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. 

Poetry and Push-pin, Satire and Sailing (14 March 2014)

[Q]uantities of pleasure being equal, push-pin is as good as poetry.
—Attributed by John Stuart Mill to Jeremy Bentham 

                                                                                                                               Prejudice apart, the game of push-pin is of equal value with […] 

                                                                                                                            music and poetry. If the game of push-pin furnish more pleasure, 

                                                                                                                                it is more valuable than either. Everybody can play at push-pin; 

                                                                                                                                                                 poetry and music are relished only by a few. — 

                                                                                                                                       Jeremy Bentham, The Rationale of Reward (1825) [III.i]  

            
            Push-pin is apparently some sort of kids' game noted for being particularly mindless, perhaps comparable to "Marco Polo" as played by Stewie Griffin on Family Guy; or, to keep John Stuart Mill's brevity and alliteration — although losing his gender-neutrality — we might say, "poetry is no better than pud-pulling."

            "Different strokes / For different folks" ….

            I've been thinking of such matters since retiring from having taught for forty years the largely poetic scripts of William Shakespeare, and such other works as Shakespeare film, the original Buck Rogers stories, Animal House, Blazing Saddles, and South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut.

            And, having a retirement income to live on — younger readers should study up on the concept of "pensions," out of which you have been screwed — having a retirement income to live on, I have entered the film biz and have, among other things, provided fairly extensive Notes to improve a brief scene of a nice young Canadian having his stomach punctured repeatedly by a pick axe. Not coming soon to your local theaters but available on Amazon.com: PSYCHOTICA! (2010), and if the bit about a pick axe would be a spoiler for you for the movie, you really don't watch many slicer-dicers and probably shouldn't watch this one.

            Since retiring I've also had to put up with my annoying best friend Dan's habit of periodically asking me why anyone nowadays should study Shakespeare. Dan, of course, is a serious reader of serious fiction, and, as Captain Dan, teaches the problematically practical art of sailing. If the south-central coast of California is ever attacked by poorly-equipped 17^th-century pirates, Dan can be out there leading the naval attack on them; or, in a somewhat more likely scenario, after a secular Apocalypse, Dan could be running supplies out to the wretched survivors on the Channel Islands, depending only on the winds for power, and the aversion to water of both robots and zombies.

            "Quantities of pleasure being equal," poetry is indeed no better than push-pin or Marco Polo or masturbation or sailing — if, but only if, all we're concerned about is quantity of pleasure.

            That's one standard response to Jeremy Bentham's bit of philistinism, but note that the formulation is "if all one is concerned about" is pleasure. Pleasure counts. Utile et dulce and all that: good art is supposed "to please and instruct," to have some utility — a good word for a Utilitarian like Jeremy Bentham — and give pleasure. If pleasure didn't count, people would do better to just read history or philosophy or self-help books or instruction manuals or, God help us, theology or law books.

            But why give university course credit for studying Shakespeare or Blazing Saddles, usually even more credit than for studying sailing?

            The answer I gave Dan: 'cause it kept me working and getting paid, (schmuck!). The more interesting question, that one out of the way — it costs money to sail with Captain Dan, and he wasn't about to push me on that argument — the more interesting question is what literature and drama and film might be good for, period. Granting that harmless fun needs no excuse, what's useful about plays or movies, or — for most of what I taught — non-technical reading?

            In The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, Steven Pinker has recycled an old and unfashionable argument defending literature, but, if it holds up, a very powerful argument. A major part of Pinker's analysis concerns "The Rise of Empathy and the Regard for Human Rights" from the 18^th century on in the West, a crucial phenomenon for what he calls "The Humanitarian Revolution" (ch. 4). And Pinker holds that this phenomenon didn't just follow substantial increases in literacy and the reading of fiction, but to a significant degree was caused by that reading — and, I will add to Pinker's list, by watching and listening to some drama and later film.

            "Reading is a technology for perspective-taking. When someone else's thoughts are in your head" — especially when reading a novel — "you are observing the world from that person's point of view. Not only are you taking in sights and sounds that you could not experience firsthand, but you have stepped inside that person's mind and are temporarily sharing his or her attitudes and reactions" (Penguin pb, 2011: 175). That is, while reading many novels, you are automatically engaging in a kind of empathy; and Pinker argues cogently that a rise of empathy was significant for the elimination or radical reduction — usually and so far! — of most of the casual brutality woven into the fabric of everyday life for almost all of recorded human history.

            And there's more involved than just empathy.

            As an admirer of satirists like Jonathan Swift, Pinker also recognizes that "Exposure to worlds that can be seen only through the eyes of a foreigner, an explorer, or a historian can turn an unquestioned norm ('That's the way it's done') into an explicit observation ('That's what our tribe happens to do now'). This self-consciousness is the first step toward asking whether the practice could be done in some other way" (175).

            As a student of satire and science fiction, I'll add that such "S&SF" works, when they're earning their keep, can be highly effective in an audience's world expansion. As Pinker says, most of us, most of the time accept the world we live in as the world, the only possible world. A study of history or anthropology would disabuse us of that delusion quickly: our ways are far from the only way. History however, often comes with quizzes where the proper little "bubble" to fill in gives "1492" for the Fall of Granada or Christopher Columbus's sailing off and doesn't get you picturing life in a besieged city or what was going through the head of a complex world-changer, and major criminal like Admiral-Governor Columbus. And you may remember from your anthro courses mostly factoids on kinship relations among the clans, phratries, moieties, demes, and what-all of the Tlingit peoples of wherever.

            Good satires and science fictions are fun, and they sucker us into seeing our world from alien points of view and seeing the weirdness of everyday life — or seeing worlds radically different from our own. How would Early Modern European history look to a humane, civilized giant of high intelligence, or to a horse-like creature who was truly a rational animal, a rational animal who had never seen an ill-natured quarrel, much less a war? How would we view human relations after several chapters inside the mind of a highly intelligent creature whose species has always come in three sexes?

            Admittedly, a bad teacher can make Swift's Gulliver's Travel's or Isaac Asimov's The God's Themselves every bit as boring, tedious, and unpleasant as bad teachers can make history or anthropology; but for their original audiences, Gulliver and Asimov were somewhat guilty pleasures, and still can be discovered with delight by curious young readers. Or some young nerds can discover to another kind of delight that there are adults willing to take Asimov and Swift and Animal House and South Park seriously.

            Pinker may be more wrong than right, of course, and the esthetes' and puritans' doctrine may be correct that poetry — and art more generally — accomplishes nothing and/or wastes time better devoted to useful things.

            I don't think so.

            Robert Browning's disreputable monk and great painter Fra Lippo Lippi gives us a look into his world in a dramatic monolog justifying himself and his painting to the Italian Renaissance equivalent of a cop on a late-night beat.

                                  we're made so that we love
First when we see them painted, things we have passed
Perhaps a hundred times nor cared to see;
And so they are better, painted — better to us,
Which is the same thing. Art was given for that;
God uses us to help each other so,
Lending our minds out. (lines 300-06)

Art, when it's working, "defamiliarizes" our world and opens up other worlds: "making the familiar strange, and the strange familiar" to paraphrase several lines in S. T. Coleridge's Biographia Literaria (1817: ch. 14). If Pinker and an old tradition are right; if Browning's Lippo is right, and Browning as well, as an author of dramatic monologs — then some forms of art can get us to see the world through other's eyes. That's empathy by definition, which can lead to sympathy; and it offers visions of alternatives.

            So it might be useful to watch and listen to Shakespeare, and perhaps study his scripts, and study and enjoy satire and SF and other arts.

            And, if you're into it, go sailing: quantities of pleasure being equal, sailing is as good as satire reading, plus it's a good way to learn some math and meteorology and the somewhat foreign language of utterly pedantic ways to talk about parts of a boat.