It's been three years since the last installment of the movie trilogy of The Lord of the Rings was released on DVD, and I've finally decided to sit down and speak my mind about the whole sordid mess.
Some of you may know that I wrote my Masters thesis on The Lord of the Rings, the book, by J.R.R. Tolkien. This makes me more of a purist than most viewers of the three movies. It also means that I take certain thematic and literary aspects of the books a lot more seriously than most people. And all of this translates to a more critical view of some of the events and characters in the movie, how they were portrayed, as well as some of the really crappy substitutions that the screenplay writers made over what Tolkien had previously intended.
I don't blame the movie's writers, Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens and Peter Jackson, for trying to find directions for the plot that are more simplistic than what the books had achieved, especially since movie audiences don't tend to be as erudite as the reading public. But I do reserve the privilege to make comment on some of the aspects where I think they foundered.
Before I go on, I should mention that much of my consternation with the films stems not only from book-related mishaps, but also from the point of view of a movie buff. Almost anyone who loves movies has at least one, but usually more than one, favourite that they can watch over and over again. For example, I could watch The Empire Strikes Back, or The Shawshank Redemption, or Gettysburg - pretty much any time, and I would still enjoy those movies for what they are to me: really well produced, entertaining and meaningful stories. I don't find myself capable of saying the same for the Lord of the Rings movies.
There's too much cliché to them, I guess. One device that is used in the movies which really turns me off is the use of "what ___ ?" In linguistic terms, this is called "evaluation," which is the story teller's way of quantifying the importance of what is going on. Music in movies is a form of evaluation. For example, in The Gladiator, the battle scenes represent excellent musical evaluation. But in strictly literary terms, repetition, exaggeration and alliteration can all mark evaluative writing - such as in Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" ("The horror! The horror!") or Shakespeare's "Richard III" ("A horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse!") An often overlooked aspect of J.R.R. Tolkien's writing is that he was a master of evaluation. It is also for this reason that his books read so well and that so many people, who otherwise don't read Fantasy novels, pick up his books and then never put them down; and his descriptions of Lorien and of the charge of the Rohirrim are among the great literary masterpieces of our time.
This brings me back to "what ___ ?" There are several instances of this poor evaluative device that pop up with irritating regularity, meaning to me that the screenplay writers were strapped for time & had no better device to fall back on. There is the instance where Frodo has just called Gollum by his rightful name, "Smeagol," and this latter responds with "what did you call me?" At the end of "The Two Towers," there is Sam's speech about going on with the fight, and there still being something to fight for. The music for that scene, and the cutting back and forth between Sam, the Ents and Helm's Deep is actually very nice evaluation - but Frodo's response, which is supposed to cap it all off, is like a flat balloon: "what is it Sam?" as though he wasn't about to tell us! In fishing terms this is like seeing your float strike downward from the vicious attack of a ravenous and frenzied ... old boot. Tolkien did not resort to this simple trick, in his books, and his portrayal of the scenes are vastly different.
But the movie is replete with these what? what? what? setups that don't exist in the book. It is very much like the blast of a hammer: the first time it is surprising, then it gets progressively less so until one just ignores it, or is bored by it. It reminds me of a critique that Mark Twain once wrote about Fennimore Cooper (author of The Last of the Mohicans), namely that:
Some of you may know that I wrote my Masters thesis on The Lord of the Rings, the book, by J.R.R. Tolkien. This makes me more of a purist than most viewers of the three movies. It also means that I take certain thematic and literary aspects of the books a lot more seriously than most people. And all of this translates to a more critical view of some of the events and characters in the movie, how they were portrayed, as well as some of the really crappy substitutions that the screenplay writers made over what Tolkien had previously intended.
I don't blame the movie's writers, Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens and Peter Jackson, for trying to find directions for the plot that are more simplistic than what the books had achieved, especially since movie audiences don't tend to be as erudite as the reading public. But I do reserve the privilege to make comment on some of the aspects where I think they foundered.
Before I go on, I should mention that much of my consternation with the films stems not only from book-related mishaps, but also from the point of view of a movie buff. Almost anyone who loves movies has at least one, but usually more than one, favourite that they can watch over and over again. For example, I could watch The Empire Strikes Back, or The Shawshank Redemption, or Gettysburg - pretty much any time, and I would still enjoy those movies for what they are to me: really well produced, entertaining and meaningful stories. I don't find myself capable of saying the same for the Lord of the Rings movies.
There's too much cliché to them, I guess. One device that is used in the movies which really turns me off is the use of "what ___ ?" In linguistic terms, this is called "evaluation," which is the story teller's way of quantifying the importance of what is going on. Music in movies is a form of evaluation. For example, in The Gladiator, the battle scenes represent excellent musical evaluation. But in strictly literary terms, repetition, exaggeration and alliteration can all mark evaluative writing - such as in Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" ("The horror! The horror!") or Shakespeare's "Richard III" ("A horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse!") An often overlooked aspect of J.R.R. Tolkien's writing is that he was a master of evaluation. It is also for this reason that his books read so well and that so many people, who otherwise don't read Fantasy novels, pick up his books and then never put them down; and his descriptions of Lorien and of the charge of the Rohirrim are among the great literary masterpieces of our time.
This brings me back to "what ___ ?" There are several instances of this poor evaluative device that pop up with irritating regularity, meaning to me that the screenplay writers were strapped for time & had no better device to fall back on. There is the instance where Frodo has just called Gollum by his rightful name, "Smeagol," and this latter responds with "what did you call me?" At the end of "The Two Towers," there is Sam's speech about going on with the fight, and there still being something to fight for. The music for that scene, and the cutting back and forth between Sam, the Ents and Helm's Deep is actually very nice evaluation - but Frodo's response, which is supposed to cap it all off, is like a flat balloon: "what is it Sam?" as though he wasn't about to tell us! In fishing terms this is like seeing your float strike downward from the vicious attack of a ravenous and frenzied ... old boot. Tolkien did not resort to this simple trick, in his books, and his portrayal of the scenes are vastly different.
But the movie is replete with these what? what? what? setups that don't exist in the book. It is very much like the blast of a hammer: the first time it is surprising, then it gets progressively less so until one just ignores it, or is bored by it. It reminds me of a critique that Mark Twain once wrote about Fennimore Cooper (author of The Last of the Mohicans), namely that:
Style may be likened to an army, the author to its general, the book to the campaign. Some authors proportion an attacking force to the strength or weakness, the importance or unimportance, of the object to be attacked; but Cooper doesn't. It doesn't make any difference to Cooper whether the object of attack is a hundred thousand men or a cow; he hurls his entire force against it. He comes thundering down with all his battalions at his back, cavalry in the van, artillery on the flanks, infantry massed in the middle, forty bands braying, a thousand banners streaming in the wind; and whether the object be an army or a cow you will see him come marching sublimely ...
This is very much the way the writers of the movie The Lord of the Rings approached their script. They hit us over and over with the same tricks, the same set ups and with the same mega-blast exaggerations of Tolkien's original. The Black Riders make creepy-crawlies slither out of the ground, the mountain troll in Moria walks into the chamber of mazarbûl and engages the entire kung-fu masters company in a brawl, the King of the Dead enters into disdainful scary-o discourse with Aragorn and Gimli and Legolas, Legolas turns into the mega atomic surfer dude snowboarding down stairs and extreme-skiing to death huge mammoths, the Ents turn into blithering idiots stupid enough to be tricked by Pippin the stupidest of all hobbits, etc... ad nauseum. In these (and so many more) scenes, the movies so misrepresent the books that anyone reading The Lord of the Rings for the first time must either find the real story bland in comparison, or be puzzled as to where the script writers got the inspiration for scenes that just do not exist in the book.
Finally, although I could go on and on, all of this forced hoopla mars the subtlety and poetry with which Tolkien had so painstakingly decorated his original stories; and I am left with the feeling, not so much of having seen something wonderful and artful, but more of having been to the carnival and having had a reel gud time.
And maybe that's all that Walsh, Boyens and Jackson had truly set out to achieve, when they sought to bring this massive beautiful and ungainly thing to the silver screen: just giving their viewers a good time. After all, it is Hollywood, and the name of the game is profit, above all else. Balancing the necessary flash-bang plot pyrothechnics with a sufficient amount of more deeply flowing literary matter is a very difficult and foolhardy thing to attempt, especially when your writer was J.R.R. Tolkien. And that is probably why the first time I saw the movies, it was a good time; but the second time, it was merely tiresome.
p.-
Finally, although I could go on and on, all of this forced hoopla mars the subtlety and poetry with which Tolkien had so painstakingly decorated his original stories; and I am left with the feeling, not so much of having seen something wonderful and artful, but more of having been to the carnival and having had a reel gud time.
And maybe that's all that Walsh, Boyens and Jackson had truly set out to achieve, when they sought to bring this massive beautiful and ungainly thing to the silver screen: just giving their viewers a good time. After all, it is Hollywood, and the name of the game is profit, above all else. Balancing the necessary flash-bang plot pyrothechnics with a sufficient amount of more deeply flowing literary matter is a very difficult and foolhardy thing to attempt, especially when your writer was J.R.R. Tolkien. And that is probably why the first time I saw the movies, it was a good time; but the second time, it was merely tiresome.
p.-
2 comments:
Let me preface my comments by first saying that I did not read the Tolkein books. I tried the Coles' Notes versions out of respect to J-Mac who wanted me to see the three movies with her. I didn't even make it through that.
When I saw the first movie, I was bored but fascinated by the visuals and kept looking for editing mistakes with all the diferent Hobbits and elves and dwarfs and whatever other characters that resided in the film. There were none.
Watching the first film was not an enjoyable experience save for Liv Tyler's breathy english accent that garnered me a new respect for her.
Watching the second one was tortuous and I think your comments shed light on why I felt that way. The writing DOES hit us over the head with the same things over and over. That repitition, so prevelant in The Two Towers, literally put me to sleep. I am so glad to hear from a fan of the books explain to me why these films did not work for me.
I am intrigued by your comments about the "what____" evaluative device. I am not sure I am able to wrap my head around it. I would love to hear other poor examples of this device in other films.
Your Faithful Narrator
Hey Jim, thanks for the comment.
Actually for shooting errors, you can find an extensive list here: http://www.moviemistakes.com/film1778 ... This site seems to prove that shooting a movie with NO mistakes is probably not possible. There are some very funny ones in the first Star Wars movie if you check it out.
Evaluation is just a term that is used in linguistic circles to describe the importance with which someone rates what they are saying. I got it from an old article on the subject, written by William Labov, which he alludes to in this very interesting article: http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~wlabov/sfs.html
section 4 describes evaluation).
The best example I can give is this: a) The car is red b) Holy shit, that car's red! Both utterances give the basic information that there's a car and it's red, but the second is highly evaluative. It exaggerates and overstates the obvious, implying something about the redness of the car. Depending on the context, it could mean that the car is really really red, or maybe a detective scratched some black paint off the car and finds out that it's red underneath (meaning it's stolen etc... [insert rest of story here]).
As far as its application to the movies, and "what____"; well, honestly, it would have been better evaluation if at least once one of the characters had chosen a different device than evaluating what was said or what is about to said than by saying "What [is it, sam?]" (after the repelled Black Rider attack at Osgiliath) or "What [did you call me?]" when Frodo calls Gollum by his true name "Smeagol" - basically every time. If Gollum had said something like "Holy shit, that's my real name!" it might have made it either more interesting, or the lesser cleverness and skill of the film writer would not have been so achingly obvious (and annoying). Even more annoying is the way they self-congratulate themselves on this clever bit of narrative in the "making of" bits on the DVD. (barf!)
The only positive I continue to get from all three movies is the successful navigation of trying to impart something (anything) of Tolkien's vision to a Hollywood audience. Overall, the film achieved that balance - but at a narrative cost that I find unpallatable.
p.-
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