by Samuel Lees
Gandalf is not all that he is cracked up to be…
Though he pretends to be a powerful wizard, Gandalf is actually a rather pathetic figure who tries to win favour with children by doing firework displays and magic tricks at birthday parties, kitted out in a dirty second-hand wizard’s costume he found in a bin. Despite looking like an elderly hobo in fancy dress, Gandalf is actually a sly old crook. He convinces a trio of rustic idiots to do all his dirty work for him, namely Frodo, Sam and Mary Poppins. Gandalf tells these parochial nitwits a cock-and-bull story about a magic ring and sends them off on a suicidal mission, dressed up as a relaxing walk in the countryside. This scheme was devised by the elders of the village who want to get rid of Frodo and his posse of juvenile delinquents, who are not only a menace to the community, but are believed to be responsible for a string of daring vegetable robberies. The magic ring was Gandalf’s idea. The ring is not really magic; it is just a pretext for Gandalf to make poorly judged anal sex jokes. Gandalf got the ring from Bilbo, a lying old man who claims to be a hundred and fifty years old. Bilbo says he found the ring in a charity shop, but the truth is he stole it off an insane cave-dwelling tramp.
Bilbo lives in a grand old stately home where he spends his days smoking his pipe and boozing on fine wine. The old pensioner is notoriously tight-arsed and ill-disposed towards receiving guests. To deter his friends from coming round and helping themselves to a glass of red, the old man tells everyone that he lives in a hole in the ground, a sordid little hole bang in the middle of nowhere.
Gandalf knocks on the door, disguised in his postman’s livery, whistling a jaunty little tune.
ー What do you want? inquires the voice within.
ー Telegram for Mister Baggins.
Gandalf hears the tinkling of chains from within, the sound of bolts being drawn, and the voice of the cantankerous O.A.P complaining about these people who come round and bother him all hours of the day. Bilbo opens the door. A brief perusal of the figure standing before him tells him that something is amiss. Despite the early hour, the old tinker is already a couple drinks in and looking rather worse for wear. He stands there, goggling at the figure before him while his mind labours sluggishly. His memory is a hazy mess, destroyed by years on the piss. However, try as he might he cannot recall the paperboy ever having had a long grizzled beard, or that the adolescent in question favoured a walking stick. Then, in a flash, the mists clear, and he realises that this postman is not an original, but a cheap imitation, and that the impostor is none other than his old comrade, Gandalf.
The old shit throws the door shut with all possible speed, but his reaction times being somewhat affected by the booze, Gandalf is able to introduce his stick ’twixt door and frame before it closes. Bilbo puts all his weight behind the door but he is no match for the wizard. After a brief struggle Gandalf prevails, throwing the portal ajar once more, in the process hurling the old pensioner to the ground. Bilbo gathers himself up, flushed and embarrassed, like a strawberry that has just pissed itself. He turns to face the wizard.
ー My dearest Gandalf, he says, how delighted I am to see you again after all this time. You must forgive my initial reaction. It was perhaps a touch uncivil of me. I did not recognise you, dressed as you are in that eccentric fashion. However, you must understand that I am plagued by all sorts of terrible people trying to take advantage of my generous and sympathetic nature, and what’s more, I am rather busy at the moment.
Gandalf graciously accepts the apology and explains to the little grey-haired bullshitter that he would not intrude upon his valuable time if the matter were not of the utmost importance. Gandalf adds that he has come a long way and that the journey has left him somewhat in need of a drink.
ーMmm, says Bilbo, ignoring the hint.
Gandalf tries the direct approach. Realising that there is no hope of convincing this alcoholic cheapskate to part with a glass of red, he asks for water. Bilbo pretends not to have heard, as if he has just noticed a crack in the wall and is absorbed in the contemplation of it. Gandalf drums his fingers impatiently.
ー Well?
ー Very well thank you.
Gandalf sighs and throws his hands heavenwards in desperation. Putting his personal malaise to one side, he asks the hobbit about the gold ring. Bilbo produces the ring from his pocket, whereupon Gandalf smites the fucker on the head with his magic stick. He nabs the ring. While he’s at it, he helps himself to the bottle of Châteauneuf-du-Pape on the mantelpiece. He then kicks the stiff on the floor in the guts for good measure, before taking off on his bicycle.
Besides being full of shit, the aged relative has just finished writing his memoirs, a sort of travel book in which he recounts a string of traumatising incidents that attended a walk in the country. It seems that this flair for bullshit runs in the family, as Frodo, despite exhibiting all the signs of being a child, with his angelic cherub face and his thick tresses of dark hair, claims to be fifty years old ー a clever ruse which allows him and his minions to infiltrate oldschool taverns and other haunts of pleasure where they can buy booze and bum fags off the elderly pissheads.
The young hobbits are indeed to blame for the spate of vegetable robberies. Frodo is the brains of the outfit, the mastermind behind the whole operation. Sam is his gardener, a flabby uneducated thug who often has difficulties speaking proper English, instead employing a sort of rural patois. Frodo keeps Sam in ignorance by refusing him his books, saying that his dirty fingers will contaminate the pages.
As he goes from one foul crime to the next, Frodo has no misgivings about the corruption of his soul, yet he is quite scrupulous when it comes to getting his hands dirty; for that he has his faithful stooge, whose hands are already dirty. Sam is his right-hand man. He is there to provide the muscle and dish out the violence when things get hairy. With his roomy interior, he can also eat the evidence if the gang is ever captured, a contingency which has never yet arisen. The third member of the gang is Mary Poppins, the village idiot. Young Pop has a sluggish brain, but nimble fingers, which make her a dab hand at picking locks.
Frodo is in the middle of planning his next job when Gandalf starts banging on his door and then banging on about this magic ring. They take their seats in front of the fire. The wizard puffs away at his pipe for several minutes in a profound state of philosophical abstraction, then begins to speak.
Gandalf invents a colourful backstory for the ring. As he speaks, an expression of childlike wonder enters Frodo’s face. It is almost as if the wizard has cast a spell over the boy; he is charmed. He watches Gandalf with lips parted and a strange brightness in his eyes. Gandalf can see that he is taken in by this load of chimerical bullshit. He tops the performance with a pointless stunt, throwing the ring into the fire, which proves nothing of course, except it isn’t made of wood. Frodo is deeply impressed by the whole spectacle, despite it not making a lot of sense.
Frodo realises the danger the ring poses to the Shire. There is only one thing he can do to protect his patch and its vegetables. So he packs his bags, hits the road and leaves the hood for good, taking with him just the bare essentials: toothbrush, a change of clothes, some light reading matter and his gardener Sam. Mary decides to come along for the ride. They leave the Shire and sally forth with a spring in their step and the wind in their sails, however the hobbits are woefully unprepared for the journey that lies ahead of them, having failed to procure a sensible pair of walking shoes before going off on their long expedition, an unfortunate oversight which leaves them no choice but to proceed barefoot. Gandalf provides them with a set of butter knives to fight off enemies and a novelty glow-in-the-dark spoon he found in a cereal packet.
Following a series of unfortunate mishaps, the gang decide to lay up for a while in a picturesque holiday resort in the mountains. Frodo remains in bed for several days playing the invalid, having sustained a small scratch to his leg from a bramble. While Frodo convalesces, Gandalf has time to reflect on recent events; he realises that this trio of diminutive weaklings is no match for Sauron and the forces of darkness. Common sense dictates that he should engage some ultraviolent thugs to look after the hobbits, and fend off any enemies who might try to do them in. Instead, he enlists the help of the elves, these thin anaemic-looking characters, including Legolas, a long-haired albino. He also calls on the dwarves, a race of midgets with anger-management problems. One can only assume this is an elaborate joke.
Gandalf wears a grubby grey dress and a slightly battered novelty pointy hat. He has a long wooden pipe which he uses to smoke crack. This is where he gets all his crazy ideas. After a couple hits on his crack pipe, Gandalf tells the assembled company that the only way to destroy the ring is to throw it into the aptly-titled Mount Doom, a big fuck-off mountain deep in the heart of enemy territory. This does not go down well. Gimli throws a tantrum, as he is wont to do whenever faced with a difficult problem, and tries to destroy the ring with a single blow from his hefty axe, however we are only forty minutes into the film at this point and Peter Jackson already has his eye on a sequel, so instead the axe shatters implausibly. Gandalf sees an opening, as ’twere, and cracks a joke about his ring being violently assaulted by a bearded thug. This sally goes down like a lead balloon.
ー But who shall carry the ring? asks Legolas.
After much deliberation, the company magnanimously decides that Frodo should have the honour of getting to dispose of the cursèd ring. The plan is as follows: the pathetic weakling, to wit Frodo, should slip unnoticed through the enemy lines and insinuate his way to the heart of Sauron’s kingdom; there he shall single-handedly defeat the forces of darkness by tossing said ring into the big fiery pit where it shall be consumed by flames. Meanwhile the rest of the company will distract the enemy by dicking about, performing pointless attention-seeking stunts and making a scene wherever they go, armed with wooden spoons and cooking pots. Frodo gets into a funk and protests that Gandalf is shifting all the responsibility onto him. To appease the miserable child, Gandalf declares that he shall be accompanied by his favourite flunkies, Sam and Mary Poppins.
Mary Poppins is a schizophrenic with a weakness for crystal meth. At one point in the film she splits into two Mary Poppinses, which is a neat trick that was done with mirrors. However, this optical illusion is quite tricky to achieve, so Peter Jackson decided to make life easier for himself by having the two Mary Poppinses tragically separated in the second film.
Frodo is the worst of the lot, a curly-haired little drama queen. Besides being melodramatic, Frodo also suffers from low blood pressure. He is often light-headed and given to fainting at inopportune moments, as well as sulking and generally acting like a never-ending time-of-the-month. Frodo also has a crippling drug habit. In his paranoid phases he believes that he is being watched by a giant eye made of fire, namely that heavenly orb the sun. Sam is his closest friend, his fidus Achates, his old China, or at least that’s what he tells him. Frodo manages to maintain a slim figure on screen by keeping his flabby retinue by his side at all times. With his powerful arms, this sturdy sack of shit can also carry Frodo whenever he tires of walking and feigns unconsciousness, as is his habit.
Frodo decides to dump the oversized turd after he is caught indulging in his favourite pastime of eating all the available food. Sam pleads innocence, despite being covered in crumbs, and speaking with his mouth full. Frodo is disgusted with Sam, as much for his dishonesty as his bad table manners. He tells the ponderous heap of excrement to remove his flabby unscrupulous ass to some far-flung corner of the world, never to sully the landscape with his odious presence, nor to defile the air with his perfidious tongue. Sam begs forgiveness, while doing his impression of a beached whale, claiming that he was stitched up by Smeagol.
Smeagol is a loathsome little fucker who trails Frodo and Sam everywhere they go, generally harshing their buzz and weirding them out with his strange double-talk. Smeagol is a hardened drug addict who has developed a split personality and hideous demeanour from many years of heavy to industrial-scale drug use. Smeagol used to be an ordinary hobbit, a touch irascible perhaps. That was until his wife drowned in a river, pushed out of a boat by him when he started losing an argument. Following this calamity, Smeagol began to dabble with heroin use. Like many addicts, he stole from his friends and family in order to pay for his fix. However, at this point his habit was more or less under control; the drug was not yet the master of him.
Though no one could prove that it was anything else than a regrettable accident, everyone knew that Smeagol was responsible for the death of his wife. Smeagol blamed society and decided to go live in a cave. In isolation he found peace at last, in other words, no one to fight with. In his married days, Smeagol was always being nagged by his wife. Now he could enjoy the bachelor lifestyle: abandoning cutlery, spending all day in his pants and living in a filthy shithole. He took to spiritualism, living an ascetic lifestyle and giving up all worldly possessions except one. If he ever started nurturing thoughts of returning to civilisation, this vestige of his former life would remind him of the corrupting influence of society. His life was simple, but he was happy, until one day a burglar broke into his cave (easily done) and stole his only possession, the ring of his deceased wife, whom he used to refer to lovingly as ‘my precious’.
Smeagol never recovered from this fatal blow. He lost his mind, but found solace in heroin. The doses increased in strength as his habit spiralled out of control. His extravagant drug use began to take its toll on his appearance; his flesh wasted away, eaten up by junk, until he resembled a child’s stick-drawing of himself. His skin faded to grey, as did his hair, before saying adieu and parting ways with his head. The changes wrought on Smeagol’s body and soul by years of excessive drug use were irreversible. Like many junkies, Smeagol became a slave to heroin and had a love-hate relationship with the drug, a bit like Marmite, or his wife; he was torn between his craving and his desire to kick the habit. It was this constant internal conflict, between his base desires and his better nature, that brought about his schizophrenia. Sometimes when he was blissed out tripping on smack, his wife would appear to him. To an outside observer, it would seem that this degenerate lunatic was having an altercation with himself, as he fixed his eye on vacancy and argued with the incorporal air. But for Smeagol it was just like the good old days arguing with his wife.
At the back of his cave he had a giant stash which would see him out to the end. For years he never set foot outside. However, with his out-of-control habit, his stash was rapidly diminishing. When it finally ran out, Smeagol followed suit, and made his first foray into the outside world. It was on one of these trips in search of gear that he ran into Frodo and co.
The hobbits were beginning to tire of being on the road. They still had a long journey ahead of them, but the scenery had taken a decidedly bleak turn, the barren wasteland that lay ahead lacking what you might call features of interest. After the millionth game of I Spy, Frodo was starting to lose his shit. It was at this point that Fate flung the wretched troglodyte into their path.
Frodo thought they could keep Smeagol as a pet, that his amusing mentally-ill antics would help wile away the tedious hours. Smeagol would often bring them bits of roadkill he had found, an act in which he persisted, each time with the air of someone who has accomplished a good deed, despite on each occasion being apprised by word of mouth and frowning of eyebrows that the market for said animal corpses was non-existent. Sam took exception to Smeagol and was thoroughly opposed to the whole ménage à trois. He saw in this loathsome, disgusting, degenerate freak a rival for Frodo’s affections. Sam found Smeagol creepy, but Frodo was fond of the little monster. It was then that Sam hit upon the scheme of eating the provisions and claiming he was framed by Smeagol. This would show Frodo Smeagol’s base, deceitful nature. Sam had made the mistake of letting his stomach do the thinking, rather than his head. It is this reputation for stupidity that had earned the gardener the ironical title Sam “Wise” Gamgee.
Whenever confronted with danger, Frodo puts on the magic ring and performs a cowardly disappearing act, leaving Sam to deal with the situation. Towards the end of the first film, the gang are besieged by a horde of enemies. Mary Poppins is whisked away by the orcs. Without hesitating Frodo slips on the ring and disappears in a flash. Realising that the odds are stacked against him, Sam legs it down to the river where he finds Frodo has already commandeered the only boat and is paddling his way to safety. Sam calls out to him from the shore in his broken English. Frodo looks back over his shoulder and shrugs as if to say ‘What can I do?’ and continues paddling. Sam starts crying and making a piteous spectacle of himself. He wades into the water, splashing about like a big baby. When he gets to the deep end, he breaks out his drowning-man impersonation, flailing his arms about and blowing bubbles underwater. Frodo takes pity on the overweight idiot, like a parent embarrassed when his child starts making a scene in public, and waits for him to catch up. Sam clambers into the boat, whereupon Frodo hands him the oars and tells him to get rowing.
After embarrassingly falling off a cliff at the end of the first film, Gandalf makes a stylish come-back in the sequel. During the interim between the two films he has aged considerably. His face is crinkly and withered, his hair all white. This is due in no small measure to his out-of-control crack habit. However, after several months in and out of rehab, Gandalf is now clean. He has ditched his tattered grey hobo weeds. Peter Jackson has given him a complete make-over, providing him with some swanky white robes. He has even painted his magic stick white. Gandalf relates this patently bullshit story of how he was bummed by a fire-breathing dragon, but managed to get out alright. Frodo makes a joke about his smoking crack. Gandalf takes his hat off to him.
The End.
04/01/2019
Samuel Lees 