The first thing that sticks out in Picturing Tolkien is a sense of purpose. These essays were written by academics for academics, and that obvious fact significantly colours both the focus and the style of each essay.
The second thing that sticks out is the overall consistency of that style. Most of the essays veer uncertainly between self-conscious formalism and self-conscious colloquialism, as if even the authors are aware that deep down, it’s a little weird to be writing all this scholarly criticism about a trio of big-budget action flicks.
I’m pretty certain this volume is intended as a college textbook, and I’m absolutely certain I never want to take the course. Described as a collection of critical essays on the nature of adapting J.R.R. Tolkien’s classic trilogy to the screen, the truth is that most of these essays are pretty damned uncritical. To be sure, the language is that of critical scholarship. And to their credit, the editors state their bias in favour of the movies at the start. With only a single notable exception, the essays take one means or another of lauding Peter Jackson’s (and his team’s) adaptation.
This means, of course, that anyone who regards a screen adaptation as good only if it remains essentially true to the characters and themes of the original… is liable to find himself in the embarrassing situation of arguing aloud with a book that seems to have failed to even consider so many basic points.
…I speak only, of course, in purely theoretical terms.
There are several essays on the subject of why and how certain characters and events were changed from novel to screen. There’s even a piece aimed at opening the minds of purists. But with a single golden exception, they tend to take for granted a presupposition that the cinematic treatment is in some way better than Tolkien’s original. To suggest, for example, that it makes not only better cinema, but better art, to portray Gandalf as less powerful and wise than he was in Tolkien’s books.
Brian D. Walter presents the case for that in his contribution, “The Grey Pilgrim: Gandalf and the Challenges of Characterization in Middle-earth.” Walter argues that it gives a more “egalitarian” level of personal strength to various other characters if Gandalf is “more humble and more vulnerable”, and he suggests that such a change “benefits” the characters. This is ultimately to suggest that Tolkien didn’t really understand his own characters as well as Peter Jackson — or Brian D. Walter — do. That an adaptation is a chance to improve a story.
Now that’s been done, I’ll grant you. Dumas’ Milady de Winter is an insult to womanhood, seen by modern eyes – let’s face it, the single essential and unforgivable sin that makes her not just an enemy, but genuinely evil …is that she’s a girl playing as hard and as dirty as the boys. George MacDonald Fraser’s screen adaptation of The Three Musketeers for Richard Lester in the ‘70s reinvented Milady as a resourceful, powerful, embittered woman, a dangerous gambler in a game that’s otherwise exclusively masculine, and well aware of how to play the cards in her hand to best advantage against the strength and social power of her opponents. It gives her actions a context and a set of motivations that make her a more credible – and often sympathetic – human being.
So Walter’s thesis might hold water… but if, and only if, the characters in Jackson’s films were more credibly human and internally consistent than Tolkien’s originals. In fact, the films are laden with character contradictions, transparently designed to maximize immediate drama at the cost of long-term character development (e.g,, Frodo ordering Sam to leave in the third film – and Sam actually complying) …while the characters in Tolkien’s novels are almost medievally immutable in the depth of their self-consistent natures. They’re Mythically Correct.
Like Bogstad and Kaveny, I admit a bias as well. I admit that I think Tolkien’s characters are wonderfully true to themselves from start to finish, whereas Jackson’s characters bend like reeds in whatever wind is blowing from maximum-drama-of-the-moment. I think that no small part of what readers have been drawn to in Tolkien’s novels, over the years, is the essential integrity the characters have within themselves. Honour comes naturally to them, aside from the hobbits; and what the hobbits possess, equally by nature, is honour in its less exalted form: common decency. Born into cultures with long histories and established traditions, all of Tolkien’s characters know their places in the world in a way humanity in the wake of the industrial revolution never can – to say nothing of humanity in the wake of social media. Most of us envy that tradition and stability. Jackson gives us some magnificent window-dressing of all that, but his characters are motivated in ways that are profoundly modern. They take the tale out of tune. They’re not Mythically Correct.
The elephant in the room of this collection stands right there. Most of these critics seem to have more background in film than in the immense pattern of world storytelling that some have called the Tale: the great archetypal story that plays out in uncounted forms, but according to curiously strict rules. Tolkien lived his intellectual life among the roots and branches of that Tale. If a story fits into those rules, I call it Mythically Correct.
And most film is not Mythically Correct, it’s …let’s call it Structurally Correct. It keeps an audience’s attention focused with timed dramatic peaks, it presents immediately recognisable characters (the Villain, the Hero, the Expert, the Buffoon), and it violates internal logic and characterisation without blinking for the sake of momentary effect. And it is among these roots and branches that Jackson has lived his life. To put it at its simplest, I think that when Tolkien pictured Gandalf, the image carried archetypal overtones of Odin; and when Jackson pictured him, the image was more like Obi-Wan Kenobi. Tolkien’s root value for his characters is honour; for Jackson, the corresponding value is glory.
Several of these essays touch on that fundamental truth in various ways, from a discussion of the visual realisation of Tolkien’s Dunharrow dead men into what amount to zombies (in Dimira Fimi’s “Filming Folklore: Adapting Fantasy for the Big Screen through Peter Jackson’s The Lord Of The Rings” to Richard C. West’s comparison of how the romantic elements are structured in “Neither the Shadow nor the Twilight: The Love Story of Aragorn and Arwen in Literature and Film.” Only one addresses that truth directly. Janet Brennan Croft offers so keen a set of insights that I’m saving her for last.
My impression from these essays is that most of the authors, like Jackson, have their own roots embedded more in Structure than in Myth. And given that perspective, it isn’t too surprising that the first section of the book – “Techniques of Story and Structure” – offers some ideas that are interesting enough on a strictly technical level.
For example, Robert C. Woosnam-Savage offers us “The Materiél of Middle-Earth: Arms and Armour in Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings Motion Picture Trilogy,” a nifty little rundown on the weaponry and armour from WETA that did so much to establish the visual look of the films. I confess to a professional bias in favour of this piece; there are details in that essay that no sword teacher worth his salt can help but find fascinating. The less interested you are in sharp pieces of forged steel, the less interested you’re liable to be this essay.
“Two Kinds of Absence: Elision & Exclusion in Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings” is one of the most enlightening pieces in the book. John D. Rateliffe compares several adaptations of Tolkien’s work and examines the reasoning behind them, and I’ll read it again.
But the second section of the collection is labelled “Techniques of Character and Culture”, and it’s here that my eyes begin to roll.
Philip E. Kaveny’s essay positing that “Gollum won the only battle that really mattered… destroying the ‘One Ring’ and in the process making the supreme personal sacrifice”, and that his role in the quest entitles him to be “granted posthumous inclusion in the Fellowship of the Ring”, is almost painfully self-congratulatory. Kaveny wants to shock us with “Frodo Lives but Gollum Redeems the Blood of Kings,” and he’s pretty smugly confident that he’s succeeded. Swerving wildly from intense scholarly terminology (“…similarly culturally situated artistic products accessible in an ever expanding myriad of formats and having existence in both…) (say, can both of anything actually make a myriad?) to personal anecdote and boast (“…this proposition knocked the socks off my dear friend, the prominent Tolkien scholar…”), Kaveny tries to support his contention that a “…New Testament reading of Gollum’s sacrifice of himself (intentional or not) redeems the weakness of Isildur’s blood, which makes in Christian terms the perfect redemptive sacrifice…”
The late Roman Catholic Professor must be rolling in his grave. Kaveny claims that he’s raising “a number of theological questions”, but the simple fact is that in a Mythically Correct universe, evil frequently carries the seeds of its own destruction, and the greater powers of goodness are perfectly capable of using evil characters to accomplish good ends. In fact, in book and film alike, Gandalf also alerts us not to discount Gollum’s importance: but he doesn’t sound so damn smug about it.
Okay, I said I was saving the best for last: here it is. The keenest critical scalpel applied in this whole bundle of diagnosis belongs to Janet Brennan Croft, whose “Jackson’s Aragorn and the American Superhero Monomyth” penetrates straight to the heart of something I could not have articulated so well.
I can say that the reduction of Gimli from the hero of Helm’s Deep — piling up orcs at the breach in the Deeping Wall while he waits for reinforcements — to a comic-relief buffoon who can’t stay on a horse and has to be continually rescued, offends me. But Croft puts her finger on the deeper principle that explains just why it offends me. I used to say Jackson simply didn’t think there was room for that many heroes in his story; Croft explains in greater depth. Using the model of American Western film, where social institutions are helpless to preserve social order and an outsider must come in, disdaining custom (and often law ) in order to save the day, Croft compares Aragorn’s role in the films with that in the books, and sheds some very clear light on both.
If you love the Jackson movies, and have a fondness for the conventions of modern scholastic film criticism, this volume may belong on your shelf. If neither of those conditions pertains, see if you can find Croft’s essay elsewhere. It’s a nice piece of clear-headed scholarship, neither condemnatory nor laudatory, but providing a clear structure of thought based on which the reader can draw more informed conclusions for himself.
Picturing Tolkien is not without its redeeming qualities. Its key flaw, in some ways, lies in the false advertising of the title: because in essence, the collection is not about picturing Tolkien, but rather verbalizing Jackson. And it still leaves me wondering whether the films are really worth so much scholastic attention.
(McFarland & Company, 2011)
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