Marriages: Comic, Tragic, Mixed, and/or Gay — and HOBBIT [2]: The Movie {21 Dec. 2013}

           I'm aware of the danger of a necessarily ignorant outsider writing about people's deepest concerns and beliefs, so please forgive me if I make any mistakes on the intricacies of the world and peoples of J. R. R. Tolkien. I studied with care his seminal — yea, downright ovular — Beowulf essay, "The Monsters and the Critics," but I never got beyond just reading Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit or seeing any of the movies more than once. Still, I just saw Peter Jackson's The Hobbit [2]: The Desolation of Smaug (2013), and I have some comments about a movie that may be of some political importance — the movie that is, not my much-less-advertised comments.

            To start with, as a short person who fetched what gentility I have from American land-grant universities, I was very happy to see a film featuring Dwarves and find it of interest that in Jackson's movie (though certainly not in The Hobbit), Kili, a Dwarf — if a young, well-connected, relatively tall, relatively clean-cut and decent-looking one — can have a chance with Tauriel, an Elven female of intelligence, skill, beauty, and some influence, even if lower caste: a Sylvan, or Wood-, Elf, rather than one of the High ones, which means she won't get very far in a love for Legolas Greenleaf, son of Thranduil, the head-elf among the Elvish military aristocracy we see in the movie.

            Anyway, there's chemistry, as they say, between Tauriel and Kili, and the set-up for a love triangle of Tauriel, Kili, and Legolas. The Tauriel-Legolas leg of the triangle would be pretty standard, with a "heavy father" character standing between young lovers of slightly different caste and class, but cinematically "white bread." Among Tolkien fans in parts of the world where caste systems are still alive and virulent, the conflicts in a Tauriel/Legolas relationship could resonate strongly; for most viewers — eh! The Elven relationship here is pretty much well-off urban royalty (male Legolas) vs. more rural gentility (female Tauriel), and whether it's a standard issue rom-com, or Romeo and Juliet (an Italian romantic comedy that goes really wrong) — been there, seen that.

            The possibility of an Elf/Dwarf mating, however, is intriguing in terms of biology to start with, and beyond that politics both past and very much present. 

            On the biology proper, though — kinky-porn-flick opportunities aside — the question is, Are the Dwarves and Elves of Middle Earth closely enough related to allow fertile matings, and if the mating was reproductively successful, would the offspring be sterile hybrids ("mules") or fertile? Or would it be a point of a future movie that their chances for offspring would be in question?

            Traditional romantic comedy moves toward a new and better world coalescing around a central heterosexual couple, either getting married or exiting toward a wedding. If it's a Shakespearean rom-com, that'll be one central couple plus about as many others as mathematically possible, plus maybe music and a dance. "Comedy" comes from komos, which means revel — a drunken revel — and in their romantic versions, comedies move toward weddings and a celebration of fertility. As Benedick says in Much Ado About Nothing, with much irony but truly, "the world must be peopled" (2.3).

            If we move toward a happy ending, with the union of Elf-female and Dwarf-male, we may celebrate union and social integration and all that, but not fertility, not unless a Personage of Great Authority on such matters certifies that you can cross successfully Elves and Dwarves (possibly resulting in Hobbits or Vulcans; I will defer to the fans here). If we move toward tragedy — and killing off major characters may become fashionable — we will mourn the sundering of a union or potential union that, again, might be infertile.

            One much-mocked reactionary argument against gay marriage is that man-on-man (sic) unions will lead to man-on-dog matings and other abominations. The more serious argument is that same-sex marriages are infertile. But what happens if an audience is rooting for an Elf-on-Dwarf relationship ("cowgirl" style in the porn version), or mourns the loss of a Dwarf/Elf union? Either way we could be affirming the goodness of "the marriage of true minds" but copulation between two bodies that either may be sterile in its results or, if the script says so, is definitely sterile. We might well reject man-on-dog relationships and pony-on-girl — and we should, given issues of informed consent and age of consent — but if we accept an Elf/Dwarf marriage with no possibility of reproduction, we are, in a very indirect, figurative way, quite directly confronting and undermining two of the underlying fears about gay marriage.

            In terms of other politics …. Well, I just read A Very Brief Introduction to the Silk Road, and I'm re-listening to a book about the Spartans. Between the two of them, I got thinking about the Elves as a military aristocracy that doesn't require horses; a wellborn Elf is not necessarily a knightly cavalier (chevalier, caballero) — but they definitely do archery. Again, a question for the experts: Is this because Elves are reflection of the Welsh, who perfected the long bow? Also, or alternatively, are Elves archers in part because however much the Elves we see in Hobbit are confining themselves, their history was woodland, and horses aren't that useful in forest warfare — but bows can be?

            From the Spartans through the Anglo-Saxon thanes to an incredibly thickheaded French aristocracy during their 100-Years War with England, aristocrats could come down on one side or the other about horses, but real men, true warriors/heroes/aethelings viewed bows as cowardly. Indeed, royal and noble and genteel Frenchmen seemed convinced that a peasants' weapon like the bow — or an infantry weapon like the pike — couldn't possibly prevail against glorious armored knights on horseback, a conviction that contributed strongly to those glorious armored knights on horseback getting slaughtered at the Battles of Crécy (1346) and Agincourt (1415). So it's interesting to see Elves as archers and hear them on occasion speak a language that to my ears sounds Welsh. A military aristocracy with brains could be, like the Spartans, a formidable force, especially if, unlike the Spartans, the Elves don't have to worry about revolts from slaves whose labor supports the military that oppresses and exploits those slaves.

            If the Elves are Welsh-ish aristocrats who can get by without horses, the Dwarves are more my people: Dwarves as infantry. In fighting on foot, Dwarves are like Anglo-Saxon warriors, or one stereotype for Anglo-Saxon warriors anyway, except the Dwarves are so ungenteel as to have civilian lives where they actually make things and deal with money. A gentleman might be poor, but he's not "in trade"! Thanes and aethelings and earls and warriors/heroes/men —Old English could conflate that last set of terms — real men don't make stuff; they destroy it. In traditional terms, the Dwarves are ignoble in their industry. That we like them and that Peter Jackson has made a popular movie featuring them, may help fantasy fans, and others, rethink definitions and evaluations of "noble."


            So I'll join the folk cheering on Tauriel and Kili and wishing Legolas well on his way to Lord of the Rings. Just being a woman-like being of non-Queenly power makes Tauriel a progressive addition to the conservative world of Tolkien's high fantasy. If Tauriel she goes for love and/or sex with Kili (or a female Elf to be introduced later), she'll have really broken new ground in Middle Earth: human society of today as well as once upon a time and long, long ago. 

All We Have Is Time, and Too Many People Want Mine (2 Jan. 2014))

A hundred years from now we'll all be dead!

A hundred years from now we'll all be dead!

So no matter what is done and no matter what is said,

A hundred years from now and we'll all be dead!

— Moderately traditional kids' song

  

           My mother's three brothers were dead before I finished school, so they had to have died at a fairly young age; my mother lived to 69, and my father made it to 72. Me, I'm about to turn 71, and, I've been thinking about time. "A hundred years from now and we'll all be dead," indeed; but it's going to be a good deal sooner for me.

            Anyway, I'm feeling more up close and personal on a theme I've dealt with before more philosophically: the insightful if overstated teaching, "All we have is time."

            This idea is part of the premise of Harlan Ellison's great dystopian SF story, "'Repent, Harlequin!' Said the Ticktockman," but Ellison's take is a Modern one, from the world of railroad schedules and analog clocks, and Charles Chaplin's clown caught in the gears of a giant machine: the world of Big-Brother style totalitarianism. Such threats are still with us, God knows, but I think the long-term danger in the United States is more like what we see in Dave Eggers's The Circle (2013): a kindly, largely free-market, little-brother totalitarianism, where the assaults on increasing number of people's time aren't so much "Fordist" assembly lines as multiple screens and windows of office computers and the repeated demands made upon us over our networks and smartphones.

            The Circle is not a subtle book, and its main concern is with privacy, and the decline thereof, with time usurpation a minor point. So the theme of time is handled quickly and directly. Eggers's  postmodern version of the assembly-line speedup in Modern Times (1936) is a digitalized speedup built into the digitalized workplace. The anti-hero of The Circle is Mae Holland, who starts out in customer relations with one screen in front of her and goals for how many customer contacts to handle with what degree of satisfaction. And, as you can guess, the screens keep multiplying, along with the tasks for her, significantly including tasks to keep up her social life as a member of the corporate community.

            If the community offers all sorts of activities, isn't it one's duty to participate? If one can provide feedback and reassurance and reinforcement to one's colleagues and many Facebook-analog "friends," doesn't it become one's duty to do so?

            Of course it does! And in the chilling parody/appropriation of the three slogans of The Party in Nineteen Eighty-Four, at The Circle we have the three-part mantra, "Secrets are Lies. / Caring Is Sharing. / Privacy Is Theft."

            Again, and very obviously, the main concern here is with privacy, but "Caring Is Sharing" also has a time component. Mae is overwhelmed by inputs on her screens not just by her business tasks but also in sharing socially. The point is made explicit when Mae's parents explain that they have fled Circle involvement — involvement was the price for their much-needed health insurance — for reasons beyond the surveillance of their lives The Circle demands.

            Mae has gone "transparent" and is on-line and communicating visuals and audios almost without interruption, and she shares with her many followers her parents' medical challenges, and what would correspond to their e-mail address.          On their way off the grid, Mae's parents send her and us the arithmetic calculating that even their cursory responses to all the well-wishes and advice and "Smiles" (= "Like's") sent them would require sixteen hours of labor a day.

            If you can keep in "Constant Contact" with all your "Friends," caring people do so.
            Similarly with offering "feedback" and "input" into the system. Mae and the co-workers of her "pod" (no shit: pod, as with dolphins) really do work hard to serve their customers, and, when it gets down to it, their careers at The Circle depend on getting good scores on the quick surveys their customers are asked to fill out after each contact with customer service. I, for one, used to get paid to take surveys on products — mostly batteries, for whatever reason — but, golly gee, I feel hard-pressed when asked to fill in a survey without being paid to do so if it will help keep employed some phone-bank serf. "Oh, and remember: anything less than 'Exceptional Service' is a bad mark for me" (as I'm told, e.g., when checking out of the Service Dept. at Toyota [at The Circle, they like A+ averages: 98%]); so I take a little extra time explaining in under 200 words on some survey forms that "competent" is quite enough for me, or I take a little extra time deciding to lie rather than risk the job of a perfectly competent, if unexceptional, service rep.

            Well, you get the point; as I said, The Circle is not subtle and shouldn't be, and subtlety has never been one of my strong points. Eggers's main target is indeed mostly increasing violations of privacy through digital technology, but there is also the point of increasing violations of "the right to be let alone" in demands on our time from various government bureaus and agencies — hey, save those receipts for tax time; and classify them; and sort them; and record them — but also and sometimes overwhelmingly by bosses, businesses, family, colleagues, and friends.

            Only governments can throw us in jail for refusing to give them our time — jury duty for a few days, which is OK; a year or so in Vietnam, which is, say, more problematic — and only our bosses can fire us. Still, there are penalties if you don't do the paper work for the people insuring you, and there are different sorts of penalties if you don't get back to family and friends and Facebook "Friends" to share with the group. It is no big deal to throw out the junk snail mail or delete e-mails or text messages you don't want. But there are penalties if you toss something actually important, and deleting the crap may not take much time, but it does take time, and worrying about that missing tax bill or credit card is, well, worry.

            ("When should I expect my credit card?" / "We mailed it ten days ago." / "What was the return address on the envelope?" / "Nothing specific: That's our policy for your security." / "Well my policy is to throw out unopened any envelope without an identifiable return address." / "We can send you a new card; expect it in three days." / "Okay, I'll spend a week feeling up envelopes. [Hmm … Sorry I put it that way.]")
            In 1976, Thomas J. Remington wrote a beautiful essay on "touch" in the fiction to the mid-70's of Ursula K. Le Guin. He noted that Le Guin (who is a communitarian sort) highly values touch and human connectedness. In my scholarly mode, I agreed with Tom but pointed out that "touch" in Le Guin's works could be bad. It is good to be in touch with family, friends, community, tribe, and outward; it is good to be part of a communal network. But a network can become a net, a trap; touch can be the communication of love; or it can be when you're trapped between your bratty kid brother and sister in the back seat of the car with them seeing how often they can touch you touch you touch you until you go quietly berserk. It is good to spend time together with the family. And then more time, and then you bloody well have to get away from the kids, and they have to get away from you and have time for themselves.

            It is a good thing to get some time off from family and friends, and one of the great gifts of the labor movement was the weekend, when one can get away from work. First, if nothing else, it is a very bad thing to strangle your children or for them to take a baseball bat to you: prudence and decency recommend some time to oneself. Second, though, it is exploitation or even expropriation if your boss or country or loved ones demand "constant contact" and have you on call 24/7.

            A quotation attributed to Oscar Wilde is "The trouble with Socialism is that it takes too many evenings." Whoever said it, the point is a valid one, even for a social democrat such as I. "All we have is time," in a sense, and people should not take any from us without solid payment, including their time returned. We humans are social animals and bonding and family and community and solidarity are good things; we are also individuals, with a right, much of the time, to be let alone, to quite literally seize time for ourselves and hold it precious.


            Not all property is theft, P-J Proudhon's slogan notwithstanding, nor is most privacy theft; privacy and refusal to have our time imposed upon can be taking back that which is most essentially ours.