Corpsey
bandz ahoy
Watched "The Thing" the other night and its Lovecraftian elements are obvious to the initiated. Its sort of a spin on At The Mountains of Madness, isn't it? (I'm not sure if the same is true of "The Thing From Another World".) The connection with body horror ala. Cronenberg makes me recall Houllebecq getting at the Freudian nature of Lovecraft's tentacled horrors, all slimy and protuberant. The cosmic is the source of Lovecraft's terror, its often said, but I wonder if the real horror of a lot of his work is located more in the intimately physical?
Anyhoo, it got me wondering about other celluloid adaptations of Lovecraft. And which ones are good.
Anyhoo, it got me wondering about other celluloid adaptations of Lovecraft. And which ones are good.
Corpsey
bandz ahoy
(Which again sets off another thought - the "oriental" cast of Tolkien's orcs, who also threaten the Aryan civilisation of the elves/hobbits/men. Perhaps there is a much stronger element of racism in the formation of many of our most beloved monsters than had occurred to me before. Dracula the swarthy Eastern European. Mr Hyde the ape like savage. Etc. I think Alan Moore explored some of this in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.)
Mr. Tea
Let's Talk About Ceps
Ha, I read this and thought "Bloody hell, Stewart Lee has turned into the lovechild of Will Self and Laird Barron".
CrowleyHead
Well-known member
Its funny that you bring this up, because I've heard the opposite from a noted race supremacist, namely Varg Vikernes from the Black Metal band Burzum, who is a huge stan for people like Quisling and such. In his viewpoint, the Orcs are actually supposed to represent the Aryan race, whilst the Elves are actually the Jews to him. IDK if he explained that on his site: http://www.burzum.org/eng/library/paganism03.shtml but he said as much in that hilarious Lords of Chaos book way back.
Eye of the beholder and all that.
Corpsey
bandz ahoy
Yeah, I guess that shows that people can find whatever they want in myths. I suppose I can see what he means, assuming the orcs are to be positively identified as WARLIKE rather than as bestial untermensch.
I've never read LOTR, actually, but I assume Orcs are portrayed as unsympathetically in the book as they are in the films?
I've never read LOTR, actually, but I assume Orcs are portrayed as unsympathetically in the book as they are in the films?
Mr. Tea
Let's Talk About Ceps
It's...complicated. Many, many pages, and quite possibly a doctoral thesis or two for all I know, have been written on the philosophical and spiritual implications of Tolkien's orcs. For a start, the orcs were not originally created evil - they were made from elves who were captured and "twisted" or "corrupted", via unspecified tortures, by Morgoth, the original Dark Lord (Sauron's boss, back in the day). Evil can never create, you see, only pervert in mockery what was originally made by Go(o)d. Morgoth, in particular, is basically Lucifer: originally the brightest and best of the angels but cast into the Pit on account of his hubris before God.
So you have these orcs, which were originally elves, which have been made evil through no fault of their own. But how 'evil' are you really if you have no choice but to be evil? Some writers have even suggested there are hints that the orcs are not totally irredeemable, although it's certainly no more than hinted, if so. It's all about original sin, predestination and free will, of course - Tolkien being slightly more Catholic than, say, your typical pope.
It's funny that good and evil should come up here, as nothing could be more off-topic in a thread about Lovecraft. I've often thought these two writers are in some ways perfectly parallel and in others, diametrically opposed. You have these two guys who were both absolutely aghast at modernity in general and who dealt with the spiritual (Tolkien) and cultural (Lovecraft) threats posed by industry, technology and capitalism by retreating, like any reactionary, into an idealized version of the past. Which for arch-Romantic Tolkien was a fantasy version of mediaeval Merrie England, and for materialist-atheist-Classicist Lovecraft was the stately, dispassionate, scientific Enlightenment. This is slightly complicated by Lovecraft's adoption in later life of moderate socialism, but I don't think that altered his fundamental worldview.
They were both Eurocentric cultural supremacists, I suppose, although to vastly different degrees. Tolkien actually held Jewish culture in rather high esteem. His orcs and Easterlings don't really mirror Russians, Arabs, Turks or any particular 'Eastern' (from a European POV) culture, they're just sort of generically savage and foreign, although I guess the Southrons are pretty unambiguously black.
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Mr. Tea
Let's Talk About Ceps
Ha, I didn't know who that was and then I googled him. The wee lad in ST:TNG! Wonders will never cease.
Edit: I like how his name sounds a bit like Wilbur Whately, although he couldn't look less suited to the part.
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