The Shire (TM)

POSTED BY SI

WARNING: This post contains unnecessarily trenchant and bordeline hysterical views about things that really don't matter in the slightest. 

(I bleat on a bit here. Initially Soph was driving, then we arrived at Whakapapa in torrential rain, so I had time to geek out. Feel free to skip this one, especially if you're one of those strange people who think Tolkien is stupid and pointless.)

I enjoyed The Hobbiton set too. Very much. But not unconditionally. It felt a little bit grubby, a little bit tainted. I've struggled to articulate exactly why. Here's an attempt. 

Soph says it's cynicism, and I'm sure she's right about that, but not in the normal way. 

I'm going to set the scene:

If you know me even slightly you know I'm a committed film geek. If you know me slightly more you may remember that I've been a hopeless Tolkien spod since before I was a teenager. I pored over the books, the art, the mythology; listened endlessly to the 13 hour Michael Horden / Ian Holm BBC radio adaptation on a loop (the way Izzy now does with Stephen Fry's Harry Potter audiobooks); and spent many happy hours after school with nothing but Tom (fellow spod) and a Tolkien quiz book. (Glorfindel's horse is called Ashfaloth, Tom. How many times?)

When Peter Jackson was first slated to direct a huge budget live action movie adaptation, I'd never heard of him. I went back and watched all his back catalogue, and heartily approved - PJ, bless him, is a spod too; his creature/horror stuff especially was tremendously encouraging - and then avidly followed the news and rumour sites all the way through production.

When Fellowship opened we were living in France, but were in London for its opening night. 

I'm not going to get into a review here, but though he got a few things badly wrong (Bree, Rivendell) he got an awful lot of it very right indeed. And the first 40 minutes, in The Shire, with the party and the Shadow of the Past, he absolutely nailed. Hobbiton was perfect. A version of an ancient rural England, but gentler, idyllic, foolish, charming, innocent. Exactly right. Spot on. 

Now, that is no mean feat. 

As a movie set, Matamata IS perfect. The 100, 90 & 60% size exteriors, the pond, the party tree and field, the fake trees, paths and moss. 

You can tell it's a set because as soon as there are people in 21st century clothes in it, it looks incongruous and daft. 

It's artificial in an important and necessarily filmic way: to make it appear that something which doesn't exist is real. 

But there are levels of artificiality, and the latest incarnation of Matamata's Hobbiton is closer to theme park than film set. 

It's not really a set any more. For Fellowship it was built as temporary structures designed (in fact contractually obliged) to be destroyed and removed after filming. For The Hobbit they were rebuilt with the commercial potential of a theme park in mind. 

It's not 2 or 3 sided like a set (the 4th side being where you put the camera). It's 4 sided. There is no 4th wall to break. You are the 4th wall. 

The Green Dragon Inn at Bywater, initially just an exterior, is now a fully functioning pub serving beer and food, with carved oak beams, real inglenook fireplaces and chairs and cushions and rugs designed to look weathered and worn by generations of carousing Bracegirdles and Proudfoots. 

This doesn't make it all bad, of course. The Bag End set is now so familiar and just so totally RIGHT that to stand in front of it in the shadow of its famously fake steel and silicon oak tree was a genuine thrill, one I'm sure I won't forget. And the view across the mill pond to the bridge and the smoking chimneys and the working water wheel and the pub looks so real it seems incredible that it's not. 

But that's what it's for now. I don't know if it's an occupational hazard of working in advertising, or just innate cynicism, but I have a highly developed sense of when I'm being taken for a ride, or being sold to, and this felt very much like the only reason it existed was to take my money. This is embodied by the blurb which talks about Hobbiton (TM) The Shire (TM) and Middle Earth (TM) and Maddie's new bf, the pleasant but brash Disney style Dan, from whom I can't help thinking Frodo and Bilbo and JRR himself would have recoiled in horror. 

One of the great ongoing debates about the themes of Lord of the Rings is whether or not Tolkien intended it to be allegorical. One of the most enduring theories about the greater moral issues at the heart of it is that The Ring represents greed and power and money, industrialisation and commercialism, and the power these things have over the innocent to lure them in and corrupt them, change then, make them do evil things they otherwise wouldn't, and destroy things that are gentle and pure and defenceless, and take advantage of those who know no better. 

This, I think, is the root of my unease about Hobbiton (TM) - the cynicism at the heart of what it now is (not what it was initially for), has engaged my own cynicism. 

Like what Sam saw in The Mirror of Galadriel, his beloved home destroyed by progress: "...There are the trees again... someone's cutting them down! They didn't ought to be felled: it's that avenue beyond the Mill that shades the road to Bywater... but the old Mill's gone. There's a great red-brick building where it stood, and a tall chimney with black smoke pouring out of it. And folk, working away, fit to bust."

There. Isn't that fantastically over the top? It's a mini theme park about a fantasy world I have great affection for. I really should get over myself. 

I'm all done now. 

Still. I wonder what Tolkien would have made of it.