Demons Dreaming...
Monday, May 11, 2009
Why do demons always enter our fantasies? I got to thinking about Tolkien the other day, and the Angmarim and Men of Rhudaur. What would possess an entire population to become “evil” and side with the forces of Mordor? Obviously, they don’t think they’re evil, or if they do, they don’t care. Their way of life is fine for them. Is it a charismatic leader, or a religion? Or possibly just greed? Perhaps you’ve just had a leader so long that you trust them, and accept their white lies.Still, you’ve got to realize allying with Sauron has no benefit, it’s not like he’s going to uphold his end of the bargain when your usefulness has worn out; you’ll just become slaves or a lower class.
Then it hit me. The Third Reich: an entire population swayed into unspeakable acts by one man and his closest advisors. How easy it must be to simply be “following orders”. So then I began to posit: “maybe this other side in the ‘war of the ring’ might not be so black and white.” It might not even be about evil at all. Certainly, the German people are not evil. Could you hate every German in 1946 when things were calming down? Little girls and old men? Maybe they had no idea of the truth of what was happening. Maybe they just went along with it.
Similarly, maybe the “evil” races in The Lord of the Rings don’t have the larger picture of what’s going on in mind. Or they’re so snowed by the promises made to them that a few casualties here and there are acceptable. Nationalism can be a potent catalyst.
Tolkien wrote “The Hobbit” in 1936. It contained nothing so dour and unspeakable as Mordor in it. It was a generally light-hearted fantasy romp about unlikely heroes and dragons, with an almost-war thrown in. This almost-war part is what interests me, because it is racially driven. In 1936, the Third Reich was fast approaching the height of its power. A racially-driven war was about to begin. Tolkien, in his fantasy, almost wishes that war to never occur.Tolkein began writing the Lord of the Rings Trilogy and the Silmarillion in 1937, and it was initially published in 1954. One has to wonder about how, subconsciously or not, something as prime evil as Sauron got into his novels. The vast forces and power he commanded, coupled with his control of annexed and allied nation-states, seems oddly reminiscent of the Third Reich.
I think that his fantasy demons were merely replicas of real-life demons thrown into an ambiguous world where they can be just as black and white as you want them to: none of the social distresses leftover from World War II existed in his trilogy.It’s interesting to examine why our fantasy villains mirror real life villains, while our fantasy heroes are absolutely outrageous. In our minds, I believe, that we want to conquer what we can’t in reality. When the war of the ring was over, it was over. Sure there was some generic cleanup and leftover pockets of goblin and orc resistance, but it was done, it ended as a real war would like to.
The social implications are gone, evil has been vanquished and the world can breathe again. There is nothing leftover to deal with like the complex issues that took hold over Berlin after it was captured: the Berlin Wall, for instance.
Think back to the last few stories you’ve partaken of: what drives the generic bad guy? I’m not talking about the absolute villain here. I’m talking about the “henchman.” Is it religion, like in so many of our Middle East-based stories? Is it religious fanaticism, like so many stories about cults and religious grey areas? Is it power, like in our stories about Communism and the former Eastern Bloc? Think about your favorite fantasy or sci-fi stories. Think about the Empire in Star Wars- committing genocide on entire planets- so many willing soldiers…and why? Think about the Borg in Star Trek: assimilating people to add to their collective, because they feel their way of “life” is superior, or the territorial expansion of the Jem’Hadar.Now think about just how black and white all of it is portrayed. All of these evils have one thing in common: they’re loosely based off of the atrocities in our own past and present. They have another thing in common: they’re all dehumanized to the point of no redemption. In these stories, like in reality, is anything really that black and white?
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