(# 9 in the series, "J.R.R. Tolkien: Smut Peddler!")
Stephen Lang, the actor who did such a great job portraying Colonel Quaritch in Avatar, gives us a brilliant insight into his character's psyche. In an interview in Energy Times (Nov/Dec 2010) he says, "[Quaritch] comes [to Pandora] as a victim. He's been dehumanized. . . . In many ways [he] presents some very fine qualities . . . but it got so twisted in these filthy wars back on Earth that part of him has just been burned away, that part being is soul. What's left is pure function." Lang--who specializes in playing tough guys--has hit the nail on the head. "Pure, soulless function": a superb description of the Colonel, of Beowulf, of your typical orc . . . and very nearly of Boromir. It's also a perfect description of others less overtly violent, such as Avatar's corporate lackey . . . or of those Republican congressmen mindlessly forcing the government to give worthless tax breaks to billionaires. It appears the Nazgul walk among us as well.
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"I don't think much about why I do things."--G. W. Bush |
The Colonel's lack of soul is why it makes such perfect, poetic sense when Neytiri puts an arrow into his heart: she's only making up for what he's missing. Since he won't let female power enter him, he'll have to have it inserted by force. And to reinforce the message, Neytiri gives him two arrows: one for her beloved father, and one for the courageous young war-chief who would have been her mate. The Colonel dares to penetrate the Bush with evil in him--and the Bush penetrates right back.
For there is no evil in this Bush unless a man brings it there himself. Then . . .
let him beware.
(It would seem a lot of fantasists like tall women. Neytiri is nine feet tall . . . so how tall is Galadriel? According to Tolkien's precise calculations, she's two Elvish rangar, which works out to be 6 feet 4 inches. The Lady of the Blue Wood and the Lady of the Golden are both tree-top lovers, and in more ways than one.)
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(Incidentally: those are Lang's real muscles, not CGI. He worked out for eight months to get the right build for the role.)
It's important for our appreciation of the Lord of the Rings that we realize Boromir is a "good guy." He's not there just to be shadow to Aragorn's light, or to represent Aragorn's "shadow side," or even to show us what Aragorn might have become if the Ring had gotten to him. Boromir is a tragic hero in Aristotle's sense, a good man with a character flaw that leads to his undoing. But here's another way in which Tolkien gives us more than we might have bargained for at the fairy-tale bazaar: Boromir has two such flaws. He's no ordinary macho man--he's a macho-macho man. But there's one more thing about Boromir--and about Aragorn--that even the Village People may not have known. . . . .
(to be continued)
Nazgul names, eh? The only name for a Nazgul that I'm 100% sure of is Khamul. I've always taken "Angmar" to be the name of the Witch King's country rather than a personal moniker, and I've been in long debates about what sort of being Gothmog may have been. (Personally, I lean toward "more or less ordinary human", like the Mouth of Sauron.) Here are a couple of excerpts:
ReplyDeletehttp://tolkien.slimy.com/newsgroups/Gothmog.txt
http://tolkien.slimy.com/newsgroups/MorgulCmd.txt
Hey, steu! Thanks for the comment. Good to know a true Tolkien scholar is paying attention! I'd completely forgotten about Khamul, though I've always assumed (perhaps wrongly) that Gothmog was a Nazgul. Paul Kocher in "Master of Middle Earth" uses "Angmar" as if it were a proper name (or at least a title), rather as Shakespeare in "King Lear" uses "Gloucester" as Edmond's title and as a name.
ReplyDeleteI wonder if the Nazgul are known to Sauron by numbers--an orc refers to the Lord of the Nazgul as "Number One," so perhaps the others are Number Two, etc. It would be interesting to see if there are any Nazgul names (or other elements of the Black Speech) still buried in some ancient Oxfordian shoe-box somewhere.
Stay tuned for a future installment, in which a crack a very poor Sindarin pun. . . .