by Ryan Britt
Sitting out the big battles and not taking a lot of credit make Bilbo the star of an epic adventure who doesn’t act like the star. So, when The Hobbit demanded a sequel, Tolkien needed something old (a Hobbit) and something new, and what we got out of that equation was Frodo Baggins, Bilbo’s plucky nephew, a deeper kind of Magician’s Nephew Bullshit that is actually not bullshit.
If viewed through the lens of heroic archetypes, in every way, Bilbo is a more iconoclastic character than Frodo, because he actively protests being part of the story that he’s in. Frodo isn’t nearly as iconoclastic, and structurally, the narrative style of The Lord of the Rings is a little more efficient than that of The Hobbit. I know, I sound like a crazy person: a three-novel trilogy is somehow more efficient in its language than a tiny little three-hundred-page deal called The Hobbit. I’m totally nuts. But I’m not. The Lord of the Rings books are way more plot oriented than the meandering child’s journey of The Hobbit. In “Narrative Pattern in The Fellowship of the Ring,” David M. Miller talks about picturesque writing versus writing that focuses on the movement of the ring. He argues that with a few exceptions (like Tom Bombadil) everything that happens in The Lord of the Rings is answering the main plot question of WHERE IS THE RING NOW?
Meanwhile, there’s a lot of random shit in The Hobbit—goblin attack, giant spiders, lots of eating and singing—not all of which really adds up to an exciting plot, which is exactly why turning this book into a series of three films was a great idea for making money for New Line Cinema, but a terrible idea in terms of making watchable movies. The characters in The Hobbit are forced in their film adaptations to sustain themselves over narrative distances they were not designed to cross. Peter Jackson tried to turn The Hobbit into The Lord of the Rings when he made his film adaptations of the novel, and if J. R. R. Tolkien had attempted the inverse—to make The Lord of the Rings a true sequel to The Hobbit—nobody would have liked The Lord of the Rings.
The creation of The Lord of the Rings is Tolkien, effectively, and brilliantly, selling out, which is exactly like the Beatles firing Pete Best. What was it like inside of Tolkien’s brain when he decided he needed a more traditional hero like Frodo? Let’s take a speculative peek into his thought process:
You know what? I can’t have a series of epic novels with some potbellied loser at the center of the action. Who’s going to read all that crap? No one! I need a similar dude, only younger and, you know, fuck it, cooler than Bilbo. It will be his nephew. That’s good. Frodo. Fine. Good. Done. He’s got a Hobbit friend, too. Wait. Screw that, he’s got THREE friends. They’ll all be a little like Bilbo, only younger and drunker. They’re like a band. I love this. I’m a genius. What else?
I also need some straight-up cold, hard badasses, too. Shit. Well, I’ve got Gandalf, so I’ll make him even more of a bad motherfucker than last time. Maybe I’ll even kill him and have him come back to life like a massive player. Yeah, everyone will love that. Hell, I love that. I’m Tolkien and I love Christian metaphors. Wow. C. S. Lewis is going to be soooo pissed. Aslan coming back in the same novel is going to be such a joke compared to when I bring back Gandalf in The Two Towers. Ha-ha. Take that C. S.! I’ll show you who wins the war of the dudes with initials who write amazing books. Okay.
Anyway. Back to cold, hard badassess. Who else? I know, I’ll get a guy, a regular guy, who wears shoes, and I’ll name him Strider. But later, his name will be something else. Everybody has multiple names. Just like me. Cause I’m J. R. R. Tolkien.
From here, you can do your own Elvish translation of “dropping the mic.”
Now, the three Hobbit films—An Unexpected Journey, The Desolation of Smaug, and Misty Mountain Hop*—benefit from the fact that most people who like the books would never say the film version of The Lord of the Rings trilogy “ruined” the book version of The Lord of the Rings trilogy. And it’s also impossible to ruin The Hobbit, because nobody cares about it the way they care about The Lord of the Rings, because in comparison, it’s just not as good. “Good,” however, is not the same as funny or relevant, because if The Hobbit hadn’t been as funny and as interesting as it was (revised version or not), there’s no way the rest of this would have happened. And that impact is obviously dramatic in the existence of the fantasy genre as we know it. A lot of people might not see this in a positive light: writer Michael Moorcock, for instance, who once “took down” Tolkien by comparing the series to A. A. Milne in an essay called “Epic Pooh.” Why being compared to an awesome writer like A. A. Milne is a takedown is confusing to me; plus even if fantasy writers want to write differently than Tolkien (like Moorcock) they’re still acknowledging his influence. Could anyone write a Christmas story without at least thinking about Dickens and ghosts post A Christmas Carol? Did Dickens “ruin” Christmas as a result?
The alternate universe without Tolkien’s accidental Hobbit sequel, The Lord of the Rings, is one without Star Wars and Harry Potter, and one with much stricter antimarijuana laws. This book trilogy normalized the idea of wizards sacrificing themselves (à la Obi-Wan Kenobi and Dumbledore) and also featured literally all of its characters toking up before a big adventure. The fact that dorm rooms in the ’60s and ’70s frequently bore a map of Middle-Earth isn’t just because people wanted to live in Middle-Earth, but because people in college like to get high, and a lot of that is in the DNA—accidental or not—of The Lord of the Rings. Appropriately enough, “pipe weed” doesn’t show up in The Hobbit as much, because, you know, little kids shouldn’t smoke pot.
In 2001, I’m sitting in my room in a house in Mesa, Arizona, which I’m renting for $200 a month. My landlord is a toothless Gollum, a guy who actually sleeps in a bed in the backyard and never wears shoes despite the fact that he drives only rented Lincoln Town Cars. There’s no way this guy was doing anything legal to get himself in this situation, and like Gollum, a fallen Hobbit, my landlord seemed to have been once great, but now was consumed by some evil and terrible addiction/affliction that made him into a weirdo. Of course, I have zero sympathy for that because I’m twenty years old and living in my own rented room, paging through a dog-eared copy of The Fellowship of the Ring, waiting for my friends to arrive so we can drive over to the movie theatre and see the first Lord of the Rings movie for the first time, at midnight. If you’ve been reading these essays in order, you’ll know there’s a weird tradition among my friends and me for pulling jerky stunts at midnight premieres of big geek movies, and the premiere of The Fellowship of the Ring in 2001 was the first and the oddest.
It goes without saying that if your landlord sleeps in the backyard and wears no shoes and is a secret criminal, people don’t ring the doorbell of your house but, rather, just let themselves in. In certain parts of Mesa, Arizona, it’s Breaking Bad all the time. So, when I hear a tremendous bellow, “The wizards have arrived!” I sort of know what is up. My best friends, Billy and George, have let themselves into my house and they are in costume, ready for the premiere. The thing is, they aren’t dressed as any real characters from The Lord of the Rings but, instead, as generic, ridiculous, off-the-rack wizards sporting polyester robes and Prince Valiant–style bobs. There were pinks and periwinkles pervading these robes, and ironed-on flames and half-crescent moons. These characters’ self-proclaimed names were “Wizard Fro-Ty” and “Wizard Irwin.” George had never read a lick of Tolkien, and Billy was a bigger fan than I was, yet both had conspired to create intentionally stupid wizard costumes to wear to go see the movie. I hung my head in shame as we squeezed into my pickup truck for the fifteen-minute drive to the multiplex.
Of course, everyone who camped out for the movie hated these fake wizards, which didn’t stop George and Billy from “casting hexes” on random strangers or chanting out nonsense incantations to spells that weren’t “real.” If you’ve ever seen footage of Triumph the Insult Comic Dog screwing with people in line for Star Wars, this was a little like that. Also, the “George Lucas Is a Virgin” thing we p
ulled a few years later was tame compared to this, because George and Billy in their colorful, foppish wizard robes were actually torturing real Gandalfs and Aragorns. In what can only be called Y2K geek-smack-talk, I heard many of the costumed Elves and Hobbits in line murmur, “These guys look more like Harry Potter fans. What losers!”
The culmination of George and Billy’s evil scheme happened when the local news station showed up to report on all the Tolkien fans lined up for the first Lord of the Rings movie and they interviewed George and Billy instead of the “real” fans. They were funnier, they were more flamboyant, they filled the stereotype of what the newspeople were looking for, people who also had probably never read a lick of Tolkien. My mom even managed to catch some of this action on a VHS tape she kept handy for whenever someone we knew (occasionally me) idiotically showed up on the local news for being ridiculous.
Here’s the scary thing: if Tolkien had never written his sequel to The Hobbit, if he’d never decided that Gollum was an addict and fallen monster, if he’d never sold out and created a more mainstream hero in the form of Frodo, if it had all just been The Hobbit, the wizards you would see in line for a “geek” movie would still only be the fake ones that George and Billy created for their prank. Unwittingly, my friends were drawing on signals from an alternate dimension where fantasy never got a hold of itself and never began to take itself seriously. Their faux wizards are straight from a dimension that none of us thankfully will ever have to live in. A world where Gandalf isn’t as famous, and Frodo doesn’t exist.
Regeneration No. 9
Living in Manhattan on unemployment payments from the government will teach you obvious lessons about financial responsibility as it relates to the rising cost of forty-ounce beers, but it will also show you just how badly you manage your time. You without a job is who you really are and if you don’t like that person you’ve got to figure out how to change that. In February 2008, I was subletting an apartment smack in the middle of Manhattan, barely scraping by on unemployment, and slowly losing my shit. In New York City the word “slowly” means “quickly,” because we’ve scientifically figured out that time passes more egregiously here. In lots of sci-fi stories, people will seem to rapidly age because time has been sped up or slowed down. This is what it’s like to crack up in New York.
After being laid off from a cool restaurant job that I liked, and teetering on the brink of endless ennui over an on-again, off-again long-distance relationship with a painter, my dour mood wasn’t helped by the fact that I was watching a ton of Battlestar Galactica. Like many of you, I’m fully aware that BSG was/is one of the best things to happen to science fiction on television, and endless discussion over who the final Cylon was certainly birthed niche websites dedicated exclusively to geek discussion.* But it’s also a fact that Battlestar Galactica is depressing as hell, particularly in season four. What passes for humor or upbeat moments on BSG is the equivalent of the soldiers whistling at the beginning of The Bridge on the River Kwai.* I’m not saying it isn’t a great show—it really is—it’s just that watching Admiral Adama drink himself silly and CRY because the Galactica rolled up on a fake version of Earth full of robot skeletons wasn’t doing much for my job search, nor was the dark nebula of mush spreading out in my brain. Now, enter Doctor Who, and the David Tennant era that totally saved my life.
My father, of course, had tried to sic ’70s and ’80s Doctor Who on me when I was growing up, but back then, I was like most pre-2005 American “classic” Doctor Who fans: I had no idea what was going on in any given episode. If you’ve already read about my childhood experiences with Barbarella, then you can guess what my dad’s angle was on the Tom Baker incarnation of Doctor Who. Hint: it wasn’t the long scarf or the robot dog. Old-school Doctor Who may not have been able to compete with old-school Star Trek in the pointless half-naked women department, but with costars like Leela (Louise Jameson) and later Peri (Nicola Bryant) it certainly tried. I’ve been heartened to learn that contemporary Doctor Who scholars refer to those characters dismissively as “for the dads.”
So, before becoming aware of the new Doctor Who in 2005, I was among the vast majority of American sci-fi fans who believed that the character’s name wasn’t “the Doctor,” but instead “Dr. Who,”* and that he was a weird guy with a giant scarf who fought obnoxious robots called Daleks, who in turn looked like big versions of R2-D2 crossed with toilet implements.
Streaming video still sort of sucked in 2008, and getting Doctor Who on cable was pretty hard. Luckily, the whole show up through season three was on Netflix, which meant if I ordered the discs I’d have some kind of new sci-fi show to fill the time between drinking too much and watching a new episode of Battlestar in which everyone was drinking too much. Right away, it didn’t quite work—because the 2005 Doctor Who relaunch with Christopher Eccleston didn’t really do it for me. He wore a leather jacket. He lectured poor Rose (Billie Piper) about how dumb she was. He randomly called human beings apes. It was jerky and too English, even for me. Still, I got an education. I learned that the faux-R2-D2 things—the Daleks—weren’t actually robots at all, but rather mutated cyborg combos, and that despite not loving the Doctor himself, the show was somehow the most progressive thing I’d ever seen. Much has been written about Captain Jack Harkness (John Barrowman), the dashing pansexual badass who joins the Doctor and Rose for the second half of the first season, and count me among those who were floored by how much I wasn’t floored when Captain Jack planted dual nonbinary smooches on both Rose and the Doctor. This weird sci-fi show was doing way more for sexual politics than Battlestar was, that was for sure.*
Just because something is aligned with your politics doesn’t mean it’s automatically your favorite TV show, and even though I liked the first season of Doctor Who, Eccleston’s Doctor (whom I totally adore now) was too much of a downer for me. Commiserating with sci-fi and fantasy survivors is a normal part of loving these kinds of big heroes (Batman’s parents get shot, Luke Skywalker’s house is burned down, Dorothy Gale is caught in a tornado and accidentally becomes a murderer), but Eccleston’s Ninth Doctor couldn’t bring me out of the sad stupor I was wallowing in. However, when he randomly became a TOTALLY DIFFERENT PERSON in the first season finale, “The Parting of the Ways,” I actually screamed with joy. The Doctor Who notion of regeneration—the idea that the hero can become a new person—is profound likely because it’s a hyperbolic inversion of how people desperately try to affect real change in their own lives.
At this point, for those who really still don’t know what Doctor Who is or what the hell I’m talking about, here’s a brief primer. In 1963, the world (mostly the British) got its first taste of a guy named the Doctor, an irascible old man, played by William Hartnell, who turns out to be a centuries-old alien capable of traveling in time and space using a machine called the TARDIS, which stands for “Time and Relative Dimension in Space.” This time machine/spaceship is shaped like a 1950s police telephone box, because it has a gizmo that allows it to blend into its surroundings. BUT, because that gizmo also got broken, the blue police box just looks like a police box on the outside. On the inside, it’s way bigger, because of sci-fi magic, making it more like the inside of Mary Poppins’s bag than a real-deal Star Wars spaceship.* From the beginning, the Doctor is a kooky, non-machismo, nonviolent, brainy hero. He’s more Sherlock Holmes than James Bond, but kinder than both. And unlike both Bond and Holmes, when this character needed to be played by a different actor, there was an actual in-universe explanation.
When William Hartnell became too frail to play the Doctor and was replaced by the actor Patrick Troughton, the writers decided that they’d actually explain why the character looked different.* In fact, they also decided to explain why he acted different. Because he was a Time Lord alien from the planet Gallifrey, he would change into a new person, also called “the Doctor,” who would retain all the previous Doctor’s memories, but be a totally new man. There have been thirteen D
octors since the transition from Hartnell to Troughton and as the show progressed, this process was branded as “regeneration.” The regeneration episodes of any era of Doctor Who always are among the biggest and most emotional for the fans and are also really odd for someone unfamiliar with the show.* Protagonists with the ability to hit the reset button, presumably even on their gender,* are a bizarre narrative phenomenon in any fiction and, as far as I know, totally unique to Doctor Who.
Controversially, Christopher Eccleston only did one season of the Doctor Who reboot, so right away, new fans the world over experienced not only their first Doctor but also their first regeneration episode. After taking on the Daleks and absorbing the time vortex (there are lots of vortices in Doctor Who), the Doctor is exhausted and explains to his friend Rose (standing in for the audience) that he’s going to “change.” It’s a great and touching moment, and just as Eccleston delivers his catchphrase “fantastic,” golden light shoots from his neck and arms and BAM, he’s got funky hair, and he’s David Tennant! I was shocked, a little irritated, but, most of all, excited. How could this be? Could this show be getting happy? Was there hope for all of us?
The answer was a hysterical yes, because Tennant’s portrayal of the Doctor (at least in his first few seasons) is not a downer at all. With his skinny suits, insane hair, manic hand gestures, and Chuck Taylor sneakers, this version of the Doctor was a full-on space hipster, but without the depressing irony. For me, sitting alone in a cold Manhattan sublet, wondering what I was going to do with my life, fighting whatever version of depression everyone in their twenties is stricken with, the new Doctor was a revelation. I wore Chuck Taylors and a suit jacket, too. I liked jazzy one-liners and over-the-top exclamations of approval, too. Within a week, Doctor Who had me going from the “oh no” inside my head to the “OHHHH YES!” of David Tennant. I was putting on my Chucks and leaving the house more often, drinking less, looking for new work, taking my writing more seriously. Doctor Who’s reboot to Tennant showed me that one of the most embarrassing clichés about life can be true: when one door closes, another one opens.