Just read a paper by Dennis Wilson Wise 1, in which he talks about the way Peter Jackson’s Hobbit movies flatten and trivialize the historical depths of Tolkien’s fiction. It’s always gratifying when someone who thinks deeply about things comes close to my reflexive response. In this case, twenty-five years ago, I walked out of “The Fellowship of the Ring” thinking that (a) If Peter Jackson understands what the Ring is, he didn’t put that in the film, and (b) that could be because the evil of the Ring might strike a bit too close to home for a movie-maker to be comfortable. DWW shows the whole iceberg of which I’d just seen the top.
In the process, he lands some well-deserved punches on Marxist literary critics. I’m always up for that. But he points us to a quotation from Fredric Jameson from 1991 that got me thinking:
…this whole global, yet American, postmodern culture is the internal and superstructural expression of a whole new wave of American military and economic domination throughout the world…
Right now, we have a natural experiment to test Jameson’s theory. The USA is backing away from military and economic domination, so if Jameson is right, a new literary and cultural movement is about to emerge. Authors, sharpen your pencils and get to work!
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