Summer is the silly season, when museums twist their mission statements all to hell in search of blockbusters, and the public, desperate to hide out from another infernal Houston afternoon, scuttle like roaches for any darkened, air-conditioned venue.
This season is particularly silly: The Houston Museum of Natural Science has Lord of the Rings: the Exhibition, a movie tie-in veiled as science. The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston is showing baseball memorabilia.
Like Star Wars: The Magic of Myth, Lord of the Rings was organized in collaboration with the film production company itself; but where Lucasfilm stumbled, trying to force thematic depth onto their sword-and-sorcery epic, New Line Cinema triumphs by focusing on the amazing production techniques.
It’s a good show. Dozens of concise, interesting video clips tell all. A makeup man talks about the 2000 prosthetic Hobbit feet they used, a computer guy talks about the custom software they wrote for animating a battle with thousands of computer-generated orcs. A prop-maker shows us how to make realistic chainmail out of plastic tubing. Fascinating. The Enzedd production crew is obviously thrilled with the expensive, high tech toys you get to play with if you’re working on a film with a $270 million budget, and their craftsman’s pride is contagious. When I was a teenage Dungeons and Dragons fan, I would have died for some of the props and costumes on display here, but it’s disappointing that they chose to show the highly finished, close-up versions, when the real genius of propmaking is to make something cheap look great from a distance. The costumes are great, the models are great, it’s a techie nerdfest. But nerds come in all shapes nowadays; the crowd didn’t at all resemble your typical gamers’ convention. There was a respectable cross section of ages and ethnicities. I even saw girls.
The Lord of the Rings was brought to Houston by a chain of interlocking interests, the least of which is science education. As New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark put it: “The Lord of The Rings trilogy has the potential to be a major tourist promotion and investment tool for years to come, by highlighting the country’s natural beauty and the creative talents of its people across a wide range of knowledge-based industries”, i.e. an island of geeks with great scenery. They appointed a “Minister of Lord of the Rings” to coordinate the spin-offs, and used part of the nine million dollars allocated for LOTR promotion to fund the show’s development. The Te Papa Museum in Wellington gets a blockbuster traveling show to “establish its brand internationally”. The Houston Museum of Natural Science gets money ($17 admission + merchandise!), and new audiences. That kid drooling over the elvish sword might be back to see the trilobites, by and by.
Baseball as America is more annoying. It’s a pre-packaged historical exhibit of baseball memorabilia, delighting in rubbing baseball’s history where it hurts: the legacy of racism and sexism which baseball shares with every other American event of the same historical period. The show proves, with boneheaded logic, that 1. baseball had problems;
2. America had problems; therefore 3. Baseball is America. By sneaky inference, the show goes on to imply that 4. America is no longer racist or sexist, because baseball has reformed itself. Nothing about striking players, drug scandals, soaring ticket prices, or the league virtually blackmailing cities into building ballparks with public money. It’s got a self-congratulatory jingoism which makes the show’s historical critique hollow. There’s still no big league women’s baseball, it’s still called the World Series, and there’s still that Cleveland Indian.
Basketball, now, that’s America.
Bill Davenport is an artist and writer, and was the first contributor to Glasstire.
