The Blue Lotus is pretty Manichean when it comes to who’s the good guy and who’s the bad guy, but this is really incidental to what makes it great…
The Blue Lotus is an unforgettably visualized, ideal portrayal of friendship and universality that eventually stretches across most of Herge’s oeuvre, informing it at its core.
Upon further thought, the manichean aspects of this and other Tintin stories are not incidental to what makes them great. Tintin is an ideal projection of a universalist, moral world view anchored in scoutism, which had been a formative influence upon Hergé in his youth.
Tintin is emphatically about the good in us, which is why Tintin — the embodiment of this ideal — fights villains of unambiguous moral turpitude. Hergé makes use of this archetypical conflict of good versus evil to promulgate an ethos of humanity, equality and brotherhood without ever becoming moralising.
Later in his career, he moved away from this approach, and it is telling that the first story to eschew the manichean is Tintin in Tibet, whose origins — both in terms of plot and theme — lay in The Blue Lotus.
Historical background of 'Tintin in The Blue Lotus' is in 1937 when Japan occupied Northeast China. At the time, many of the great Western powers were present in China, administering small pockets of territory called international settlements or concessions.
At one point during narrative, Tintin is bounced about between settlements as the corrupt chief of police Dawson kicks him out of the British sector, and he is transferred across Chinese territory into the Japanese-controlled zone.
The Blue Lotus is filled with a certain angst not found in other adventures of Tintin. At times it has a desolate quality, as Tintin finds himself alone in the vastness of China, the most populous country in the world.
Labels: adventures of tintin, The Blue Lotus, tintin movie, tintin youtube
