One of these days I'll get around to Epispde II of my Tolkien piece. After having considered and dismissed Tolkien's efforts as a poet, translator, storyteller, and student of human nature, there is still one beast left unslain: that Tolkien had a gift for imagination, and that his work represents a great acheivement of the imagination.

The reasons why that is not the case are already spelled out for me in Poe's scathing attack on Drake's Tolkienesqe fantasy, The Culprit Fay. You have to get past the lengthy introductory bit where Poe defends his publication against its critics (fun in itself) before you get to the Drake part.

Then he spells it all out. Drake is following Spenser's Faerie Queen, but he fails, because, well, because he's like Tolkien. All narrative and mechanics, no character. And most importantly, he sets up a set of conditions or rules that must hold in his fantasy world, and then proceeds to simply follow them to their necessary conclusion. So because Fay is a fairy one inch tall, his lance is a bee sting. His cloak is of butterfly wings. Get it? You will, after the 200th of these cute little bits of "imagination".

My favorite part is when Poe parodies this endless rule-following construction of an alternate reality, showing how easy it is to tediously fill in the details once you have set some initial condition.

Is it any wonder geeks like this kind of stuff?

You imagine some planet inhabited by cat-men, and then proceed to mechanically map each familiar thing in this world to the "exotic" "imaginative" cat world. Red Dwarf does an excellent send up of the cat thing, by the way.

Anyway, there is nothing imaginative in doing what Tolkien did. Tolkien is the equivalent of a guy who built a really huge model railroad. It is amazing that anyone could stick to a mindless task for so long, to take it to such an extreme, but when you realize how easy it is to fill in the details of Hobbit or Elf life once you have decided what the initial rules are, you realize that Tolkien has been fooling his fans into thinking how clever he is. This same failure of creativity is what dragged Monsters, Inc. down. Boring characters and the alternate reality was just what anyone would have come up with given the intitial premise. They should have surprised us. How?

Well, in The Nightmare Before Christmas, the same method sets up the basics. It is the Halloween world, so everthing there is scary, everyone is some kind of monster, etc. Jack Skellington's dog is a ghost. Ha. But then, it is constantly getting twisted, surprising you. Like the vampire band. Where did that come from? Or the dominant plot element of Jack wishing to enact Christmas himself. Or the love theme. Like the way the "evil" doctor turns out to have simply been seeking his own soul mate. The evil child trick or treaters aren't quite what you would have thought of. Disney or Pixar would have made them sweet and good, as is the obvious thing.

What makes it creative is that it takes what you would expect -- a Halloween world -- and then starts throwing you little curves, and some big curves.

Consider how closely all of Tolkien's various "exotic" cultures and races match his familiar Europe -- in fact he doesn't really leave England in his search for models for his peoples. Maybe I should be thankful for his narrowness: seeing Star Trek's wanky bastardization of Japanese samurai culture for their highly predictable Klingon race always made me cringe. How creative.

This isn't a complete argument on the subject. I told you not to read this, didn't I? Go back and read Poe's article, and then you'll know what I mean.

I had some good stuff to say about Moulin Rouge and The Queen of the Damned too, but I have busy adult work stuff to do so I can't play all day. I will say that The Queen's big problem was that it wasted half the film on exposition, on the mistaken assumption that all the rules and details were critical to the work. That just keeps the fucking geeks happy. They would bitch if we didn't get a full explanation of who Marius is and what Rice's vampire rules are. Blah blah blah. Should have given the symbols and the visuals more screen time and let those who cared so much about mechanics go read the book.

Which is why Moulin Rouge is so vastly superior. Doesn't try to explain or justify every last thing; it just throws it all at you and lets your subconscious put the meaning together.

I bet the anoraks hated that movie, didn't they?