"I am the enemy you killed, my friend": Fantasy, Sci-Fi and the Evil Empire

Something which came back to me in the midst of all the Jackson and Tolkien love when watching the EE: my one issue, or perhaps it’s merely an observation, not with Jackson, but with Tolkien and with most – but not all – of the fantasy sagas that ensued following his mighty footsteps. I also recalled a recent observation by londonkds, and something deborah_judge said. It all comes down to this: Orcs, Uruk-hai, and assorted villains are uniformely, unambiguously evil. As are their goals. They can be slaughtered by the dozens and hundreds without the reader having to wonder about Mrs. Orc at home, and their kids – or does anyone do that when being amused by Legolas and Gimli competing in Orc killing and head counts? Nobody has ever to bother wondering whether one could negotiate with them, since they’re clearly only out to kill everyone else, and not to be reasoned with.

(Yes, I know, there is the passage in which Sam reflects about the dead Easterling (or was it a what-are-they-called-again? ), reflections which in the film version are given to Faramir (in the extended edition of TTT). But that is one passage against more than a thousand pages.)

About the only big fantasy book saga which doesn’t follow Tolkien’s lead in this – providing armies of evil who can be killed without ever Our Heroes or the readers having to regret any of their deaths – is George R. Martin’s yet unfinished fantasy twist on the Wars of the Roses. Wherein we get the perspectives of both sides, and get characters from both sides to sympathize with. But it’s an exception. Now, I get the advantage of the concept. I’m not sure I’d want Legolas and Gimli to reflect on the Mrs. Orcs they’ve just widowed (before any Tolkien purist jumps on me, I’m aware that Orcs were once elves who got twisted and transformed and aren’t a natural race etc.) instead of celebrating the victory at Helm’s Deep. But I sometimes wonder whether said concept of Armies of Evil doesn’t lead, in some people, to a transference of this concept to Real Life.

Londonkds, when talking with me about the enduring popularity of Nazis as movie/tv show/book villains, said that one reason probably is that the Third Reich is as close as you can get in Real Life to the fantasy concept of the Evil Empire. Hence the seductiveness. Here, too, you have villains who are so unquestionably in the wrong that negotiations are never on the menu. Anyone opposing them is utterly and unquestionably in the right. The knowledge of genocide makes killing them not something the readers/audience has to reflect upon.

I remember Wolfgang Petersen, in an interview, describing how the first viewing of Das Boot (for anyone who hasn’t seen it in either its cinematic or TV incarnation – the story of a German submarine crew in WWII) in the US went. When the film started with the preamble saying how many U-Boats in WWII were sunk and how many crews died, there was wild applause. Petersen said he and those members of the film crew and cast who were present were completely shocked. (Also very relieved when by the end of the film, the audience reacted very differently and had come to like and sympathize with the characters.) Now, flawed as Petersen’s most recent oeuvre, Troy, might have been, it did make a point of presenting both Greeks and Trojans as equally deserving to live. And I do suspect that might have been one of the reasons why it wasn’t that popular. There were no Evil Empire or Armies of Evil around.

Sci-Fi does love its space Nazis, too, but in sci-fi, I recall, perhaps due to being imprinted with Star Trek as a teenager and adult, a lot more attempts to show their, for lack of a better term, humanity. (Let’s just overlook the embarassing TOS Pattern of Force, though.) Ever since TNG introduced the Cardassians in the episode The Wounded, and especially since DS9 promoted them to center stage and fleshed them out, they’ve been a favourite vehicle for the writers for tackling Third Reich related issues, and by and large, they did a good job. AN episode like Duet brings up the full horror of camps, slave labour and genocide, and investigates the different ways of guilt – from giving the order, to being silent and contributing through being a part of the bureaucracy, without prettifying and whitewashing them – but when, at the end, a Bajoran kills the Cardassian, we’re not meant to cheer and applaud (and I don’t know anyone who has), but be horrified like our pov character of the episode, Kira, who spent most of her youth fighting against said Cardassians.

Otoh: I bet many, many more people have watched Independence Day and applauded the demise of Evil Aliens ™ and their Evil Armies of Doom than have watched Duet and other ST episodes.

deborah_judge asked me for a bit of meta on what it feels like to be German and get presented with all of the literal or allegorical Nazis in fantasy and sci-fi. It really depends on the situation and on the presentation. At a B7/B5 Redemption conventions in England I attended, there was a costume competition for villains (not limited to villains of these universes) and when I dropped by with some English pals, Judith suddenly asked me whether I was insulted. It took me some seconds to understand why she asked – the guy on stage was dressed in black leather, stomping around, speaking in a strange accent and calling himself Fritz. Then it registered. He was supposed to be a Nazi, apparently. No, I didn’t feel insulted. I felt somewhat bemused. A bit similar to watching Harrison Ford, as Indiana Jones, declare: “Nazis! I hate those guys”, and outwitting and defeating them as soundly as Han Solo has ever defeated Stormtroopers. You can call these types “Operetta Nazis”. Safe, as hissworthy as you want, and completely unreal, especially if you live in a city where you can take the metro to visit the concentration camp in Dachau and feel sick at the very sight of the stones. When you live in a country where you’re aware that most of the old people you know/meet/see on the streets either actively believed in Hitler, or were too scared/complacent/lethargic/any or all of the above to do something. When you know that said old people are not any less human than the old people you meet in other countries.

Only in retrospect, when reflecting about, say, an episode like AtS’ Hero (never mind Doyle dying, I was completely okay with that and the way it was done – the reason why I don’t care to rewatch is one of the dumbest use of Operetta Nazis ever, the Scourge), or reading, say, a novel by Simon Green where the opposing forces consist of demons as unreasonable and ripe for the slaughter-by-hero as any Orc, the bemusement becomes extreme unease. Because then you wonder whether the apparent desperate need everywhere in the world for an easy enemy to hate, someone whose feelings and motivations you never ever have to wonder about because this enemy is utterly contemptible, and whose death you never have to regret, doesn’t directly connect to… well. Let me put it this way. I know a bookstore owner, retired now, who had one of the biggest collections of books burned and banned during the Third Reich in Germany. One of the reasons why he tirelessly did and does compaign to keep the memory of those writers alive is this: he was sixteen at the end of the war. A member of the Hitler Youth. He utterly believed. He told me that once, they came across a group of slave labourers working on a road. They were from a camp, they wore the uniforms, and they were visibly malnourished, haggard, dirty. He did not pity them. He thought they looked just as subhuman and contemptible as he was always taught Jews/Gypsies/Communists (Orcs?) were. It took the shock of being shown the films made during the liberation of the concentration camps after the war, and the conversation afterwards with several American soldiers who had been there, to get him out of his conditioning.

So. Ugly brutes slavering to kill nice people or soldiers in complete body armour without faces or evil insects from space or peope in black leather stomping around shouting in bad accents – sometimes I wonder whether the attraction isn’t similar to the attraction that ideology offered. The principle of saying, here is the enemy responsible for all your/the nice guys’ miseries. He can not be lived with, he can only be killed, because he only wants to do us harm and does not deserve to exist.

Maybe I’m overly touchy. But that really concerns me at times. Especially as a genre fan.