Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Everything is totally normal and fine!!!

Too often we confuse noise with substance. too often we confuse setbacks with defeat.

I’ve spoken to my cat about this, but it doesn’t seem to do any good.

Make the republican party small enough to drown in a bathtub.

Why is it so hard for them to condemn hate?

The worst democrat is better than the best republican.

Of course you can have champagne before noon. That’s why orange juice was invented.

You passed on an opportunity to be offended? What are you even doing here?

Rupert, come get your orange boy, you petrified old dinosaur turd.

Prediction: the gop will rethink its strategy of boycotting future committees.

We still have time to mess this up!

They traffic in fear. it is their only currency. if we are fearful, they are winning.

Pessimism assures that nothing of any importance will change.

It is possible to do the right thing without the promise of a cookie.

We need to vote them all out and restore sane Democratic government.

Within six months Twitter will be fully self-driving.

The Supreme Court cannot be allowed to become the ultimate, unaccountable arbiter of everything.

A norm that restrains only one side really is not a norm – it is a trap.

Shallow, uninformed, and lacking identity

Jack Smith: “Why did you start campaigning in the middle of my investigation?!”

Narcissists are always shocked to discover other people have agency.

We can’t confuse what’s necessary to win elections with the policies that we want to implement when we do.

Everybody saw this coming.

Insiders who complain to politico: please report to the white house office of shut the fuck up.

You are here: Home / Open Threads / Excellent Links / Open Thread: Show the Monster

Open Thread: Show the Monster

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“In emotional genres, you cannot advocate good taste as an argument.”

So sayeth Guillermo del Toro in a New Yorker profile by that name, but I think it has a certain resonance for political blogging as well. I also look forward to del Toro’s The Hobbit:

Del Toro, with his ornate aesthetic, was hardly the obvious choice to follow Jackson, who in his trilogy had placed Tolkien’s mythological characters in realistic landscapes—one worried about Frodo’s furry toes getting frostbite as he trudged through heavy snow. As del Toro put it, Jackson had reconstructed the Battle of Mordor with the same exactitude as the Battle of Gallipoli. Del Toro described his own style as more “operatic.” Speaking of Tolkien, he said, “I never was a mad fan of the ‘Rings’ trilogy.” “The Hobbit,” he said, “is much less black-and-white. The monsters are not just evil. They’re charming, funny, seductive. Smaug is an incredibly smart guy!”

What other stories have we been overlooking in the mad crush of the last few days?

Reader Interactions

85Comments

  1. 1.

    Redshirt

    Wait, what? Del Toro is back on The Hobbit? Did I miss something? I thought he backed out and Jackson was going to direct again. Or did I dream all that?

    Also, can’t wait for this movie!

  3. 3.

    Violet

    Well, there’s the psyops story

    The U.S. Army illegally ordered a team of soldiers specializing in “psychological operations” to manipulate visiting American senators into providing more troops and funding for the war, Rolling Stone has learned – and when an officer tried to stop the operation, he was railroaded by military investigators.

    Apparently they’re going to investigate it now.

  5. 5.

    aimai

    I have mixed feelings about this. We just finished re-watching the entire Ring and though I thought lots of the choices that were made were unfortunate it was pretty gorgeous, and let the New Zealand landscape and the fine craftmanship of the various prop divisions speak for themselves. I’m not sure I want the Hobbit to be too cutesy and fantasmagorical. On the other hand? I’ll definitely go see it.

    aimai

  6. 6.

    Trentrunner

    Del Toro’s out (and has been for months).

    Jackson is back in (after labor strife and ulcer surgery).

    Shooting begins March 21.

  8. 8.

    Royston Vasey

    113 confirmed dead in Christchurch. This number will go up.

    75% of city back on power
    50% of city back on mains water

    Not only has this earthquake been terrifying and traumatising for the people of Canterbury, it has also affected our animals. They are scared too.

    Hundreds of people and their animals are affected and displaced by the earthquake. It is with this in mind, the SPCA Canterbury has set up the PET EMERGENCY EARTHQUAKE FUND to help people and animals in distress over the coming weeks.

    All donations from the PET EMERGENCY EARTHQUAKE FUND go towards the additional costs needed to support the health, welfare and care of the large numbers of affected animals in Canterbury.

    Tony in NZ

  9. 9.

    Mark S.

    Jackson had reconstructed the Battle of Mordor with the same exactitude as the Battle of Gallipoli.

    Did anyone else feel the movies started getting a little tiresome (and stupid) once the big battles started? I think the first one was by far the best movie because it didn’t consist mostly of CGI orcs getting slaughtered by the thousands. You felt more for the characters because they weren’t lost in all the mayhem.

  10. 10.

    Bob L

    “Smaug is an incredibly smart guy!”

    I might be wrong but I thought Smaug was based on Ayn Raynd?

  11. 11.

    Linkmeister

    @aimai: But it IS fantasmagorical. It’s a classic Quest story, but it’s not the Heroic variety. I love LOTR as an example of the latter, but The Hobbit is great in a different whimsical way.

  12. 12.

    Royston Vasey

    @Trentrunner: Agreed!
    Mr Jackson will be back directing The Hobbit as soon as he is fit and well.

    Was front page news here in NZ when he went into hospital.

    Del Toro has been off the movie for some time now.

    Tony in NZ

  13. 13.

    Redshirt

    @Mark S.: Totally. The big battles have become the weakest parts of the movies for me. They’re all the same: Super scary army of orcs threatens our beleaguered heroes, until at the last moment, something or someone arrives to turn the tide.

    I much prefer the smaller encounters, or no fighting at all.

  14. 14.

    Tom Hilton

    I also look forward to del Toro’s The Hobbit:

    Naga happen, as becomes clear later in the article.

    On the other hand, I am really hoping they greenlight At the Mountains of Madness. I think del Toro would be perfect for that.

  17. 17.

    jibeaux

    I don’t know anything about any of this, but I think William of the Bull is an awesome name and I want to know why we of the more boring Anglo-Saxon heritages can’t have cool names. I’m not counting things like Cooper Throckmorton IV as a cool name.

  18. 18.

    MikeJ

    I never made it all the way through the first movie. Last week when TCM showed the third one I managed to suffer through about 20 minutes.

    I really wish they’d find somebody else to direct. Not that I’ll camp out to see The Hobbit in either case, but I would give it a higher likelihood of being a good movie with someone else at the helm.

  19. 19.

    Violet

    Speaking of movies, the Oscars are this Sunday. I don’t think I’ve seen a single movie nominated for Best Film. I might have seen some of the ones nominated for other things.

  20. 20.

    R-Jud

    @Mark S.:

    Did anyone else feel the movies started getting a little tiresome (and stupid) once the big battles started?

    Yeah, I agree. They were pretty spectacular on the big screen, but as someone who re-reads LOTR most years, I was looking at my watch a lot, and wishing they’d stop beating me over the head with the music. Yes, I get it. Frodo and Sam climbing Mount Doom is important. Enough with the pan pipes.

    It was also pretty dumb for Jackson to not use Tolkien’s ending for the Two Towers– what a great goddamn cliffhanger. I remember finishing it for the first time late at night as a kid (“Frodo was alive, but taken by the enemy.”) and not being able to sleep or function the next day, because the third book was in my Mom’s room.

    I loved the first movie. It was a good adaptation: it used the most filmic bits, and it made them feel very Tolkien-y: a good mix of silly, creepy, and epic. I did wonder why the elves in Lothlorien were stoned all the time, though.

  21. 21.

    Amir_Khalid

    @Redshirt: Yeah, the studio (New Line, IIRC) postponed it again and again — they couldn’t line up the financing — until the shooting schedule began to conflict with work del Toro had lined up for after The Hobbit. Last anyone heard, Peter Jackson was in charge. But let’s hope that three years of del Toro’s preproduction work with Jackson will still be there on the screen.

  23. 23.

    Bob L

    @Royston Vasey: Hey, just found out the Lord of the Rings trilogy is an Libertarian epic next to Atlas Shrugs.

    The Volokh Conspiracy explains.

    Tolkien was not a libertarian. But he was extremely suspicious of government, an attitude reflected in The Lord Of the Rings and even more in some of his other works. There is a clear synergy between his view of state power and that held by most libertarians. The necessity of destroying the Ring of Power (as opposed to having it wielded by a benevolent ruler, as proposed by several characters at different points in the story) drives home the point. So too does the critique of socialism in “The Scouring of the Shire.”

    Isn’t it nice how fantasy books provide good models on how to run the real world?

  26. 26.

    Nemo_N

    Just saw on CNN “Boeing Wins $35 Billion Contract to Build Air Force Tankers”.

    The reporter was gushing about all the jobs this will create (with graphics and all). Wolf Blitzer congratulated Boeing.

    And guess what? Not one pip about “austerity” or “government spending”. I wonder why?

  28. 28.

    lou

    I thought the scrubbing bubbles of death in the last movie were a bit ridiculous, but I did love the Ride of the Rohirrim. (“Death!”) Tolkien’s description of this scene was thrilling and operatic and Jackson did a good job capturing it.

    The Hobbit is definitely different in tone than LOTR and I worry that Jackson will lose that tenor and make it too close to LOTR. The Hobbit was a wry children’s book that Tolkien wrote for his young children. LOTR was an adolescent’s action story he wrote later for them when they were in their teens.

  29. 29.

    JonathanW

    This is why you can’t trust Balloon Juice as a credible source.

    Maybe John Cole should see if one of The Atlantic’s poetry fact-checkers is free?

  30. 30.

    aimai

    @R-Jud:

    Yes, I agree with all of these criticisms. I really didn’t need to see the endless orc birth scenes, or the grotty battles. In order to put those in they had to cut out the various important, humanizing elements: Sam’s gift from galadriel and the scouring of the shire. I also really disliked the way certain scenes were ‘magicked’ up–like the premature dotage of King Theoden which is “magically” stripped away. In the book its a perfectly explicable case of political poisoning, not magical aging.

    aimai

  31. 31.

    Anne Laurie

    @Tom Hilton:

    What, no Lovecraft fans here? What is wrong with you people?

    With the Repubs we’ve got running amok, who needs a fictional version of “The Mountains of Madness”?

  33. 33.

    Sentient Puddle

    @Tom Hilton:

    On the other hand, I am really hoping they greenlight At the Mountains of Madness. I think del Toro would be perfect for that.

    When I first read that, I initially thought that there had been a movie made of that a while back. So I checked and…well, it seems you might get your wish.

  36. 36.

    cleek

    the worst part of the LOTR movies are the innumerable shots of Elijah Wood’s gigantic weepy eyes. the second worst part was the weepy chest-heaving bromance between Frodo and Sam. yes, they were close in the book, but i never got the impression that they were aching to fall into a deathless kiss.

  37. 37.

    R-Jud

    @aimai:

    the scouring of the shire

    I think of all the cuts made, that one would probably have angered Tolkien himself the most. It was a pretty direct comment about what had happened to Birmingham (and Britain generally) following WWI.

    Speaking of Birmingham– behind my local pub is a modest two-story house called Fern Cottage. It was the last place Tolkien lived before he was orphaned. I run in the Lickey Woods a lot, and look for Entwives.

  38. 38.

    trollhattan

    @trollhattan:

    BTW, as the tanker production is slated for unionized Everett, Wash, this is a fine “screw you” to the alternative of assembling the competing plane in Southern “right-to-work” states.

  39. 39.

    aimai

    @R-Jud:

    How very cool.

    Agreed, as well, on all the Frodo and Sam hate. Frodo should have been much older, and more staid and worn, not some ephebic weeper. And Sam should have been a skinny little fifteen year old, not a fat surfer dude with an accent. And he *never* should have called him anything but Mr. Frodo. Class issues are totally lost in the movie.

    Also, why can’t the elves hire some damned gardeners to sweep up the leaves? Its so untidy. Isn’t there any other way of hammering home the pathetic fallacy than eternal autumn?

    aimai

  42. 42.

    elmo

    @lou:

    “Horns, horns, horns. In dark Mindolluin’s sides they dimly echoed. Great horns of the North wildly blowing. Rohan had come at last.”

    One of my favorite passages, and typing it just now is giving me goosebumps. I can quote huge swaths of the book from memory.

  44. 44.

    Mark S.

    @aimai:

    And why does Elrond spend the will trilogy looking like he’s passing a kidney stone. Does Aragorn really want this guy for a father-in-law?

  45. 45.

    srv

    They’re remaking Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.

    I’d be upset about it, but the cast is stupendous.
    http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1340800/

    Colin Firth, Ciarán Hinds, Benedict Cumberbatch, and Gary f’ing Oldman as Smiley.

    Thankfully, Cowboy Bebop and GiTS live-actions look to be dying.

  48. 48.

    Mark S.

    @Mark S.:

    That should be “whole trilogy,” not “will trilogy.” Anytime those edit buttons can come back would be most welcome.

    Look! Lord of the Rings rings for sale up at the top!

  49. 49.

    Polar Bear Squares

    Favorite director. Devil’s Backbone and Pan’s Labyrinth were masterpieces.

    In the immortal words of Bart Scott … CAN’T WAIT!

  50. 50.

    elmo

    Okay, animal update since this is an Open Thread.

    We were supposed to take in a Pyr mom and pups two weeks ago for short-term fostering, but one of the pups is sick and they’ve all been quarantined for a while. In the meantime, though, we agreed to take in a Pyr/Newf mix who was found wandering lost in a snowstorm.

    He’s ten months old and weighs about 120 pounds. We’re calling him Leviathan (Levi for short).

    So then our local shelter, which is horrible, advertised that it had three Pyr mix babies, 6 weeks old, on their last day. Oh noes! Panic! Run down there and rescue the babies! So now they’re in my kitchen.

    But wait. They don’t have puppy breath; they are starting to cut adult teeth; and they are VERY coordinated. They’re not six weeks, they’re twelve to sixteen weeks, and that means they’re NOT PYR MIXES at that size. Oh well, it’s still a good save, and we’ll find them good homes.

    Also in the meantime, one of my goats gives birth to twins yesterday.

    So that brings us to today. And this ad.

    That amount of misery I can’t just ignore. So he’s coming home today too.

  60. 60.

    joe parallax

    The publishing event of 2011

    Deconstructing Obama: The Life, Loves, and Letters of America’s First Postmodern President by Jack Cashill

    Published by Threshold Editions, an imprint of Simon & Schuster. Mary Matalin is editor-in-chief of Threshold Editions

    Publisher’s blurb

    Did Obama write his own books and is the story they tell true? “I’ve written two books,” Barack Obama told a crowd of teachers in July of 2008. “I actually wrote them myself.” The teachers exploded in laughter. They got the joke: lesser politicians were not bright enough to do the same. During the 2008 presidential campaign, Obama supporters pointed to the first of those two books, the 1995 memoir, Dreams from My Father, as proof of Obama’s superior intellect. Time magazine called Dreams “the best-written memoir ever produced by an American politician.”… There was just one small flaw, as writer and literary detective Jack Cashill discovered months before the November 2008 election: nothing in Obama’s history suggested he was capable of writing either Dreams or his 2006 book, The Audacity of Hope. In fact, as Cashill continued his research, he came to the shocking conclusion that the real craftsman behind Dreams was terrorist emeritus Bill Ayers… Deconstructing Obama tells the story of what happens when a citizen journalist discovers a game-changing reality that the media refuse to acknowledge. Despite their rejection, Cashill expanded his research into Obama’s literary canon. As he came to see, if Dreams serves as sacred text, the poem “Pop” is the Rosetta stone, the key to deciphering Obama’s shrouded past, his fragile psyche, and his uniquely cryptic political life. In unlocking that past, Cashill discovered that the story that Obama has been telling all his life varies from the true story in ways big and small. In fact, much of Obama’s life story appears to be a wholly constructed fabrication, one that Jack Cashill “deconstructs” to show the world just who Barack Obama really is.

    h/t http://books.simonandschuster.com/Deconstructing-Obama/Jack-Cashill/9781451611113

  62. 62.

    Tonal Crow

    @R-Jud: I agree. They messed up the hobbits’ encounter with Faramir, which was much more convincing — and self-consistent — in the text. I mean, after the Ringwraith saw Frodo holding the Ring on that bridge, why weren’t all Nine of them in close pursuit ever after? Also, it was over the top to have Frodo ordering Sam to go home, and worse to have Sam obey. That just couldn’t happen.

    But then, I prefer well-told stories to ever-higher heaps of eye-candy.

  64. 64.

    joe parallax

    @joe parallax:

    Revision of previous post: Mary Matalin’s name no longer appears on Threshold Editions’ webpage. Nonetheless, shame on Simon and Schuster for getting in bed with the wingnuts.

  67. 67.

    Tonal Crow

    @Bob L: Volokh is wrong. The Ring was not to be destroyed because it gave the power of just government, it was to be destroyed because the (very great) power it conferred redounded to evil. LoTR had no problem with just government. Indeed, a central thread of the tale concerned the restoration of the Kings’ rule over Gondor and Arnor. And The Scouring of the Shire was all about hobbits restoring their own just self-rule in the Shire. Anyone who reads that as an allegory of dislike for sockialism idiotically equates brutal plutocratic autocracy (Sharkey’s rule) with sockialism. Sharkey was there to brutalize the hobbits for revenge, not to ensure that their (already pretty flat) society cared for its poor.

    As for Volokh’s allegorical reading generally, Tolkien strongly disclaimed allegorical content, and expressed dislike for the very concept of allegory, calling it “purposed domination of the [reader by the] author”.

  68. 68.

    Mark S.

    @Southern Beale:

    I read that earlier and found it kind of confusing. It isn’t clear if that tape still exists, but if it does, Roger could be in a little hot water. Of course, we’ve got to hedge our bets:

    Depending on the specifics, the conversation could possibly rise to the level of conspiring to lie to federal officials, a federal crime, but prosecutors rarely pursue such cases, said Daniel C. Richman, a Columbia University law professor and former federal prosecutor. “In the scheme of things there are other priorities, and these are not necessarily easy cases to make,” Mr. Richman said.

    I think they’re a lot easier to make if you have a tape.

  69. 69.

    Tonal Crow

    @Tom Hilton: Lovecraft fan here. I wouldn’t mind adding a subtle allegorical reference about climate change to At the Mountains of Madness. Ya know, Cthulhu’s been sleeping soundly for millenia in Antarctica’s deep cold. But now it’s not quite so cold anymore, and somehow a drop of water occasionally falls upon his/her/its head….

  70. 70.

    Citizen_X

    @Sentient Puddle: YYYEEEEESSSSSSSSSSSS!

    Seriously: del Toro doing Mountains of Madness? If I had a terminal illness (and I don’t), I would do everything possible just to make to the release of that. Then I could die happy.

    If Cameron was directing? Blech. But Cameron producing and del Toro directing? Pure awesome.

  71. 71.

    Herbal Infusion Bagger

    “It was also pretty dumb for Jackson to not use Tolkien’s ending for the Two Towers—what a great goddamn cliffhanger.”

    Dumb of him not to use the Scouring of the Shire also, missing a key point of Tolkein’s work, that there’s nothing untouched by evil on this world.

  72. 72.

    Citizen_X

    @srv:

    there’s a rumor Leonard Nimoy will be Smaug!

    Srsly? Then I am required, by the laws of Teh Internets, to post this.

    Once you watched that (or as much as you can stand–30 seconds?) then you can watch this–THE greatest thing on the internets…EVAR.

  75. 75.

    Origuy

    Can’t edit my post for some reason. Anyway, Gollum was about £3,000, but Born of Hope (Aragorn’s backstory) was more like £25,000.

  76. 76.

    befuggled

    @Tom Hilton: I’m too jaded and cynical to think any movie made from The Mountains of Madness will be any good. But (assuming it does get made) I’ll go see it and hope to be wrong.

  77. 77.

    jwb

    @Tonal Crow: Here’s Tolkien’s quote on allegory, which is a bit more complicated than a simple dismissal.

    I dislike Allegory – the conscious and intentional allegory – yet any attempt to explain the purport of myth or fairytale must use allegorical language…. Anyway all this stuff is mainly concerned with the Fall, Mortality, and the Machine. With Fall inevitably, and that motive occurs in several modes. With Mortality, especially as it affects art and the creative (or as I should say, sub-creative) desire which seems to have no biological function, and to be apart from the satisfactions of plain ordinary biological life, with which, in our world, it is indeed usually at strife. This desire is at once wedded to a passionate love of the real primary world, and hence filled with the sense of mortality, and yet unsatisfied by it. It has various opportunities of “Fall.” It may become possessive, clinging to the things made as its own, the sub-creator wishes to be the Lord and God of his private creation. He will rebel against the laws of the Creator – especially against mortality. Both of these (alone or together) will lead to the desire for Power, for making the will more quickly effective, – and so to the Machine (or Magic). By the last I intend all use of external plans or devices (or apparatus) instead of developments of the inherent inner powers or talents – or even the use of these talents with the corrupted motive of the dominating: bulldozing the real world, or coercing other wills. The Machine is our more obvious form though more closely related to Magic than is usually recognized.

  78. 78.

    S. cerevisiae

    Another Lovecraft fan here, looking forward to a big budget movie doing him justice but it won’t be easy. Hoping for the best – the Old Ones should be interesting

  79. 79.

    Uloborus

    Lovecraftwards:

    Del Toro is the only current director I know of who I’d put in charge of doing a Lovecraft movie. The man knows creepy imagery and he’s an excellent and restrained storyteller who does not automatically sugarcoat things. He might actually be able to take Lovecraft’s love affair with his monsters and make those monsters as scary as they were meant to be.

  80. 80.

    cleek

    @srv:
    good choice, at least visually. not sure i know his work.

    it was pretty wild seeing old Bilbo in The Aviator.

    Bilbo? i mean Ash, from Alien.

  81. 81.

    Tonal Crow

    @jwb: Na. That’s merely saying that one must perforce use the language of allegory (this from the story means that in the primary world) when interpreting myth, if one wishes to draw real-world lessons from it.

    I think the following discussion clarifies things. It’s about allegorical meanings some had claimed to have found in LoTR, and is from the Foreword to The Fellowship of the Ring, Ballantine Ed. 1965, :

    As for any inner meaning or ‘message’, [LoTR] has in the intention of the author none. It is neither allegorical nor topical…The real war [WW II] does not resemble the legendary war in its process or its conclusion….But I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done so since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence…. I think that many confuse ‘applicability’ with ‘allegory’; but the one resides in the freedom of the reader, and the other in the purposed domination of the author.

  83. 83.

    Tehanu

    Just watched the third movie again, and also just re-read the Mythopoeic Society’s collection of essays about Tolkien on film (see http://www.mythsoc.org/). I find I agree with their consensus view: visually the films are marvelous, and there are things as good as or better than the books (e.g., the Gate of Moria, the beacons of Gondor, the fight between Smeagol and Deagol). As far as the ideas/themes, though: a mess, and too many of the changes to make it “more dramatic” actually end up making it very different from Tolkien’s intention. Dropping the Scouring of the Shire is really the worst mistake. And yet I still cried when Sam came home and said, “Well, I’m back.” I guess I’m just grateful the movies are as good as they are.

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