The author himself was properly repulsed by the hippie movement (and indeed, by what he saw as the entire slovenly depths of American culture in general), and late in life began referring to their nightmare world of antiwar riots and hedonism as “this Fallen Kingdom of Arda, where the servants of Morgoth are worshipped.” But it was not only our side of the pond that gave him grief: he watched aghast as his work became so superficially popular and grossly misunderstood among the hip and the mod in Great Britain that the Beatles expressed a desire to star in a film version of The Lord of the Rings, complete with Stanley Kubrick directing!

It was Gandalf himself who warned Saruman that, “He that breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom.” But that little nugget of common sense, and virtually everything else that made the book special, was passed over by those who were trying to snort, smoke, and screw their way out from under the thumb of The Man and Western Civ. Tolkien considered the free-love drug mob and its associated subgroups “cults of faineance and filth” that mindlessly smashed everything Old and Noble and Sacred while simultaneously embracing everything New, Hip, and Easygoing, all in a foolish, futile attempt to deconstruct and experiment their way to an earthly Utopia. Unlike so many from that crazed era, the man who decades earlier had laboriously penned Frodo’s arduous journey to Mount Doom knew better than to grant hippie pipe-dreams intellectual or spiritual credence.

“The essence of a fallen world,” he once wrote, “is that the best cannot be attained by free enjoyment, or by what is called ‘self-realization’ (usually a nice name for self-indulgence, wholly inimical to the realization of other selves); but by denial, by suffering.” Catholics will well-recognize this belief, and (in my experience) are laudably well-versed in the truth of its sentiments. “What a dreadful, fear-darkened, sorrow-laden world we live in,” Tolkien groaned in 1969, while the childish, cataclysmic madness was at its height. “. . . Chesterton once said that it is our duty to keep the Flag of This World flying: but it takes now a sturdier and more sublime patriotism than it did then. . . there seems nothing more to do than personally to refuse to worship any of the hydra’s heads.”

The chattering class, as it always does, ham-handedly tried to make sense of it all. In Life magazine for February 24, 1967, Charles Elliot did a good job of embarrassing himself while capturing the elite condescension of that time:

Surely [The Lord of the Rings] is not the stuff of which campus heroes are made, even though it does provide Tolkien aficionados with something to discuss over their pipe-weed, mushrooms and brown ale. What apparently gets the kids square in their post-adolescent sensibilities is not the scholarship top-dressing but the undemanding, comfortable, child-sized story underneath. No symbolism, no sex, no double meanings, no questions about which are the Good Guys and which the Bad, just a good yarn on the level of Tom Swift and His Electric Runabout.

The Lord of the Rings is thoroughly innocent. It is even innocent of ideas, which doubtless helps recommend it to those aggressive searchers for sincerity, the opt-out crowd. . . I am prepared to be generous so long as the whole thing doesn’t get out of hand.

Prepared to be generous. Gee, thank God for that! That’s the kind of pompous cultural gate-keeping that far too many professional critics engage in, and it always makes them look like fools in the long run. I note that, forty-five years later, Tolkien is as popular (and as critically studied) as ever, even while Charles Elliott is forgotten and the magazine he wrote for is defunct.

As the 1960s degenerated into the 1970s Tolkien’s popularity shot into the stratosphere, his book standing as a veritable beacon of light in the darkness of the Age. The counterculture, via Tolkien interviews and exposés featured in magazines and on TV, began to learn a bit more about the man behind the tripped-out novels that had them all abuzz. This was no cool, far-out elderly statesman like Timothy Leary or Pete Seeger, but a devout Catholic war veteran whose every public utterance seemed to shore up the old ways rather than mock them or tear them down. It wasn’t long before the pot-smoking, ’shroom-popping crowd abandoned Tolkien almost as quickly as they had embraced him.

The backlash was presaged as early as 1969, when two miscreant humorists (who soon after would found National Lampoon magazine) released Bored of the Rings, a popular parody penned in what would become the classic Lampoon style. Fun as it was for a few idle laughs, it also foreshadowed Tolkien’s future among the “we are the change we’ve been waiting for” halfwits. They were “Bored of the Rings” because the tale was now mainstreamed, and thus stripped of its counterculture cachet. Previously used by hippies as a literary lava lamp to inspire wild mental imagery suitable for dropping acid, making jejune political points at insane rallies, or freaking out one’s elders, it now possessed all of the utility of a used condom. Within a few years most ripped the Middle-earth posters off their walls, tossed out their Leonard Nimoy “Ballad of Bilbo Baggins” records, and moved on to the next fleeting hot thing.

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At the hill’s foot Frodo found Aragorn, standing still and silent as a tree; but in his hand was a small golden bloom of elanor, and a light was in his eyes. He was wrapped in some fair memory: and as Frodo looked at him he knew that he beheld things as they once had been in this same place. For the grim years were removed from the face of Aragorn, and he seemed clothed in white, a young lord tall and fair; and he spoke words in the Elvish tongue to one whom Frodo could not see. Arwen vanimelda, namárië! he said, and then he drew a breath, and returning out of his thought he looked at Frodo and smiled.

“Here is the heart of Elvendom on earth,” he said, “and here my heart dwells ever, unless there be a light beyond the dark roads that we still must tread, you and I. Come with me!” And taking Frodo’s hand in his, he left the hill of Cerin Amroth and came there never again as living man.

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“I seldom find any modern books that hold my attention,” J.R.R. Tolkien wrote again and again over the course of his long life. “. . . I am looking for something I can’t find.” Given the state of literature both before and after The Lord of the Rings, it’s not hard to imagine why. Purpose and Truth is such a rare thing to feel in art of any kind — books, film, painting, dance, song. It’s certainly utterly absent from the tales of modern authors who spend thousands of pages knocking our emotional and spiritual joints out of kilter in an effort to be hard-hitting, funny and edgy.

In so many stories from the “bored with the Good” crowd, readers are continually invited, even cleverly lured, into trusting their higher aspirations and nobler instincts, only to have those precious, delicate things cast back into their faces with a cackle. At base, it’s an attempt to deliberately scramble and pervert your inner compass — your moral and spiritual pole star — beyond all recognition, rearranging the stained glass windows of your mind until all that’s left are meaningless, mad swaths of bright color. To some of us, this is no light matter to be laughed at or ignored.

The work of modern authors like Martin, Abercrombie, Stover, et al. would have surprised Tolkien not a bit — he clearly anticipated the various attempts of today’s fallen fantasists to (d)evolve past The Lord of the Rings by making their stories “self-aware,” “quasi-historical,” “morally complex,” and (most laughably of all) “real.” Such authors, he felt, cultivate and cherish “sneer and cynicism” because it allows them to preen with the false belief that they are “freer from hypocrisy” than past generations, “since it does not ‘do’ to profess holiness or utter high sentiments.” Scaling hills of garbage and then gazing down on humanity as if from artistic or moral high ground didn’t impress Tolkien. “Inverted hypocrisy,” he called it, and deemed it a belief as false as “the widely current inverted snobbery: men profess to be worse than they are.”

In a letter to his son Christopher dated May 6, 1944, Tolkien said that much of his early writing on Middle-earth was conducted “in grimy canteens, at lectures in cold fogs, in huts full of blasphemy and smut, or by candle-light in bell tents, even some down in dugouts under shell fire.” He clearly was no stranger to the dank gutters of Life, and despite what lazy critics say his fiction adequately reflects this. Hobbits, Men, Dwarves, Elves, Wizards, and even Angelic Gods all are portrayed as fallible and fully capable of being tempted into great wickedness. “Some critics,” Tolkien sighed, “seem determined to represent me as a simple-minded adolescent, inspired with, say, a ‘With-the-flag-to-Pretoria’ spirit, and willfully distort what is said in my tale. I have not that spirit, and it does not appear in the story.”

Yet if, as Tolkien famously stated, “a safe fairyland is untrue to all worlds,” then equally untrue are fairylands devoid of sincere expressions and manifestations of “holiness” and “high sentiments.” Something that (even at this late date) is little known to average Tolkien fans is that soon after the publication of The Lord of the Rings he made overtures towards writing a sequel of sorts. The extant pages bear the title “The New Shadow,” and take place “about 100 years after the Downfall [of Mordor],” long after the death of King Aragorn.

Any hopes for a repeat of achieving a sanity and sanctity comparable to his earlier works were soon dashed by a sobering reality. “It proved both sinister and depressing,” he admitted, explaining that

Since we are dealing with Men it is inevitable that we should be concerned with the most regrettable feature of their nature: the quick satiety with good. So that the people of Gondor in times of peace, justice and prosperity, would become discontented and restless — while the dynasts descended from Aragorn would become just kings and governors — like Denethor or worse. I found that even so early there was an outcrop of revolutionary plots, about a centre of secret Satanistic religion; while Gondorian boys were playing at being Orcs and going round doing damage. I could have written a “thriller” about the plot and its discovery and overthrow — but it would be just that. Not worth doing.

Upon reading this, I’m sure our fallen fantasists would offer up a whoop of approval, and lament that the old white-bread professor hadn’t gone through with this tentative exploration of his fictional universe’s treacherous underbelly, exposing all of the heroism and holiness of his earlier books as a hypocritical sham. They might even feel a certain justification about their own work, seeing in it a continuation of where Tolkien’s nascent ideas about “The New Shadow” left off, bravely (and perhaps with a smirk, nod and wink) descending into sewers where even the Master feared to tread.

As for myself, I believe that Tolkien stopped work on “The New Shadow” because he knew that a fairyland attuned solely to the “sinister and depressing” would ring false, and that the things he cherished in works of high romance would feel too distant, too pale, in this new Age of Men. He knew in his heart that a fairyland bereft of heroism, nobility, and grace was just as “untrue to all worlds” as the reverse. And yet — like many artists past their prime — he was now too old and weary to seek out the rays of eucatastrophic sunlight which, in tales of Truth and Purpose, always manage to shine through the mass of dark billowing clouds threatening to engulf the world in everlasting gloom.

No, it took another brilliant writer to look deep into that grim, savage epoch of decadence and encroaching evil, and set against it noble men who leapt into battle with “the chants of old heroes singing in their ears.” In so doing, he thunderously proved that — in a true artist’s hands — hard-boiled is very different from nihilistic and morally reprehensible. The writer’s name is Robert E. Howard, and by virtue of his haunting artistry, poetic splendor, and heroic sweep, he serves as Tolkien’s indispensable literary shield-brother in the fight against the vacuous capitulation to wickedness that infests so much of modern fantasy.

To be continued (in two weeks, after a much-needed vacation). . . . .

By graciously satisfying his readers’ insatiable curiosity in as many ways as possible, Tolkien puts himself at odds with many of today’s authors who, in an attempt to be ostentatiously arty and edgy, delight in leaving their readers with a sense of dramatic emptiness and thematic pointlessness. Just like in the film world, stories that ultimately resolve nothing and leave important plot threads hanging are in increasing vogue. Providing a paying reader with such basic dramatic tenets as resolution and closure is so last century, dont’cha know? Many books are so egregious in this regard that they leave readers saying, “Forget about happy endings, I’d be willing to settle for an ending of any kind — just tell me what happens!”

In the fantasy arena, a reader can easily wade through the swampy sludge of three books, five books, ten books, and even more, all spaced out over a period of many, many years, without ever reaching that terminus. Many fans die every year waiting for our fallen fantasists to achieve some sort of climax in their work worthy of the name.

As we have seen, Tolkien’s goal was to create “heroic legend on the brink of fairy-tale and history, of which there is far too little in the world (accessible to me) for my appetite.” The good professor and his voracious literary appetite didn’t live to see Terry Brooks usher in the first of what would eventually be a tidal wave of slavish-yet-shallow Lord of the Rings copycat series, nor the later crop of nihilists who have reacted against that phenomenon with their tedious reliance on the artistic, cultural, and moral dead-ends of anti-heroes and torture-porn. But my guess is that — despite the abundance of fantasy choices on bookshelves, and the common refrain among fans that there is “something for everybody” out there — none of it would have satisfied the hunger that originally drove him to write his own books in the first place.

“My work is not a novel,” he insisted, “but an heroic romance, a much older and quite different variety of literature.” The writers of modern-day fantasy soap opera — their novels chock-full of dozens of point-of-view characters all trapped in bewildering plots so lengthy and complex that, quite often, not even the authors are able to successfully keep track of them — don’t seem to have a clue about what this means. The answer, I believe, can be found in a little-quoted letter of Tolkien’s.

When a fan once called Tolkien “a believer in moral didacticism,” the author blanched and replied huffily that “I neither preach nor teach.” But writing to friends, he could let down his guard enough to admit that, “I would claim, if I did not think it presumptuous in one so ill-instructed, to have as one object the elucidation of truth, and the encouragement of good morals in this real world, by the ancient device of exemplifying them in unfamiliar embodiments.” (italics mine)

Our fallen fantasists, one can’t help but notice, recoil from truth like a vampire from a crucifix. There is none of their beloved shades of gray in truth: by its very nature, the word renders or implies some sort of moral judgment on the events described, and forces the author to come down on one side or the other of the cosmic “good vs. evil” debate at play. Liberals often contort the English language into pretzels in their effort to avoid making these judgments, hence they speak of “my truth” versus “your truth” and how all truths need to be respected in an enlightened society. If, say, Sauron’s truth is different from Gandalf’s truth, then who are we to force the reader into embracing one over the other?

Tolkien, at least, refused to torture the English language until the words lost all sense of meaning. To him the word truth said what it meant and meant what it said: to wit, there can be only one truth, with all other conflicting views being false. Furthermore, he believed that “fairy story has its own mode of reflecting ‘truth,’ different from allegory, or (sustained) satire, or ‘realism,’ and in some ways more powerful.”

Mind you, Tolkien’s method of explicating truth was not evangelistic. He very deliberately left all mentions of religion out of his fiction, as well as all totems, icons, and symbols of Christianity. Instead, he chose to bring to life what he called a “monotheistic world of ‘natural theology’” wherein the lamps illuminating truth are invisible but nevertheless there. Only very rarely are we lucky enough to see that light burst through dark clouds in full splendor, revealing the sense that Life, for all of its seemingly random evils and tragedies, is threaded with a great, majestic pattern that provides both comfort and the bracing sense of underlying reason.

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“The reason of my waking mind tells me that great evil has befallen and we stand at the end of days. But my heart says nay; and all my limbs are light, and a hope and joy are come to me that no reason can deny. Éowyn, Éowyn, White Lady of Rohan, in this hour I do not believe that any darkness will endure!” And he stooped and kissed her brow.

And so they stood on the walls of the City of Gondor, and a great wind rose and blew, and their hair, raven and golden, streamed out mingling in the air. And the Shadow departed, and the Sun was unveiled, and light leaped forth; and the waters of Anduin shone like silver, and in all the houses of the City men sang for the joy that welled up in their hearts from what source they could not tell.

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Sitting in church in late 1944, J.R.R. Tolkien had an epiphany. As he later told his son Christopher in a letter, he was listening to “a wonderful commentary on the gospel” one peppered with stories of modern miracles of healing among the faithful. “I was deeply moved,” Tolkien said, “and had that peculiar emotion we all have. . . For it I coined [in his now-famous essay "On Fairy Stories"] the word ‘eucatastrophe’: the sudden happy turn in a story which pierces you with a joy that brings tears. . . [which is] is the highest function of fairy-stories to produce.”

Eucatastrophe.

It’s a word that has been studied by Tolkien fans and scholars a great deal, but often I think in the wrong way. It is not just a feeling of preternatural joy or relief — it is a revelation of truth. As such, it is also a judgment — thunderous in its silence — on the nature of Man, God, and the Universe. Tolkien stressed that…

[Eucatastrophe] produces its peculiar effect because it is a sudden glimpse of Truth, your whole nature chained in material cause and effect, the chain of death, feels a sudden relief as if a major limb out of joint had suddenly snapped back. It perceives. . . that this is indeed how things really do work in the Great World for which our nature is made.

Truth, in other words, with a capital T. Eucatastrophe is revealed truth on a biblical scale — it’s no wonder that Tolkien referred to The Resurrection as “the greatest ‘eucatastrophe’ possible in the Greatest Fairy Story,” and credited it with creating “that essential emotion: Christian joy which produces tears because it is qualitatively so like sorrow, because it comes from those places where Joy and Sorrow are at one, reconciled, as selfishness and altruism are lost in Love.”

That feeling of “Christian joy,” so deeply felt that it’s almost indistinguishable from sorrow, was in Tolkien’s view the closest a living human being could come to discerning an underlying reason for existence, and thus satisfying that ultimate appetite which all men have gnawing away deep within their guts, whether they admit it nor not. The film director Werner Herzog, in much the same context (a context which, I propose, was derived from his own flirtation with Catholicism in his teens) calls this same feeling ecstatic truth.

For those keeping score, this is the exact opposite of nihilism.

To be continued. . . .

“It’s nice to find that little American boys do really say ‘Gee Whiz’,” the author joked to his son Christopher when he mentioned receiving the note. But surprisingly, his prevailing mood was somber:

I find these letters which I still occasionally get. . . make me rather sad. What thousands of grains of good human corn must fall on barren stony ground, if such a very small drop of water should be so intoxicating! But I suppose one should be grateful for the grace and fortune that have allowed me to provide even the drop.

Those are words, humble and true, that evoke the New Testament, conjuring an image of lost souls looking to quench an almost spiritual thirst. At the very time he wrote them, Tolkien was already deep into the agony and the ecstasy of the creation of The Lord of the Rings, and the intersection of the literary and the spiritual was on his mind. “God bless you beloved,” he told his son by way of signing off, but then tagged on a final, lingering question, one weighing heavily on his work: “Do you think the ‘Ring’ will come off, and reach the thirsty?”

It should be clear now to even the dimmest of critical bulbs that Tolkien’s own craving for heroic romance was hardly unique. Millions of others, equally parched in the modern world, were in dire need of the potent drought he was brewing. After The Lord of the Rings finally appeared, it inspired fan letters from grown adults that matched the enthusiasm of the little boy writing from America decades earlier. In The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien we are mostly denied the original missives, but can frequently read Tolkien’s reactions to them.

To one fan, a Mrs. Carole Batten-Phelps, Tolkien said:

You speak of “a sanity and a sanctity” in the L.R. “which is a power in itself.” I was deeply moved. Nothing of the kind had been said to me before. But by a strange chance, just as I was beginning this letter, I had one from a man, who classified himself as “an unbeliever, or at best a man of belatedly and dimly dawning religious feeling. . . . but you,” he said, “create a world in which some sort of faith seems to be everywhere without a visible source, like light from an invisible lamp.”

That’s a fascinating comment, not only because it’s indisputably true, but for what it says about the genre of fantasy fiction at its very best. So many dismiss fantasy in general and Tolkien in particular as shallow children’s fairy tales, with simplistic nursery-rhyme notions of good and evil, and all of it of little relevance to the modern adult world. And yet here are grown adults, intelligent and erudite, who clearly were affected on some bedrock level by The Lord of the Rings. They speak of a sort of comfort, as if reaching a port in the storm of Life, battered and weary, and of being nourished and refreshed by a Power, “some sort of faith,” a Light “from an invisible lamp,” a “sanity and a sanctity.”

There’s been any number of analyses which attempt to discover and unearth the hidden roots of Tolkien’s genius. The author himself disliked academic dissertations, seeing them for what they usually are: examples of the writer trying to preen and peacock his intellectual superiority over the reader, not by understanding or empathizing but by dissection and vivisection. It’s the difference between a critic taking his audience into a golden field and inviting them to share his wonder at the butterflies coloring the skies with beauty and life, and a grumpy collector showing you a scrapbook filled with those same butterflies pinned and cataloged in monotonous order. Both methods address the same subject — but which truly captures their nature, and is a more accurate representation of Life and Creation?

Tolkien’s work steadfastly resists deconstruction because so much of its power isn’t physical or tangible, and hence cannot be pinned or cataloged or dipped into academic and postmodern formaldehyde. It is spiritual, ethereal, concerned not so much with plot as with Purpose. One of Tolkien’s friends, a priest, read portions of The Lord of the Rings in typescript and told the author that he distinctly felt what he called the “order of Grace” in the tale. The phrase left Tolkien quietly overjoyed.

Lying at the center of this Order, holding it all together like divine mortar, is heroism. Tolkien himself was often moved by scenes he wrote displaying his characters’ “physical resistance to evil,” reverently calling their actions nothing less than “a major act of loyalty to God.” This loyalty, equal parts physical and spiritual, was in turn something that he believed “only becomes a virtue when one is under pressure to desert it.” The world of The Lord of the Rings is filled with great temptations of a sort that don’t lead directly to evil per se, but that lead to the abandonment of the physical resistance — the pain, the suffering — that Tolkien considered so central to his notions of true heroism.

When viewed in this fashion, heroism becomes the heritage not only of the strong and mighty and scary-smart — in fact, frequently it is they who most easily give in to the temptations of power. It should be remembered that among the greatest tragedies of Middle-earth is that even such monstrous villains as Morgoth and Sauron were once forces of great good in the world, veritable angels who ultimately allowed themselves to be corrupted into Lucifers by their anti-heroism, i.e. their disloyalty to God. Much the same can be said of Saruman and the Ringwraiths — all tempted into sowing the seeds of their own undoing.

Conversely, many of the greatest heroes of Tolkien’s legendarium are Hobbits and men who, compared to immortal Elves wielding rings of power from the safety of their forested fastnesses, are weak and low and even wretched. And yet by their “physical resistance to evil” they manage to save the world. “The ennoblement of the ignoble I find specially moving,” Tolkien once wrote. “. . . .I love the vulgar and simple as dearly as the noble, and nothing moves my heart (beyond all the passions and heartbreaks of the world) so much as ‘ennoblement’.”

His use of the word “vulgar” here is interesting. He of course did not mean dirty language or nudity, but common or simple. Middle-earth is a world that rocks to what Tolkien described as “unforeseen and unforeseeable acts of will, and deeds of virtue of the apparently small, ungreat, forgotten.” He was enchanted both in fiction and in life by how ordinary people, through even the most seemingly minor acts of charity, pity or goodwill, could create earth-shaking effects that redounded to the good of Good, and of humanity.

This, of course, immensely echoes Christian, and particularly Catholic, teachings. “Pity,” for instance — which Tolkien once reverently described as “a word of moral and imaginative worth” — appears in the Douay-Rheims Bible no less than fifty times. “Without the high and noble,” Tolkien believed, “the simple and vulgar is utterly mean; and without the simple and ordinary the noble and heroic is meaningless.” The Lord of the Rings is awash in this symbiotic interplay between nobility and vulgarity — it is in fact a large part of its overall charm.

Perhaps Tolkien had such affection for the vulgar becoming noble because he felt that he was once vulgar himself, a “grain of good human corn” who was only spared the fate of spiritually perishing on “barren stony ground” by an act of common, unsung heroism that would both haunt and inspire him for his entire life.

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Crying farewell, the Elves of Lórien with long grey poles thrust them out into the flowing stream, and the rippling waters bore them slowly away. The travelers sat still without moving or speaking. On the green bank near to the very point of the Tongue the Lady Galadriel stood alone and silent. As they passed her they turned and their eyes watched her slowly floating away from them. For so it seemed to them: Lórien was slipping backward, like a bright ship masted with enchanted trees, sailing on to forgotten shores, while they sat helpless upon the margin of the grey and leafless world.

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“I am one who came up out of Egypt,” Tolkien once wrote. Few people now remember that Tolkien, one of the best-known Catholics of the twentieth century, was not born into the faith.

When he was a young boy, Tolkien’s widowed mother forsook her Baptist heritage and converted to Catholicism in the face of vociferous condemnation from her family. Outraged, they proceeded to cut the desperate, ailing woman off from all financial assistance, leaving her to linger and struggle on for a few more years, all the while steadfastly refusing to recant her religious conversion. She finally died of diabetes at the tragically young age of thirty-four, but not before impressing on her sons the depth of her new-found faith, and not before making arrangements that her two orphaned boys would be taken in by a kindly Catholic priest, sent to college via his auspices, and raised within the mental Lórien of the Catechism and Holy Sacraments.

Throughout a long life filled with many disappointments and temptations, Tolkien remained ever grateful that his mother had, to the point of death, gifted him with the “sudden and miraculous experience” of being thrust into “a Faith that has nourished me and taught me all the little that I know.” By 1941, already neck-deep in the composition of The Lord of the Rings, he was able to write to his son Michael with conviction that, “Out of the darkness of my life, so much frustrated, I put before you the one great thing to love on earth: the Blessed Sacrament…..There you will find romance, glory, honour, fidelity, and the true way of all your loves upon earth.”

Romance, glory, honour, fidelity. On the surface, the words evoke Arthurian legends and other warrior tales of heroic deeds more than Catholic piety. But, as usual, Tolkien chose his words carefully. It was because his mother left him with a priest that he met the woman who would become his beloved wife. He would also, while under the care of that priest, attend college, discover philology, and ultimately become the man who would pen the grand tales that today loom like a monolith over the genre of fantasy fiction.

It strikes me that a lot of what our fallen fantasists do these days is as artistically disingenuous as it is morally bankrupt. They claim to be moving the genre forward into refreshingly uncharted territory, and yet virtually everything they do bears the foul-stenched hallmarks of a knowingly maledictory reaction backward to Tolkien and Howard. They consciously use anti-heroics to drain their fictional worlds of virtues like charity, pity, and goodwill, until their tales become metaphorical Death Valleys in which Tolkien’s “grains of good human corn” perish on the “barren and stony ground.” Having done this, they then claim that The Thirst of Tolkien’s fancy is just a myth perpetuated by out-of-touch conservatives wistfully pining for a time that never was.

And yet all the while, the thirsty seek.

Speaking of his characters, both the noble and the vulgar, Tolkien once humbly proposed that, “I lack what all my characters possess (let the psychoanalysts note!) Courage.” But that is not true. He had the courage to spend decades creating a mythology few seemed ready to embrace, and which many were wont to criticize. Just as heroes are ennobled by their courage and convictions, and readers by savoring the tales of their exploits, so too are writers ennobled by telling those tales so beautifully, and by satiating — one precious drop at a time — the eternal thirst that is the bane of good men.

“It remains an unfailing delight to me,” Tolkien admitted, “to find my own belief justified: that the ‘fairy-story’ is really an adult genre, and one for which a starving audience exists.” From a small, vulgar American child going “Gee Whiz!” to a spiritual woman looking for “sanity and sanctity,” from an honest unbeliever’s relishing of the faith that shines out from The Lord of the Rings “like light from an invisible lamp,” to a perceptive English priest savoring the tale’s innate “order of Grace,” all confirm Tolkien’s belief, and drown out the mewling of those unfortunates too irredeemable to realize it.

To Be Continued. . . .

Thus exclaimed English academic Hugo Dyson as his friend J.R.R. Tolkien prepared to read aloud the latest chapter in his then-unpublished “heroic romance” to a small audience of intimates in the pleasantly smoke-filled, gin-scented rooms of C. S. Lewis. Years earlier, during a fateful night of impassioned debate, it was Dyson and Tolkien who together convinced Lewis to forsake unbelief and embrace Christianity, doing such a good job of it that the future author of The Chronicles of Narnia would become the most influential Christian vindicator (I despise the word apologist) of the twentieth century.

Now Dyson was mocking the work of the man who would become the most influential purveyor of Christianized fiction of that same century, and many of Tolkien’s fellow Inklings were of the same mind. It was thus left to Lewis to spur the author of The Hobbit on to greater heights of imagination. “If they won’t write the kind of books we want to read, we shall have to write them ourselves,” he once told Tolkien, and that’s just what they did. Each used the medium known (fondly to some, pejoratively to most) as “fairy stories” to achieve the tang and ring and chime — and through them the thoughts and feelings and beliefs — that they were seeking in literature.

In between his increasingly unpopular Inkling readings, Tolkien wrote during snatches of time carved out of days filled with exhausting academic duties, and frequently only after penning worried, often melancholy letters to his sons off to war. “I sometimes feel appalled,” he admitted in one 1944 missive, “at the thought of the sum total of human misery all over the world at the present moment. . . If anguish were visible, almost the whole of this benighted planet would be enveloped in a dense dark vapour, shrouded from the amazed visions of the heavens! And the products of it all will be mainly evil….” In another he lamented that, “A small knowledge of history depresses one with the sense of the everlasting mass and weight of human iniquity: old, old, dreary, endless repetitive unchanging incurable wickedness. All towns, all villages, all habitations of men — sinks! . . . We do so little that is positive good, even if we negatively avoid what is actively evil. It must be terrible to be a priest!”

And yet, he also possessed shadowed hope: “At the same time one knows that there is always good: much more hidden, much less clearly discerned, seldom breaking out into recognizable, visible beauties of word or deed or face — not even when in fact sanctity, far greater than the visible advertised wickedness, is really there.”

Finding that quiet sanctity amidst clangorous wickedness and despair would become the defining characteristic of The Lord of the Rings.

To his youngest boy, Christopher (b. 1924, and then stationed in South Africa with the Royal Air Force), he regularly sent new chapters of his burgeoning magnum opus, along with news that, when he read each aloud to C. S. Lewis, the author of Mere Christianity and so many other kindly, bracing works would sometimes be moved to tears. “[Lewis] was for long my only audience,” Tolkien wrote later with deep appreciation. “Only from him did I ever get the idea that my ‘stuff’ could be more than a private hobby. But for his interest and unceasing eagerness for more I should never have brought The L. of the R. to a conclusion.”

**********

All about the hills the hosts of Mordor raged. The Captains of the West were foundering in a gathering sea. The sun gleamed red, and under the wings of the Nazgûl the shadows of death fell dark upon the earth. Aragorn stood beneath his banner, silent and stern, as one lost in thought of things long past or far away; but his eyes gleamed like stars that shine the brighter as the night deepens. Upon the hill-top stood Gandalf, and he was white and cold and no shadow fell on him. The onslaught of Mordor broke like a wave on the beleaguered hills, voices roaring like a tide amid the wreck and crash of arms.

**********

“I have not been nourished by English Literature,” Tolkien once wrote, “. . . for the simple reason that I have never found much there in which to rest my heart (or heart and head together). I was brought up in the Classics, and first discovered the sensation of literary pleasure in Homer.”

While browsing through a dusty old college library as a teen, young “Ronald” Tolkien discovered a veritable Ring of Power in the form of a book on Finnish grammar. Learning that language, he would later marvel, was “like discovering a complete wine-cellar filled with bottles of an amazing wine of a kind and flavour never tasted before.” Soon his study of other languages gave him a “sensibility to linguistic pattern which affects me emotionally like colour or music,” and he began penning stories and poems in a genuine, rigorously applied archaic mode, deeming our more garish modern idiom as possessing “an insincerity of thought, a disunion of word and meaning” whenever it was applied to tales of high romance. In Tolkien’s view, you couldn’t drink vintage spirits out of a soda pop can without it fatally marring the taste and experience.

At the same time, many old myths were missing something important. “I do know Celtic things (many in their original languages Irish and Welsh),” he once explained by way of example, “and feel for them a certain distaste: largely for their fundamental unreason. They have bright colour, but are like a broken stained glass window reassembled without design. They are in fact ‘mad’. . . but I don’t believe I am.”

He thus “set myself a task, the arrogance of which I fully recognized and trembled at: being precisely to restore to the English an epic tradition and present them with a mythology of their own.”

By the time the 1930s gave way to the 40s and then the 50s, Tolkien began to quietly despair at ever accomplishing his quest. “I have produced a monster,” he wrote to one correspondent, “an immensely long, complex, rather bitter, and very terrifying romance, quite unfit for children (if fit for anybody).” In 1953, while checking galley-proofs, he admitted that it “seems, I must confess, in print very long-winded in parts.” Over fifteen years after beginning his “arrogant” task, he was left to grimly muse that:

Hardly a word in its 600,000 or more has been unconsidered. And the placing, size, style, and contribution to the whole of all its features, incidents, and chapters has been laboriously pondered. I do not say this in recommendation. It is, I feel, only too likely that I am deluded, lost in a web of vain imaginings of not much value to others — in spite of the fact that a few readers have found it good, on the whole.

The first print run of The Fellowship of the Ring was limited to 4,500 copies. “I am dreading the publication,” he wrote, “for it will be impossible not to mind what is said. I have exposed my heart to be shot at.” Many in the entrenched Ivory Towers of academia and literary criticism did just that, offering up scathing critiques that — all too typical of such people — frequently got whole portions of the book (characters, events, dialogue) embarrassingly wrong. In response Tolkien could only sigh, having told his publisher, “It is written in my life-blood, such as that is, thick or thin; and I can no other.”

But one man above all others was determined to (I use a phrase coined by Robert E. Howard) “not be backward when the spears are splintering.” C. S. Lewis took up his pen like a Crusader and, in a review titled “The Gods Return to Earth,” shouted out to the world a written manifestation of the same tears he had shed while first hearing the story read in manuscript:

[The Fellowship of the Ring] is like lightning from a clear sky. . . To say that in it heroic romance, gorgeous, eloquent, and unashamed, has suddenly returned at a period almost pathological in its anti-romanticism, is inadequate. . . Here are beauties which pierce like swords or burn like cold iron; here is a book that will break your heart. . . .

It is sane and vigilant invention, revealing at point after point the integration of the author’s mind. . . Anguish is, for me, almost the prevailing note. But not, as in the literature most typical of our age, the anguish of abnormal or contorted souls; rather that anguish of those who were happy before a certain darkness came up and will be happy if they live to see it gone. . . . But with the anguish comes also a strange exaltation. . . when we have finished, we return to our own life not relaxed but fortified….

Even now I have left out almost everything — the silvan leafiness, the passions, the high virtues, the remote horizons. Even if I had space I could hardly convey them. And after all the most obvious appeal of the book is perhaps also its deepest: “there was sorrow then too, and gathering dark, but great valour, and great deeds that were not wholly vain.” Not wholly vain — it is the cool middle point between illusion and disillusionment.

Over the ensuing decades Tolkien’s “long, complex, rather bitter, and very terrifying romance” sold millions of copies, and immeasurably enriched the lives of millions of souls, many of whom felt lost and alone in a mad world seemingly bereft of the sanity and the sanctity that his tale embodied. By the time the indispensable scholar and philologist Tom Shippey published his book J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century (2001, with a title meant to be taken as a comment on Tolkien’s thematic essence as much as his popularity) his remaining detractors resembled nothing so much as the routed forces of Mordor, running “hither and thither mindless. . . wailing back to hide in holes and dark lightless places far from hope.”

And from the cimmerian gloom of those dark, lightless places, oh how they snarl! “The Lord of the Rings is racist,” wrote John Yatt in the Guardian in 2002:

It is soaked in the logic that race determines behaviour. . . the races that Tolkien has put on the side of evil are then given a rag-bag of non-white characteristics that could have been copied straight from a BNP [British National Party] leaflet. Dark, slant-eyed, swarthy, broad-faced — it’s amazing he doesn’t go the whole hog and give them a natural sense of rhythm. . . .

[LG -- actually, it was the 1980 Bakshi cartoon that did that: "Where there's a whip!" (ssss...crack!) "There's a way!"]

Begun in the 1930s, published in the 1950s, it’s shot through with the preoccupations and prejudices of its time. This is no clash of noble adversaries like the Iliad, no story of our common humanity like the Epic of Gilgamesh. It’s a fake, a forgery, a dodgy copy. Strip away the archaic turns of phrase and you find a set of basic assumptions that are frankly unacceptable in 21st-century Britain.

What gall. The Guardian is a paper, after all, that later praised fantasy author George RR Martin for his unflinchingly graphic portrayal of a world in which “the old are tortured and humiliated, women are raped, suffering is everywhere,” for his “unsettling passages of bracingly weird sex” and for his myriad scenes of “inventively unpleasant killing.” It’s a paper that later recommended Joe Abercrombie’s first book for its “delightfully twisted and evil” torturer “who can shorten a man’s arm from fingers to elbow in neat little slices,” and for its young hero possessing “no redeeming qualities whatsoever.” Hey, if that’s all to your taste, fair enough.

But does anyone really expect the rest of us to take that same paper seriously when it draws a courageous line in the sand against a mild-mannered Christian professor and his exquisitely rendered masterpiece? To meekly agree that Tolkien sitting on the shelf next to the books of Mssrs. Martin and Abercrombie is “frankly unacceptable” in this evolved new century of tolerance and diversity, lest we be branded racists and throwbacks ourselves? Or to renounce The Lord of the Rings in favor of books overflowing like a backed-up commode with torture-porn, sadism, and nihilism? (Apparently so: the J.R.R. Tolkien Encyclopedia has a meaty entry dedicated to RACISM, CHARGES OF.)

After a lecture, Shippey (whose wonderful Author of the Century book was itself trashed in the Guardian as “a belligerently argued piece of fan-magazine polemic”) was once asked what motivated people to spit such abject nonsense onto Tolkien’s self-professed “life-blood.” A man of eloquence and erudition, he responded with exactly the tone, and at exactly the length, that such diatribes deserve.

“They’re bastards!” he said cheerfully.

Or perhaps we should translate that into words Tolkien would have ruefully recognized, and that adequately express what people with intellectual standards think whenever they open a typical newspaper these days:

“Oh f***, not another liberal critic!”

To be continued. . . .

Towering above all, though, was (and still is) my unabashed obsession with the two titanic literary talents chiefly responsible for birthing the entire shebang: J.R.R. Tolkien (1892-1973) and Robert E. Howard (1906-1936). I consider each the complete equal of the other, two flat-out geniuses destined to be remembered and reread hundreds of years after the Pulitzer-winning authors praised by most mainstream critics are forgotten.

But it was only recently, after decades of ever-increasing reading disappointment, that I grudgingly began to admit the truth: I don’t particularly care for fantasy per se. What I actually cherish is something far more rare: the elevated prose poetry, mythopoeic subcreation, and thematic richness that only the best fantasy achieves, and that echoes in important particulars the myths and fables of old.

This realization eliminates, at a stroke, virtually everything written under the banner of fantasy today.

The mere trappings of the genre do nothing for me when wedded to the now-ubiquitous interminable soap-opera plots (a conservative friend of mine once accurately derided “fat fantasy” cycles such as Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time as “Lord of the Rings 90210”). Nor do they impress me in the least when placed into the hands of writers clearly bored with the classic mythic undertones of the genre, and who try to shake things up with what can best be described as postmodern blasphemies against our mythic heritage.

Take the latest novel by popular Brit author Joe Abercrombie (b. 1974), who regularly hits the UK bestseller lists with his self-described “edgy yet humorous un-heroic fantasy.” Titled The Heroes, the tome is guaranteed, given the scribe’s past work, to feature the exact opposite of what it advertises. “Abercrombie takes the grand tradition of high fantasy, and drags it down into the gutter, in the best possible way,” gushed Time magazine about Best Served Cold, his previous book.

Alas, I haven’t read it — Abercrombie’s freshman effort, the massive First Law trilogy (The Blade Itself, Before They Were Hanged, and Last Argument of Kings) was more than enough for me. Endless scenes of torture, treachery and bloodshed drenched in scatology and profanity concluded with a resolution worthy of M. Night Shyamalan at his worst, one that did its best to hurt, disappoint, and dishearten any lover of myths and their timeless truths. Think of a Lord of the Rings where, after stringing you along for thousands of pages, all of the hobbits end up dying of cancer contracted by their proximity to the Ring, Aragorn is revealed to be a buffoonish puppet-king of no honor and false might, and Gandalf no sooner celebrates the defeat of Sauron than he executes a long-held plot to become the new Dark Lord of Middle-earth, and you have some idea of what to expect should you descend into Abercrombie’s jaded literary sewer.

On various blogs you can find critics raving about this mythic bait-and-switch. “Gritty, violent, morally ambiguous and darkly funny fantasy with a streak of intelligent cynicism,” says Adam Whitehead of The Wertzone. “Dark, almost nihilistic, yet shot through with black humour,” writes Simon Appleby at Book Geeks, adding approvingly that, “[Abercrombie] writes about ordinary people thrust in to extraordinary situations who seldom, if ever, acquit themselves heroically.”

Troll the Amazon reviews of many of the latest books hailed as among the great mold-breaking fantasies of the last few decades, and you’ll see similar memes cropping up again and again. One fan reviewing Matthew Woodring Stover’s otherwise ingeniously plotted Caine books bemoans, as I did when trudging through them, the main character’s continuous “bitter, cynical and almost self-hating monologue.” Most of the second book in the series has Caine paralyzed and gracing the reader with detailed descriptions like, “I am — right now, lying naked in a pool of a dead woman’s shit, chained to stone, gangrene eating my dead-meat legs….”

The latest entry in Steven Erikson’s ten-volume Malazan Book of the Fallen, a series running many thousands of pages, is described by one exhausted fan as “pointlessly depressing. . . a lot of death that seems purely random and serving no purpose at all.” “Despair and fatalism dominate,” confirms another reader. (For those who haven’t gotten enough, Erikson recently announced that, with the help of another writer, he will now be expanding his opus from ten volumes to twenty-two — assuming both he and his fans live that long.)

Michael Swanwick’s subversive 1993 novel The Iron Dragon’s Daughter sported a title that lured in many young girls thinking they were getting a standard Young Adult fantasy. According to Publisher’s Weekly (and confirmed by my torturous slog through it a few years ago), it was actually a “nihilistic tale features a human changeling who tries to make her way in a cutthroat society that mirrors contemporary life. . . a powerful, yet dark and hopeless fantasy that should forever shatter charming illusions of Faerie and its folk.” Scenes of teenybopper elf sex and coke-snorting pile one atop the other until the book becomes to fantasy literature what the films of Larry Clark (Kids, Bully) are to cinema.

To be sure, people have every right to publish such books, and in so doing express their frustration or boredom with what can loosely be called the classic Tolkien/Howard mode. Such blowback against the grandmasters of fantasy is nothing new — it stretches back at least to 1934, when a teenaged Robert Bloch (who later went on to write Psycho) wrote in the letter column of the pulp magazine Weird Tales that:

I am awfully tired of poor old Conan the Cluck, who for the past fifteen issues has every month slain a new wizard, tackled a new monster, come to a violent and sudden end that was averted (incredibly enough!) in just the nick of time, and won a new girlfriend, each of whose penchant for nudism won her a place of honor, either on the cover or on the inner illustration. Such has been Conan’s history, and from the realms of the Kushites to the lands of Aquilonia, from the shores of the Shemites to the palaces of Dyme-Novell-Bolonia, I cry: “Enough of this brute and his iron-thewed sword-thrusts — may he be sent to Valhalla to cut out paper dolls.”

But, to quote Tolkien’s famous rejoinder to his critics from his introduction to the revised edition of The Lord of the Rings, “Some who have read the book, or at any rate have reviewed it, have found it boring, absurd, or contemptible; and I have no cause to complain, since I have similar opinions of their works, or of the kinds of writing that they evidently prefer.” The other side thinks that their stuff is, at long last, turning the genre into something more original, thoughtful, and ultimately palatable to intelligent, mature audiences. They and their fans are welcome to that opinion. For my part — and I think Tolkien and Howard would have heartily agreed — I think they’ve done little more than become cheap purveyors of civilizational graffiti.

Soiling the building blocks and well-known tropes of our treasured modern myths is no different than other artists taking a crucifix and dipping it in urine, covering it in ants, or smearing it with feces. In the end, it’s just another small, pathetic chapter in the decades-long slide of Western civilization into suicidal self-loathing. It’s a well-worn road: bored middle-class creatives (almost all of them college-educated liberals) living lives devoid of any greater purpose inevitably reach out for anything deemed sacred by the conservatives populating any artistic field. They co-opt the language, the plots, the characters, the cliches, the marketing, and proceed to deconstruct it all like a mad doctor performing an autopsy. Then, using cynicism, profanity, scatology, dark humor, and nihilism, they put it back together into a Frankenstein’s monster designed to shock, outrage, offend, and dishearten.

In the case of the fantasy genre, the result is a mockery and defilement of the mythopoeic splendor that true artists like Tolkien and Howard willed into being with their life’s blood. Honor is replaced with debasement, romance with filth, glory with defeat, and hope with despair. Edgy? Nah, just punk kids farting in class and getting some giggles from the other mouth-breathers.

It’s quite rich to see many of the guys writing fantasy today being praised for (to once again quote Publisher’s Weekly talking about Joe Abercrombie) successfully exposing the “madness, passion, and horror of war.” How soon we forget that some of the early work of J.R.R. Tolkien — the man who pioneered the selfsame High Fantasy now being dragged “down into the gutter” to make it suitably “edgy” — was penned while he sat in the trenches of World War I, even while most his closest friends were being killed. Tolkien later wrote the a sizable amount of The Lord of the Rings during the Second World War, while worrying about two of his sons as they headed off to do their part.

Call me humorless, call me old-fashioned, but I daresay the good professor had a much better idea of war and heroes than the nihilistic jokesters writing modern fantasy.

To be continued. . . . .

After listening to these misty-eyed reveries, I usually press them with what, to anyone else, would be the obvious question: If it was all so great, why did they leave the Haight and the Castro and all of their associated communes and bong-fueled revolutions behind, and fall into a more conventional lifestyle elsewhere? Why not continue living in what was, according to them, the closest thing to paradise on earth imaginable?

The answer, boiled down, is usually some variant of “I realized the lifestyle was killing me — that if I didn’t get away I would soon be dead.” I’ve heard tales of bad drug trips, violence and paranoia, anarchism and terrorism, and any number of utterly disgusting and disease-ridden sexual perversions. Promising paradise and delivering nightmares is as good a definition of socialism as any (socialism, communism, liberalism, progressivism — call it what you will, it’s all the same poison, just delivered in different doses and by different means). Every few decades a new group of idealistic young fools attempt to stage a new revolt (“Yes, we can!”) in an attempt to overturn the wisdom of their forefathers and the immutable laws of reality, and each time they end up like Icarus, staging spectacular belly-flops into cesspools of unintended consequences.

Examine the cinema of the era, and you’ll see this whole thing play out again and again. Easy Rider, Billy Jack, Vanishing Point, The French Connection, Apocalypse Now!, and so many others glorified nihilism, hedonism, revolution, and hopelessness. Again and again we were treated to, on the one hand, liberal myths of heroes striving mightily to fight, escape, or ignore evil conservative society only to be mercilessly extinguished, and on the other stories of conservatives discovering the corruption and emptiness infecting their base values and ideals.

One of the things I am most grateful for in my life is that I came of age not in the late Sixties, when America was descending into this chaos, but in the early Eighties, when Ronald Reagan was dragging us out of it.

Reagan was a longtime FDR-Democrat turned staunch Republican — once, when reporter Sam Donaldson tried to embarrass Reagan at a press conference by asking him pointedly if he bore any of the blame for the country’s fiscal woes, Reagan shot back, “Yes, because for many years I was a Democrat.” He argued tirelessly for a return to can-do American optimism, family values, and conservative policies, bringing both domestic inflation and foreign totalitarians to heel.

Wherever he spoke, one could almost feel the deeply destructive hippie mindset of the Seventies fleeing like a vampire from sunlight. I find it poetically appropriate that would-be presidential assassin John Hinckley Jr. was obsessed with the movie Taxi Driver — it was as if the entire Seventies zeitgeist, encapsulated into one deranged man, was striking out in a last-gasp effort to stave off what was coming. When Reagan not only took the bullet but virtually laughed it off, that was the true end of the Flower Power era and its often insane grip on the popular culture.

At the same time Reagan was transforming us politically, guys like Steven Spielberg and George Lucas were transforming our cinema. They were suburban kids who, unlike many of their filmmaking friends, had largely avoided the hippie lifestyle, and their early efforts at politicized “message” filmmaking (Spielberg’s The Sugarland Express, Lucas’ THX-1138) were flops. It was only when they embraced the needs and desires of America’s great middle class, in effect becoming the unwitting cinematic arm of the Reagan Revolution, that they experienced the stupendous success for which they are best known.

They did this not by being avant-garde or trying to impress liberal critics or professors, but by refreshing themselves at the wells of myths, old movies, and pulps (much of them politically incorrect), and then infusing their new versions of those tales with a sense of optimism largely absent from the hyper-politicized movies of the Seventies. Jaws (1975), Star Wars (1977) and Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), in addition to being monster hits, don’t feel as if they belong in the 1970s at all. Monsters, sci-fi, special effects, genuine everyman heroes, conventional happy endings — they instead are the harbingers of the mass flowering of such films (and books, and video games) throughout the 1980s, movies that inspired and entertained more than they depressed or preached, that recapitulated the alleged “Goody Two-Shoes” cinema of their youth rather than rebelled against it.

There’s no doubt in my mind that Reagan is destined to become something of a Lincoln figure in our nation’s history. He brought optimism and rejuvenation to an America wrecked for over a decade by liberalism (in both parties), and in so doing set the stage for one of the Golden Ages of cinema: the era of the populist, family-friendly, PG-rated blockbuster. It was a great time, for both the nation and its moviegoers.

The music by Bear McCreary (Battlestar Galactica, The Walking Dead) evoked a cinematic air in the James Bond/Indiana Jones mold, but with an underlying somberness that lent a pleasing heft to the proceedings:

Actors Mark Valley, Chi McBride, and Jackie Earle Haley all shine in their roles for various reasons — especially Haley, whose delicious politically incorrect performance as Guerrero is the most consistently entertaining tough guy I’ve seen on TV since Michael K. Williams’ Robin Hood-of-the-ghetto Omar in HBO’s The Wire (a show that ended up ruined by its nihilistic writers, but that’s a topic for another post).

But later, settling in to begin watching Season 2 of Human Target on my computer, I wondered if Fox could bring a fledgling action/adventure series into its sophomore year without their usual pattern of first screwing it up and then unceremoniously canceling it. The sad spectacle of Big Hollywood regular Adam Baldwin’s Firefly getting canned before it even had a chance to get started was the most lamentable flameout of many at that often hapless network. Sure, they gave us The X-Files, but that was a looooong time ago. They also gave us 24, but I go against the usual conservative meme by thinking the show terrible. Human Target, on the other hand, held a lot of promise — but would they be able to capitalize on it?

At first, things looked good. The opening episode of Season 2 rocked, most memorably in the startling scene when Jackie Earle Haley cold-cocks a skinny little waif in a thunderous recapitulation of his character’s essential Sam Spade ethic of never playing the sap for anybody. But by the end of the hour, it became clear that some horrendous changes were in the making. Not one but two ladies were added to the permanent weekly roster alongside the three guys — and as the second episode progressed it became clear that both were firmly stuck in the sad realm of hoary Hollywood feminist cliché. In scene after tiresome scene, both characters repeatedly dissipated every attempt at recapturing the sleek, blistering, cat-and-mouse action of the first season.

Now, whenever Jackie Earle Haley begins to quietly infuse a scene with menace, threatening to put some industrial-grade hurt on the bad guys, the same skinny little waif he cold-cocked earlier leaps in uninvited, ruins his plans, and (totally out of character for Haley’s Guerrero) is allowed to skip away without repercussion. And now, whenever the formidable assassin/cop tandem of Mark Valley and Chi McBride put one of their brutal but effective tough-love plans into motion to help a client, the other new woman (who has become the team’s boss in another of Hollywood’s painfully tired and overused feminist-fantasy plot twists) incessantly questions the heroes’ motives and actions like a harried mother chastising her bratty kids.

What a disaster. In place of the excellent female characters that wove their way in and out of the first season — Emmanuelle Vaugier’s game FBI agent, Kristin Lehman’s mobster’s daughter turned district attorney, Autumn Reeser’s spunky computer hacker, Leonor Varela’s South American guerrilla spitfire, Grace Park’s icy oddsmaker, Moon Bloodgood’s Alaskan doctor — we now have two regulars who offer nothing to the existing team except whining, complaining, nagging, bitching, moaning, and (in the case of the new boss) passive-aggressively yapping out crisp, rude orders in between bouts of mewling “Maybe I can’t handle this.”

You would think that in this day and age, hip Hollywood writers would avoid that most catastrophic of clichés, the hectoring female sidekick. The difference between Season 1 and Season 2 of Human Target is like the difference between Raiders of the Lost Ark’s Marion Ravenwood and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom’s Willie Scott. As scene after mind-numbing scene degenerates into domesticated, needy, hyper-emotional neuroticism, what used to be a blissful escape from reality now feels like just another hour at work, class, or home.

Another demerit against the second season is the absence of composer Bear McCreary, whose cinematic orchestral effusions have been replaced by a techno score (punctuated by the use of contemporary pop tunes like Outkast’s “Hey Ya!”) indistinguishable from any number of other insipid modern television series. They didn’t even keep the show’s main theme, choosing instead a faux rock style for the opening credits:

Doing some research, I discovered that Human Target’s showrunner, Jonathan E. Steinberg, was dumped after Season 1 and replaced by Matt Miller. Miller hails from NBC’s Chuck, another show that started out with lots of promise before largely degenerating into a series of exhausted “will she?/won’t he?” scenes of manufactured romantic drama unworthy of a soap opera, much less a pleasantly goofy spy satire. I note that Chuck also features a harridan-as-boss dictatorially snapping out rude orders from her booster chair in the Pentagon (actress Bonita Friedericy is 5’3’’).

ZAP2It’s “TV By the Numbers” blog reports that, given the declining ratings ever since these terrible moves were made, Human Target is now “certain to be cancelled.” If so, it will be a mercy killing. I fear that conservatives won’t get the TV shows they want until technology allows for Hollywood-quality programming to be made and streamed online completely independent of the big studios and their advertisers. It is then that we’ll see shows like Human Target continue on in their original alluring vein rather than succumb to death by a thousand perfume inhalations.

The company’s now-famous little red envelopes first gained fame around the time the dot-com boom went bust in early 2000. Video rental behemoth Blockbuster, reeling from a catastrophic bleeding of market share to this wily challenger, entered the rent-by-mail fray in 2004, but it soon became apparent that they were going to get their hats handed to them. An even younger upstart, Redbox, began as a subsidiary of McDonald’s, and by 2007 its kiosks has spread across the fruited plains of America like wildfire, in the process putting the final nails in Blockbuster’s coffin.

My folks watch a lot of flicks, either at the theater or at home, so there’s always opportunities for improving the experience — the Great TiVo Immersion Program of 2005, masterminded and forced upon them by moi in the face of strenuous objections, turned out to be life changing. So after years of watching them drive out in the early evening to various video stores, I bought them a year-long Netflix subscription in Christmas 2009, and waited to see how it played out.

To my surprise, they hated it. For a year they bemoaned that Netflix never seemed to have the newest titles already available at the local rental shops. Even when using the service to queue older titles, they never got used to having to wait a day or two for DVDs that they could have in fifteen minutes by driving down the street. Eventually they settled in to using Netflix only for older or obscure films, things they otherwise wouldn’t have rented at all, and of course taking chances on such films was more of a hit-or-miss proposition than using Redbox to rent new movies they were jazzed to see. Meanwhile Netflix’s newest innovation, streaming to computers and TV, went entirely unused.

Now that their subscription is expired and they are once again happily back to using Redbox and video stores exclusively, I found myself wondering whether Redbox had some sort of edge over Netflix I hadn’t adequately factored in — some combination of convenience, selection, and the satisfaction that comes from immediate impulse renting that would soon allow them to supplant Netflix the way Netflix once supplanted Blockbuster.

It wasn’t long before I came to the conclusion that Redbox, for all of its merits, would ultimately flame out before it reached the pinnacle of the video renting mountain. Sure, their business model currently works well for those people who want a new movie and want it tonight. But what of the people whose pop culture horizons go back further than the week’s new releases? Redbox makes a token effort at sprinkling their kiosks with a smattering of older and classic selections, but they don’t even begin to compete with Netflix’s monster backlist.

Furthermore, what of the people who catch some long-running show on TV, and then want to plow through an archive of previous seasons? What of the many people who live in rural areas far from the nearest kiosk? Or the many people who are older and can’t leave the house, or don’t drive due to some disability, or can’t jump in the car and find a Redbox because they are too busy watching young kids? There are many situations where by-mail and streaming models are superior to the selection down the street.

Add to that the chilling precedent of the decline of music CDs — how quickly they went the way of vinyl records and 8-tracks. These days, everyone is increasingly dumping their bookshelves full of CDs in favor of carrying around a single iPod that connects to MP3-enabled speakers in the house, in cars, on the computer, and anywhere else there’s a USB plug. I think it’s beyond any doubt that physical DVDs are soon going to vanish in the exact same way. Even massive blu-rays are now effortlessly copied by pirates and shared over the Net, and legal video distributors like Netflix will all soon be streaming in 1080p resolution to living room TVs.

Netflix jumped onto the unlimited streaming bandwagon years before it became commercially viable, and that foresight will redound to its benefit for many years to come. Streaming is going to be huge, and Redbox, like Blockbuster before it, is being forced to try to compete in that arena. But by doing so they are competing on Netflix’s home turf, facing a company famed for its easy-to-use website, its fantastic movie-recommending algorithms, and its astounding selection of titles.

Once physical DVDs become a non-issue, studios will buckle one by one and offer their new releases to the major streaming companies, just as the record companies all eventually conceded to Apple’s 99 cents per individual song plan. The day new movies are able to be streamed directly to your TV via Netflix on the same day they are available at Redbox kiosks, that’s the end of that brick-and-mortar (metal-and-plastic?) business model.

So I think that when the dust clears, we’ll see Netflix standing tall as the preferred video rental company in the land, streaming its content long after Blockbuster, Redbox, and even many cable companies have declared bankruptcy. Not that they’ll have long to crow about it, given the looming Armageddon hanging over the industry as a whole.

What is that, you ask?

I remember in 1996 buying a 4 gig hard drive and thinking it was the bee’s knees, a virtual Great Plains of unused digital space that would take years to fill. A scant fifteen years later, a single writable DVD in larger than that, and a flash drive is many times bigger while costing many times less. And this trend of exponentially increasing data storage, file compression, and internet bandwidth will eventually hit a seismic pivot point. For me personally, that point will be the day a single torrent appears from some movie-loving college kid called “All movies, 1888-Present,” an archive that has every single title available at Netflix, in a format that will sit comfortably on the latest hard drives or flash drives. Five minutes after clicking on that file, it will be sitting next to the “All music” and “All books” files on the user’s media drive, with the contents capable of being streamed to any number of devices in their electronic world.

That’s when all bets are off, and Netflix (and Hollywood itself) will be left to come up with a whole new business model.

All of Hollywood, in one file, copied down to your computer in five minutes. It will happen, and sooner than anyone thinks possible.

Believe it or not, there was a time when it was a regular thing to get a printed movie program whenever you went to an A-list film. These booklets would have photographs, cast and crew biographies, interviews, and information on the production, music and special effects. Not only did they act as a nifty souvenir, but they increased the appreciation the audience had for the film they were watching and for the art of cinema in general. In a way, they were a sort of analog version of the special features you typically find on DVDs these days.

Movie programs, like so much else that used to play a part in luring audiences to the theater, had largely died out by the time I reached the Age of Attendance in the mid-’70s. But luckily, I arrived at the perfect time to catch a final brief renaissance in the form of the Spielberg/Lucas blockbusters of the late ’70s and early ’80s.

I still distinctly member going to the theater as a 6-12 year old and seeing Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Gremlins and Goonies program booklets stacked up in the lobby for people to buy when they purchased their tickets. Flipping through them in anticipation of the coming screening, looking at photos of the upcoming action, reading capsule bios of the new characters set to appear — all of that was imaginative kiddie crack.

So what prompted movie theaters to stop providing such extras? They couldn’t cost that much to make. Heck, these days they could have a virtual program booklet available on Wi-fi for theater patrons to download onto their iPhones and Droids, complete with videos, music cues, sound effects and nifty wallpaper images to use on your computer, coupons to buy the film’s toy and movie-related merchandise at stores.

To me, the loss of program booklets from the moviegoing experience is just another indicator of how anemic the imagination and creativity of Hollywood has become. Entertainment in the purest sense seems very low on their list of priorities. Ditto for the theater chains delivering the product.

Circa 1978, I recall attending a Star Wars screening in suburban Indiana as a kid, where they advertised personal appearances by C3P0, R2-D2, Chewbacca, and even Darth Vader himself. Us kids didn’t dwell too much on how The Dark Lord of the Sith was happily sharing a stage with the others and signing autographs for us kids without a phalanx of stormtroopers coming in to escort us off to some undisclosed Imperial time-out location. A few years later, when Raiders of the Lost Ark appeared, the entrance to the theater had been dressed up to look like a cavernous South American temple, complete with spider webs and stone façades.

What’s happened to that level of showmanship in the movie business? My local mall megaplex has a hipster bar across from the concession stands, so how come they don’t also have a gift shop carrying books, soundtracks, and toys relating to the latest releases? Heck, even a Redbox-style kiosk in the lobby would do the trick.

As I flipped through my cache of old program booklets, remembering the Christmas-Day excitement of my Dad buying them for me on my way in to see Star Wars or Raiders of the Lost Ark for the first time, all of these thoughts crossed my mind. If theater-owners and the studios who provide them with content treat moviegoing as little more than as a loss-leader for selling absurdly overpriced popcorn and soda, they’re going to continue to lose ground to at-home big screen TVs and surround sound systems.

The first film, released in 1969, sits in the mid-upper tier of movies made by its star, John Wayne (as well as winning him his only Oscar), and as such has achieved a kind of classic status among both Wayne fans and lovers of good westerns. There is a brand of theatergoer who maintains that there is no need to craft fresh takes on successful pictures, any more than we need new painters to dutifully re-imagine a masterwork like Da Vinci’s Last Supper.

On the other side of the debate are those who see good reasons for taking another swing at this piñata. Ever since the appearance of Wayne’s Grit, many fans of the novel — which first appeared forty-two years ago as a Saturday Evening Post serial written by Charles Portis (1933–) — have been keen to see a cinematic version that hews far closer to the plot of the book. Others see remakes as akin to a contemporary orchestra re-recording — and in the process re-interpreting — a famous piece of classical music, imbuing it with their own particular sonic signature. Seen in this light, the announcement of a new True Grit was a welcome one.

So now that the movie is out, who is right? Is the remake ill-advised, or a welcome addition to the western canon? Does the 2010 version have what it takes to make it a classic in its own right, or is it destined to be forever overshadowed by the 1969 original?

For all of the talk by the Coens of keeping their movie closer to the plot of the novel, the differences between it and the 1969 film are fairly minor — so much so that enterprising fans have cut new YouTube trailers to the 1969 version that manage to almost exactly match the trailer for the 2010 one. Both pictures rely heavily on the dialogue penned by Portis (a good thing, as the meticulously crafted and exquisitely well-toned repartee between the characters is the best part of the book, and one only need look to Peter Jackson’s painfully inept adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s equally rarefied Lord of the Rings dialogue to see what happens when one strays too far from the original work of literature).

Both also make some of the same changes to the characters. In the novel, Rooster Cogburn is about forty years of age and sports an openly disfigured and useless eye. In both films, he is played by a sixty-one-year-old actor (Wayne and Bridges were the same age when they undertook their respective attempts at the role), with each wearing an eye patch nowhere to be found in the book. (“I noticed by the lamplight,” Mattie says at one point in Portis’ original, “that his bad left eye was not completely shut. A little crescent of white showed at the bottom and glistened in the light.”) The murderer Tom Cheney, meanwhile, changes from a twenty-five-year-old in the book to a 40-50ish man in both movies.

Neither cinematic version gives the girl, Mattie Ross, the fiery bible-quoting Christianity the novel uses to help explain her perseverance and courage (the Coens make a surface stab at this, including an epigraph card that quotes the first half of Proverbs 28:1, but they still fall far short of Portis’ immersive ideal). In the book, Mattie Ross is constantly quoting scripture with expertise and passion to justify her hardheaded prejudices and decisions, often going so far as to offer extended (and, to the degree they disagree with her own beliefs, humorously acerbic) asides on the differences in the ways Presbyterians, Methodists, Baptists, and Catholics interpret the Good Book.

This is the kind of earthy Christianity that anyone who has roamed the South is familiar with. (Once, about ten years ago while in rural Texas, I asked an old lady whether a mutual acquaintance was a Baptist or a Methodist, at which point another old woman overhearing the conversation piped up with, “My momma told me Jesus was a Methodist!”) When writer Charles Taylor wrote in the New York newspaper Newsday that Portis’ Mattie Ross, “springs from the blood and memory of the American past, her every word a hymn to the plain grace of Puritan forbearance” he was referring to that kind of deep faith, leavened by humor. Unfortunately, although the novel is filled with it, little seeped into either film beyond window dressing.

Setting aside the few non-crucial variances in plot between the two movies (things like the result of Mattie’s encounter with rattlesnakes, and the fate of the Texas Ranger LaBoeuf), it’s in other areas that the differences between the two pictures really manifest themselves. Neither can truly claim to have superior acting: I would rate Wayne, Robert Duvall, and Strother Martin in 1969 over Bridges, Barry Pepper, and Dakin Matthews from 2010, while 2010’s Hailee Steinfeld, Josh Brolin, and Matt Damon take the prize over 1969’s Kim Darby, Jeff Corey, and Glen Campbell. The Coens are far more cinematic and talented directors than the competent but seldom inspired journeyman Henry Hathaway, but their stand-in locations for Arkansas/Oklahoma are far less memorable than the lush Colorado vistas chosen in 1969, and Elmer Bernstein’s musical score from the 1969 movie is light-years ahead of anything Carter Burwell has done here in 2010, or indeed in his entire career.

In the end, the 2010 True Grit is valuable in its own right, but doesn’t seem poised to knock the 1969 film off its pedestal as the definitive go-to version. John Wayne’s centrality to the western genre, and the film’s centrality to his reputation as an actor, guarantees that. Jeff Bridges plays a competent drunken hombre, but Wayne dug deeper into cinematic history by aping the voice and mannerisms of the great Wallace Beery (profiled in Part 2 of last year’s For Conservative Movie Lovers look at 1931’s The Champ). It’s the kind of performance that tells us that the actor is having as much fun with it as we are.

Coming full in the face of the onset of the Vietnam War and the Hippie Era (not to mention Leone’s genre-altering spaghetti westerns and Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch, which was released a mere week after True Grit), this unabashedly entertaining and overblown character study was also a courageous thing to attempt, possessing a resonance extending well beyond the confines of the picture itself. Film critic Richard Schickel captured the full measure of Wayne’s contribution in his June 20, 1969 review of the movie in Life magazine when, talking of the story’s famous climax (capped by the salty declaration, “Fill your hand, you sonofabitch!”), he wrote:

Watching, one shouts, laughs and, unaccountably, feels tears beginning to tingle. For you feel you may be witnessing not just the beginning of a good movie’s climax but a full-throated valedictory for a tradition. Here is Wayne, the last of a great generation of western heroes, committing himself again to an action that at once affectionately parodies and joyously summarizes the hundreds — thousands — of similar moments that have preceded it in film history. And there is a tremendous sense of relief in the way he goes about it.

This “tremendous sense of relief” is extended in a final scene that doesn’t appear in either the book or in the 2010 Coen version, where Mattie Ross is allowed to offer her family’s grave plot to Rooster while he is still alive, cementing their friendship, and Rooster rides off into the sunset, jumping the fence Mattie said he was too old and fat to attempt while shouting, “Come see a fat old man sometime!” Like the young boy in Shane shouting “Come back!” (which likewise wasn’t in the book, but was only added later for the film), it’s a scene so possessive of dramatic satisfaction (what Schickel called his “tremendous sense of relief”) that we walk away from the 2010 version feeling cheated that it has been replaced by the comparatively predictable, bittersweet, and elegiac ending of the novel, the kind of dreariness we’ve long come to expect from “real art.”

Regardless of the gateway to True Grit you choose — 1968 book, 1969 film, or its 2010 cousin — it has once again proven that it is a story good enough to sustain multiple treatments. I recommend taking them on in order: Portis, Wayne, Coens.