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.In this context, the filmcycle can be seen as projecting a crusading militarism that celebratessocial hierarchy, patriarchal masculinism, and a deeply conservativevision and critique of the modern world.By interrogating the narrative,discourses, cinematic spectacle, and specific film stories, sequences, andscenes, I will unfold the  political unconscious of the cinematic epic andits allegorical articulations of highly conservative notions of gender,sexuality, race, class, and politics.Utilizing a multiperspectivist approach,I will also be interested in articulating some of the ambiguities andcontradictions of the film, the tensions with Tolkien s novel, and itsreception and response with critics and audiences.My main interest in thefilm cycle and its reception is to use the material to provide a diagnosticcritique of the present age (see Kellner and Ryan Camera Politica;Kellner Media Culture; Kellner Dangers).From the perspective of diagnostic critique, popular films provideimportant insights into the psychological, socio-political, and ideologicalmake-up of a society or culture at a given point in history.Reading filmsdiagnostically allows one to gain insights into social problems andconflicts, and to appraise the dominant ideologies and emergentoppositional forces.Moreover, diagnostic critique enables one to perceivethe limitations and pathologies of both mainstream conservative andliberal political ideologies and oppositional ones (see Kellner Media2For my views of the Bush administration and account of the contemporary socio-politicalsystem that provides a background to the release and reception of The Lord of the Rings films,see Kellner (Grant Theft; Spectacle; Dangers; and Crisis).I should probably note here that I amnot arguing that The Lord of the Rings cycle are fascist films, but that they have fascist motifs.20 Douglas KellnerCulture, 116-117).This interpretive approach involves a dialectic of textand context, using texts to read social realities and context to help situateand interpret key films of the epoch.The Lord of the Rings films were illustrative of a global fantasy-production machine with a creative team drawn from all over the(especially) English-speaking world.The novel cycle that inspired thefilms was penned by English writer J.R.R.Tolkien; the film was fundedby American corporations like Miramax and Time Warner; the director,writers, and production crew were largely from New Zealand where thefilm was shot; and actors came from throughout the English-speakingworld.The global popularity of The Lord of the Rings films was related toa deep need for fantasy, escapism into alternative worlds, and distractionsfrom the turbulent and distressing conflicts of the contemporary era, aswell to the enticements of a technologically dazzling cinematic epicmachine generating a fully articulated fantasy universe.Yet the  escapeled precisely into the tentacles of the conservative ideology that has beena major source of the present world disorder.Shire, Gemeinschaft, and the Fellowship of the RingThe film trilogy opens with a Prologue announcing that  the world haschanged and the old ways have been lost forever, a conservative lamentthat pervades the cycle.A narrator tells the story of the magical Ringsthat were forged to give leaders of respective human, dwarf, and elfworlds the power and wisdom to govern successfully.But a Master Ring,the One Ring, was produced by the Dark Lord Sauron to give him powerover all domains.His attempt to control the world led to an alliance ofthreatened peoples and nations and to a war against him, in which Sauronwas defeated and the Ring passed into the hands of a human, Isildur, theruler of Gondor.The Prologue takes place in a long past prehistory,evoking a mythic time that is being destroyed by the advent of modernity.Tolkien s project, in part, was to create a specifically English mythologyto compete with German and other European mythologies, although,curiously, his story of the Ring and how it was produced and corruptedThe Lord of the Rings as Allegory 21was remarkably similar to Wagner s reworking of the Nibelungen Saga inhis operatic Ring cycle.Jackson and his crew are faithful to the mythicand epic scale of Tolkien s saga, as was Fritz Lang in his two-partcinematic rendition of the Nibelungen tales (1924)  a high cinematiclevel to which Jackson and company aspire.Isildur is corrupted and destroyed by the Ring and it is lost in alake.Much later, it is found by a Hobbit, Gollum, who is also corrupted.After years of exile, he loses it in an isolated mountain where it is foundby yet another Hobbit, Bilbo Baggins.Baggins, seemingly oblivious to itscorruptive force, takes the Ring and returns to his home in the Shire, aland in Tolkien s imaginary Middle Earth which most scholars and fansrecognize as a fantasy vision of Merry Olde England.The Shire is aGemeinschaft, or organic community of the sort valorized byconservatives against the intrusion of Gesellschaft, the encroachingindustrial society (see Tönnies Community) [ Pobierz caÅ‚ość w formacie PDF ]