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Even if his thesis is true

Posted by Bulkington (A) on December 22, 2003 at 10:53:23

In Reply to: Someone's really good explanation of why LOTR has bored me and so many others. posted by clarkjohnsen on December 21, 2003 at 13:50:15:

How does "Tolkien ripped-off [or borrowed from] Wagner" explain why the films/books bored you? I don't see the argument.

I could care less about whether Tolkien was in any way indebted to Wagner. What about his uses of (i.e., references to) Beowulf, the Aeneid, the Odyssey, etc.? Why do the latter make the Lord of the Rings literate while the former has to be denied in his defense?

I'm pretty well over Tolkien, personally. I find his historical Middle Earth to be a greater work of fiction than I find his novels to be anything like great literature. That said, I really disliked the films, and while I'm by no means a Tolkien purest, let alone one believes that films should honor the purity of their source-material as a general principle, the films so botched basic issues of narrative strategy as to make Tolkien look like a story-telling genius. Worse, they violated the realism by which Tolkien made his world palpable to his readers. Unfortunately, this violation seems to be exactly what most viewers and some reviewers loved about them. From David Edelstein (at Slate):

There's a sequence an hour into Peter Jackson's The Return of the King (New Line), the final film of his The Lord of the Rings trilogy, that renders any narrative confusions, any objections to the lack of fidelity to J.R.R. Tolkien's original, any lingering doubts about the scale of this accomplishment, magnificently irrelevant. The armies of Sauron—hundreds of thousands of Orcs—are heading for the seven-tiered "city of kings" called Minas Tirith, where the wizard Gandalf (Ian McKellen) and hobbit Pippin (Billy Boyd) are attempting to convince a dangerously depressed and unhinged ruler, Denethor (John Noble), to call in reinforcements. Pippin is dispatched to climb a tower, slip past the guards, and set fire to a huge beacon as a signal to Aragorn (Viggo Mortensen), the future king, across the plains at Edoras, the Rohan capital. What happens when Pippin fulfills his mission is breathtaking: Jackson's camera soars, godlike, to the next Olympian peak, where watchers light their own beacon, and then to the next and the next and the next, until, in Edoras, Mortensen's Aragon turns his blue eyes to the light on yonder mount and asks the men of Rohan to ride into battle.

Of all the things to love about The Return of the King, it's those lightning shifts in scale that I find the most thrilling. I don't mean just the sudden impossible hugeness of it—those hundreds of thousands of demonic Orcs led by massive trolls and winged dragons called Fell Beasts and eight-story elephants called Mumakil as they surge toward a seven-tiered city that soars into the sky.

It's exactly those "lightning shifts in scale," those swooping camera shots, those brought-to-you-by-the-New-Zealand-Tourist-Board, airborn, landscape sequences, those let's-shift-the-perspective-to-that-of-an-arrow (are-we-adapting-Tolkien-or-a-postmodernist-here?) moments that bug the hell out of me, because they are typical Hollywood generic conventionalism (sci-fi, fantasy, historical epic), authenticating divices whose effects, I think, are ultimately the opposite of what they're explicitly trying to achieve. Authenticating divices on that scale are always a weirdly defensive and question-begging move, and I'm baffled that this failing keeps going unnoticed: they so want you to believe in the authenticity of the world, that it has real geography that must be traversed, that the armies that march it really number menacingly in the thousands, etc., etc., that they undermine that desire by failing to take the world for granted and in so failing, present us that world from perspectives never afforded the characters living in it. This isn't just the Lord of the Rings. Again, most every Hollywood-style genre film produced does this (on increasingly masurbatory scale as studios and SF wizards seem bent on serving themselves over the demands of the film), and I think the effect is to hold the audience at arm's-length. Certainly it frustrates audience identification with the film's protagonists when, for example, rather than cutting to Frodo waking up in a strange room and letting us share in his fear and uncertainty, the audience is taken on a CGI-rollercoaster ride up the side of the tower and through the window to discover him lying there, where we can no longer feel whatever sense of dislocation he must feel because we've been turned into privilaged viewers who know more about his circumstances than he does.

Certainly people like the films. But some day, when the effects are dated and viewers are no longer dazzled by them, they'll see them for what they are. Or so I hope.

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