[Zigûr]

What is frustrating is that outside of places like this it is difficult, if not impossible, to hold any discourse about Professor Tolkien's work without the films rearing their head. I simply don't understand how these adaptations, just because they were popular, have somehow become grafted onto the source material as if they are all fundamentally the same thing, as if Professor Tolkien and Peter Jackson are somehow collaborators in a combined literary and cinematic vision, which is something Zaentz's countersuit would like to establish as well.

It really seems to happen a lot with "geek culture", though, doesn't it? Or maybe I should say "genre culture," or really anything that seems to attract the frothing hysteria of bored, comfortable Western people. Everything becomes indistinguishable: the source material, the adaptations, any merchandise, and their cultural presence in the shape of references, memes, catchphrases etc. It seems to be the same with things like Harry Potter or, as we've discussed elsewhere, "A Song of Ice and Fire", or comic-book superheroes. Sherlock Holmes might be another example. I find this to be a shame because it treats all of these things as one entity, so we can't talk about one without the other, at least in mainstream conversation. At least we have places like this as an alternative.

Imagine if we treated "canonical literature" this way, like if you mentioned Ninteen Eighty-Four everyone started thinking about John Hurt, or if you tried to talk about Great Expectations people started quoting lines from the various adaptations that weren't in the book. It'd be absurd, but that doesn't happen because adaptations of those kinds of texts haven't become somehow inextricably merged with the source material for whatever reason. There once was a time when I was very hostile towards the literary establishment for what I perceived as its snobbery, but these days I am as frustrated, if not more, with the cultural milieu surrounding 'popular fiction' or 'genre fiction' or however it should be described. It seems as if the overwhelming majority of enthusiasts couldn't care less if these texts are exploited into franchises which ultimately only serve a corporate interest, happily devouring the repurposed material which is chewed up and regurgitated by Hollywood and the like.

Again, I apologise if this comes across as pretentious or arrogant. There are just times when I feel extremely isolated and alien among a culture which seems to have completely different values to my own.