Krug
Newshound
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/16/movies/16SCOT.html
The summation is quite an insult to loves of fantasies though... I have extracted parts, but it might be best if you read the whole damn thing before critiqueing.
Perhaps more than ever before, Hollywood is an empire of fantasy. But despite the popularity of these movies — and despite the unmatched power of the studios to blanket the real world with publicity, advertising and media hype — Hollywood is not the center of this empire. It is, rather, a colonial outpost whose conquest has been recent and remains incomplete.
Fantasy literature, which in the broadest sense includes modes of storytelling from novels to movies to video games, depends on patterns, motifs and archetypes. It is therefore hardly surprising that the most visible modern variants of the ancient genres of saga, romance and quest narrative are so richly crosspollinated and resemble one another. The central characters show an especially close kinship. They are, following a convention so deep it seems to be encoded in the human storytelling gene, orphans, summoned out of obscurity to undertake a journey into the heart of evil that will also be a voyage of self-discovery. Frodo Baggins lives quietly in an obscure corner of the Shire, oblivious to the metaphysical storm brewing in distant Mordor. Luke Skywalker dwells, like Dorothy in Kansas, in a dusty hinterland far removed from the imperial center of things. Harry Potter, in his suburban Muggle exile, bides his time shut up in a closet under the stairs, a prisoner of his beastly aunt and uncle. Peter Parker (Spidey), meanwhile, occupies a more benign and familiar modern environment in Woodhaven, Queens, and is cared for by much nicer relatives.
...
For all their ancient and futuristic trappings, fantasy stories speak directly to the condition of contemporary male adolescence, and they offer a Utopian solution to the anxiety and dislocation that are part of the pyschic landscape of youth. Freaks become heroes. The confusing issue of sex is kept at a safe distance; romantic considerations are ancillary to the fight against evil, and to the cameraderie of warriors. But ultimately, whatever fellowship he may have found along the way, the hero's quest is solitary, his triumph an allegory of the personal fulfillment that is, in the real world, both a birthright and a mirage.
...
The appeal of fantasy has been especially powerful among those who find themselves marginalized by the brutal social universe of American secondary education — geeks, losers, nerds. You remember them from high school — or you remember being one of them — the guys who filled their notebooks with meticulous line drawings of broadsword-wielding berserkers and their large-breasted consorts, who staffed the tech crew for the spring theatricals and dominated the computer club, who used words like "grok" in ordinary conversation. Their devotion to sci-fi and sword-and-sorcery arcana invited ridicule, but was also a defense against it. But such mockery is, by now, obsolete. The triumph of fantasy culture, like the transformation of the cult of the computer into mainstream religion, is their revenge. We are all nerds now. And we had better do our homework.
The summation is quite an insult to loves of fantasies though... I have extracted parts, but it might be best if you read the whole damn thing before critiqueing.
Perhaps more than ever before, Hollywood is an empire of fantasy. But despite the popularity of these movies — and despite the unmatched power of the studios to blanket the real world with publicity, advertising and media hype — Hollywood is not the center of this empire. It is, rather, a colonial outpost whose conquest has been recent and remains incomplete.
Fantasy literature, which in the broadest sense includes modes of storytelling from novels to movies to video games, depends on patterns, motifs and archetypes. It is therefore hardly surprising that the most visible modern variants of the ancient genres of saga, romance and quest narrative are so richly crosspollinated and resemble one another. The central characters show an especially close kinship. They are, following a convention so deep it seems to be encoded in the human storytelling gene, orphans, summoned out of obscurity to undertake a journey into the heart of evil that will also be a voyage of self-discovery. Frodo Baggins lives quietly in an obscure corner of the Shire, oblivious to the metaphysical storm brewing in distant Mordor. Luke Skywalker dwells, like Dorothy in Kansas, in a dusty hinterland far removed from the imperial center of things. Harry Potter, in his suburban Muggle exile, bides his time shut up in a closet under the stairs, a prisoner of his beastly aunt and uncle. Peter Parker (Spidey), meanwhile, occupies a more benign and familiar modern environment in Woodhaven, Queens, and is cared for by much nicer relatives.
...
For all their ancient and futuristic trappings, fantasy stories speak directly to the condition of contemporary male adolescence, and they offer a Utopian solution to the anxiety and dislocation that are part of the pyschic landscape of youth. Freaks become heroes. The confusing issue of sex is kept at a safe distance; romantic considerations are ancillary to the fight against evil, and to the cameraderie of warriors. But ultimately, whatever fellowship he may have found along the way, the hero's quest is solitary, his triumph an allegory of the personal fulfillment that is, in the real world, both a birthright and a mirage.
...
The appeal of fantasy has been especially powerful among those who find themselves marginalized by the brutal social universe of American secondary education — geeks, losers, nerds. You remember them from high school — or you remember being one of them — the guys who filled their notebooks with meticulous line drawings of broadsword-wielding berserkers and their large-breasted consorts, who staffed the tech crew for the spring theatricals and dominated the computer club, who used words like "grok" in ordinary conversation. Their devotion to sci-fi and sword-and-sorcery arcana invited ridicule, but was also a defense against it. But such mockery is, by now, obsolete. The triumph of fantasy culture, like the transformation of the cult of the computer into mainstream religion, is their revenge. We are all nerds now. And we had better do our homework.
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. I see the "mainstreaming" of fantasy as just the latest strand in a broader trend of society catching on to the economic potential of an intellectual elite who just happen to have some quirky hobbies. I.e., people who were Tolkien and D&D fans in their youth are now adults with a lot of disposable income.
