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It's ironic that all these peace-loving premodern agrarians are making astonishing amounts of cash for a lot of postmodern technocapitalist movie executives. Fantasy is hot, and studios are backing up the truck. Even as New Line and Warner Bros. (which, like Time, are owned by AOL Time Warner) churn out Potter and Rings sequels, New Line is already developing a follow-up franchise based on Philip Pullman's critically acclaimed fantasy trilogy His Dark Materials, about the journey of an adolescent girl and boy through alternative worlds inhabited by witches, angels and armored polar bears. Late next year the Sci-Fi Channel plans to air a lavish production of two of Ursula K. LeGuin's Earthsea novels, A Wizard of Earthsea and The Tombs of Atuan. The movie of C.S. Lewis' beloved Chronicles of Narnia is in development with Andrew Adamson, who co-directed the animated hit Shrek, a more comic medieval fantasy. Miramax will shortly begin work on a movie version of the best-selling Artemis Fowl books, a hot contender for the post--Harry Potter sweepstakes, and the company paid seven figures for book and film rights to the Bartimaeus trilogy, a series of novels about a jinni and a young magician by British writer Jonathan Stroud. Not to be outdone, Disney reportedly paid nearly $8 million for the film, theme-park and multimedia rights to Clive Barker's fantasy novel Abarat.
But is all this fantasizing really good for us? Should we worry about all these strapping men poking each other with sharpened phallic symbols? After all, on the political correctness meter The Lord of the Rings is radioactive. Where are the women? Peter Jackson filled out Liv Tyler's role for the movies (it's much less prominent in Tolkien's version), but the Fellowship is still as much a boys' club as Augusta National. And whiter too. Don't let all the heartwarming Elf-Dwarf bonding between Legolas and Gimli fool you. The only people with dark skin in Middle-earth are the Orcs.
The clarity and simplicity of Middle-earth are comforting, but there's also something worryingly childish, even infantile, about it. Things are too simple there. Everyone has his class and his place--funny how feudalism works that way--and he's either good or evil, with no messy gray area in between. "Just because something is reassuring, comforting and seductive doesn't mean that it's offering you what you need," points out Sherry Turkle, professor of the social studies of science and technology at M.I.T. "The question is whether that prepares us to live in a world that's complex, where we need to be able to work in a structure where there are no rules and where we have to be really attentive to other people's cultures and other people's ways of seeing things."