Zinn: You view the conflict as being primarily about pipe-weed, do you not? Chomsky: Well, what we see here, in Hobbiton, farmers tilling crops. As Tolkien later establishes, the Shire's surfeit of pipe-weed is one of the major reasons for Gandalf's continued visits. And he wondered why Gandalf was traveling so incessantly to the Shire. In the books we learn that Saruman was spying on Gandalf for years. Now, this is, to my mind, where the story begins to reveal its deeper truths. Who is producing this tale? What is their agenda? What are their interests and how are those interests being served by this portrayal? Questions we need to ask repeatedly. It is as though the people who live in these places are despicable, and unworthy of mention. And this so-called map casually reveals other places the Lost Realm, the Northern Waste (lost to whom? wasted how? I ask) but tells us nothing about them. What of places such as Anfalas and Forlindon or Near Harad? One never really hears anything about places like that. Obviously this is because they have men living there. Rohan and Gondor are treated as though they are the literal center of Middle Earth. Zinn: And observe the map device here how the map is itself completely Gondor-centric. These terrible armies of Sauron, these dreadful demonized Orcs, have not proved very successful at conquering the neighboring realms if that is even what Sauron was seeking to do. Why? Chomsky: Notice too that the "war" being waged here is, evidently, in the land of Mordor itself at the very base of Mount Doom. There are at least 19 rings floating around out there in Middle Earth, and yet Sauron's ring is supposedly so terrible that no one can be allowed to wield it. The race of Man has nine rings, for God's sake. The Dwarves have seven rings, the Elves have three. Tolkien makes no attempt to hide the fact that rings are wielded by every other ethnic enclave in Middle Earth. For one, the point is clearly made that the "master ring," the so-called "one ring to rule them all," is actually a rather elaborate justification for preemptive war on Mordor. Chomsky: We should examine carefully what's being established here in the prologue. "The world has changed." I would argue that the main thing one learns when one watches this film is that the world hasn't changed. Already we can see who is going to be privileged by this narrative and who is not. He says this to Merry and Pippin in The Two Towers, the novel. "The world has changed," she tells us, "I can feel it in the water." She's actually stealing a line from the non-human Treebeard. Chomsky: The film opens with Galadriel speaking.