Distributed Mind

I stopped by Barnes & Noble tonight. I looked mostly at two things: Lord of the Rings (which I still did not buy - only $20, though), and also the Nausicaä "manga" (basically, a comic book), which sure enough they had. Some thoughts:

First, Nausicaä was interesting. The movie is based on the Manga, not the other way around, though both were made by the same person so they show more than a little similarity. Visually, the manga and the movie are practically identical. The story from the movie follows the first two volumes fairly closely, it seemed, though there were a couple points radically different (the movie has a more dramatic climax, and implies a resolution at the end; the manga is less dramatic and the story still has a long way to go at the end - 5 volumes to be precise). I hope to get a chance to read the whole thing sometime, but they are $10 a piece, and there are seven volumes, so...

I wanted to check on one thing in Lord of the Rings (as I also tried to persuade myself to buy it), namely the scene where Eowyn kills the Nazgul. I love that scene, largely because of the ironic line Eowyn gets to spout about not being a man (and I swear, Tolkien must have been thinking of the end of Macbeth when he wrote that...). I wanted to read that part becuase I have been thinking about the heroines in epics. Specifically, I have been sitting on a few stories for a while, and most of them star epic-style female characters. I don't know that I have liked what I have seen as far as portrayals of heroines in epics, but I had to do my research anyway (it hasn't been very comprehensive, to be sure). It is an intersting thing though that Miyazaki has created a character not too far from what I was thinking in Nausicaä (who incidentally, is named after a character in The Odyssey), not to mention a philosophy that is fairly close too. We think too much alike some times, he and I, which is strange given he is a 60 year old Japanese artist and I am... well, whatever I am.

Anyway, back to Lord of the Rings. I like it, and I like it more as time goes on, especially as I have realized how brilliantly Tolkien has crafted his universe out of old epics and some crack language abilities, and made it to somehow give back to the very material it drew from. And one has to respect him for being trying, and largely succeeding to create a national epic. One thing, though, that I really don't like about it is the violence. The epic virtues still hinge on killing. The same complaint can be made about most of the epics we draw from in our culture - such as Star Wars. In so far as pulp and comic book heroes might qualify as epic heroes (the stories aren't always epic, but the characters can take on epic proportions over time), that might not be as accurate - I mean, they don't always rely on lethal violence. But still, most epics, and certainly all literary epics hinge on violence. That reinforced my thought that we need a good pacifist epic. That prompted me to remeber though that Miyazaki is already going that way. He may not have gone all the way but he has gotten closer than anyone else. (Part of this difference must surely be born out of different world view - Tolkien's Christian background, and Miyazaki living in a country heavily influenced by Buddhism and pantheism. In Tolkien's story there is good and bad, and bad must be destroyed. In Miyazaki's story there is no such thing as pure evil, so peace makes more sense, though it is not always there strictly necessary.)

So, anyway, I must read Nausicaä, and meanwhile, I will have to work on my pacifist epic and my superhero story, among others.