Christine Kelley

About Christine Kelley

Christine Kelley writes about speculative fiction and radical politics from a queer revolutionary perspective. Currently her main project is Nowhere and Back Again, a psychogeography of J. R. R. Tolkien's Middle-earth. Her first project was the now semi-retired blog Dreams of Orgonon, a song-by-song study of Kate Bush.Support Christine on Patreon.

Posts by Christine Kelley:

May 5, 2023

Daisies (An American’s Guide to Czech Movies)

Christine KelleyAn American's Guide to Czech Movies, Czech New Wave, Daisies, Vera Chytilova1

Věra Chytilová’s Daisies defies questions like “what the fuck is this?” It is simply unlike anything else in world cinema. I’ve watched films from every continent on the planet and cannot think of a single movie that compares to Daisies. It’s anarchic, ebullient and ruthlessly itself. In an era of petulantly formalist films, its blend of medium-breaking collages, jump-cuts and percussionist staccato soundtrack stands alone as a crowning achievement of drastic bizarreness.

Yet this hour-and-16-minute chronicle of two women wreaking havoc in Prague is, in its own way, profoundly accessible and grounded. Yes, this is a film that starts with a montage of naval warfare, followed by two girls, Marie I and Marie II, declaring that “if the world is bad, then we are going bad as well.” It’s a cry against the ugliness of war. Yet it’s ultimately about the tumultuous journey of two girls failing to understand adulthood in a world that expects them to achieve it off the bat, a fact bolstered by its lack of professional actors in its lead roles. And like The Firemen’s Ball, it broadly relies on non-professional actors (its leads are played by a schoolgirl and a shop clerk).

More than many Czech New Wave films, Daisies benefits from the viewer knowing a spot of Czech. My Czech is far from proficient, but its simple dialogue, which replicates the speech patterns and worldview of children, was often clear to me even before I read the subtitles. But more importantly, there’s wordplay in the film that’s easily missed in English. In Czech, Ivana Karbanová’s line “I am a virgin” is “já jsem panna”, ending with a noun that can mean “virgin” or “doll.” The duo’s catchphrase, where one says “vadí?”, to which the other replies “nevadí”, meaning “do you care?” And “I don’t care” refers to a Czech children’s game. “Daisies is fundamentally childlike: a film that plays with adult ideas in adolescent terms.

“We are going bad as well” is an adolescent declaration of war against a disorienting world. The world is burning, so let’s burn it more. And the film follows suit: aesthetically, Daisies operates like the play-acting young girls it follows. It plays with the medium of film, mixing analogue effects, strange montages and color grading. When the Maries are home in their apartment, the film adopts color, portraying the girls’ world as vibrant and lively. When the Maries take on false identities to troll lonely older men over dinner, Daisies often switches to sepia or black-and-white, turning into a Buster Keatonesque comedy of manners. Just take the scene where the Maries run with an old man towards a train, hopping on board it, and then trade places with the old man. It feels like something out of The General or Modern Times. And that’s before we get to the Maries deploying a Burroughsian cut-up technique to each other, where they use scissors to cut each other apart, while their animated body parts occupy a different part of the frame, before the film devolves into a flashy montage of percussionist snipping set to bits of the frame clashing against each other.…

April 28, 2023

The Firemen’s Ball (An American’s Guide to Czech Movies)

Christine KelleyAmadeus, An American's Guide to Czech Movies, Czech New Wave, Miloš Forman, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, The Firemen's Ball1

Miloš Forman is best known in the Anglophone world for his crowd-pleasing (if delightfully truculent) blockbusters One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Amadeus. Both relate the life stories of iconoclastic eccentrics who burn like a barn fire, disrupting the higher powers, and then die in obscurity. Neither film exactly suggests that Forman was a politically dissident Czech Jewish child of Holocaust victims and whose initial films were banned by the Soviet authorities in Czechoslovakia before he resettled in the United States to become a filmmaker.

Yet this is the key to Forman’s anarchic spirit. His American studio films reflect his impish proclivities and emigration from an authoritarian government. Nobody sells outsider artists quite like Forman does. Yet his most countercultural and rebellious work hails from the first part of his career, when he was a pioneer of the Czechoslovak New Wave of filmmaking, a movement where Czechs and Slovaks used the medium of film to flip the bird at the Kremlin.

In the days before the Prague Spring, when the Czechoslovakians faced the possibility of democratic reforms, and the days following the Warsaw Pact invasion of the country, which quelled those hopes, some filmmakers pioneered a mode of filmmaking that viciously but furtively blasted the structure of Soviet authority. When the Czechs and Slovaks fell behind the Iron Curtain, those modes became stronger than ever.

So Miloš Forman’s The Firemen’s Ball is different from Cuckoo’s Nest or Amadeus. It lacks a countercultural protagonist with reckless countercultural tendencies hat results in his early death. Indeed, The Firemen’s Ball doesn’t have a protagonist, instead depicting a cast of Bohemian firemen driving to host a ball which their bureaucratic whims repeatedly thwart. They’re not exactly the kind of frigid authoritarians who’d be villains in Forman’s later work. The firemen — many of whom are played by real Czech firemen with no acting experience — are incompetent rather than malicious, attempting to honor their chairman who, unknown to him because of Soviet medical policy, has cancer. Yet instead of centering the ball around him, they try to protect a series of prizes which are stolen from them. At the start of the film, two firemen argue over whether to hold a latter in place while a man at the top of the ladder accidentally sets a banner on fire. This is revisited later in the film when the firemen are too late to save an old man’s house from burning down because they’re trying to save his prizes. These aren’t cartoon villains — they’re a much worse threat: bureaucratic oafs whose fixation on micromanaging non-issues in an extremely small space fucks everything up.

It’s hard to fathom why the Soviet Union had a problem with a film about incompetent bureaucrats failing to feed civilians. Yet after the Warsaw Powers invaded Czechoslovakia in 1968, Soviet authorities banned the film forever, which is difficult to fathom when a crucial moment features a panicked old man throwing a stolen ham onto a table and then fainting in front of a crowd.…

April 21, 2023

An American’s guide to Czech literature & film

Christine KelleyCzech cinema, Czech literature, Milan Kundera6

I’ve spent the past several months researching my genealogy, primarily focusing on my Czech ancestry. To say it’s been an ordeal would be an understatement — Czech-Americans don’t have WASP’s advantage of having their history accessibly documented (though they have a better shot at it than Black and Indigenous people in this country). To piece together my family history, I’ve read hundreds of pages of records, written more notes than I can hope to organize, and started to learning Czech, a language so complex that even other Slavic dialects want it to calm down.

While that may sound like an arduous exercise in self-torment, it’s been one of the most fulfilling experiences of my life. All of my recent writing has been shaped by my genealogy research in some way. Most notably, I wrote about it for The Statesman, Stony Brook University’s undergrad newspaper for which I am Opinions Editor, using Castle Garden in the Battery to discuss my second great-grandmother’s immigration journey. But there’s potentially hundreds of pages worth of material in my research, similarly to how Jack Graham made a whole Austrian economics beat out of his Neoreaction a Basilisk contributions. Eventually I plan to turn this project into a book (and you should really back my Patreon so I can eventually afford a research trip to the Czech Republic).

One of the byproducts of this research has been absorbing a ghastly amount of Czech cultural history. Consider this a holistic genealogist agency where unpacking a family history requires dissecting the world around it. Since many of my ancestors were farmers in rural South Bohemia, I’ve learned more Czech history than biographical details of Grandma Stazi’s life. This whole project is an absurd transatlantic psychogeography which I have no hope of selling to a general audience, and it’s my favorite thing I’ve ever done.

So while I prepare to write my eventual weird genealogy book, I figured I should turn my research to good use (i.e. monetization). One of the great joys of Czechophilia is the breadth of extraordinary Czech art. The cultural output of the Czech lands is often surrealist and detached in character, reflecting a culture fragmented by everyone from the Nazis to the U.S.S.R. It’s haunted, playful, creepy, and some of my favorite art in the world — perfect for an essay series with a vague sense of thematic unification.

For now, I’ll be focusing on Czech literature and cinema. Both have enough major works that I can paint a general picture without overwhelming myself. I don’t know how many entries this series will have — it probably depends on how much my readers like it. Most likely, I’ll be hewing to one book per author, hoping to represent distinct moments in Czech history.

Part of this is the relative underrepresentation of Czech literature in the literary canon. Franz Kafka is one of the only major Czech writers who readers already know, so I’m somewhat (if not entirely) disinclined to include him in this series (that and Kafka’s works being in German gives them a flavor distinct from some of these other writers).…

March 31, 2023

Trans visibility at Ezra Furman’s Brooklyn concert

Christine KelleyBrooklyn, Concert, Ezra Furman, Trans Day of Visibility, Transangelic Exodus0

Williamsburg is a hodge-podge of different eras in Brooklyn’s history. Its upscale apartments reflect post-2005 gentrification. Its bodegas and food joints evoke the era when new Italian immigrants and Mafia soldiers lived in the neighborhood. And its queer artsiness is still highly visible.

When I arrived at the Music Hall of Williamsburg on Thursday, March 23rd, I fell into line with a bunch of flamboyant queers. One of the first people in line was a trans woman. Plenty of folks were wearing leather. One gal was talking loudly about her girlfriend. This was definitely a Williamsburg crowd.

Equally, it was an Ezra Furman crowd. I first discovered Jewish trans singer-songwriter Furman a few years ago when a friend showed me Transangelic Exodus, Furman’s concept album about a queer person and their guardian angel fleeing an authoritarian government. Clearly this was extremely my shit, and I fell in love with the album, but for the longest time I failed to hear Furman’s other stuff (a mistake I still hadn’t rectified when I got to Williamsburg).

I wasn’t in the best of moods that night. It wasn’t the first time I’d been to Williamsburg while mourning a turn of events — that neighborhood has some weird associations for me. It’s not my favorite part of Brooklyn, which is probably BedStuy, nor is it my least favorite (Bushwick exists). But it was familiar enough to be comforting.

Lately I’ve been in an emotional downturn. I’ve felt isolated and abandoned in my personal life. My country is slowly orchestrating a legislative genocide against me. And I don’t belong where I am. It’s hard to be visible. Most of the time I feel invisible. Feeling seen when you’re dissociated and grieving feels as paradoxical as feeling loved as a trans person in America.

Yet that night I felt love in Williamsburg. This was a crowd I belonged to — queer and decadent. The support act, Jeffrey Lewis, wasn’t quite my scene, but he wasn’t unhelpful. But when Furman herself came onstage, I felt like I was watching a trans priestess administer a ritual to heal every person in the room.

Furman, an up-and-coming Rabbi, is profoundly spiritual not just in her writing but in her performing style. The way she strives around onstage feels like nothing short of prayer — a cry to Adonai for help, yet a call of surrender. The way she lovingly caressed amplifiers is a kind of musical tenderness I’ve never seen onstage.

It was healing. It was thrilling. By the end of the night my ear drums were busted but it was worth it. When Furman broke into her classic glam hit “Suck the Blood from My Wound,” I hopped up and released an adolescent scream which I hadn’t heard from myself in about 15 years. One of the venue employees seemed both alarmed and charmed by my display.

More than a week later, I feel invisible again. But for just one night, I belonged to a community. A great trans Rabbi, Ezra Furman, helped me find God in my gender for just one night.…

March 17, 2023

“Such terrible, terrible joy”: the anti-fascism of Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio

Christine KelleyCarlo Collodi, fascism, Guillermo del Toro, Italian, Italy, Oscars, Pinocchio1

Originally posted to my Patreon on December 17, 2022. Now that the movie has an Oscar, this seems like an appropriate time to post it. Please back my Patreon to support my work.

My nonna was born in Vicenza, about 40 miles west of Venice, in what seemed to be the dying days of Italian Fascism. She was one year old when the Allies bombed Vicenza, targeting strategic locations but killing around a thousand civilians. My nonna’s brother rescued her from the rubble of their bombed house. He was a toddler at the time.

In the early 1960s, my nonna, a woman of 20, left Italy with her two young sons. When she arrived in the United States, she spoke hardly a word of English, raising her boys alone while her husband (a Green Beret of the U.S. Army) slept with every woman under the son. The marriage didn’t last — Nonna married an Air Force officer some years later, trading in her family name Salvarese for Kelley.

As a third generation American, my connection to my Italian family history was mediated through family anecdotes and media. Disney’s Pinocchio was probably the first vaguely Italian movie I saw. The still abjectly frightening scene where the boys on Pleasure Island transform into donkeys might be my earliest life memory, a fact which probably explains a lot about me. While the 1940 movie largely glides around its source material’s basis in Italian culture (no small part, the donkey scene preserves a key part of Carlo Collodi’s tremendously disturbing book in which Pinocchio murders the Cricket who has lived in his house for 100 years. The Italian words for donkey — asino, somaro, ciuco — are polysemous, referring not merely to animals but to lazy students and — paradoxically — people who work themselves to death, with the underlying understanding that poverty sucks, but that hard work and school are ways to avoid it.

While Disney avoided explicitly referring to Italy in the Mussolini era, Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio embraces its source material’s Italian heritage in the age of Giorgia Melloni. It’s an explicitly Italian film, with characters shouting “arrivederci” and having names like Spazzaturra (which means “trash”). It’s also unequivocally anti-fascist, as del Toro always is, trotting out Fascist nightmares as the death of family and wonder. Mussolini even gets a cameo, voiced by none other than Tom fucking Kenny.

Yet despite its independence from previous Pinocchios, the del Toro film is keenly aware of its debts to the Disney film. It’s a musical, its setting in Fascist Italy is a nod to when the original film was produced, and Ewan MacGregor’s Sebastian J. Cricket (a perfect boy for whom I will die) serves as a narrator like Jimmy Cricket. Del Toro looks at Disney’s template, plucks bits from it, and goes “OK, I’m going to plug my own anti-fascist weirdness into this.”

Del Toro’s anti-fascism is unique to this Pinocchio. Le avventure di Pinocchio predated Mussolini’s rise to power, while the original Disney film elided the issue altogether.…

March 3, 2023

“A good way to hear God laugh” (David Milch, Deadwood, and Saint Paul)

Christine KelleyAl Swearengen, Alzheimer's, Autobiography, book review, christianity, Community, David Milch, Deadwood, Doc Cochran, Elizabeth Milch, Forgiveness, God, Life's Work, Life's Work: A Memoir, memoir, Reverend Smith, St Paul, Universal salvation, Universalism0

“I believe one way God says, “I too have a hand here” is in the rhythms and metrics of speech,” writes David Milch, the author of television’s most profane iambic pentameter, in Life’s Work: A Memoir. “[…] The metrics of speech are important and representative of our fellowship even in those of us who feel, mistakenly, that we are separate from each other as individuals.”

That paragraph could well be the perfect synopsis of Milch’s career; fitting enough, as Life’s Work is a self-knowing epilogue — also effectively a last will and testament — to Milch’s corpus. Milch and his family assembled the book through years of dictation by amanuensis as Milch’s Alzheimers has sent him into a decline. Considering that slow process, Life’s Work is stunningly cogent — possibly one of the best I’ve ever read — comparable only to something like Blackstar in its powerful finality.

In essence, Life’s Work is a prayer — like all art is, particularly Milch’s. “Every day, before I write, I pray, and I ask to be willing, and then I see what happens. “I offer myself to Thee to build with me and do with me as Thou wilt. Relieve me of the bondage of self, that I may better do Thy will.” (This is a practice I have started to borrow from Milch — although for him it’s an AA method, whereas I have the curse of alcohol intolerance which prevents me from downing whiskey over a typewriter.) Writing starts with an act of contrition — with utter humility. Art comes from forgiveness.

One gets the impression Milch’s work is fundamentally based in dialogue, not only with God, but with other people (although frankly, that’s not a distinction which has any meaning). Certain truths percolate through the encephalic plaque that accompanies Alzheimers.

“When I look at my grandchildren or I hold them, I can feel that it’s only my individual strength that is subsiding. The strength in the family, in the species, and in the whole beating heart of the universe hasn’t subsided at all.”

Milch’s dedication to the idea of humanity as one contiguous organism comes through even as he gives the impression of being a single-minded solipsist whose drug-and-booze-addled decision-making leads him to do things like sign off part of his ownership in a network TV show to his Vicodin dealer. Or when Milch, as a Yale student, tripping balls on acid, blows out street lights and a police car siren with a shotgun (he then told the cops “I’ll confess when your badge stops melting”). Milch’s account of his addictions, including a gambling penchant which cost his family their financial security, evince a clear sign of an urgent need to fulfill his own desires. His devotion to universalist community is genuine, but it’s clearly tied to his need for gratification.

To call Milch a monomaniac would be problematic given his diagnosed OCD (and learn harder into diagnosis than I’m remotely interested in doing) and yet it’s not exactly wrong.…

January 31, 2023

“I never set my suitcase down”: Margo Price, country music, and the triumph of struggle

Christine KelleyAutobiography, Country music, Jeremy Ivy, Margo Price, Music memoir, Outlaw country0

Screen-Shot-2023-01-08-at-2.18.48-PM-Large

CW: Infant death, reference to eating disorder

Music memoirs face biographies’ usual problem of being tasked with turning the inherently chaotic narrative of a person’s life into a coherent novel-shaped story. Sometimes artists innovate in the space — Bob Dylan’s hilariously titled Chronicles Vol. 1 is notoriously 75% delightful bullshit. More often though, artists will spin an narcissistic mythology about themselves, reveling in the glories and pitfalls of stardom (which more often than not are the same thing).

Alternative country and rock singer-songwriter Margo Price is uniquely situated to dodge the music memoir’s trademark solipsism. Price’s brand of hippie-cum-psychedelic folkie demarcates her from any particular subculture. She comes out of the Nashville country music scene, but she has more in common with singer-songwriters who are external to mainstream country, such as Sturgill Simpson or Brandi Carlile, than Hot Country Songs blights like Florida-Georgia Line or Luke Combs. Price is by no means obscure — her first album landed her on Saturday Night Live, and she’s covered Cardi B’s “WAP” for The Daily Show. But Price’s brand of rollicking ballads about struggling to get by and alcoholic depression evince a working-class solidarity and folkie pride that don’t get much air time in commercial country.

Price’s memoir Maybe We’ll MakeIt counteracts the narcissism of memoirs by showing just how hard-won her career is. The book tracks her losses, disappointments and tragedies in grueling detail yet with engrossing depth. Price’s childhood in rural Illinois is marked by an eating disorder and her Midwest family losing their farm. In early adulthood, she drops out of college, hits the road, and spends several impoverished years in Nashville hovels. By the time Price’s beloved dog has died and her apartment has been flooded with sewage, it almost seems like maybe part of Maybe We’ll Make It defines it. If one can ding the book for anything, it’s that Price’s listing of her various disappointments becomes almost repetitive. Which isn’t a terrible problem to have: plenty of strong albums have extraneous songs. And Price, who adamantly refrains from utilizing a ghost writer, writes astonishing prose. The book’s prologue reads like classic rural literature: “I watched the bloodred Midwest sun as it set past the crooked tree line at the edge of our property.” The book feels like Price’s songs sound: the tales and reflections of a traveling balladeer who’s seen a little too much and needs to write it all down.

The most heart-rending and upsetting part of Maybe We’ll Make It constitutes Price’s loss of her infant child Ezra, with a gut-punch where a doctor tells her “technically he’s still alive.” It’s a story about the endless process of building one’s life while incessantly falling short of outright success, a rebuke to the standard mythology of making it big at just the right moment. Ethan Hawke has spoken about how obscure country singer Blaze Foley makes strong biopic material because he never got a big break. Price shows that failure is often more instructive than success, resulting in an at times extraordinarily upsetting but profoundly moving piece of autobiography. …

January 10, 2023

Glass Onion Review

Christine KelleyBenoit Blanc, daniel craig, Glass Onion, Knives Out, Murder mystery, Rian Johnson, whodunnit1

Well, this is a fucker. A gleeful puzzle whose joys come from intricate and pervasive surprises. A review of this movie, like any good mystery, has to duck and weave around the truth without bringing it into plain view. In short, it’s a dream for a slightly burned out media critic with a deep love for detective fiction.

Glass Onion comfortably settles into the “continuation-but-not-a-sequel” mode of detective series by dint of being broadly incomparable to Knives Out. It deploys some of the same structural tricks — the “here’s what you saw, and now here’s the other side of it” technique that defines Knives Out is on full display. But Glass Onion takes it much further, adopting an almost movie-within-a-movie approach, showing the bulk of the action, cutting away for a tremendously long time, and letting the story unfold in completely different directions.

Remarkably, it navigates between the plot threads without losing momentum. Like Knives Out, Glass Onion plays out as half-mystery/half-thriller, using a Columbo-style opening act to establish some of the murders and then delving into Benoit Blanc’s investigation. The film weaves deftly its whodunnit and suspense plots, using the question “but how did we get here?” to generate dramatic tension. Janelle Monáe’s character (an instance of Rian Johnson understanding perfectly how to use a character) provides much of the suspense, indulging the pleasures of a flawed enigmatic character and asking “but how does this set of actions gel with what we know here?”

The title Glass Onion is of course ostentatiously fitting here. By naming itself after John Lennon’s masterpiece of obscurantist trolling, the movie loudly telegraphs its own structural complexity, but also gives itself a vibrant central image. The Glass Onion of Edward Norton’s tech billionaire Miles Bron (who, to the movie’s credit, never gets depicted as not a vicious asshole) is a striking emblem at the heart of the film: a location, an in-joke, and a metaphor all at once. It’s extremely on the nose, and absolutely perfect.

The use of a Beatles song from the sprawling, willfully messy White Album is equally fitting. Knives Out was Seventies to its core, with half of its central cast named after Boomer rock stars (Joni? Richard? Linda?), and a cinematographic style closer to Murder by Death or Clue than a late 2010s thriller. But while Knives Out’s brown Massachusetts palette went with an earthier soundtrack, Glass Onion is more ostentatious and glam, befitting its globe-trotting Aegean locale — two songs from Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars pop up here. The entire budget is on the screen, with a truly spectacular roster of needle drops, SFX work, and cameos (Angela Lansbury and Stephen Sondheim shook me up). Glass Onion is directed by a post-Last Jedi Rian Johnson, one who can make whatever he wants without deferring to a corporate IP. And it’s utterly refreshing.

Yet the spectacle is belied by how quirky and strange the whole movie is. Mystery fans will recognize the obvious hat tips to The Last of Sheila — a bizarre Seventies mystery film where an eccentric rich man invites and blackmails a cadre of celebrities to his yacht in the Mediterranean to have them play a series of murder games.…

October 7, 2022

Mirkwood: Taur-nu-Fuin

Christine KelleyNowhere and Back AgainBook II, Mirkwood, Nowhere and Back Again0

• Name: Taur-nu-Fuin (Sindarin: forest under night), Deldúwath (Sindarin: deadly nightshade) / Dorthonion (Sindarin: land of pine trees)

• Description: An expansive forest in southern Dorthonion. Dorthonion, a forest region in Beleriand, sees crucial action in the First Age. Like the rest of Beleriand, it is wiped away.

This picture has lived multiple lives. In this form, it’s called “Beleg finds Gwindor in Taur-nu-Fuin,” illustrating an episode from The Silmarillion where Beleg the Sinda discovers Gwindor, an elf prince, who escaped a 14-year imprisonment by Morgoth and his orcs, now “spent and bewildered in the mazes of Taur-nu-Fuin.”[1] It’s one of Tolkien’s relatively few portraits of a narrative event, and a grim one at that. Shortly afterwards, Beleg is inadvertently killed “at the hand of him whom he most loved,” his closest friend Túrin, another survivor of orc captivity, “thinking him a foe.”

Yet this depiction of a heroic final act is one of Tolkien’s most colorful and distinctive portraits. The watercolors’ menagerie of brown and green and blue make Taur-nu-Fuin a disorienting, psychedelic landscape. The forest that kills Beleg won’t stay put.

Tolkien reused the picture to depict Mirkwood for The Hobbit. Taur-nu-Fuin’s colors are gone, and it has fewer trees, but it’s unmistakably the template for this new drawing. The trees, some plants and mushrooms, and survived longer than Beleg. (Tolkien also tried to reuse the picture as Fangorn in a couple calendars, but we’re calling his bluff.)

The forest’s similarities are not simply visual. Like Mirkwood, Taur-nu-Fuin is also possessed by Sauron, with its flora turning against its denizens. Both forests are elvish territories. And most crucially, both are initially called Greenwood and transform into Mirkwood.

For the first time in Nowhere and Back Again, we’re in Beleriand, the northwestern part of Middle-earth where most of The Silmarillion is set. The War of Wrath, fought by the Valar and Morgoth, destroys Beleriand late in The First Age. Taur-nu-Fuin, in the elvish realm of Dorthonion, along with most of Beleriand, becomes a memory preserved by Wilderland’s Mirkwood.

On the whole, The Lord of the Rings is less grim than The Silmarillion, where half the characters suffer jaw-droppingly grim fates. Similarly, Taur-nu-Fuin is even nastier than The Hobbit’s Mirkwood. Morgoth’s occupation of northern Beleriand makes it “turned little by little into a region of such dread and dark enchantment that even the Orcs would not enter it unless need drove them[2].”

The Forest under Nightshade grows ”black and grim” trees, whose “roots were tangled, groping in the dark like claws; and those who strayed among them became lost and blind, and were strangled or pursued to madness by phantoms of terror.”[3]

With Beleriand, Dorthonion gets a creation myth. As Beleriand’s “new-raised highlands[4],” it is a young land in The Silmarillion. Its raw untamed power is purely mythic. Its echoes permeate into Wilderland millennia later. Corrupting nature is Arda’s original sin.

Like Mirkwood, Sauron occupies it in a gothic form. Lúthien, the protagonist of Tolkien’s mythology, subdues him, and Sauron “immediately took the form of a vampire, great as a dark cloud across the moon, and he fled, dripping blood from his throat upon the trees,” settling in Taur-nu-Fuin and “filling it with horror.”[5]…

September 27, 2022

The Rings of Power: Partings Review

Christine Kelleythe lord of the rings, the rings of power0

“Partings” is The Rings of Power settling into a status quo. Characters in different locations face down interlocked threats, all of them vaguely pointing to Sauron, while their interpersonal relationships are threatened by Sauron’s return. Some subplots, like Durin and Elrond’s relationship, work quite well, while Arondir and Bronwyn fail to go anywhere. In short, we now know what an average Rings of Power episode looks like.

To give this show its minor due, we must concede the show has gotten stronger in its theming. It draws parallels between its sundry plots, indicated by titles like “Partings.” The Rings of Power has paired up a number of characters who seem to be working towards the Last Alliance of Men and Elves, or at least paving the way for the Second Age’s world. Elrond and Durin’s plot, which while contrived (all elves’ fates rely on Durin? Really?), uses mythology as a roadblock to character’s healthy relationships. Elrond’s devotion to his oath while Celebrimbor bullies him (and will probably close out Season 1 by crafting the titular Rings) is genuinely affecting, and works to give Elrond a character beyond “look at this guy you liked in the early 2000s.”

Galadriel and Míriel get a fair piece of the action too, guiding Númenor towards the Last Alliance of Men and Elves. Having women determine this part of the mythology is genuinely valuable, and admittedly even undermines Tolkien’s patriarchy ever so slightly. Turning Galadriel into simply a hot girl who swings swords good undermines this somewhat, but admittedly, this show is running so low on pleasures that I’ll take “hot sword lady.”

Not all of it works. Arondir and Bronwyn are still flipping a big nothing burger. Isildur’s character lacks content outside of “will be important later,” amounting to little more than a failson rather than the tragic failed hero he really should be. Nori and not-yet-Gandalf are… perfectly fine, if hardly moving forward. The moment where not-yet-Gandalf pieces together language while adjusting to his new body is one of the show’s better moments so far.

As ever, the politics are insidious. This isn’t an artistic problem in itself — if it were, I wouldn’t be a D-list Tolkien scholar. But this show’s approach of “women take charge while men stumble in pursuit of their destiny” still validates a “women need to do the hard work approach.” And the valorization of high birth lionizes an upward mobility mindset that’s absolutely revolting to come out of Amazon.

This show hates commoners and poor people. Only those who align themselves with power or come from noble birth are moral people. This isn’t Tolkien, it’s Amazon with pointy ears.

Which is to say this is one of the stronger episodes so far, and sees The Rings of Power becoming slightly less awful.

1. The Great Wave

2. Adrift

3. Partings

4. A Shadow of the Past

5. Adar…

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