I think I might have just come up with another way of approaching Peter Jackson’s controversial decision to eliminate the Scouring of the Shire from his film version of The Lord of the Rings.
I recently quoted the following passage from my review of The Myth of the American Superhero to somebody:
In The Myth of the American Superhero, philosopher John Shelton Lawrence and New Testament scholar Robert Jewett claim the myths and legends that have defined the American imagination are quite different from the stories that have shaped the imaginations of most other cultures.
Whereas the ‘classical monomyth’ usually concerns a hero who leaves his community in order to face tests and develop skills that he can then bring back to the community, the ‘American monomyth,’ as Lawrence and Jewett define it, typically concerns a selfless superhero who rises up from obscurity and rescues a threatened community after its own institutions have failed to do the job. Once the community is restored to its original state of paradise, the hero fades back into obscurity.
The typical American hero, the authors argue, is concerned about his community but never practices citizenship; he acts outside and sometimes above the law, and the popularity of this sort of story, the authors fear, could undermine the public’s faith in democratic institutions. . . .
I wasn’t quoting this with The Lord of the Rings in mind, but since I had seen those films just a couple days ago, it occured to me as I quoted this that Jackson may have transformed J.R.R. Tolkien’s story from a “classical monomyth” into an “American monomyth” — by removing the Scouring of the Shire, Jackson has kept the Shire a “paradise” and removed any trace of the way in which Frodo and the other hobbits brought something back from their adventures that might have been of benefit to the community.
Does this make sense?
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