When I think about movies that have made an impact on me, there are plenty that I have loved. I watch them over and over again whether I’m feeling blue or otherwise; I recommend them madly to friends. But when I think about the word “impact,” the choice is pretty obvious.
I saw Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone in the theater when it came out and was so hyped, but it was the trailer for a soon-to-be-released film that would eclipse my Hogwarts fervor for years to come: The Fellowship of the Ring.
I’d never read Tolkien, though I’d seen the 1977 The Hobbit a number of times as a child and recalled being mostly creeped out, though also not unreasonably delighted. But 2001 was well before the time when one could count upon a slew of nerd-centric films over the course of the year, so I was naturally into anything that promised elves on the big screen.
And how it delivered.
To this day I still get a chill when I hear Galadriel’s voice over the pitch-black opening title, and not just because the movie itself was a wonder. Because of Peter Jackson’s interpretation of Tolkien’s Middle-earth, I forged my first online identity and found friends in other cities and across the globe who are close to my heart even today.
Before social media, we were just social: we navigated impossible-to-follow AIM chats where everyone personalized their font and the color of their text, and we commented on every single blog entry on our platform of choice, Diaryland. We called ourselves the LOTR Sisters and we were online friends when online friends were still something parents didn’t necessarily know about. We were teenage girls from Ohio and Illinois and Texas and Louisiana and Arizona, we were from Malaysia and Singapore and Canada. We aspired to be a whole lot of things but mostly we just nerded out with each other, writing blogs and poorly photoshopping Tolkien-themed holiday cards. We tried to grow up without giving too much of our love of wonder away.
Today we are from even more places. We are engineers and librarians and photographers and actresses and writers and designers and creators and social workers and mothers and managers and educators. As I’ve gotten older I’ve come to revel in the power of the internet to connect like-minded folks, and feel pretty lucky that I got to experience that from a relatively young age – before it was a relatively common thing. Every time one of these gals shares something about her life, whether it’s a new baby or a new book, I smile, remembering how we came to know each other and how likely we are, still, to rise to the defense of our favorite elf or hobbit.