Lord of the Rings as a Paradigm

[syrakusos]

In the discussion on Atlas Shrugged Reviews, Ted Keer compared and contrasted expectations and outcomes for Lord of the Rings. Those who read the books, including The Hobbit and Silmarillion knew a different work than those who only saw the movies. That is especially true for those who found some (ideally all) of Tolkein's deep scholarship rewarding in its challenge. The poems, the languages, the folks and races and their histories, all of that was a deep foundation for what on the screen was admittedly flashy, but somewhat hard to explain.

Just for an aside, my daughter grew up only with some of this. She read The Hobbit, both as a children's illustrated from the film, and as a novel. Of course, she played D&D computer games. When the movies came out, she asked her boyfriend to take her to The Two Towers. He knew none of it. When he asked her why elves and dwarves don't get along, she told him to just watch the movie: she knew it was too much to explain.

But elfs and dwarfs - and as I recall those are the preferred plurals, not the English forms to go with knives and wives - are not homogenous. Like peoples (or "peoples") everywhere, they had clans and loyalities and feuds and misunderstandings lost deep in time. In the movie, the troupe passes seamlessly from one Elfish realm to another.

In the book, when Sam sees an elephant, he quotes a long passage. It would not be a show-stopper, but it would stop the action cold. So, we skip that... just as we skip the alphabets grammars, syntaxes and vocabularies.

For the aficianado, the linguistics and folkways are the stuff of the story. They did not make it to the screen.

All of that aside, it is also true, if you watch the Ralph Bakshi animated film of LOTR, that Peter Jackson lifted it. The plagiarism is obvious. It is not just a matter of two competent directors working from the same book.

Then, there is the fact that LOTR, nice as it is, is sort of a Wizard of Oz story, an invention to be a substitute for the real thing. When I was a sophomore in 1968 and LOTR books were sprouting on cmapus, our English Literature professor assigned us Njal's Saga in preference to Beowulf, which "everyone" reads, he said. But that't the point. LOTR was Tolkein's invention for his grandchildren. It was expected that anyone serious about the romance of archaic literature would know it firsthand.

A similar case can be made for the Greek (and Latin) classics that have been cinematized: we get the surface-level conflict, but none of the real substance. That becomes consequential for libertarians who speak about Thomas Jefferson and John Adams with absolutely no idea whatever why they called King George a tyrant. The problem begins with the dumbed down college classes that offer "Oedipous Tyrannos" as "Oedipus Rex."

So, too, with Tolkein, are the many levels of misunderstanding projected flatly on the screen. The actors said perhaps for the fans that they loved being able to speak Elfish. It sounded beautiful to them. It so happens that Chinese movies have Chinese subtitles because the language is written mostly the same, but spoken differently. So, too, is Elfish intended to be read in runes and scripts. But you would need to freeze frame while the audience moved their lips through the dialog. That delays the action.

So, when you make a moving picture, you necessarily have pictures that move. Every film is an action film. You do not display a man in a chair reading a book out loud for four and half hours. And I have attended one-man performances close to that, Richard Kiley as Miguel de Cervantes, the Man of LaMancha, which was totally different from the movie of the same name. A great actor alone on a stage can be with each person in the audience individually alone in the dark, one on one. A film is a different kind of experience. It is not a recorded stage play. As a film, Peter Jackson's LOTR was not merely a translation of the books to a different medium, though as a film it remained true to the books, keeping to the broad themes and important characterizations.

Edited February 27, 2011 by Michael E. Marotta

[BaalChatzaf]

As a film, Peter Jackson's LOTR was not merely a translation of the books to a different medium, though as a film it remained true to the books, keeping to the broad themes and important characterizations.

Not so. The movie was an abomination. It was a Franken-Film. Pieces here snipped and sewn to pieces there.

Without the back story told in the Silmarillion LOTR was not properly grounded.

Ba'al Chatzaf

[kiaer.ts]

I had no problem with any mere cuts from the plot in the adaptation of the LotR films. It was the additions such as the self-parodic Dwarf tossing and the dragging of Aragorn which necessitated not filming some of Tolkien's actual story which infuriated me.

Jackson is a cheap hack. I could have put up with the choice of the creepy Hugo Weaving as Elrond or the cheap monochromatic CGI and the obvious and unimaginative portrayal of Sauron as a flaming billboard atop Barad Dur, had it not been for the fact that Jackson was such an obvious twit who clearly thought with his Jerry Bruckheimerian direction choices that he was improving on Tolkien.

My objections to the LotR movies are not linguistic or academic. (I was actually surprised that so much Elvish (and yes, that's the historically, if not prescriptively, the proper term) was preserved and featured in the film.) My objections are artistic. Only one single change (rather than deletion) of Tolkien's own material was justified - the substitution of Arwen for Glorfindel as the rider who came to Frodo's aid at the end of the first film. No aspect of the film where Jackson was true to Tolkien's work was problematic. Deletions such as the omission of Tom Bombadil were quite understandable. Jackson could easily have kept himself to trimming, rather than bastardizing Tolkien's work.

But why complain if a real creator's work is mangled? After all, every hack is entitled to express his own creativity. Somehow.

[syrakusos]

I had no problem with any mere cuts from the plot in the adaptation of the LotR films. It was the additions such as the self-parodic Dwarf tossing and the dragging of Aragorn which ...

The dwarf-tossing was bad enough to be evil and they did it twice. I missed the part where Aragorn was in drag. I did wish he would wash his hair, though.

... unimaginative portrayal of Sauron as a flaming billboard atop Barad Dur

I have no alternative - maybe less flame. The realization of Sauron was difficult at best. I imagined him maybe as a black cloud, almost material, within his castle, with Palantiri (the seeing stones) around him. Throughout the books, it was clear that he needed agents to act through. The eye in the pyramid thing was the wrong concretization, I agree. But, again, you have to show the audience that his "gaze" is "distracted" and you might do that differently.

Jackson could easily have kept himself to trimming, rather than bastardizing Tolkien's work...

Heinlein said that any work can be improved by cutting. A three-part story was long... maybe four, each shorter, would have been artistically better, but commercially difficult. It is easy and unfair to criticize the work you did not do. I thought that the sequences with the Steward and the Pyre were way too long. But, I did not make the film, so it was not my choice. My interest is specifically in those "linguistic and academic" areas that are so hard - impossible, perhaps - to bring to the film. Yet, if you consider A Beautiful Mind, or Contact you can appreciate the possibilities. The basic challenge is that reading is different from viewing. People can read faster than they can talk or move, so no film can deliver what a book can.

I always liked the intro to Amazing Stories. Books were a rapid transmutation of a different tradition, entirely. It was only in the Middle Ages that we learned to read silently - and thus quickly. Previously, letters were only cues for speaking. Today, film is only a century old. We are still working on it and I believe that we are waiting for a paradigm shift in cinema that is as consequential as silent reading was. If you watch old TV shows from the 60s, you may find them glacially slow compared to today's presentations. But, if you watch really early TV from the 1950s, it is even worse: radio where you see the people, but not yet television.

I am not sure about the extent to which TV changed our expectations for cinema. Casablanca, for one, still stands up, it has a modern pace. Many films from previous days do, as well - though others were mired in their times.