The Two Towers

Is it sacrilege to say that the movie version of The Two Towers is better than the book? Since JRRT wrote LOTR as one big book, each section of the trilogy lacks the captivating structure to which we western readers have become accustomed. The movie actually has a more interesting structure, and the ways in which Peter Jackson deviated from the canon allowed the story to have more well-defined themes.

I am unfailingly moved by this movie. I'm not exactly sure what either Tolkien or Jackson intended to say with TTT, but the themes I always pick up on are those of loyalty, and honor, and living up to one's promises and duty even if they are centuries or even millenia old, living up to one's promises and obligations even if they could have reasonably been overlooked and forgiven even by the beneficiaries thereof. How could one not love the arrival of the elves to Helm's Deep, in all of their smirking condescension, knowing that they were squandering idyllic immortality in a lost cause because once, countless human lifetimes before, they promised they would come to the defense of Man when needed. I don't care if it's fiction, that's some powerful stuff.

That's the kind of sentiment that led United State to send her soldiers to spill blood on the fields of Flanders and the shores of Normandy. Modern Americans love to decry France for its largely undeserved reputation of 20th century capitulation- it was less a case of willing collaboration than it was like an instance of a beautiful woman, her fears having been laughed off by her friends and neighbors, waking up one day with her sociopathic stalker neighbor in her bedroom with a bayonet at her carotid. Twice. Some Americans, at least, recall that France once came to the aid of this distant English colony with delusions of nationhood, providing arms, troops, and materiel that tipped the Revolutionary War from a colonial inconvenience to one of the few and most successful revolutions the world has ever seen. If it weren't for the French, we'd still probably be speaking English to this very day.

Anyhow, I like TTT and its theme of remembering and keeping promises, doing one's duty, living with honor, and sticking by one's friends. I also find Theodin, the broken subsequently redeemed king of Rohan, to be the most captivating character of the entire saga.

(Yes, I know that Flanders is in Belgium. We still entered the war to help the French, among other nations.)

This place? I don't live here, it's just where I spend my time...

I sometimes complain about my tiny apartment and the crappy state in which I keep it, but I only do that when I bother to notice it. That's not where I live, not really. I vow to clean it and organize it and upgrade it, but then I slide into one of my more important worlds and the disordered state of my humble earthly apartment no longer holds a position of any significant priority.

Don't get me wrong. It's not disgusting. There's nothing rotting or smelling too bad, and the garbage gets taken out weekly. Well, pretty close to weekly. I feel bad about neglecting my place, mostly when there's a chance of having another human being over, but the feeling slips away as soon as I have somewhere else, somewhere better, to be.

Where do I live? I live in a fantasy world. Actually, I live in several fantasy worlds, and I always have.

I live in a world where, when I go to work, I am surrounding by people who are laughing, and dancing, and singing, and joking. They are spirited, emotional, smart, funny, and compassionate, with positive views of the world and optimistic visions for the future. They like working hard, even requesting of me the privilege of doing so, even if their focus is occasionally brief and personal goals are mobile targets. I've read Lord Dunsany, Hope Mirlees, Spenser, and Shakespeare. I know the land wherein I work, and the nature of the folk with whom I work. I get to work under the crepuscular canvases of distantly glittering diamonds on backgrounds of Indian ink, and also under Monet dawns and Bierstadt sunsets. These are not, I suspect, the skies that most of us see in our everyday lives.
 
And that's just when the weather is nice.

At other times, I work under fay skies of gray under which distance and dimension are lost along with perspective, and when I'm really lucky, there rolls in a fog worthy of Doyle or Hammett. When the day lacks the interesting character of notable weather, it reverts to the default mode of beautiful and mild-to-warm, the take-it-for-granted weather of dreams and childhood memories of transplanted Midwesterners like myself.

Truly, when I walk out my front door, I get confirmation that I live and work in a place not quite of the quotidian.

Should I then talk of my social life? I dine like a fantasy of a hungry youth: pizza for the asking any and sometimes every night of the week, with an auburn-haired princess by my side, consumed with world-class beer or exquisite wine, any of which- food, companionship, comestibles- would be the envy of kings and caliphs, khans and czars. Every dinner is the stuff of fairytales. And when my princess cooks...well, there are even limits to hyperbole. How much can one use the terms "best ever," "unbelievable," and "fantastic?" I cannot imagine better food. It is said that an employee at the best pizza restaurant in town tells his customers how much better was the pizza that he had from her hands.

That's just what, for sake of a simplistic reference point, I refer to as my "real life." The worlds where I spend most of my time? Well, that will just have to wait until the next installment.