Over the years, Miyazaki’s political stance about America’s involvement in global conflicts as well as the country’s contribution towards the globalisation of American culture has been unwavering. “Anti-jeans, Anti-bourbon, Anti-burgers, Anti-fried chicken, Anti-cola, Anti-American coffee, Anti-New York, Anti-West Coast,” Miyazaki once said while describing his beliefs.
According to excerpts from multiple interviews, Miyazaki’s dislike for all things American also extends to the realm of cinema.
“Americans shoot things and they blow up and the like, so as you’d expect, they make movies like that,” Miyazaki stated. “If someone is the enemy, it’s okay to kill endless numbers of them. Lord of the Rings is like that. If it’s the enemy, there’s killing without separation between civilians and soldiers. That falls within collateral damage.”
Miyazaki compared the visual politics of large-scale Hollywood productions such as the Lord of the Rings to the country’s international policies. Attacking America’s actions in Afghanistan, Miyazaki claimed that such projects are a dangerous addition to public discourse because they diminish the value of human life by weaponising the audience through cinematic violence.
Of all the movies I would have picked to epitomize American bloodlust, I would not have picked Lord of the Rings. He's got a point though, the films and the books both uncritically paint orcs as wholly unredeemable monsters in a similar way to how American media paints our state departments designated enemies. Even though you might feel a bit of sympathy for the Orcs of Mordor who are effectively slaves of Sauron, we know from their conversations with each other that if they were free they would be bandits and marauders, and Tolkien wrote that into the book because he had a very specific anglo worldview.
You could go down the whole rabbit hole of myths and metaphors and talk about how the Orcs are degraded and corrupted by industry and militarism, but the point is that the metaphor that paints an entire society as evil exists in the first place - saying that it's a fairy tale for kids doesn't explain why it's so simplistic, it just reveals that your culture is even more monstrous than it was before, because you are brainwashing impressionable kids with this worldview that entire countries of people need to be exterminated.
But I don't agree with that view. I think even kids understand the distinction between fantasy and reality, and that things in fantasy are not meant to be taken as literal reflections of the real world. The Orcs represent militarism and industrialization (which btw doesn't just invade Middle Earth from the east, it also corrupts the hearts of Middle Earth's leaders especially Saruman), while the most idealized people in Middle Earth, the Hobbits, completely reject both of those things and get to live happy lives in the countryside as a result.
I think it's telling that the first mention of Sauron in the Hobbit is (an admittedly brief appearance) as the Necromancer, a term that has come to be associated with one who creates an unfeeling, unquestioning army from the dead, creating a place where the only thinking, feeling creature in the Bad Place is the Bad Guy.
We're essentially seeing that same thing but with living organisms in his subsequent works. There is no orc culture outside of his armies because an orc is a biological creation made for the purpose of being in his army. To be orc is to once have been something else, at least in some versions. In others, they are creations from foulness itself, again, Bad Dude's creations for his purposes.
The subordinate nations he calls on are again corrupted, which requires suspending disbelief to accept that you can bad-ify someone with magic. The solution to the story is to remove the corrupting influence (a thing we get to see happen) to make everyone good again. Part of JRR's brain worms is the insistence on Good Hierarchy to oppose the Bad Hierarchy.
I think reading Mordor as a nation-state in the modern sense, and orcs as anything other than a metaphor for man with the humanity subtracted is going to lead to unsatisfying conclusions, when what we are seeing is warlords and what amount to purpose-built biological creations for war. To speak of Mordor society assumes there was one there prior to Sauron.
There were orcs in Mordor before Sauron fled south from the ruin of Beleriand at the end of the First Age. The orcs are humans without humanity, but within the lore they are a people in their own right with interests that don't always coincide with Sauron's (or Morgoth's).
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