By now everyone has probably seen for themselves why The Hobbit is such a magnificent movie, and why I have written so much about it. Peter Jackson is one of the great directors of our time in that he took one of the greatest books and put it on the screen as it was written which was no easy task. It is clear that The Hobbit is not just a movie like all the other entertainment options available at the theater, but is in a class by itself. It is also clear that many of the people who made it are finding the Christian parallels difficult to explain away out of fear that they might not work again in film industry run by producers who have become like Smoug in the movie—sitting on a pile of stolen gold. The dragon Smoug is drunk for power, which is the great theme of The Hobbit and it is difficult for people to see the movie and not see themselves in one of the characters. A powerful story always has this effect and is the sign of a lasting mythology. Those who don’t like The Hobbit are clearly seeing themselves as the villains of The Hobbit—they are like Smoug, the Orcs, or even the Ring Wraths who are trying to come back into the world from the land of the dead. The Hobbit covers within its story line all the various degrees of evil that can be easily seen in modern life and puts it into context—which is a great benefit to the minds of man. Many however who see The Hobbit are likely to see themselves as the Hobbit Bilbo Baggins as Glenn Beck did when he covered this new film and its literary legacy over time on a recent episode of The Blaze TV. The Hobbit is meant to appeal to those types of people and to provide them with courage as they navigate through the many evils that we all encounter in day-to-day life outside of books and movies. For me however, I do not relate to The Hobbits very much. They are way too timid for my liking—instead it is the wizard Gandalf that I directly relate to. It is Gandalf the Grey that I understand and why I love the story of The Hobbit so much.
Peter Jackson like J.R.R. Tolkien understood that if he came out and overtly proclaimed that the messages in The Hobbit were essentially Christian that the other religions of the world would take offense. Wisely, Jackson has avoided such comparisons during the making of the movie in New Zealand. Even more remarkable were the various labor disputes that my readers here will recognize with my frequent articles about teacher unions in The United States. The same type of radicalism is present in the film industry and it gets harder every year to deal with the increasing costs of making profitable movies as unionized labor has pushed up those costs to unsustainable heights. This is one of the reasons that The Walt Disney Company is now picking up so many profitable properties such as Marvel Comics and Star Wars, because they are mythmaking machines, and have the revenue streams to deal with the labor unions through other businesses such as theme parks—for now. But projects like The Hobbit to be as epic as it deserves has to be made as cheaply as possible—and it took the actors who played in The Hobbit to display a lot of courage to commit to these Hobbit films. On top of that, the Tolkien family was split over the success of the Jackson’s Lord of the Rings films and wanted to dissociate with Jackson’s work. Peter Jackson masterfully navigated all these production perils to tell the magnificent story of The Hobbit that can be shared with audiences. Without question the son of J.R.R. Tolkien, Christopher remembered the stories his father wrote for him to be much less action packed than Jackson presented in movie theaters, but ultimately Peter Jackson understood that Christopher is not unlike Bilbo Baggins himself, and is prone to out-bursts protecting his father’s legacy as he remembered it. So Jackson blew off the family rift to make the movie he envisioned anyway. You can read about some of these issues at this link:
http://www.stuff.co.nz/business/7971185/Kiwi-actors-suffer-after-Hobbit-dispute-union
So it is a small miracle that The Hobbit was even made—and it is a larger miracle that it was made so well by so many people. Actors know it is unpopular for them to play in a movie that is so obviously taking a stand on good and evil when the progressive labor unions they must join to work, and the other studios they hope to get work from are filled with progressive movie producers. Being involved with a movie like The Hobbit will earn the actors respect forever from millions of fans, but they will have their work in The Hobbit held against them in future roles and most of them will not get “rich” off their work in The Hobbit, so they will feel pain from their decision. The Hobbit will be blacklisted by the Academy Awards because of the labor dispute mentioned in the article above. There was a lot against The Hobbit; there was every excuse for the film to fall short which of course it didn’t.
But the Gandalf in me sees a bigger work at play here, and that is that The Hobbit is so incredibly needed by our present civilization. Evil is very much at work in our modern world and it rides the backs of progressives like Orcs ride the backs of those giant wolves in the film. Evil works within the collectivism of the labor unions, it works mindlessly in politics, in religion destroying stalemates, in sheer greed, and many who watch The Hobbit and hate it recognize that they are one of the villains in the movie—so Academy Award snubs should be expected and considered a privilege. The movie The Hobbit based religiously on the original work by J.R.R. Tolkien but upgraded enough to carry the mind of today’s youth, is about facing down evil and living to tell about it. Without this confrontation with evil, the world as we know it will crumble away into nothing, which is the entire point of the film.
There are a mere handful of films over Hollywood’s history that do what The Hobbit has done, films like It’s a Wonderful Life, The Sound of Music, and of course Star Wars, that so accurately captures the hopes and dreams of our society and paints a picture that is so clearly understood. The Hobbit is a special film because it steps up and over the many evil forces that desired with drool running down its mouth to stop goodness from being shown to a mass audience for the inspiration toward good that would fill the minds of millions with hope. The Hobbit provides genuine assurance without the distraction of obvious religion to separate the mind from the contents of a powerful story. It is in this way that evil finds that it cannot advance easily upon the minds of man—when those minds can see it coming a mile away, The Hobbit teaches in story form what that evil looks like and how it works so it can be seen in reality. That is why I love Gandalf so much, because he is able to assemble all the parts of the story to work toward an aim to thwart the work of evil, even when those evil doers are his own friends. Gandalf knows enough to protect himself with a simple Hobbit while he goes on his crusade on behalf of the good. And now audiences everywhere can do the same. This is why I most identify with Gandalf, and somehow I think that Peter Jackson does too. Jackson might tell the public that he is a simple Hobbit, so that he can make his films, but his mind is like that of Gandalf—a master manipulator on behalf of a good that nobody can yet see—but only the wise master of all things, a mediator between Heaven and Earth and crusader for everything that is good, and an enemy to all that is evil.
Gandalf for President!
Rich Hoffman
The Overmanwarrior 