Transhuman and Subhuman: Essays on Science Fiction and Awful Truth (6 page)

Okay, I get it. I get the idea. This movie is a sequel to the successful
Fellowship
, and the audience knows the ring is actually the One Ring, and therefore major mojo and bad news and so on. It is supposed to simply scream EE-VIL-LL whenever it appears on screen, and ergo again Bilbo has to yank it off his finger as often as possible so as not to become a shadow beneath the vaster shadow of the Dark Lord. I got it. I got the concept.

But the execution of the concept was a big, fat skull-whack from the now all-too-familiar Stupidity Hammer.

Smaug can defy armies of men and elves, but when a three-foot tall burglar materializes right in front of his nose, he can suddenly neither bite nor strike nor breathe fire. Or, rather he does all these things, but is suddenly affected by some odd nerve disease that makes it impossible for him to control his limbs, so the bane of the Lonely Mountain, the destroyer of kingdoms, the scourge of Esgaroth, he flails and spits flame and hits to the left and right of his targets.

Just so we are clear on this point: Smaug suddenly and for no reason finds he cannot kill a perfectly visible hobbit, because Bilbo suddenly and for no reason thought it was a good idea to doff his magic ring while standing before the dragon so as to make himself perfectly visible.

Well, things go from bad—no, excuse me, they were already WAY past bad. This dial had been cranked up to eleven when the meter only goes to ten—things go from inexcusably stupid to indescribably stupid.

I should not attempt to describe it. The pain… the pain….

And yet I must! It is my penance for having spent real money on this turkey and inadvertently aided the forces of brain-gag by rewarding them for this craptastic jerktrocious smegbladder of a film. My money crossed their palms! Peter Jackson went out and bought himself a Starbucks cup of coffee with the four bucks he got from the forty dollars I spent on tickets! Forgive me, O Muses! I MUST SUFFER! (And you shall suffer with me, dear reader).

The next scene is almost too stupidcallafragilisticexpeallidumbass for words to describe it. In fact, in the last sentence, was something that was not a word and did not describe it, proving my point. But what happened next is this:

When the dwarves heard the ruckus of Smaug unable to kill Bilbo, they decided Smaug must be the biggest pussywillow in Middle Earth, and unable to hit the broad side of a lonely mountain, because the twelve (or is it ten?) short men scrambled down into the lair and stronghold of the diabolical monster who killed WHOLE FINGOLFIN ARMIES and KINGDOMS and CRUD LIKE THAT because he is MORE OF A BADASS THAN FINGON GODZILLA!

Where was I? Oh, yeah, on the floor, in the fetal position, weeping blood from my eyes and brain goop from my ears, calling on mommy to make it stop. But. It. Won’t. Stop.

The comedy relief pantomime dwarves, who could not manage to fight a group of shrimpy, non-fire-breathing goblins except with elf acrobat-ninja help while wearing comedy relief barrels, now attack Godzilla. The rockets of the jets and the gunfire of the tanks of the Japanese Self Defense Forces can do nothing against the monster, and wading through the high tension power lines only enrages him, so he ignites a petroleum refinery.

But the dwarves come to attack him, and their plan is to dance on his nose.

They ignite the furnaces, thinking perhaps that hot things will hurt the demon-serpent whose inward parts are filled with fire hotter than any furnace in Middle Earth can achieve. Good thinking. If that works, you and Thor head out to find the water-breathing sea-serpent coiled around the world and drown it. In water.

Now, no doubt you are asking — well, if the dwarves are so hardcore balls-o’-brass brave in this scene, why were they so cautious about the army-eating dragon earlier? I mean, this is a monster that eats armies. He deep-fat-fries and eats whole armies.

I dimly recall that there were some scenes of short people swinging on long lines, unless I am confusing this with a similar scene where Frankenstein’s monster with a glowing skull window, while trying to escape from Dracula, was spider-manning across a deep chasm in the movie
Van Helsing
. Or maybe that was Spider-Man trying to escape from Doctor Octopus atop a speeding train. Or maybe it was the last board in the famous video game
Dragon’s Lair
made by that guy who animated
Rats Of Nimh
. I dunno. It is all a popcorn-oil-flavored blur now.

With the infinite weariness of one who wishes only to die and be reborn due to bad karma as a stinging centipede, I pried open one gummy, tear-crusted eye and focused it dimly at the great shining screen of neverending movie dumbness.

I saw a giant statue of a dwarf king made of molten gold fall over on the dragon. It hit the dragon and he shook it off, sending expensive droplets, worth a thousand dollars an ounce, off in every direction. He was not hurt in any way.

That was the plan.

It was a two step plan: Step (1) dance on the dragon’s nose and then Step (2) construct or find a conveniently placed Lady Liberty-sized master mold of a cast statue of Durin the Great or someone, fill it with the molten gold conveniently stacked and prepared in the furnaces, which conveniently all heat up to the proper temperature and need no crew to work any of their moving parts, and wait until the flying version of Godzilla, the guy who EATS WHOLE FUNDIN ARMIES is hovering on his vast batlike wings right in the exact right spot, and drop the entire molten statue on his head, because he will be too surprised and stupefied to use his vast batlike wings to move eight meters to the left or two meters up and ergo avoid the falling Lady Liberty-sized but still hissingly molten statue of Durin the Great or someone.

Ah, but not to worry, because the third part of the plan, right after the dragon shakes off the molten gold because it cannot hurt him in any way, is better than the first two parts! In the third part of the plan, the dragon shakes off the molten gold and opens his mouth and breathes out fire which kills every living thing in the chamber where he is and all the corridors and chambers to each side of him, as he destroys everything in his vast, inhuman, unstoppable rage.

The dragon then uses his nose like a bloodhound, and scents his foes, if any survived, and follows them one by screaming one, slithering his snaky body into narrow spaces if need be, or if the prey attempts to hide in holes too small for him, he vomits fire on them, burns up all the oxygen in the room, and laughs while they die.

Failing that, he topples titanic pillars and statues to block any escape exits he discovers, and then goes to the main gate and takes up a position and waits for them to starve to death, all the while shouting out mocking riddles to them, or perhaps catching the king’s deer and, with puffs of his fiery breath, cooking the venison so they can smell the savory fumes.

Whoops, I am sorry, that is not the third part of the plan. The third part of the plan is that the dragon loves the idea of people breaking into his lair and taking his stuff, and he does not really want to disturb them, and so he flies away to go attack Laketown, perhaps because he is miffed at the customs agents who are stopping the Scarecrow of Romney Marsh and mad about the treatment of French aristocrats.

The end. To be continued in our next episode. Perhaps there will be even less of Bilbo in Part Three.

Let us be clear on that last, dumb, super dumb, stupidly dumb scene of dumbfounding dumbness. Let us review, one more time, the steps of this awesome, awesome plan:

1. Send down Bilbo.

2. Have him take off his magic ring while standing directly in front of the dragon’s nose.

3. Listen for the sound of the dragon inexplicably not killing the hobbit in one-eighth of one second.

4. Rush into the dragon’s lair.

5. Hope he misses you while trying to swat you.

6. Dance on nose.

7. Swing on things, run in circles.

8. Hit him with a zillion cubic feet of molten metal. Watch to make sure he is not wounded or inconvenienced in any way as he shakes it off.

9. Watch as he flies off for no reason whatsoever, during the one moment when nothing in Middle Earth or Upper Heaven or Lower Hell could possibly have forced him to depart, namely, the very moment when someone is trespassing on his horde.

Since that was the plan anyway, I wonder why the plan was not to forget about the stupid map and key and Durin’s Day and all that rigmarole, march into the front gate, hope the dragon misses, et cetera, and watch him fly off to go burn Laketown, and then gather up as much loot as your donkeys can carry. Repeat every week for 151 weeks or until you have all the hoard.

The paramedics had to haul my broken and bleeding body and wet, soggy brain out from the theater after the riot police, mistaking my hysterical leaping and gargling caused by post-traumatic movie disorder for a threatening gesture, had been forced to club me down, and as I was dragged away, leaving a long slimy snail trail of popcorn butter-flavored oil behind, my last words could be heard, as weak as twitching ants blinded by exposure to fumigation fumes who crawl out into the sunlight to die:

“Shoot… him. with… an… elf… arrow….”

If, like me, you have too much free time on your hands, you have probably wondered why Snow White, at least as Walt Disney portrays her tale, has small woodland animals to help her with her household chores, with bunnies and chipmunks scrubbing dishes, songbirds helping to sew, and fawns dusting the furniture with their white tails.

If, like me, you have too much education on your hands, you have probably used Aristotelian categories to analyze the question.

If, as a child, you ever asked the question, “But WHY must I go to bed?—I am not sleepy!”, and heard the answer, “Because Daddy says so!”, and you found the answer unsatisfying, you experienced the frustration of hearing the wrong kind of answer to the right kind of question.

The sleepy child is asking for a justification, asking what fair purpose lights out for unsleepy children serves, and the impatient parent is explaining a formality, that a command from a lawful authority must be obeyed independent of its fairness. It answers a different “why” than the “why” that was asked.

Aristotle answers that there are four kinds of answers to the question “why”.

1. Final cause is motive, or, in other words, it is the answer in terms of that for the sake of which the thing is done to explain the thing.

2. Formal cause is structure, or, in other words, it is the answer in terms of how the thing is put together, the relation of parts one to another.

3. Material cause is substance, or, in other words, it is the answer in terms of the content, what stuff the thing is.

4. Efficient cause is the past, or in other words, it is the answer in terms of the history of cause and effect leading up to the event being described.

In this case, we can discard the answer that, “Snow White has maidservant bunnies because Uncle Walt put them in the story”—this tells us the efficient cause, and we don’t care about that.

Likewise, we can dismiss the answer that, “Snow White has maidservant bunnies because it is a fairy tale and therefore made of make-believe: in real life, when I tried to get my bunny to clean the rug, he left poop pellets over everything, and ate the leather slip covers on my couch”—this tells us that you never want to ask me for advice on housekeeping or animal-training.

Likewise again, to answer that, “Snow White has maidservant bunnies because they are a convenient, labor-saving pets for her,” gives the story-world final cause, that is, it tells us Snow White’s motive inside the story, but it does not tell us the real-world final cause, that is, it does not tell us Walt Disney’s motive outside the story.

Presumably the motive of Uncle Walt is to tell a good and memorable and charming story to entertain both young and young-at-heart. That we can presume, but it does not answer the question asked. In this case, the answer we are asking is one of formal cause, that is, what makes this particular conceit entertaining, that is, charming and memorable and good?

We want to know what about having shy and wild deer befriend and love a virginal maiden appeals to any audience whose hearts are fit for fairy tales. We want to know what about furry animals doing human chores appeals to those young children and any graybeard philosophers innocent or wise enough to delight in fairy stories.

The alert reader will note that I introduce a thought into this question slyly, but, if I may be allowed, crucially. I propose that we cannot answer what makes a story element fit for being told in a fairy story without answering what makes a heart fit for hearing a fairy story.

Let us answer the smaller half of the question first, as it is easier. I assume nearly everyone who likes fairy stories, and who likes seeing wild animals befriend the virgin princess in the story, sees immediately what the appeal is. Any reader who cannot see it is asked merely to imagine the same conceit in other types of tales, so as to see how wrong or comical it would be there.

Imagine the detective story where the hard-boiled gumshoe, having just survived a beating from Lash Canino, the thug of Eddie Mars the gambler, and only now realizing that his old pal, Sean Reagan, whom everyone thinks ran off with Eddie’s wife to Mexico, is actually dead, stumbles into his ratty apartment lit only by slanting strips of light from the Venetian blinds. A cigarette is dangling from his bleeding lip, and hatred glinting from his swollen black eyes. He stumbles over to his gun cabinet, and his pet groundhog, Mr. Flunbuffly, hands him a tumbler of scotch. Dwinky the Fawn reloads his shooting iron for him.

Such a scene could be done for comical effect, or absurd, or as a wild hallucination after a svelte dame slips someone a Mickey, but it is foreign to the mood of Film Noir whodunits and utterly outside the conceptual frame of what a detective story universe allows.

To use a less absurd example, imagine a similar scene either in a Sword-and-Sorcery story, or a myth, or a work of science fiction or High Fantasy.