I finally got around to reading the Time magazine issue from December about “The Two Towers” — the one that contained a much-talked-about essay by Lev Grossman that tried to identify a cultural shift away from science fiction and toward fantasy.
Grossman’s idea is that the zeitgeist right now — post 9/11, war-on-terrorism-driven — is tilted towards clear conflicts of good and evil. Tolkienian fantasy fits this bill in a way that the dominant science-fiction mode of the ’90s — dystopian cyberpunk, Philip K. Dick, “The Matrix” and so on — doesn’t.
All of which seems to make sense on the surface. Except for one annoying fact: Tolkien first achieved huge popularity in the U.S. during the 1960s — the very era when American certainties about good and evil fell apart under the burden of Vietnam. Grossman tries to address this by writing: “A country drowning in the moral quicksand of Vietnam and Watergate found comfort in the moral clarity of Tolkien’s epic story of a just, clear war. Good and evil are fixed stars in the skies of Middle-earth even as they’re starting to look wobbly in ours.”
Maybe so. But now we’re having it both ways: Tolkienian good and evil are appealing in times of (ostensible) moral clarity like the present — and they’re appealing in times of moral ambiguity, too!
I think the problem here is one endemic to the kind of trend-story journalism Grossman’s piece represents — in which a writer starts from a cultural phenomenon and then tries to use it to draw wider conclusions about “the state of the culture.” The writer must assume that the cultural phenomenon is “touching a nerve” or “striking a chord.”
But sometimes the culture moves for simpler reasons. It’s probable that Tolkien’s books became popular in the ’60s because that was the first era in which they were widely available in affordable paperback editions in the U.S. If they’d been published in the ’50s or the ’70s or the ’80s, they’d have probably ended up just as popular — and we’d have writers trying to explain that popularity in terms of those decades’ zeitgeists.
Similarly, the “Lord of the Rings” movies are great film adaptations of Tolkien’s work that are popular because they are really good, and they would be popular in virtually any era you can imagine. We probably had to wait till now for the opportunity to see Tolkien on screen because the filmmaking technology had to reach a certain level — not because the culture needed to move into a state where it was receptive to Tolkien’s tales.
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