| From West by Northwest.org Arts & Letters The Matter of Middle-Earth By Patrick Diehl Dec 23, 2002
Peter Jackson, his fellow script-writers, and their global team of thousands have done it again. Their translation of The Fellowship of the Ring (Part I of The Lord of the Rings) was a visually glorious, emotionally riveting film from its hallucinatory prologue of battle 3000 years before at the foot of Mount Orodruin all the way through to its quiet ending on the stony highlands of the Emyn Muil three hours later, with Sam and Frodo looking out over the Dead Marshes toward the mountains of Mordor and the half-hidden volcano (still erupting) where the action began. The Two Towers is just as intense, just as beautiful, and (fortunately) just as long. But the really good news is Gollum. Through a combination of remarkable physical acting overlaid by cutting-edge computer animation that tracks every detail of the body language and facial expressions of the live actor, the film-makers have met the supreme challenge of bringing this character, the most original and uncanny product of Tolkien's genius, fully and convincingly alive. In fact, the initial impact of his inner torment, translated from the remove of prose on the page to the magnified immediacy of images on the screen, was so great that I found myself shrinking back into my seat, pierced with a terrible empathy for this lost soul who wanders absolutely alone in the Ring-wrought desolation of his haunted, broken mind. By degrees, I grew more accustomed to the presence of this ruined E.T. with the big head, the large eyes, and the almost hairless skin of a new-born child, with an infant's direct and uninhibited expression of basic, unfiltered emotions, and yet with the power of speech--speech wrenched and twisted by a long and terrible history and memory of suffering and resentment, and by madness. But to the end of the film, Gollum continued to unnerve me in a way that no orc, Balrog, Eye, or other monster or mere nightmare ever could. And it made perfect sense that the bleak little song, sung by a woman, with which the film-makers chose to accompany the credits turns out to be, as the last line of the credits inform us, "Gollum's Song," for if this film is any one character's film, it is Gollum's, and Gollum deserves to have the last word--or at least the last word should be about him. Before I go on to talk about the additional dialogue (or monologue) that the script-writers have created for Gollum, however, or the scores of other significant, fascinating, and usually successful changes they have made in Tolkien's story, I want to describe my own relationship to The Lord of the Rings and to the process of adaptation and transformation of an existing text. As others have noted (including Mr Jackson himself), the audience for The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, and the forthcoming Return of the King is anything but homogeneous. The experience of a teenager who comes to these films with no previous knowledge of Tolkien will doubtless be very different from the experience of someone like myself, now engaged in rereading The Lord of the Rings for the 16th time in 38 years, and having read--several times, in the case of certain volumes--the wholeHistory of Middle-Earth that Tolkien's son Christopher edited from his father's papers after his father's death. In fact, I may be burdened with so much prior knowledge that I cannot really see these films as independent works of art; consequently, my response to them may have little relevance even to viewers who may have read The Lord of the Rings, but only as one book among many, not as a foundational text to which they return, blessed by an unquenchable, ever-reviving thirst, again and again throughout their lives. Other factors, more peculiar to myself (for there are a great many lovers of Middle-Earth on this Earth of ours), also shape my response. Like Tolkien, I was trained as a medievalist--in fact, I studied Old and Middle English under the auspices of the very same Oxford college to which Tolkien himself was long attached, though by my time Tolkien was no longer teaching at Oxford, or teaching at all. Therefore, I am acquainted with some of the languages, legends, and lore on which Tolkien drew for his invented world. I have also done translations from several different languages (French, Italian, Greek, Latin) into English verse, so I am familiar with the difficulties and compromises inherent in producing a new version of an existing piece of literature. And I have written several novels of science fiction and fantasy, one of them on the same scale as The Lord of the Rings, so I am familiar with the complex choices a writer (or film-maker) must make in weaving the dance of theme, character, plot, and image. In addition, my study of the volumes of The History of Middle-Earth, with their multiple versions of the legends of the Elder Days and their elaborate presentation of the rough drafts of The Lord of the Rings, has shown me Tolkien himself sometimes feeling his way slowly through a series of false starts to the finished narrative which I experienced as an absolute, uncontingent reality when I first read it at the age of 17. All these things predispose me to leniency toward Jackson & Co, who are faced with the appalling task of fitting over a thousand pages of main narrative, plus some "appendices" where crucial additional narrative lies hidden, into a mere nine hours of film-time. I know what it is to translate, as the film-makers have had to do. I know how Tolkien borrowed at will from the European Middle Ages. I know that The Lord of the Rings is the utterance of an individual, mortal, and fallible human being, not something that has fallen to Earth, whole and entire, from a Platonic realm of Immortal Art. And there is one thing more. As a former medievalist, I am also familiar with how whole cultures tirelessly fashion and refashion certain central bodies of story--for example, the Arthurian legends, formerly known as "the matere of Britain." Indeed, we are still retelling (and reshaping) the "matter of Britain" today, in the form of books like The Mists of Avalon and a variety of films and theater-pieces. From that perspective, I can only welcome the beginning of a similar refashioning of Tolkien's mythos that I hope will endure for centuries or even millennia. The "matter of Middle-Earth" has enough complexity, depth, beauty, and meaning that it can survive and thrive no matter whether the refashioners are third-rate hacks (as some medieval re-tellers of the Arthurian stories were) or genuine creators with something new and powerful to say about, and through, the old, traditional material (as Jackson & Co have). So, if you demand a strict fidelity to the letter of Tolkien's text and find only irritation in any deviations from it, this review is not for you. For I am excited, rather than annoyed, by the refashioning of The Lord in the Rings in the two films that have appeared so far, and I want to focus on the changes the film-makers have introduced and the rationale for them--in celebration, not defense! Contrary to some reviewers whose knowledge of the original seems extremely vague (or non-existent), I would never accuse the film-makers of a slavish fidelity to Tolkien. Instead, I salute their bold infidelities to the letter of the book, and their profound, imaginative engagement with its spirit and inner meaning. Not, of course, that all their alterations, extrapolations, and interpolations are successful.. Some of the new material seems aimed at the "groundlings" who expect a big helping of violent physical action every half-hour or fifteen minutes; the commercial realities of competition with adventure and martial arts films explain (but do not excuse) things like the tedious series of Battles with Monsters and Descents of Collapsing Staircases that lead up to (and unfortunately undercut) the encounter between Gandalf and the Balrog on the Bridge of Moria in The Fellowship of the Ring. Fortunately, The Two Towers is relatively free of this kind of eye-candy. The one wholly invented scene of physical violence that I recall in the new film--namely, the attack on the Riders of Rohan by a band of Wargs and the Orcs who ride them--is frighteningly convincing (kudos to the creators of the Wargs!), and it acts as the launching-pad (literally!) for a crucial and very creative new plot element that establishes a parallelism between Aragorn and Gandalf that is absent from the book but that felt absolutely "right" to me. (In deference to those who have not yet seen The Two Towers, I will say no more.) The main alteration in The Two Towers that did not work for me involves the handling of the Ents. Jackson makes them much more tree-like than they are in the original. Treebeard (aka Fangorn) is turned into a pompous buffoon; the other Ents, who are given grotesque, even demented faces, never speak at all. Incredibly, they all seem entirely unaware of the devastation Saruman's timber-harvesting has wrought on their beloved forest. After several frustrating minutes of film-time (frustrating to this viewer as well as the two hobbits whom Treebeard has taken captive), Merry tricks the slow-thinking Ent into carrying Pippin and himself close to Isengard, and the sight of the large clear-cut (much smaller than many an actual one in the Pacific Northwest, alas) on the slopes above Saruman's stronghold at last persuades the Ents to reverse their decision not to intervene. Their attack on Isengard is a telescoped version of Tolkien's, with most of the essential details still recognizable. But there are no Huorns, and no silent forest waiting to wipe out the fleeing Orcs when Gandalf returns with reinforcements to Helm's Deep and brings doom at dawn to Saruman's great host. As a result, it is unclear to the militarily savvy viewer how the force of cavalry led by Gandalf could actually defeat the much larger force of Orcs into whose pikes they charge with suicidal recklessness. And the critical plot-function that the Ents serve in the book is destroyed. For, if Saruman's army is annihilated at Helm's Deep without any help from the Ents and the wild trees they move into place, there is no need for the Ents to destroy Isengard. The whole episode of the Ents is reduced to a hectic detour from the main action to the south, good as spectacle and as a symbol of the revenge of the natural world on machine-worshippers and militarists, but very poorly integrated into the rest of the film. As I watched this unfortunate lapse limp its way to conclusion, I felt an intense exasperation beating down upon me from the screen--exasperation on the part of the film-makers, who would have loved to ditch the Ents but knew they dared not. They made the best of things (from their viewpoint) by using the episode to show Merry to advantage as he outsmarts Treebeard (no great feat), rejects the temptation of returning to the Shire to which Pippin almost succumbs, and delivers a couple of ecologically and politically aware speeches to Treebeard and to Pippin. Meanwhile, they take out their frustrations by making fools of the damn perambulating trees and then returning as quickly as decency permits to the heroic defense of Helm's Deep. After Gollum, the handling of Helm's Deep is the other artistic triumph in this film. Those who worried, based on the brief battle scenes in the first film, that the Helm's Deep episode would be a chaos of axe-, arrow-, spear-, and sword-play can breathe easy. There is plenty of violence, of course, but it is much less graphic than in the standard action film of today (no exit wounds!), and it is never perfunctory. However confusing and swift the hand-to-hand fighting may be, the battle as a whole unfolds in clearly-articulated stages, as one line of defense after another falls to Saruman's army of Uruk-hai. Better still, scenes of actual combat alternate in an unforced way with scenes of unarmed interaction among the principal characters (Aragorn, Eowyn, Théoden), supporting characters like Legolas and Gimli, and secondary characters like the captain of Théoden's guard, H·ma, or the people of Rohan who have taken refuge in the fortress and the caves behind it. The tone of these scenes is beautifully modulated, shifting through all the gradations between comic relief and high tragedy. Two of the non-combat scenes especially stand out, and neither of them is in the book. One is the arrival of several companies of elf-archers, led by Haldir (whom we met in Lothlórien in the first film). Costumes, movements, even the sound of the elvish horn--everything is perfect, and the explicit reference to the historical precedent of the Last Alliance connects the scene powerfully to the battle in the prologue of The Fellowship of the Ring, linking events 3000 years apart with electrifying effect. The other scene is the arming of Théoden. In the book, we see Aragorn and Legolas don coats of mail at Edoras, and Gimli a small cap of iron and leather that Théoden wore as a boy; Eowyn also receives a sword and "a fair corslet." But we do not see the king himself put on armor and weapons. The film-makers rectify this omission quite wonderfully. Centered in the screen, in a large room inside Helm's Deep, with H·ma in attendance, and the camera far enough away that we see both of them from head to feet, Théoden is arrayed for war. It is very formal and deliberate, but not stiff. As one piece of armor after another is placed upon his body, the king speaks. He quotes a poem that Aragorn quotes in the book: "Where now the horse and the rider? Where is the horn that was blowing?" Neither Tolkien nor Jackson tells us, but this poem is a translation of a very famous Old English poem, one of the few survivors of the wreck of time that has come down to us over the many centuries since the age of Beowulf. On Aragorn's lips, it is a tribute to the high seriousness, the tragic sense, of the warrior-folk of Rohan; on Théoden's lips, it acquires much greater poignancy, for Théoden believes that the end of his people has come. (1) The rider is himself, and all his knights; the horn that still blows for battle, but will soon be silent, is his own. But there is more. As he looks back, in imagination, from the far side of his own death upon the death of Rohan, he faces the full meaning of kingship. Yes, H·ma assures him, his people will follow him, even to their death. And as you hear the king's voice and watch the king's face, the weight of that loyalty, the piercing singleness of that royal responsibility, come home to you. They came home to me, with a force that I had never felt in all my long years of reading heroic epic from Homer, to the Chanson de Roland, to Tolkien himself. I shook in my cinema seat, choking back sobs, wracked with the passion of the old world and its ancient, tragic loyalties. Where did this moment of magnificence come from? In part, no doubt, from the script-writers' own knowledge of heroic literature, in which the "arming of the hero" is an important, highly ritualized type-scene (see Homer's Iliad for examples). But I think they have also read Tolkien's one-act play, "The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth," and especially the pendant to it, the essay "Ofermod," in which Tolkien meditates upon the nature of heroism and the tragic error of leadership commemorated in the Old English poem, "The Battle of Maldon." Before Théoden arrives at Helm's Deep, it has already been made quite clear that he may be leading his subjects into a death-trap. As he is armed, we see that he has arrived at the same conclusion. Like the war-leader in "The Battle of Maldon," his error of judgment seems likely to cost the lives of all who trust and follow him. However superbly he may measure up to the heroic code as he (and they) die fighting, their blood is still upon his hands. I have dwelt on this scene because I believe it shows how deeply the film-makers have engaged with Tolkien's thought and writings. Their knowledge, I am convinced, goes far beyond just The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit. When I heard the poignant words of Treebeard (see VI:6, "Many Partings") intoned by Galadriel in the prologue to The Fellowship of Ring, "The world is changing: I feel it in the water, I feel it in the earth, and I smell it in the air", I knew that these films were being made by people who not only had a genuine love and understanding of Tolkien, but also the courage and imagination to re-arrange and alter his words and still remain true to his world and world-view. Given these things, their stumbles--even their Ents!--can be forgiven. That much may be said even if one only considers each of the various changes the film-makers have made in isolation. What if one takes a step back, now that two of the three films have been released, and looks at the changes for underlying patterns or consistent rationales? What is the thought behind this interpretation of Tolkien's masterpiece--for it is an interpretation, somewhat as the great 17th- and 18th-century English translations of Greek and Roman poetry are interpretations, rather than carefully literal, or near-literal, renderings of the original words? One thing that was already noticeable in the first film, and has now become unmistakable, is a systematic reduction in the nobility--i.e., distance and elevation--of the "noble" characters, aside from the Elves who rule Rivendell and Lothlórien. This is most striking in the case of Aragorn. In the book, he never sheds his dignity and difference, even in the chapters where he is merely "Strider" to the hobbits. His royalty may be hidden under weather-beaten garments and a wry sense of humor, but Tolkien makes sure we always feel its presence. In the films, by contrast, he is almost modern in his tone and behavior. In The Two Towers, when Gimli and Legolas, challenged by Éomer out on the plains of Rohan, unwisely insist on conforming to the heroic code (you tell me your name first!), Aragorn steps in with visible impatience, pushes Legolas' drawn bow and arrow firmly aside, and engages Éomer in sensible conversation. Another example: after we see the "investiture" of Théoden in his armor and in his role as king and war-leader (described above), we see Aragorn in a brief contrasting scene, alone, in close-up, quickly, deftly, unceremoniously putting on his mail, fastening his sword-belt, and generally seeing to business like a worker pulling on his work clothes. Théoden is also given a generally down-to-earth rendering in the film. The "investiture" scene is something of an exception, and even in it, Théoden's language is quite direct and relatively unadorned. The raw emotion of another interpolated scene, in which he grieves for his dead son outside the walls of Edors, with only Gandalf to console him, and in which the climactic line is, "No parent should bury his own child," is unthinkable for the Théoden of the book. Both the good and the evil are brought closer by the film-makers to the human average. Legolas himself has begun to unbend before The Two Towers ends. With warriorly humor, he greets Aragorn, whom he thought dead, with a smile and a joking "you're late," and then adds, "You look terrible." Poor Gimli's short stature, sloppy eating habits, and lack of equestrian skills are the occasion of many a joke, and his claims to heroic dignity are undercut by his own constant wisecracking. Saruman's agent in Edoras, Grima Wormtongue, who is entirely despicable in the book, gets a courtship scene of sorts with Éowyn and actually sheds a tear, presumably out of some remnant feeling of solidarity with other human beings, when he realizes that Saruman's army of Orcs is large enough to kill everyone in Rohan. If one turns to the Frodo & Sam branch of this complex tale, one sees that their nobler moments have been cut down to size, and that they have been given more moments of ill temper. Even Faramir, whose immediate renunciation of the Ring in the book's Ithilien contrasts so admirably with his brother Boromir's earlier behavior, at first decides to keep the Ring--though for his father, Denethor, not for himself. He only releases Frodo and Sam after he has marched them down to Osgiliath and seen Frodo almost surrender the Ring to a winged Nazg°l and then come within a hairsbreadth of killing Sam for thwarting him. (2) It's pretty clear, in short, that the film-makers are bent on "humanizing" their cast of characters. On its title-page, as one discovers if one troubles to decipher the Elvish letters at the foot, the book describes its contents as The War of the Ring and the Return of the King as Seen by the Hobbits. By the end of the film-version of The Two Towers, I realized that the point-of-view had shifted. Which is why the title of this review-essay includes the line from Tolkien's title-page but modifies its ending to read, "as Seen by the Humans." Given the fifty years that have passed since The Lord of the Rings appeared, the conventions of modern cinema, and the tastes of both film-makers and audience, it is only natural that this shift has taken place. Once one perceives, and accepts, the change of perspective, a lot of the changes the film-makers have made fall into place. Even the portrayal of Gollum is affected by the film-makers' "humanizing" impulse. As I mentioned earlier, they give him quite a lot of new dialogue. Some of this takes the form of additional inner debate. But some of it serves to make him more attractive (or less repellent) by revealing softer feelings than he shows in the book. His extra-large eyes have the same effect, at least when the "good Sméagol" is in the ascendant. He is even allowed to save Frodo from drowning in the Dead Marshes--an action of which the original Gollum would be quite incapable! As with the other characters, making Gollum more "human" helps bring the action and the feelings it communicates down to the audience's level. But there is something else in play as well, something more specific to Gollum, as a brief, brilliant scene that the film-makers have invented makes stunningly clear. At one point during the journey through the pleasant woodlands of Ithilien, we see Frodo holding the Ring on the palm of his left hand and petting it with the fingers of his right; in the middle distance, perhaps ten feet away, Gollum is crouching in the same posture, holding an imaginary ring on the palm of one hand and petting it with the other. Even the most inattentive viewer now realizes, if they haven't already, that as Gollum now is, so may Frodo be--and that this is something Frodo knows too. (3) The possibility that Frodo could share Gollum's damnation, while it is certainly present in the book, becomes much more vivid in the film, partly because we have the two characters present before our own eyes, but also because the film-makers have stressed the similarities between the two hobbits. One could argue that in this case the film has actually taken a critically important aspect of the book's meaning and strengthened it. Gollum is not just a ruined E.T., as I called him earlier; he is also a ruined Frodo, a shadow cast back onto the present by a dreadful future. (4) In the film, this future seems all too likely to become reality. On the moral plane, the burden of the Ring is already affecting Frodo much more gravely in the film's Ithilien than it does even inside the book's Mount Doom, moments before Gollum seizes the ring and falls into the fire with it. Meanwhile, in an invented scene, we have heard Galadriel warn Elrond that "the Ringbearer is failing." Indeed, his personality has disintegrated so badly before the end of the film that we (and Faramir) see him draw Sting and set it to Sam's throat before he comes back to himself. He seems to revive completely in the very last scene of the film, after Faramir has released him, but the viewer wonders how he can hold himself together long enough to get anywhere near Mount Doom. Perhaps Jackson & Co have a really big surprise in store for us--bigger than a regiment of Elves arriving in Helm's Deep, or Faramir taking the Ringbearer and the story on an unexpected detour down to Osgiliath. More could be said about Frodo, and about Sam. I would like to return to Aragorn, however. Earlier, I spoke of the "modernity" of his character as depicted in the films. Paradoxically, he is the human being who is most closely involved with the Elves, whom the film-makers leave on their pedestal, raised high above human, dwarf, and hobbit. (5) It seems perfectly reasonable that the original Aragorn, the right-hand man of Gandalf, the king who is so well-equipped to rule, would consort with Arwen, daughter of the Elf-King Elrond. In the first film, by contrast, no one can miss the distance between the vulnerability, self-doubt, and physical disshevelment of Aragorn and the queenly self-possession and physical elegance of Arwen. Her deep love for him seems almost miraculous. The second film makes excellent use of the tensions in their relationship that the first film only hints at. Much as any lonely soldier far from his beloved might do, Aragorn dreams or daydreams a love-scene with Arwen--his initial encounter at Edoras with the Lady Éowyn, niece to King Théoden and skilled swordmaiden, has probably triggered this reverie. His manner makes it clear that he is attracted to Éowyn. Later, as he travels with the people of Rohan from Edoras to Helm's Deep, Éowyn, who is obviously smitten with Aragorn, asks him who gave him the clasp he wears. The painful memory comes to him of his parting from Arwen in Rivendell, when he told her to give him up and tried to return the clasp. Readers of Tolkien realize, with a shock, that the rock-solid relationship between Aragorn and Arwen in the book is very much in doubt in the film. Aragorn's mind then moves to a scene between Elrond and Arwen in which the father convinces the daughter to leave for Valinor with her people, and we see her in a lantern-bearing procession of Elves who are apparently leaving Rivendell for the Havens which lie far to the west, beyond the Shire. Since this scene must have taken place after Aragorn left with the rest of the fellowship of the Ring late the previous December, he could not have witnessed it, and it is unclear to the viewer whether he is imagining it or not. Returning from his reverie, he at last answers Éowyn, stating that the person who gave the clasp to him is "leaving with her people for the Undying Lands." This is a rather clear message to Éowyn that he is available, a message that he must realize will encourage her feelings for him. (Again, this Aragorn is far removed from the original Aragorn, who feels empathy for Éowyn's desire to escape from the trap her life has been, but who has only pity to offer in return for her love!) During the journey to Edoras, Aragorn is almost killed. Arwen's spirit, or a vision of Arwen, brings him back from unconsciousness with a kiss, and an invocation of the protection of the Valar upon him. He rides to Helm's Deep, arriving just before the invading army of Uruk-hai. His friends are delighted to see him, of course, but Éowyn is beside herself with joy. So, like a thousand film-makers before them, the makers of The Two Towers have taken pains to create a love-triangle where the book which they are adapting offered nothing of the sort. One might dismiss this as standard operating procedure, but it is actually consistent with the larger pattern in these films of "humanizing" Aragorn and thereby giving his character greater dramatic interest. Tolkien's idealized Aragorn offers great beauty and nobility to the reader, but few surprises. The absolute reliability of his feelings for Arwen, and hers for him, turns their relationship into a dead issue for the reader. It really only comes alive in Appendix A.(v), which tells "a part of the Tale of Aragorn and Arwen." This seven-page "tale" is one of the best things Tolkien ever wrote. Characteristically, he buried it in the more than a hundred pages of fine print that follow the final chapter of the main narrative. It is altogether excellent, but its transcendent moment is near its end, when Aragorn bids farewell to Arwen and lets go of his mortal life, rather than "wither and fall from [his] high seat unmanned and witless." In yet another stroke of poetic imagination, the film-makers have rescued this masterpiece from the attic of the Appendices and let it shine in all its tragic splendor in the main narrative. For when I described the scene between Elrond and Arwen just now, I deliberately did not mention that Elrond's clenching argument is the inevitable parting that time will bring to Arwen and her beloved. As he speaks, we see Arwen, clad in black, standing beside Aragorn, a hundred years hence. Aragorn lies smiling upon a platform of stone; his profile is wrinkled now, and we see that he has grown old, though he still seems vigorous, even in repose. As we watch, his living body seems to change into a marble replica of itself, lying atop what is now clearly Aragorn's tomb. This quiet vision of the ultimate ineluctability of death, coming at last even to the warrior, king, and hero Aragorn--this vision of an inevitable future set into the middle of the fiercely present action of The Two Towers, reduced the audience of which I was a part to absolute silence. Not long before, we had seen Gandalf free Théoden of Saruman's spirit; Théoden's horribly wrinkled, decrepit face returned to smooth and glowing health before our eyes. Now we saw a reversal of this magical transformation, with age and death triumphant. Formally, it was as beautiful as the mirror-reversal of a theme in Bach; emotionally, it was overpowering. (6) The handling of the wizard Saruman in The Two Towers, though less affecting than the handling of the relationship between Arwen and Aragorn, is too important thematically to be left out, and it illustrates how slight changes introduced into the films can intensify and also modernize latent meanings. Tolkien wrote The Lord of the Rings two to three decades before the formulation of the feminist analysis of patriarchy, and he would not have been sympathetic to it, intellectually, in any event. The film-makers, however, working in the wake of this analysis, have grasped how well Saruman lends himself to it. Treebeard had already struck the crucial note in the book: "He has a mind of metal and wheels; and he does not care for growing things, except as far as they serve him for the moment" (III.4, "Treebeard"), In the first film, we saw Saruman breeding super-Orcs, the Uruk-hai, asexually, in vats. Motherless, they emerge fully-grown from their amniotic sack, eager to do their father's will, which is wholly for war. We also saw the ordinary Orcs tearing down whole trees at his orders and flinging them into a huge wound he has had made in the earth of Isengard, flinging them down into an ever-burning, all-consuming fire. We see his dwelling-place, the phallic spike of Orthanc, where he lives raised above the Earth, halfway to heaven; we also see him in the paleo-industrial underworld in the great wound, supervising the destroying work of his slaves. He rules through his voice and his intellect, through his Logos, absolute master within his symmetrical, sterile little realm. In the second film, we learn that he wants to destroy all human beings. Unlike the Saruman of the book, who merely wants to rule over all living things, this Saruman is an exterminist, a would-be "dark lord" who longs (it appears) for a world of "dead sea and withered land" unsullied by life. He is busily enhancing his destructive powers through the invention of gunpowder. Up in the forest, Merry speaks of the imminent destruction of all that is green, including the Shire. The green life of the Earth, in the shape of the Ents, and the cleansing power of water are the answer to Saruman's life-denying passion. The tree-men tear down his walls of stone, and the flood that they unleash quenches his fires and fills the wound he has made. Now he is trapped in his tower, between hostile Earth and unreachable Heaven. Those familiar with the feminist analysis will see that Saruman has been made into a textbook case of patriarchy run mad. He longs for the purity of sky-godhood, free of the mess and dirt of generation and organic life. His progeny are biological killing-machines whose creation mocks and circumvents the natural channels of sexual reproduction. The male principle triumphs; the female principle is annihilated. Sauron is to Saruman as Gollum is to Frodo. Unlike Sauron, Saruman is still changing. He is partway along the trajectory that leads, for the Maiar, from the spiritual state of a Gandalf to the spiritual state of a Sauron. The film-makers have understood the precious resource that Saruman, as opposed to the fixity of Sauron, offers to a dramatic presentation of the story of The Lord of the Rings. They have also understood Saruman's value as a symbol of the anti-life, machine-worshipping, patriarchal forces in the world of their audience, and they have chosen to turn up the volume on Tolkien's already forceful warning against the dangers of modernity. Since it is a message I support and that I think we need to hear, I applaud their choice. In closing, I would like to offer a tribute to qualities of The Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers that lie outside the traditional literary categories of theme, plot, characterization, symbol, etc. to which I have so far adhered. In general, movies are closer to the world of dream than are novels. This is particularly true of artistically successful fantasy movies like the ones we are considering. The dream world is characterized by the intensity of its images and the absence or illogicality of the connections among them. As a medium, movies struggle to break free of the bonds of narrative and to escape into the pure power of imagery, auditory as well as visual. Any adaptation of novel into film, so far as it is cinematically alive, will to some degree subvert the logic of its original. Tolkien was fanatical about plausibility, within the terms of his invented world. The two film-versions of The Lord of the Rings that Jackson and his co-workers have released are much less concerned about this value. One example of implausibility in The Two Towers that I cited earlier is the great charge of Éomer and Gandlaf down into the Deeping Combe, the valley below Helm's Deep. The part of me that is wedded to the novelistic values pre-eminent in Tolkien satisfies its needs by busily criticizing the charge for its violations of probability. Another part of me, however, sits blissfully before the memory of the image of the charge, remembering how one sees the start of the charge from behind, launching itself toward what appears to be the edge of a cliff, and then how one is suddenly half a mile away, looking along the steep-sided valley, watching the cavalry flooding down below the break in the slope, edged with the white light of Gandalf the White Rider, driving irresistibly down into the dazzled dark tumult of the Uruk-hai. The image of the charge answers so perfectly to one's atavistic desire for victory and vengeance coming down like the hand of God on the insect-like doers of evil. Even more primitively, the image offers the child-like delight of pure motion, caution thrown to the winds, down, down, and still down. And this charge possesses the supreme virtue that it never ends. The film cuts away as Gandalf and the Riders crash into the front ranks of the Orcs, their motion unchecked, frozen in time, and therefore eternal. Logically, all charges must end, but in the dream-world of film, they do not have to. Much the same happens with another of the great dream-images in The Two Towers, the fall of Gandalf and the Balrog down the abyssal shaft below the shattered Bridge of Durin. For some seconds, the screen is filled with the two combatants. Gandalf snatches his falling sword out of the air as it overtakes him and slashes at the fire-demon, who tries to strike back. Then, as with the charge at Helm's Deep, the camera suddenly retreats. We see the light from the Balrog's flames illuminating the walls of the shaft and an immense underground lake toward which it and Gandalf fall, made one by distance and enmity. It is how one might imagine Lucifer falling from heaven. And we never see them strike the surface of the lake (where, as the book tells us, the Balrog's flames are quenched and it turns into a thing of slime). Instead, without following them up the Endless Stair, we see them erupt from the top of Zirak-zigil, where Gandalf finally kills his foe, dies, and is then sent back. Again, logic tells us that they must have fallen into the lake, but in the dream-world, they are still falling, in a hallucinatory image of terror and desperate battle transformed into a breathtaking, eternal beauty. In my memory, they still fall, even though the part of my mind that turns bits and pieces of information into the illusory continuity of narrative insists that their fall ended and that their climb then began and that their combat then ended and that Gandalf then met Aragorn, Gimli, and Legolas a short way into the forest of Fangorn and so on, and on. The underlying reality is the dream. The inner life of The Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers is in the images that they dream, with their transparent envelope of sounds and music. The audiences know this, and so do I. The dream draws us, and it is to the dream that we return. These films dream powerfully and truly. If that were not so, they would not matter. Because it is so, they matter, and as for the rest, the glittering nets and chains of logic and causality, those things matter little, or only matter as they open the doors of our minds and hearts to the dreams over which they turn and dance like the spume of the waves of the sea. Footnotes (1) There are many cases where a character in the films speaks words originally spoken by someone else in the book. One that particularly impressed me involves a transposition of scraps of the Barrow-Wight's incantation (I.8, "Fog on the Barrow-Downs") to the scene where Faramir tries to question Gollum in The Two Towers, and Gollum delivers a high-speed, incoherent monologue, his face to the wall, his body curled up almost into fetal position. "Cold be hand and heart and bone, / and cold be sleep under stone/ till the dark lord lifts his hand / over dead sea and withered land"--that is the fearful text that Gollum quotes from, thereby equating himself to the Barrow-Wight, alone in his cold dark tomb-world, and letting us know that the apocalyptic vision of a dead world--Sauron's end-point--is present before his inner gaze. So, not only have the film-makers salvaged one of the most powerful "bits" from the Old Forest/Tom Bombadil/Barrow-Downs section that time limitations forced them to omit in The Fellowship of the Ring, they have found a way to use it that has a truly revelatory effect on fellow lovers of Tolkien. All praise to their powers of poetic imagination! (2) The parallel between Faramir's disappointing behavior and the disappointing behavior of Treebeard and the other Ents, who initially refuse to attack Isengard in the film, should be noted. Tolkien has both Faramir and the Ents do the right thing with little hesitation; the film-makers make these characters more fallible and less admirable by having them choose wrongly, at first, and only then correct their mistake. (3) There is also a notable facial resemblance between Gollum and the ordinary (non-Sarumanized) Orcs. My partner, who saw the film with me, told me that the bridge that Gollum creates between Frodo and Orcs helped her perceive the Orcs as victims, not just as evil predators. I would add that in both the book and the films, the Orcs are born "damned"--they have no possibility of escaping from their irremediably ruined nature as Orcs. Gollum has moved from the hobbit-world, where "salvation" is possible or even natural, almost completely into the orc-world, where salvation is denied. His plight, and his physical reality, link these contrasting worlds into a continuum back and forth along which the viewer's imagination can begin to travel. The journey is not a pleasant one, but it is instructive to face the evident reality that one could fall out of the "good' world of the hobbits into the wholly evil world of the Orcs. (4) Earlier, I mentioned that "Gollum's Song" plays during the credits. Till the name of the song appeared as the credits ended, I thought that it was the voice of Frodo's despair. This identification between Gollum and Frodo is exactly what the film tries to convey, and it was very satisfying to see it re-affirmed even after the film was technically over. (5) The only significant change is a certain harshness of tone absent from the book. This change does not make the Elves less noble, perhaps, but it does make them somewhat less other-worldly. (6) There is an analogy here to the way in which Gollum makes Frodo's fate visible to us, as already explained. Fortunately, this fate, unlike the end that awaits all hobbits and humans, is not inevitable--provided that the Ring can be destroyed. ©Copyright 2002 by Patrick Diehl Patrick Diehl is a former medieval scholar, one-time academic, writer, and a peace and ecology activist. He lives in the Southwest although part of his heart is always in Middle-Earth. © Copyright 2000-2004 by West by Northwest.org |
