Dumb Animals

"I was caught in Fangorn and spent many weary days as a prisoner of the Giant Treebeard."

- Gandalf, in an early draft of LotR from The History of Middle-Earth

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Amish guy smacks Berlin in the face with a bedpost, news at 11.

While I welcomed its predecessor Moon as hard science fiction at a time when the superhero movie craze was just amplifying, watching (and increasinly skipping through) Mute I found myself constantly wondering why this was made into a SciFi story at all, aside from the hero regaining his voice by technological means, which foregone conclusion hardly justifies two hours of padding. Where Moon solidly anchored its plot to its scientific precepts, Mute looks like Duncan Jones decided to make a cyberpunk flick, just because, and backfilled generic details as an afterthought. So, obviously it needs some robots for the techno angle, plus lotsa pimps 'n hoes for the gritty film noir angle, and the rest is extended shots of the hero or antivillain brooding. So much brooding.

Visually at least its cold, inhuman urban wasteland aesthetic fits the bill (and is rather skillfully conveyed, e.g. that two second time-skip at the library) but even in that department you have to giggle at the occasional gratuitous interposition of <something techy> into the scenery to remind us we're at least nominally watching SF. The plot itself (a plucky squire pure of heart and doughty of bicep, racing to the aid of his lady love) offers nothing you couldn't get out of ten thousand children's fables no matter how many broken noses and transvestite hookers you toss in to jack the rating out of PG territory. Even a potentially solid ending is undermined by sap and a lack of attention to how exactly our hero will contend with the scores of mobsters he's just set after his blood. Tone shifts hardly help either, undecided from scene to scene whether it wants to be Blade Runner or Pulp Fiction, and stock politically correct characterization just nails that coffin shut. Every man is a cackling sexual predator except the one-good-man protagonist, women are innocent victims and goodness intrinsically tied to cuteness. And of course the primitivist angle goes hand-in-hand with the feminist one for bonus purity points. If you want more depth than that, you won't find it watching Skarsgard sit dramatically at various tables.

I'm reminded Tolkien said there was only one part of LotR which flowed leisurely, which he wrote basically in one go once he had its basic idea, and that was the Rohan / ents / Isengard conflict. Of course that's largely because the ent angle runs on a stock nature vs. tech juxtaposition (and yes, it was stock even in the early 20th century, and had been for a century prior) and he lifted the hubristic comeuppance angle from Macbeth (twice: no man of woman born / 'til Birnam wood remove to Dunsinane) because he disliked Shakespeare's handling* of those plot twists. His original idea was pure fairytale fluff, in which giants fee-fi-fo-fum and carry off victims to their lairs; not much to it. Fairytales were invented by simple minds which simply imagined bigger versions of themselves, giants as giant humans, because that's as far as a dirt-farming illiterate's imagination could stretch. Tolkien did not abandon that source material ("ent" shares its linguistic root with "ettin") but tweaked it into a more naturalistic extension of the world beyond ourselves.

Nota bene, Treebeard did not shift completely from being a mean giant who imprisons good guys to a member of Aragorn's army. He (and his kin by extension) is still prickly, standoffish, dangerous independent will alien to the world of men (as magical creatures are by default outside monotheistic folklore) not evil but best left alone. And though Eowyn in turn was given the right-of-way in her big speech about being denied her chance at glory just because she's a woman, she never descended into a trite feminist "strong woman" stereotype slapping boys around to show 'em who's boss. In fact she was at one point meant to die on the Pelennor Fields, her mad quest for glory being a mode of self-destruction driven by hopeless infatuation and family tragedies, yet another victim of the defeatism Saruman/Sauron's machinations instilled in their enemies. The point being not least that anyone who actually wants to go to war must be at least partly cracked.

 

And he achieved that added nuance by moving past set pieces or stock heroics and even by critiquing The Immortal Bard Himself! But that took a lifetime of study and reconsidering many drafts, not just pumping out the lucrative Hobbit sequel his publisher had demanded.

Publish or perish. It's often remarked that Dickens' books are padded due to being paid by the chapter. But of course plenty of 19th-century writers also padded their works for the very same reason. They just lacked Dickens' flair and so have dropped from memory. How many movies have you seen which featured one or two decent scenes but obviously should never have been more than a 15-30min short - dragged out to two hours to pay the mortgages of armies of third camera grip understudy foley wranglers and buy a fifth private jet for a studio executive? How much less wasteful would it be to simply pay all such potential creators a universal income simply to exist, and let them create at their own pace, rather than actively push an economy based on the mass production of waste?

"Is the rabble also necessary for life?"

 

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* I'm of mixed opinion. I find Tolkien replacing "no man (of woman born)" with a woman instead of caesarian birth a more fitting resolution, but I do still prefer Shakes' original non-supernatural solution to the removal of the wood. (Don't get me wrong, I love the ents, but still...)