The Emerging Chaos Mythology of World War One
How Peter Jackson and J.R.R Tolkien - Along with Sam Mendes - Forged An Emerging Mythos
In an age of Chaos Magic impacting upon our lives in everything from propaganda and counter-propaganda, and on to computer games and marketing, one particular development I have been paying close attention to is the transformation of World War One into an emerging mythology of the present and of the future. The catalyst of all this being the unlikely figure of movie director Peter Jackson.
Jackson, and we know, was the director of the magnificent Lord of the Rings movie trilogy. His screen adaptation of J.R.R Tolkien's Middle Earth mythological cycle has become one of the defining and greatly loved cinematic masterpieces of modern times. A colossal level of psyche charge has been poured into these three movies during the last twenty years. Due to the countless millions who have taken the story of the Fellowship into their hearts. Finding it both deeply moving and inspiring within their own lives. As indeed readers of novel had likewise experienced during the latter half of the 20th Century.
The author of Lord of the Rings, and the creator of the remarkable Middle Earth mythology, J.R.R Tolkien was himself a veteran of World War One, and indeed began the earliest drafts of his mythology with the initial outline of the Silmarillion while still in the trenches of the Western Front. What Tolkien witnessed – in terms of the bravery and tenacity of ordinary men – during the horrors of trench warfare also made its way into the Lord of the Rings story in the characters of Frodo and Sam. The two Hobbits carrying the Ring of Power to the fires of Mordor. Regardless of the hardships they both endured along the way.
In 1918, Peter Jackson then directed the documentary They Shall Not Grow Old which took old newsreel footage of World War One, and by using the latest computer technology colourised, speed-corrected and even used lip readers to bring the century-long silent voices of the unknown soldiers – seen in these reels of old film— back to life. It was a remarkable and complex undertaking which amazed and moved everyone who has watched They Shall Not Grow Old.
Even so, the computer generated recreations of the old films have an almost painterly and dreamlike quality about them. They appear strangely mythological and otherworldly in terms of their visual gravitas. Rather than that of cold and harsh portrayals of the Great War between 1914 and 1918.
Where this gets really interesting, is that in 2019, director Sam Mendes – inspired by the stories of a relative during his time in World War One, created his own cinematic masterpiece 1917. Which for all intents and purposes has a story-line which bears an uncanny parallel to that of Sam and Frodo traveling across Middle Earth on their way to Mordor. In this case, the plot revolves around two ordinary service men having to deliver orders to call off a doomed attack upon the German lines in which one of the two men’s brother will almost certainly be killed.
In one particular part of 1917, the two men are ostensibly moving across a landscape of dead bodies and mud-filled shell craters which is not too dissimilar to that of Sam and Frodo crossing the Dead Marshes in both the novel and movie adaptation of Lord of the Rings. Likewise 1917, also deeply impacts upon the emotional charge of the viewer to the point that people who do not even like war movies found 1917 a deeply moving cinematic experience.
The result of all these connections - between the names and works listed above - is that; as we pass more than a century from the end of World War One, this period of history is currently passing into mythology as much as it is actual history. The recollections and psychic, emotional and cultural collective repository of what is history, and what is mythology, are becoming fused into an emerging new mythos derived from a one hundred year-plus series of passive Chaos Magic rituals. Which began with J.R.R Tolkien in the trenches of the Western Front jotting ideas into his notebooks, through the creation of his Middle Earth cycle as a successful author, followed by Peter Jackson’s cinematic adaptation of Lord of the Rings, followed then by his World War One documentary, and finally all this leading into the psychic cauldron of Sam Mendes’ 1917.
In centuries to come the horrors and stories of World War One will become akin to that of Arthurian lore rather than being consigned exclusively to the historical archives. The process has already begun.
All art is a form of magic, and when the art is capable of generating a powerful and sincere emotional response in the people exposed to it; then reality and synchronicity come into play. Not only in the aftermath of the closing of the rite - in this case the movie 1917 - but also during its creation. It is worth remembering that during the production of the second of the Lord of the Rings movies entitled The Two Towers, that the cast and crew in New Zealand witnessed the attacks upon the World Trade Center in New York during the shooting schedule. This was not an accident, nor merely a coincidence. This was the gods taking notice, and then as always, moving in their ever mysterious ways.