not have experienced things that the veterans did, but up until recently, their lot was hard in total war.\u00a0 That may be an extension of the first point, but there’s a different emphasis.<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0 But Jackson trips himself up by defying Tolkien’s judgment, substituting his own supposedly in an effort to portray what Tolkien clearly expressed!\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
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).\u00a0 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).\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
A lot of the difference was just factual ruin.\u00a0 My actual friends and acquaintances had largely turned into screw-ups and deadbeats, with some notable try-hards and a few successes.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0 This was not just my percepton, no matter what the case.\u00a0 People who had been there throughout said “Dude, it’s not like how it was when you left — things have gone downhill.\u00a0 I’m ready to go.”<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0 Check me if that’s a literary reference.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Take your eye off the ball for even a little while and you run a serious risk of coming unhitched.\u00a0 Yet it’s not only the individual thus hazarded.<\/p>\n
America sends her best to war.\u00a0 And some of the middle of the pack (hey!).\u00a0 Heck, the worst don’t even make it through boot camp even if they do slither on in.\u00a0 Bill Cosby spoke of returning from the war being unemployable as a veteran because the dropouts and the shirkers had all the jobs.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Only worse war can make any war seem worthwhile.\u00a0 Only the prospect of losing makes the victory worth having at all.\u00a0 We would all have been better off minding our business, our literal<\/em> business as a nation of shopkeepers, as well as some rebel colonial scum who turned out to be even better shopkeepers.<\/p>\nThe 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 I can still recite the inscription on the ring from memory, but I will not speak it here.<\/p>\n
The Scouring of The Shire can be seen as the only real payload of that entire trilogy.\u00a0 Tolkien can despise allegory all he likes, but a man does not for nothing<\/em> put pen to paper for literally a half a million words at publication<\/em>, nevermind the profusion of PhD-level linguistic and mythic background, unpublished ancillary work, and no doubt just as many edited-away supporting words.\u00a0 Tolkien did it for a reason, and that reason is found in the penultimate chapter of the entire trilogy, The Scouring of The Shire.\u00a0 Yes, he absolutely had something to say, and you don’t have to look too hard to find it.\u00a0 It’s right before the hero of the book literally decides to simply lie down and die.<\/p>\nAs 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.\u00a0 Jackson simply did not understand Tolkien if his meager justifications are in fact his reasons.\u00a0 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…”.<\/p>\n
Hate-watch here:<\/p>\n