The oppressive conditions of these militaristic states are underscored in Tolkien's final part of the trilogy, The Return of the King. Here Frodo learns that Sauron built the fearsome Tower of Cirith Ungol not for defensive purposes but in order to keep those under his power within the borders of Mordor. Any reader old enough to remember the great totalitarian regimes of the past century will recognize the allegorical dimension of Tolkien's work.
J.K. Rowling's vision of political and social evil is rather obscured in the first two Harry Potter films. But in the climactic scene of Rowling's first novel, in which Professor Quirrell reveals himself to be Harry's hidden enemy, the two-faced villain recites the creed of his master, Voldemort: "There is no good and evil, there is only power and those too weak to seek it." Voldemort's vulgar Nietzscheanism is a familiar moral nihilism that can never be entirely vanquished. As opposed to Harry, who represents the redeeming power of love, Quirrell has become, like Voldemort, "full of hatred, greed, and ambition." His amoral doctrine waits a new incarnation by means of which it can re-enter the world. Should Voldemort ever succeed, Hogwarts -- Harry's school of wizardry and witchcraft -- would become "a school for the Dark Arts." Rowling suggests that this evil has manifested itself fairly recently in the modern era: "Dumbledore is particularly famous for his defeat of the Dark wizard Grindelwald in 1945."
But if the ultimate institutionalization of the Dark Side is kept at bay in the Harry Potter films, lesser forms of badness trouble Harry's years at school. In particular, Harry, the quintessential scholarship boy, constantly struggles against the malign intentions of his upper-crust classmate Draco Malfoy. Given the historically contentious class politics of modern Britain, the threat that Malfoy exemplifies, class prejudice and snobbery, likely touches a raw nerve among Rowling's British readers in a way that their American counterparts do not fully appreciate. Nonetheless, the virulent and unjustified antipathy that Malfoy feels toward "riffraff" and "Mudbloods" (those of non-magical ancestry) clearly represents the defining ethos of the ancient Malfoy family, Professor Snape, and the residents of the most exclusive (and illustrious) house at Hogwarts: Slytherin. Not surprisingly, the evil forces of Voldemort are surreptitiously linked with the upper-crust students and teachers of Slytherin. Ron Weasley, Harry's close friend, reports that Draco Malfoy's distinguished father (a Slytherin alumnus) was among those great wizards who joined Voldemort during his first grab for power -- and that he needed little persuading to ally himself with the forces of evil.
One might say that the defining moment for Harry's future comes when he insistently asks not to be placed in Slytherin, despite his eligibility. In short, the great menace that haunts Hogwarts and indeed Britain itself is the old self-interested political, financial, and cultural elite that remains opposed to the new, more democratic heroism of Harry Potter.
If the Harry Potter series displays hostility toward conservatism and the traditional class hierarchies of England, its success nonetheless relies on recuperating many traditional features of English society for a more pluralistic, multi-ethnic, and egalitarian vision of the United Kingdom. The charm of these films relies not solely on the thrill of magic, but also on the appeal of the archaic and anachronistic. In a fundamental respect, the Potter stories are simply fanciful versions of a well-established and well-respected literary genre: the Bildungsroman or "novel of education" set at an elite public school or university (e.g., Tom Brown's Schooldays, Brideshead Revisited). Like the modern middle-class boy admitted on fellowship to an elite English educational institution, Harry must learn rituals, games, social protocols, and systems of knowledge that belong to the past.
To memorize ancient chants and spells is not so very different from learning the dead languages of Latin and Greek. To become a star "Seeker" at Quidditch is comparable to mastering schoolboy games such as Fives (played at Eton) or taking up a traditional pastime of the English social elite -- cricket. The remote and bucolic location, immense wealth, privileged social standing, quaint academic dress, architectural grandeur, and ancient historical stature of Hogwarts all bespeak a rootedness in the English past. To enter Hogwarts is to travel back in time.
Indeed, before he passes through its ancient doors, Harry must buy his school supplies -- a wand, an owl, books of magical lore -- in Diagon Alley, a secret shopping district at the heart of present-day London that is a visual compendium of medieval, Renaissance, and Victorian England. The persistence of such places and institutions as Diagon Alley and Hogwarts in a contemporary Britain dominated by the spirit and customs of ordinary Muggles (as normal humans are called) is more truly magical than any spell cast at Hogwarts.
Of course, Harry's school does not represent a simple return to the moral values of the English past. Rowling carefully introduces crucial features of modern liberal Britain. The student body at Hogwarts is notably heterogeneous: Its houses hold a conspicuous mix of black, South Asian, Celtic, and Anglo-Saxon students. Girls are fully the equals of boys, as students, faculty, and Quidditch players. Most important, those who attend the prestigious school are drawn from rich and poor, privileged and obscure, urban and rural backgrounds. All accents are spoken at Hogwarts. If class conflict still lurks behind the institution's attractive face, the school also exemplifies the progressive spirit of the new multi-ethnic, feminist, democratic, postimperial, and communitarian U.K. The education of Harry Potter represents a magical attempt to wed the best of traditional English culture with Britain's most progressive social values.
Because Star Wars reflects an American rather than British worldview, it draws on a briefer national history. Luke Skywalker's status as a provincial farmboy making his way in the galaxy evokes a distinctively American nostalgia for the small towns and rural communities of the recent past. By visually evoking the American western -- the dusty barren landscape of the planet Tatooine on which Luke's aunt and uncle make their home, the image of the burned-out homestead and the bodies of massacred settlers -- Lucas manages to establish his hero as a representative of the American frontier. More generally, the aw-shucks demeanor of Luke and Han, their love of futuristic hot rods, their do-it-yourself Yankee ingenuity, and their go-it-alone determination are meant to summon up the virtues of a simpler, pre-urbanized, pre-corporate, decentralized, and more virtuous American era. Victory over the Empire depends crucially on the virtues and skills of Yankee farmers, frontiersmen, and commercial traders. (Han is the exemplary unregulated, freewheeling, independent trader cum smuggler).
Meanwhile, as in the Harry Potter series, the virtues of the American past are slyly blended with a forward-looking and progressive sense of the new American century. The conflict between frontiersman and aboriginal, between white and black, between the "native" American citizen and the ethnic immigrant are largely effaced. (A few residual traces persist -- the Jawas of Tatooine, for example, are troublesome nomadic desert scavengers, though not a serious threat to civilized existence.) In Lucas' future there exists amity and equality between white man and Wookie (Chewy is more of a full partner than Tonto to Han's Lone Ranger), between whites (Han, Luke, Obi-Wan) and blacks (Lando Calrissian and Mace Windu), between men and women (Princess Leia, Queen Padmé Amidala).
The irregular rebel army is the racially and sexually integrated volunteer force of the post-Vietnam era. Even the deeply fraught relations of master and slave are reinvented as the amicable relationship between a young man and his favorite androids. The most heterogeneous clientele gathered from the farthest reaches of the galaxy drink together in the same wayside cantina, and a rich interplanetary mix of ethnicities, races, and genders are conspicuously represented in the Republican Senate. Lest this multi-ethnic, gender-neutral future seem to lack ancient traditions or theological grounding, the Jedi are there to represent a deep wisdom -- part Eastern mysticism, part Rosicrucianism, part traditional Protestantism, and wholly New Age. The American past, it seems, is to be the progenitor of the New American Millennium.
Of the three series, The Lord of the Rings represents the most conservative and critical assessment of modernity. Where both Harry Potter and Star Wars project a youthful optimism about the future, The Lord of the Rings exhibits a more deeply nostalgic and elegiac attitude toward the past.
To be sure, the forces of Saruman and Sauron are ultimately defeated by the unified efforts of "the four, the free peoples" -- elves, dwarves, Ents (giant, peripatetic, talking trees), and men, to which we must add the fifth free people, the hobbits of the Shire. Aragorn is triumphantly crowned King Elessar and united in marriage to the elfin Lady Arwen. Yet any reader of Tolkien's novels or viewer of Jackson's films recognizes the tragic dimension of these works.
Bilbo is tormented until his dying day by the memory of the Ring. Frodo never fully recovers from the wound he suffers from the blade of the Ringwraiths, nor the one Gollum inflicts on him at Mount Doom. Boromir dies repenting his betrayal of the Ring bearer. The Shire does not escape the dreadful consequences of the War of the Ring: Before Frodo and Sam return home, Saruman brutally exploits and tyrannizes the Shire. And the longed-for destruction of the Ring of Power marks the end of Elvish civilization in Middle Earth (as Tolkien's world is called). Of the Elvish peoples only Arwen, who chooses a mortal life, will remain. The others, along with Frodo, are borne by ship "into the West."
The tragic and elegiac dimensions of The Lord of the Rings only heighten the appeal of traditional and premodern ways of life. Making spectacular use of the varied natural scenery of his native New Zealand, Jackson has succeeded in conveying a vision of preindustrial existence that is immensely appealing. The unsullied beauty of the country's mountains and lakes provides an inspiring backdrop for the simple village life of the Shire. The realms of the elves are fully integrated into their wondrous natural settings, while their architecture, furnishings, and clothing are based on organic forms; it is impossible at times to distinguish those things crafted by the elves from the natural shapes that flourish in their old forests and mountainous river valleys. Having spent much of his youth in and around the urban blight of Birmingham, one of England's first great industrial cities, Tolkien anticipated in his fiction many contemporary ecological concerns. Treebeard -- leader of the Ents -- speaks for Tolkien when he says Gandalf is "the only wizard that really cares about trees." With few exceptions, the free peoples of Middle Earth are distinguished by their willingness to integrate themselves into the natural world and not to disrupt or destroy it.
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