Review: The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey

In my opening post I explained my use of the term "Meme Catapult" in the title of this blog.

A meme is a unit of information that is passed from brain to brain via communication. "Good" memes are those that are likely to replicate themselves by motivating their “hosts” to pass them on to other minds. A “_____ Meme Catapult” is what I call a source of information that open-fires a particular kind of meme at its audience.

I then specifically applied the concept to rationalist memes. But there are other kinds of meme catapults. The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey is what I call a Hollywood Meme Catapult.

For a film to be a Hollywood Meme Catapult it needs to pump its audience with the hegemonic values that dominate Hollywood (and by extension, American, and by extension, Western) culture.

The Hobbit, although distinctive in many formal respects, is ideologically typical. It regurgitates the status quo: American Christian white straight male corporate values. These include “hope against all odds,” the Us-vs-Them mentality, blind faith, and reliance on intuitions over rationality, among others.

This post won't be structured like a typical review. Instead I'll list off a bunch of examples of Hollywood memes perpetuated by the film, introducing new (and old) jargon while I go, much of which will be re-used in future blog posts.

The Lose Yourself Cheer: The film in many ways is a raucous cheer for the belief that life's obstacles can be overcome by determination and will power. The Lose Yourself Cheer seems to be the very premise of the film. You know the one, “You can do anything you set your mind to, man.” This is similar to but distinct from the Terry Fox Cheer:

The Terry Fox Cheer: The greatest heroes are those who overcome the odds through perseverance. The Hobbit is a typical story of the underdog accomplishing the impossible. It's easy to understand the popularity of such memes. They feed egos and make people feel important. This is exactly the kind of thinking that perpetuates biases and irrational thinking, however. Cheers and prayers accomplish little, but they can work to enforce and re-enforce ideas and power dynamics.

Invincibility Stars: Have you ever read Harry Potter and noticed all the lethal jets of green light that “whiz past Harry’s ear” or “missed him by two inches”? In the moment, do you ever remark to yourself that there’s no way Harry can die here because there’s still two books left in the series? Emphasizing how near death Harry is in all of his near-death situations is an ineffective way of building tension because we all know Harry can’t possible die in this chapter. We’re just waiting to see how he manages to get out of yet another sticky situation. It’s as if he caught a star in a Nintendo game: he’s invincible for this part of the story. In The Hobbit, everybody with a name has an Invincibility Star. We aren’t worried for their lives even when their situation seems hopeless because we know some deux ex machina will save them in the nick of time.

Deus Ex Machina: This is an Ancient Greek term for when some improbable occurrence steers the plot in the playwright’s favoured direction wihout there being any plausible chain of events leading up to this occurrence. In The Hobbit, the most obvious example of a Deus Ex Machina is the Eagles. They come out of nowhere to rescue the company from a hopeless situation. Gandalf also serves this role in many scenes, always re-appearing just in time to save the situation. The dwarves do not seem to be on a predictable journey from A to B to C. Instead they are on a crash course, full of surprises and disasters and divine intervention.

Us-vs-Them Mentality: A popular phrase for the drawing of a divisive line between two groups, resulting in biased in-group support and out-group hostility. This is seen in many places in real life: with nationalism, sports fandom, wars, religions, politics, entertainment. It's all very Team Edward vs Team Jacob. The ways in which the Us-vs-Them mentality is problematic are well-documented in the media. They divide people instead of bringing them together. They provide an emotional basis for being hostile to others. Take the case of the sports fan that despises a group of human beings on the basis that as children their fathers bonded with them over a different team's sports games, a factor that is usually based on the city they were born in. This mentality holds people accountable for variables that are out of their control. It hijacks the primal lust for adrenaline, heroics, camaraderie, and competition, applying it to situations where it has no place. Sports fandom shouldn't be about laughing at the misery of others, it should a communal appreciation of entertainment and athleticism. Politics shouldn't be about sides, it should be about creating a good society for everyone. Philosophy shouldn't be about "winning" arguments or apologizing for an ideology, it should be an open form of inquiry. And so on.

The Us-vs-Them mentality also essentializes identities, implying that certain arbitrary personality, historical, racial, ethnic, religious, or stylistic traits are enough to tell us whether someone is worthy of moral condemnation. It says that everybody on one side of the line is good and everybody on the other side of the line is bad. In real life this is rarely the case. When our mental maps do not accurately correspond to the territory they represent, then they are in need of tweaking. In the case of The Hobbit, the Us-vs-Them mentality is explicitly tied to race but this is a problem Jackson inherited from the source material and is not to blame for. The meme, however, is still catapulted into the public consciousness by the film.

Super Epic Awesomeness: Most critics and ordinary movie watchers don’t get excited about great movies, they get excited for Super Epic Awesome movies that are dramatic, sensational, smart, quick, and flashy.

There isn’t just a conflict… the fate of the world hangs in the balance.

There isn’t just a villain… he is the most evil and powerful being in the world.

The characters don’t just get stranded in a burning tree… it is a tree at the very edge of a cliff… that is snapping bit by bit so that any moment the characters fall.
The Eagles don’t just save the characters… they snatch them out of the tree a second before it collapses.

And so on. The predicament is always elaborate and over-the-top, the solution always an improbable turn of events in the 11^th hour. Everything is MAXIMUM or JUMBO or EXTREME like at the supermarket.

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I felt the strongest scene of the film to be the adaptation of the chapter "Riddles in the Dark."

During that scene there was a definite air of self-awareness, the script playing to the fact that Gollum, despite being completely new to Bilbo was well-known to the audience and, in fact, a fan favourite. The game of riddles was one of the only scenes in the movie where Jackson took his time, allowing real suspense to build. Despite Bilbo’s Invincibility Star, there was tension brewing in the dark beneath the Misty Mountains.

The film is ideologically simple-minded but this is a Hollywood film after all. It isn't necessarily trying to be a philosophical or artistic masterwork. It might just be trying to entertain, or to push technical boundaries.

I think it did both of those things. It certainly entertained me even if only because of how ridiculous it was. And the effects were impressive for those that care about such things.

Personally, I found the movie to be overproduced. This is the technical companion to Super Epic Awesomeness. Every blockbuster desires to have the highest possible resolution, the most mystifying special effects, the most awesome explosions and monsters. I’m not too into the hyper-fresh, state-of-the-art equipment look, even in films without such a huge reliance on CGI. It doesn’t bother me for movies to just look and feel and operate like real life.

The use of CGI in almost every shot makes The Hobbit an interesting example of the place of cinema in a post-digital media world. In What Is Cinema, Lev Manovich argues that cinema is now a subgenre of animation or painting because of how digital media allow filmmakers to construct images from scratch, to manufacture them rather than capture them. He holds that the emergence of digital media radically changes the ontological status of the moving image. The Hobbit would work as a very interesting case study for this kind of analysis, as it uses CGI throughout, even in scenes without magic or explosions, for instance to enlarge the size of hobbit feet.

All of these elements combine to make The Hobbit a highly dramatic, bombastic, and on the whole, quite ridiculous story of the few improbably escaping the snares of the evil, time and time again, propelled onward by divine intervention toward a yet more daunting challenge. The needle on God’s Bayesian compass whirls out of control with every step of the epic journey where the laws of probability are substituted for the choice feel-good values of the Hollywood religion: blind faith, hope against all odds, Us-vs-Them mentalities, sensationalism, and the surrendering of rationality and autonomy to the belief in benevolent supervision. Ultimately, the characters pull through because of crucial differences between Middle-Earth and our world. One gets the sense that the Company’s Invincibility Stars extend through the next installment as well.