An Urban's Rural View

Every family has its holiday traditions. One of ours is binge-watching The Lord of the Rings trilogy on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. In between opening presents and devouring the Christmas ham, we spend 12 hours with Frodo Baggins as he struggles to take the ring of power to Mount Doom and his friends battle Uruk-hai and Orcs.

As we watched this last Christmas I was struck again by an irony at the heart of these magical movies. They use sophisticated modern technology to romanticize a simpler, low-technology past.

And we, my family but also the wider audience, are unconcerned about the irony. We admire the technology; we wallow in the righteousness of the anti-technological message.

J.R.R. Tolkien, the English author who wrote the novels the movies are based on, came of age as automobiles and tractors were starting to replace horses. That distressed him. Tolkien has been described as a man who loved trees and hated technology.

Director Peter Jackson's movies are faithful to Tolkien. Horses and trees are revered, manufactured things disdained. At one point in the second film, The Two Towers, walking, talking trees called Ents destroy an evil wizard's primitive factory.

Subtler expressions of anti-technology sentiment abound. The good guys are swordsmen and archers, hand-to-hand warriors who triumph through skill and heroism. Only the bad guys wage war with machines -- catapults, battering rams and siege towers.

Yet to bring the war for Middle Earth to life, Jackson used computer-generated imagery, motion capture and other state-of-the-art filmmaking technology. The three movies were ahead of their time; they hold up well today despite all the technological progress filmmakers have made in the decades since.

Had Tolkien lived to see the films, would he have appreciated Jackson's artistry? It's a fair guess that he would not have. But Hollywood did. Each of the three won the Oscar for visual effects. (All told the trilogy won 17 Oscars.)

That millions of viewers have been mesmerized by the technological effects while embracing the anti-technology story line says something about the species homo sapiens. We are creatures of first-rate intelligence, assuming the test is F. Scott Fitzgerald's "the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind." We fantasize about the simpler past while appreciating high technology and the good things it bestows on the present, including great movies.

It's akin to how some city dwellers regard agriculture. Their ideal farmer is essentially a small landholder who farms the way today's farmers' great-great-great grandfathers farmed. These people enjoy the plentiful, affordable food modern agriculture provides even as they romanticize an older agriculture that produced less. If they're aware of the contradiction, it doesn't bother them.

Many of us perform these kinds of mental juggling acts. They may be a defense mechanism, a way of coping with the breathtaking speed of technological change. Dizzied by that speed, we long for the past in spirit while accepting the material benefits technological change brings. That's understandable; the benefits of technology are many and slyly seductive.

I'm not suggesting that every technology is good, that technology should be embraced unthinkingly or allowed to run wild unregulated. No one is advocating widespread use of nuclear weapons, for example. Productivity-boosting technologies can put people out of work; the public's angst over what AI will do to jobs is palpable. While some attacks on chemicals are wrongheaded, there are definitely chemicals we don't want in our drinking water.

I've been reading Walter Isaacson's "The Code Breaker," which chronicles the development of CRISPR gene-editing technology. CRISPR has the potential to make astonishing contributions to the diagnosing, preventing and curing of a wide variety of diseases, not to mention making agriculture more productive with less impact on the environment. But it raises serious concerns, from "designer babies" to "off-target edits" creating unforeseen and undesirable genetic changes.

Isaacson reports that Jennifer Doudna, the Nobel Prize winning star of the book, had a nightmare about gene-editing falling into the wrong hands. Adolf Hitler visited her and wanted to know all about the technology she co-created. Oh, and in her dream, Hitler had the face of a pig.

In the end, for good or ill, once a technology is invented it tends to get used. We accept the downsides of innovations because we want the upsides. We tell ourselves, with some justification, that there are downsides to not using technology, too.

But that doesn't stop us from daydreaming about a mythical less-complicated idyllic past, especially when it's served up as only high-tech filmmaking can deliver it, complete with memorable effects, fascinating plot twists, great acting, stunning scenery and a haunting score.

I hope your Christmas was as enjoyable as ours. I wish you a bounteous 2025.

Urban Lehner can be reached at urbanize@gmail.com

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