Iraq, War, and... Tolkien?
These days it's hard to avoid hearing of U.S. plans to invade Iraq, and those in favour of such action are looking to some strange places for support - including the recent release of The Two Towers. Viggo Mortensen (Aragorn), is quite upset with the film being used for pro-war purposes, as he and fellow actor Elijah Wood (Frodo) voiced last month with interviewer Charlie Rose.
An excerpt of the interview can be read here,
and the audio of the interview is in the Charlie Rose archives here.
There's a lot of banter here and there over the whole war/no-war issue and Mortensen's comments.
In retrospect I suppose I can see how one might intrepret the film in such a way, but I have always felt the books - and even this theatrical release - to have a decidedly anti-war slant.
Comments
Not sure what happened, but yeah, it was me. ;)
Anonymous is just becoming a very popular news submitter these days :D
Melissa "MelSkunk" Drake
Right, well, that is a very loose intepretation of the movie, now is it? Besides, just to make an example, you can trow the roles around. Bush can be compared to Saruman, because of his lack of commitance to the international treaty of Kyoto. And go on and on. The point is that this is an extremely loose intrepetation of the movie and makes as much sense as comparing the Sherrif of Nottingham to Saddam, or the A-Team to NATO.
The movie shows the horror of war and as said in the article, they are mostly against war. Tolkien has fought in the horrors of the War to end all Wars. Basicly this is yet another attempt of the Washington propaganda machine to prepare the commoners for war. The date is set, Bush is going to attack, whenever we like it or not. The problem is the public opinion, and as we all see, they are getting more desperate by the minute to gain support.
Tolkien has long been used as a metaphor for political themes (regardless that Tolkien himself said that it was not meant to be that). It's been alleged to be allegorical of the cold war, anticorporate, pro-environment, and now pro-Iraq war. This tells us a lot more about the things on the mind of those reading or watching it than what Tolkien really put into it. He's certainly not the first to have more read into his tales than he wrote into them.
It has been said that Tolkien's actual intentions were to represent a basic metaphor for World War 2, with Sarumon as Italy Sauron as Germany, the humans as Britian...not everything fits into the metaphor, and Tolkien denied it while alive.
This is not a war that ANYONE has to fight, so the metaphor being used is in no way analagous. No one's homes or countries are being ruthlessly invaded, and I hope it really pisses both Viggo and Elijah off, and they get quite loud about it.
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