Last week I went to the movies with my son to finish watching the J.R.R. Tolkien project from New Zealand, which consists of six long movies. Having read the Hobbit twice I much prefer the Rankin and Bass children’s animation from the 1970s, as it was more in the spirit of the tale the old Brit told.

A female elf was inserted and the entire elvish presence in the story was grotesquely expanded, which makes sense, since elves are essentially denatured men. Of course black citizens of the Nordic lake town were also inserted. The focus on the dwarves was also feminized and denatured, by concocting a romance between the only dwarf that looks like he could have played guitar in a 1980s hair band and having him fall in cross-species love with the murderous elf babe, who was admittedly pleasing to the male eye.

As for the original story I always had a problem with the extreme domesticity of the adventurers and that fact that these lovable little chunkers never suffer PTSD after a year of nightmare battle. Honestly, Tolkien is emasculating enough. If I was rewriting the Hobbit I would write it as a patriotic call to ork kind, as the two ork generals were the only real believable warfighters in this entire battle heavy adaptation of the old children’s tale. I rarely cheer in a movie, but I did cheer when that greedy little dwarf Thorin got gutted by the ork general Azog, who I think was played by a Polynesian dude.

The emasculation of war—and that is a huge topic—in this movie also amounts to its trivialization. A few flying faɡɡots can wipe out armies of armored badasses without getting their hair messed up. Of course the good guys must always win. But the fact that they do so without sweating, bleeding, or needing another hairspray application in such video game inspired movies is truly obscene. Of course the elf chick basically wipes out an entire NFL team worth of armored monsters and threatens to murder her head of state, over her love affair with a person of a different species, not just race—species.

There was something about this that was nagging more than lack of realism. I am used to that, having avoided martial arts movies most of my life because of their lack of realistic combat. I did not figure out what was bothering me until a lady asked me who my favorite superhero was on Monday, and I had to face that pantheon of commercial propaganda deities.

Effective propaganda is not specific like the crude work of fascists and communists backed by naked power. Truly effective propaganda inculcates mores that assist the aspirations of our much more subtle brand of veiled hybrid power.

Ideally this propagandistic impulse is driven by consumerism—which will make it the best it can be—and will become so pervasive as to be self perpetuating.

The original broad message of Tolkien’s work was this:

The Lord of the Rings was essentially a healing salve for the carnage of World War II [published 9 years after in 1954], and as such was an adaptation of Tolkien’s earlier attempt to provide a comforting fantasy in the wake of the horrific World War I [the Hobbit, 1938]. The eagles are so obviously RAF Spitfires and the Nazgul so grotesquely Luftwaffe Studkas. It is no accident that both tales spend so much time reinserting the adventurers in their fairytale setting, as Tolkien was a WWI veteran himself.

What the makers of the Hobbit add to this is the notion that beautiful people [elves] can just pick up a piece of superior technology, get involved in a spur of the moment war against committed members of a warlike society, suffer nary a scratch, and walk away with only a care for their love life. Basically we have just piled ‘and it’s cool’ on top of Tolkien’s tea and biscuits message.

Superman is the American consciousness writ large. He is Aragorn and Frodo, righteous might and innocence. The key aspect is Clark Kent, unassertive ass-kissing functionary with no agency, submissive to women and the hierarchy—until, trouble comes. When trouble comes he morphs into Superman [anonymously, this is important] wipes out the bad guys, and returns to his ass-kissing life, taking no credit for saving the world.

In 1938 Superman was launched as a dark haired version of the Arуan Superman of Nazi myth, a capitalist alternative to that full time blonde warmonger; a part time combatant who is so superior that he could do what the Minute Men failed to do in New England against the British redcoats—win. Superman is the metaphor for the American male population that will toil industriously, submissive to his woman and the hierarchy he sits at the bottom of, and then go off to win victory, and return in anonymity and sink back into obscurity. The submissive anonymous nature of Clark Kent reveals Superman as propaganda targeting the working/warfighting underclass.

This is the genius of consumer culture based on advertising over substance; that your mind control engine is built right into daily living. Rather than go to church every Sunday to be psychologically harnessed to the social hierarchy as the patriot of 1776 did, the modern patriot is conditioned with his every waking breath.

Have a Coke, you deserve it.