Feeding On Fantasy

Sunday, Nov. 24, 2002 By LEV GROSSMAN

CHIVALRY WILL NOT DIE: Karl Urban, center, as Eomer in The Two Towers, prepares his knights for battle

New Line Cinema

Article Tools

Reprints

(2 of 3)
The magic would have to come from somewhere else, and we found it in fantasy. Swords, not lasers. Magic, not electricity. Villages, not cities. The past, not the future. It's a world we see in the creepily cozy work of Thomas Kinkade, whose soft-focus paintings of bucolic never-never lands has brought his company, Media Arts Group, almost $75 million so far this year. Fantasy envisions a society modeled loosely on agrarian medieval Europe, though with plenty of Vaseline on the lens. Antitechnology, antiglobalist, it's a misty, watercolored memory of a way we never were. But if the vision is imaginary, the longing for it is very real.

That may be why the 24,000 members of the Society for Creative Anachronism are so busy brewing mead, sewing doublets and whacking each other with swords. Their motto? "Forward into the past!" "I think our technology today has taken us further from morality and generous behavior," says Darren Chermack — that is, Sir Tristan. "I find that this lifestyle is a way to touch on something that I want to be as a person — the pursuit of courtesy, chivalry and proper behavior." "There's a heavy anti-industrial streak there," agrees Carrie Crowder, 41, a conservative Republican, mother of two and former S.C.A. member. "It's tied back to the medieval, feudal landscape that is the backdrop for so much of fantasy." Granted, the S.C.A. crowd is a good deal further out on the fringe than most people who will shell out to see The Two Towers, but as John Adcox, 38, a fantasy fan in Atlanta, points out, it's all relative. "If I told you about a group that dresses oddly, paints their bodies and gathers by the thousand to share an enthusiasm, who would you think of?" he asks. "Right, football fans." Point taken.

But the appeal of fantasy goes deeper than mere nostalgic Luddism. Tolkien, a veteran of the British nightmare at the Somme in World War I, is a poet of war, and we are a nation in need of a good, clear war story. At a time when Americans are wandering deeper into a nebulous conflict against a faceless enemy, Tolkien gives us the war we wish we were fighting — a struggle with a foe whose face we can see, who fights out on the open battlefield, far removed from innocent civilians. In Middle-earth, unlike the Middle East, you can tell an evildoer because he or she looks evil. The Lord of the Rings also plays to America's view of itself as a reluctant warrior. As Peter Jackson, director of the Rings trilogy, remarks, "On some level most of the people watching these movies regard themselves as peace-loving, gentle people who would rather stay out of trouble and who are forced to deal with situations that are out of their control." Sometimes fantasies tell us less about who we are than who we wish we were.

It's ironic that all these peace-loving premodern agrarians are making astonishing amounts of cash for a lot of postmodern technocapitalist movie executives. Fantasy is hot, and studios are backing up the truck. Even as New Line and Warner Bros. (which, like Time, are owned by AOL Time Warner) churn out Potter and Rings sequels, New Line is already developing a follow-up franchise based on Philip Pullman's critically acclaimed fantasy trilogy His Dark Materials, about the journey of an adolescent girl and boy through alternative worlds inhabited by witches, angels and armored polar bears. Late next year the Sci-Fi Channel plans to air a lavish production of two of Ursula K. LeGuin's Earthsea novels, A Wizard of Earthsea and The Tombs of Atuan. The movie of C.S. Lewis' beloved Chronicles of Narnia is in development with Andrew Adamson, who co-directed the animated hit Shrek, a more comic medieval fantasy. Miramax will shortly begin work on a movie version of the best-selling Artemis Fowl books, a hot contender for the post — Harry Potter sweepstakes, and the company paid seven figures for book and film rights to the Bartimaeus trilogy, a series of novels about a jinni and a young magician by British writer Jonathan Stroud. Not to be outdone, Disney reportedly paid nearly $8 million for the film, theme-park and multimedia rights to Clive Barker's fantasy novel Abarat.

But is all this fantasizing really good for us? Should we worry about all these strapping men poking each other with sharpened phallic symbols? After all, on the political correctness meter The Lord of the Rings is radioactive. Where are the women? Peter Jackson filled out Liv Tyler's role for the movies (it's much less prominent in Tolkien's version), but the Fellowship is still as much a boys' club as Augusta National. And whiter too. Don't let all the heartwarming Elf-Dwarf bonding between Legolas and Gimli fool you. The only people with dark skin in Middle-earth are the Orcs.