The Zombie Apocalpyse (Post 2): A Review of *The Walking Dead* Compendium 1

After reading The Walking Dead Compendium 1 (that's issues #1-#48), I was inspired to think about the "generic" status of the "zombie apocalypse" genre. It struck me as a very interesting, liminal genre that isn't quite a fantasy, isn't quite a science fiction, and isn't quite a supernatural horror. If you're interested, here's the post: Defining the Zombie Apocalypse

There's lots more to be said about this interesting issue. And yet--I wanted to do something a little less abstract today.

I want to review The Walking Dead issues #1-#48, something useful for a change. I want to make a case for why you should invest in a copy of the compendium and take the time to read it.

But first, a brief reflection about my relationship with comic books...

I've never been much of a comic enthusiast. I guess this is because the image and character of the super hero never stirred me. I don't know why. I can't say why.

There's nothing about the over-the-top hyper-masculine  hero with super powers that I find intrinsically distasteful (hell, one of my favorite characters of all time is Conan of Cimmeria--a kind of "superhero," although he doesn't have super powers).

I just couldn't get into Spiderman or the X-Men or Superman. The comics I read when I did read them were more D&D or sword and sorcery derivative: The Savage Sword of Conan, Conan the Barbarian (Marvel); and The Warlord (DC) were and still are my favorites (I have a fair collection of them).

Once I started graduate school, some friends of mine who shared my genre interests introduced me to what they described more "artistic" comic books, which folks tended to call "graphic novels": Alan Moore's The Watchmen, Charles Burns Black Hole.

Sidenote: I think this term, the "graphic novel" is kind of funny. It's my sense that the term "graphic novel" is meant to portray the idea of these work's aspiration towards artistic seriousness. Historically, of course, novel, was a kind of artistic pejorative word, detonating a type of colloquial writing in contrast to verse. It's a kind of "validating term" enthusiasts use in order to claim some artistic credibility. Science fiction enthusiasts do a similar move when they refer to their favorite genre as "extrapolative fiction" or "speculative fiction."

My favorite validating term for comics term is "sequential art," which connotes the theoretical and formal.

And now, my review of The Walking Dead...

Long story short: I was first introduced to The Walking Dead as a graphic novel. Little did I know, it was actually a monthly comic and what I had been given was a compendium of many issues.

This is where I'd like to begin: reminding folks that Walking Dead: Compendium 1 is not a single novel. It wasn't written, I don't think, as an overarching narrative (I could be wrong--this is a critic's hunch).

It feels as if the narrative unfolds as you read it. In other words, it seems to respond and adapt to previous events. You get the sense you get with other serialized narratives (I'm thinking of shows like Lost, Battlestar Galactica, etc.) that the writers are exploring and tracing characters, subplots, and scenarios as you are reading.

With that said, there's a quality to The Walking Dead I'd like to call "narrative vitality." The story seems alive. What do I mean by this? Well, as I read, I don't get the sense that the writers know precisely where the narrative is going, i.e. whose going to live, what's going to happen. I find this as the primary source of the narrative's pleasure. Often times, when you turn the page and are surprised to see one of your favorite characters (who you thought was a main character) being eaten by zombies, you get the sense that the writers were just as surprised as you.

The narrative is just great. It possesses a kind of adaptability, as if at the end of each issue the writers had no idea what was going to happen. And, more importantly, they seem to have been open to the development of any scenario. This is what keeps you reading, this idea that anything could happen.

O.k.. Enough about narrative. What about the style?

I'm not as qualified to discuss in any substantial way visual art. I just don't have the vocabulary for the conceptual tools. With that said, let's give it a try!

First off, the art does change throughout the compendium. They change artists. From issues #1 to #6 the artist is Tony Moore; and at issue #7 the artist changes and becomes Charlie Adlard.

I really like Moore's artwork; however, I absolutely prefer Adlard's. There's something visceral and dark about Adlard's work that conforms so wonderfully to the dark world related by the comic book.  I would describe Adlard's work as beautifully manipulating dark and light shapes. It's tends towards "evocative two dimensionality," I think, and relies less on shading and more on high contrasts between black and white. It's so interesting.

Summary: if you like the AMC show, The Walking Dead, I highly recommend you read this, the comic that inspires it. It's just as mature and exciting and intriguing as the show; at times, it much more intense than the show. The Walking Dead is a comic book at it's best.

It beautifully probes how the struggle to survive intensifies and modifies our sometimes dark, sometimes inspiring, human nature.

Defining the Zombie Apocalypse (Post 1): Not a Fantasy, Not a Sci-fi, Not a Horror

Yesterday I finished reading Compendium 1 of Robert Kirkman's comic, The Walking Dead (issues #1-#48).

First off, I really enjoyed it! I have some minor resevervations that I'll explore in a later post. But, in general, if you haven't read the comic book and love the show (this was how I came to it), I highly recommend it to you. It's so interesting.

But, before I get into discussing specifically The Walking Dead (this will come in a later post), I want to explore some thoughts about the "zombie apocalypse" genre.

It was a strange realization, but when I started seriously considering "the zombie apocalypse" sub-genre, I realized I don't know how to describe it.

Is the "zombie apocalypse" a fantasy?

Well, the dead rising is a common theme in modern fantasy. The icon of the sword wielding hero fighting an animated human skeleton is a common trope in modern fantasy (sword and sorcery specifically). And yet, in many zombie apocalypse texts there is a tendency to attempt to describe the phenomenon of the dead rising in terms of scientific theory. E.g. it's a disease; it's a new micro-organism; it's the result of the earth passing through a comet, etc..

This seems to disqualify it as a fantasy for me, which seems to turn, specifically, on how fantastic phenomena are treated. In fantasy, the appeal is always to magic, the inexplicable. A key element of fantasy is, to my mind, the thesis that all is not explainable through recourse to the observable world.

And so, is the "zombie apocalypse" a science fiction?

Hmm. The appeal to science to explain the phenomenon of zombies seems to make it conform to the conventions of hard science fiction. It is a kind of "extrapolative" genre. It's kind of a thought experiment based upon the initiating question: "what if all the dead rose up?" And yet--it feels wrong to call the "zombie apocalypse" a science fiction as it doesn't manifest any of the familiar tropes of the genre.

The key source of drama in a zombie apocalypse is always the struggles of the survivors. The story seems to emerge from a conflict with Nature (i.e. "Nature" designated as a world filled with zombie). And so, the zombie apocalypse seems to have more in common with the naturalistic survival stories of, say, Jack London, than the speculative stories of H.G. Wells.

Is the "zombie apocalypse" a horror?

Hmm. This feels the most intuitively correct. I'm sure lots of folk would be happy just filing the sub-genre away after glimpsing the gore, the undead, etc.. I'm not willing to do that. There's something about the "zombie apocalypse" that disqualifies it as a horror to me. Before you call BS on me, let me try to make a case for it.

In a "pure" horror tale, the key aesthetic effect is the experience of horror. Thus, the monster (or the ghost, or the demon, or the alien) emerges as a kind of negativity, something that cannot be fully represented or described: you see a flash of a tail, a pair of eyes, some teeth, etc.. The "experience of horror," according to many theorists of the genre, is that moment when our language breaks down, when we can't describe what - that - thing - is. In the "zombie apocalypse," you always know precisely what the horror is: zombies. And in these zombie apocalypse tales, very often the characters become somewhat desensitized to the sight of zombies and move among them, somewhat un-fazed (although their guard is always up).

So, we're back to where we began: how do describe the "zombie apocalypse" genre. I have a working answer. I don't have time to write it up just now. Tomorrow I'll pick up where I left off.

More Human than Human: The Replicants of Ridley Scott's *Blade Runner*

Last night my wife and I watched the 2007 Director's Cut of Ridley Scott's Blade Runner (1982). This is in my top 5 favorite science fiction films. And the 2007 director's cut is so beautiful and a great improvement on previous versions. I highly recommend it.

In the summer of 2011, I taught a class, titled, "Visions of Delight, Visions of Horror: Technology and the Cultural Imagination of the 20th Century," and Blade Runner was a major text of that class (by the way, I've blogged about that class. Here's a link to the first post, if you're interested: Post 1). In this post, I'd like to pay homage to this film and perhaps speculate on some of its important themes that were brought up last summer.

First, let me say something about the cinematography: in terms of imagery, this film is beautiful. I'm always struck by how colorful and "busy" the shots are, by the vast amount of stuff that is forced into the "mis-en-scene": empty coffee cups, ash trays, banzai trees, photographs, flashing neon signs, garbage, chopsticks, musical scores -- it's as if the camera is trying to show you everything. Really: there are moments where I just glory in the sensitive eye of Ridley Scott. For example, there's a shot where Deckard--having received a beating--takes a sip of alcohol from a clear shot glass, and as he pulls the shot glass away from his mouth, the crystal clear liquor has become clouded with a crimson swirl of blood. So beautiful. This sort of attention to fine detail--the very surface texture of the imaginary world--is a characteristic of Scott's style that attracts me to his films.

O.k.. Enough about the style. Let's move on to theme.

Generally speaking, this film engages with a theme that recurs throughout science fiction, namely, our ambivalent relationship to technology.

More specially, however, this film engages with another recurrent theme running through science fiction texts that incorporate technology: the idea that technology, as it advances, becomes more and more human: in the form of robots, anthropromorphic A.I.s, androids, cyborgs. 

Very often this technology-become-human is misanthropic, as in the case of The Terminator, The Matrix, and Battlestar Galactica. Alternatively, in other texts, as technology approaches becoming human, it becomes benevolent and helpful to humanity: consider Lieutenant Commander Data in Star Trek: TNG, Terminator 2, Bicentennial Man, the character of David in Spielberg's A.I. (2001).

What makes Blade Runner so interesting a text in consideration of this theme is how the Replicants not only become human, they become more than human. Technology not only approaches becoming human; it surpasses humanity in every category that counts: mortality, emotion, hubris.

Let's think about what makes the Replicants more human than human.

They are more mortal than humans. They only live four years. Thus, their lives are lived at breakneck speeds and they experience everything more intensely because of this. There's a theme in literature that suggests, with immortality, everything "becomes as dust" (consider the bored Vampire characters that pervade Anne Rice's vampire novels). The inverse of this idea is true: with more mortality, everything becomes even more intense and exciting. This is what the Replicants experience.

They experience strong emotions; they aren't objective, unemotional robots. Even though they are technological by nature (they are machines and they are "retired" rather than killed), they are driven by sentimentality, fear, anger, and love. Consider Roy Batty's lamenting of Priss at the end of the film; consider his rage when he finds out he cannot live and murders his maker, Dr. Eldon Tyrell. In spite of the fact that they struggle with human emotions--they are emotionally under-experienced--there's a way to suggest the Replicants are over-emotional.

Here's the big one: hubris. The Replicants manifest a very human kind of arrogance. They try to live forever. And, unlike us, they are able to confront their maker and question him. Indeed, Roy Batty, in approaching Dr. Tyrell and interrogating him, is like a great poet who laments to god and the universe how horrible mortality it.

With the Replicants the traditional theme of technology-becoming-human is intensified to the extent that technology in this film surpasses humanity, becomes humanity with the volume turned up.

A Colorful Dystopia: Review of *The Hunger Games*

Last night a whim took my sister-in-law, wife, and I to see The Hunger Games. 

I hadn't read the book. I didn't know anything about it, other than that it was a movie based on a novel about a dystopic future. A gallon of soda and a bucket of popcorn later, I am happy to have seen it and am eager to read the novel.

Let me be clear: there are elements of the story and plot that I might criticize. For example, I couldn't help but dwell on the obvious structural crisis that pervades the narrative: the protagonist, in order to be the hero, must refrain from killing sympathetic characters in a battle where only one person survives; thus, though an corollary narrative logic, any sympathetic characters have to die unfortunately, on accident, or murdered by one of the bad guys. This seemed a little forced to me.

But what did I expect? Should the protagonist have taken out a sympathetic character? The audience would have had a very different, vexed relationship with her then.

Anyhow, with that aside, this was a really, really interesting movie.

Of primary interest to me was the setting. This dystopic future was so intriguing, visually and conceptually. Visually it was intriguing because you had such intense contrasts in terms of the many layers of society: the rural and naturally simplistic district 12 that suggested an idyllic, Appalachian village in early America; the urban, cosmopolitan, technological, and decadent Capital where all the folks were dressed in crazy colors.

This visual contrast suggested a conceptual one: you see the late post-industrial civilization at every level, from the rustic base of production upward and trough the highest level of society, the decadent and perverse aristocrats. Thus, the film encapsulates a "totalizing" impulse: in the manner of a secondary world fantasy, it wants to "map" a complete society.

Another issue. I was really intrigued by the relationship between the female protagonist and the male protagonist. I read a lot of pulp adventure, and always, always there are scenes where the huge-thewed male hero rescues the scantily clad female "prize-wife" from trouble, who then lolls like a rag doll in his arms, all hair and limbs, as he bumps along and slays with sword and gun.

Here--this did not happen. The main protagonist was the female; the person who needed her help and protection was the male. I know this is not so unique these days; it is, however, exciting to see this narrative structure exhibited in a mainstream Hollywood film. That's worth something.

The last thing I want to note was the image of technology in this film. Technology was presented as being so very powerful in this film, almost to the level of magic; and yet--(and here it where things get weird and interesting)--the technology presented didn't seem to me to be very implausible. All of the over-the-top technology--even the arena where the distinction between the natural and the virtual collapses--didn't feel to me to deviate from a "reality principle" too very much. What does that say about me?

Ἀκέφαλος in H.P. Lovecraft's "Azathoth": The Aesthetic of Ignorance

I recently read a fragment of a novel written by H.P. Lovecraft titled, "Azathoth," which was written in June of 1922.

It's a very interesting, suggestive fragment that the editor of my anthology suggests might be framed as anticipating the The Dream-Quest of the Unknown Kadath.

There's a line in this fragment that stirred some thoughts. Discussing the life and time of the protagonist, the narrator states that he lived in a time when "learning stripped earth of her mantle of beauty" (214).

I find this statement so intriguing. It makes me wonder, do scientifici theories "strip" the earth of "her mantle of beauty." Is there something about ignorance, naieve "unknowledge," that makes the world beautiful?

This is definately a question that Lovecraft's work courts and is, to an extent, an answer to.

This passage suggests a more famous passage from Lovecraft's work, the opening to call of Cthulhu: "“We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.” I won't quote the whole opening. It ends with a conjecture that, perhaps, scientific theory will reveal the truly horrific place humanity has in the universe and that we will recoil from it to the "safety" of a new dark age.

By juxtaposing this passge from "Azathoth" on the opening of "The Call of Cthulhu," we start to get a vision of a particular theme in HPL's work, namely, that learning, that theorizing, is the problem.

This pattern brings to mind an ancient greek myth/concept, the Ἀκέφαλος (Akephalos) or Headless Ones. These are humans without heads.

I like to think of Akephalos generally and allegorically, as just folks who... just. Don't. Think.

Though he doesn't say so, for Lovecraft, the Akephalos are the one's who we should envy, the ones who know nothing. Why is knowing nothing good? For Lovecraft, true knowledge is equivalent to horror; ignorance is a precondition, it seems, to the aesthetic experience of beauty.

In a strange way, there is an ethos is much of Lovecraft's work that seems to say, we should envy the headless/mindless ones.

Hmm...

Lin Carter and Clark Ashton Smith's, "The Stairs in the Crypt": Pastiche and the Haunting of Art

Last night I read another Clark Ashton Smith pastiche written by Lin Carter, a short story called "The Stairs in the Crypt." I loved it! It's about a necromancer whose apprentices fail to bury him properly, and, of course, like all necromancers who aren't properly stowed away after death, he rises, organizes an army of ghouls, and proceeds to go about the countryside feasting on the living. This is such an interesting juxtaposition of fantasy and horror. Also, the language is great. Carter does a good job approximating Smith's beautiful language and prose style. It's a wonderful pastiche!

I have to admit something. I'm always slightly disturbed when I read genre fiction pastiches. Why? Well, before answering that let me be as clear as possible and give you an idea of what I think pastiche's are.

A pastiche is defined as "a literary, artistic, musical, or architectural work that imitates the style of previous work" (http://www.merriam-webster.com). It's different from parody, which is "a literary or musical work in which the style of an author or work is closely imitated for comic effect or in ridicule" (http://www.merriam-webster.com).

The key difference between parody and pastiche, one might argue, is the issue of "respect." Both "parodies" and "pastiches" are imitations; however, the significant question becomes, what is the intention of the author? To recreate the aesthetic effect of the work that is being imitated? Pastiche. Or, to make fun of it or to ridicule it? Parody.

No doubt in my mind: Carter is writing pastiches of Smith's work and not parodies. He clearly respects the author's work. And, lo, he has written a very entertaining/provocative story.

And this disturbs me. But why?

A good pastiche haunts my definition of art. A key element of artistic worth, for me, is originality. And, a first principal of a pastiche is its imitative quality. It's key characteristic is its unoriginality. Thus, to truly take aesthetic pleasure in a pastiche requires, I think, one conditionally set aside originality as a key feature of art.

I'm not ready to do that. And yet! A good pastiche written with genuine enthusiasm and, dare I say, love of the original work, has the capacity to trouble my aesthetic first principles.

Developing A "Corpus-Wide Working Familiarity" of H.P. Lovecraft: "What the Moon Brings"

I've decided it's time to re-read all the works of H.P. Lovecraft. Why? Lovecraft is going to be a major topic of my dissertation (I plan on devoting an entire chapter to him). And so, of course, I want to be familiar with his work.

I find developing this sort of "corpus-wide working familiarity" particularly difficult in the case of pulp writers, who tend to write copious amounts of short fiction (in addition to lots of shorter novels). When you're studying a novelists, it's somewhat easy to isolate their major novels and just read them. It's not so easy with pulp writers. First off, they tend to write a lot more; and, secondly, because they write a lot more, it's difficult to clearly delineate what's worth studying from what's not worth studying.

Although I've read the majority of HPL's fiction (is a scattered sort of way) I can't attest to having read it all; and so, I think it's time for me to march steadily through his entire bibliography (as much as is possible).

You might be interested in this PDF version of H.P. Lovecraft's bibliography: H.P. Lovecraft's bibliography. I for one have difficult keeping track of which of his stories I've read.

The first story I read in this effort to develop "corpus wide working familiarity" of HPL was actually a prose poem called, "What the Moon Brings." According to the introductory note in the anthology I'm reading from, it was written on June 5th, 1922, and it was published in The National Amateur in May of 1923.

What's it about? It's about a wanderer who hates the moonlight, which seems to change the familiar to the unfamiliar and strange. Also, the wanderer is stirred by visions of the ocean illuminated by moonlight.

To a large extent the narrative is skeletal. The only thing that happens is the wanderer watches the ocean tide roll out and then he sees a horrible sight: "I watched the tide go out under that sinking moon, and saw gleaming the spires, the towers, and the roofs of that dead, dripping city" (213).

This seems to be a recurring image in Lovecraft, the receding of a veil and the exposure of a secret, usually figured as gross and threatening. I am thinking of a little kid, overturning a rock, and seeing spiders and centipedes and pill bugs.

Lin Carter's, "The Scroll of Morloc" and the Wonder-filled Primordial Scene of Humanity

Gods! It's been nearly two weeks since I last posted! I guess I underestimated how distracting writing my dissertation prospectus and teaching responsibilities would be.

Anyhow, I read a story this morning I wanted to briefly reflect on. It is a short story titled, "The Scroll of Morloc" by Lin Carter. It appears to be based on notes by Clark Ashton Smith. This story comes from the anthology, Lost Worlds, by Lin Carter, which is a collection of tales thematically unified as "a unique and marvel-haunted tour through magic lands no longer known to man" (from the back cover).

Some summary: the story relates the attempts by a disgruntled shaman--Yhemog of the Voormish tribe of Hyperborea--to desecrate a temple to Tathoggua. To an extent, the shaman succeeds; however, his success comes with it more than he bargained for. I'll refrain from giving away the ending.

I really enjoyed this story. The primary effect, for me, derived from the ancient and forgotten nature of the world it's set in. I'm not sure how much of this world is Carter's and how much of it is Smith's, but Hyperborea came to life for me through this story. It suggested itself as a kind of "primordial scene" of humanity that was filled with wonder and cruelty.

I think this effect, the ability to convey an "emotional idea of the mythical past," is one of the unique capacities of fantasy literature generally and sword and sorcery specifically. Utilizing material bequeathed by Smith, I think Carter succeeds in doing that here.

To a large extent, I think, the conveying of this feeling subordinates the construction of an interesting, twisting narrative. Indeed, the narrative shape of this story is quite simple and straightforward: the protagonist infiltrates forbidden territory and has an encounter therein.

But it's not in the narrative that the pleasure of this story coheres. It's in the effect. And the effect, I believe, is connected to the quality by which the setting is conveyed.

The Moral Maturity of *Game of Thrones*

So last night my wife and I purchased a blu ray edition of Game of Thrones, a fantasy drama television series produced by HBO based on the first novel in A Song of Fire and Ice, a series of low fantasy novels by George R.R. Martin set in his fantasy world, Westeros. I'd seen the series before and loved it. Last night we watched the first episode, titled, "Winter is Coming."

Let me get the obligatory recommendation out of the way: if you haven't seen this show and you like fantasy and drama, I recommend it. Highly recommend it. It's subtle fantasy. It's nuanced. It's more about the characters and their struggles with personal circumstances and less about sorcerers and orcs and magical rings.

I'm inclined to compare the show to Peter Jackson's The Lord of Rings. I want to say, "if you like LOTR, then you'll love Game of Thrones." For most people this may be true. For some, it wouldn't be true at all. Why? Martin's work (and by extension, the show) is very dark in comparison to LOTR.

In LOTR good and evil are quite clearly defined. The bad guys look like bad guys. The good guys look like good guys.

Things aren't that simple in Game of Thrones.

A major theme of that novel and this show is how morality is not not black and white but more gray (to say nothing of the fact that a major confrontation in the show is between "The Night's Watch"--who wear all black--and "White Walkers"--who are, umm, white). The major conflict of the show is not some glorious battle between good and evil, between a dark lord and an angel; rather, it's a civil war.

Martin has a way of making you hate someone, and then making you love that that same character. It explodes your moral paradigms I think. Just as quickly as you turn a character into a monster, they become a human again. I call this "moral maturity."

The moral maturity of this show allegorically resonates to the extent that the novel (and show) end up focusing on some pretty serious, "adult" themes. As in the novel, sex is all over the place in the show. I have a hunch on that point, though; I get the sense that HBO producers--enjoying their "premium cable" affordances--throw in graphic and sometimes gratuitous sex just for the sake of it sometimes.

 Neither here nor there. Not only is the show mature in terms of graphic sexual material, it's mature in terms of its moral material. Adult in content. Adult in theme.

Amazing Stories Episode 1, "The Ghost Train": The Train as a Symbol of the Past

The grandfather listening at a rusty track.

Last night my wife introduced me to a television show called, Amazing Stories. It's a science fiction anthology series created by Stephen Spielberg. I watched the first episode, titled, "The Ghost Train." I want to briefly review this episode and to make a case why you might consider setting aside 30 minutes to watch it.

First, some summary. It's about a family who has built a house. They bring their grandfather to the house so that he can see it. He sees the house and is very disturbed because the family has built it on land that used to be railroad land, land that had a railroad track running through it (although the railroad track has long since been torn up). If the railroad was still in existence, then the train would have run right through the house. Here's where things get supernatural: the grandfather knows a ghost train is coming for him the night of this visit. He tries to warn his family that the house will be destroyed. They, of course, think he's crazy, and have him sedated. I won't spoil the ending. Suffice it to say that something supernatural does happen.

I loved this episode, this initial exposure to Amazing Stories, and I'm glad my wife introduced it to me. It "reeks" of the 1980s, and so, I find it very comforting. My primary emotional/aesthetic response, I would characterize as "nostalgic." It makes me think of being a little kid in the similar way that watching Rankin and Bass and Jim Henson productions does.

Let me be clear; I'm convinced Rankin and Bass and Jim Henson productions are actually art. I've blogged about that already. But let me honest: with this show, I completely realize a large portion of my pleasure in it is connected to nostalgia. And so, I wouldn't go so far as to claim "The Ghost Train" is art (and yet I'm interested to hear that argument). It's quite entertaining. It's very intriguing; however, there's something it does not have the Rankin and Bass and Jim Henson has.

An interesting element of this episode: I love how the ghost is a train. In much of the 19th literature I've read, the image of the train-as-progress is very intense. And, in much of the "Modern" literature I'm familiar with, trains persist in being framed as "avatars" of progress, of the future. In this episode we have the passenger train being figured as a symbol of the past. A minor point, but I find that intriguing.

It makes me wonder if, one day, the idea of blogging, or the use of smartphones, will be figured as a parallel "ghost of the past." Hmm...

The Two Experiences of the Lord of the Rings: the Novels, the Films

I've started rereading J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. I'll confess. I've read The Hobbit many more times than LOTR. Also, I've watched Peter Jackson's movie versions, the Ralph Bakshi animated versions, many, many times, to the extent that I sometimes conflate those narratives with the original narrative. And so,  rereading this novel (last time I read it was in undergraduate) some of its original strangeness shines through.

One thing that strikes me about reading the novel is how feasible the world of Middle Earth is in the novels and how epic and somewhat grandiose it is in the Peter Jackson films. There's a kind of concreteness and ontological weight, if you will, to the Middle Earth of the novels that just it not there in the films. For me, in the Jackson films, the world is so colorful, so vibrant, and so artistic--beautiful, sublime, horrifying--that it seems unreal. Middle Earth in the Jackson films is so intense makes me focus on the technology and production value. What I mean is, I can't forget the bluescreens, the CGI, the props.

With the novels, the strangeness of the world, its tangibility, its history subordinates the prose style. In other words, the story being related seems to have a life of its own that precedes any narrative or literary stylistic acrobatics Tolkien might be able to pull off.

I know you're waiting for it! I'm not going to recite that lame adage, "The books are so much better than the film!" Why? Because I don't think such a move is very useful or interesting, comparing the books to the film. The only thing they share are single narrative. Artworks are composed of many, many things aside from narrative. Narrative is just one element that creates emotion.

For me, the books and the films are two separate experiences, two different media that evoke in audiences qualitatively distinct aesthetic responses. You watch films with lots of people; you read books by yourself. The dialog in a novel can be charged with lyrical beauty, and yet--the action passages can only achieve a certain amount of excitement. In the films the battle scenes are astonishing and exciting while the dialog, though intriguing, loses is nuance through truncation and needs to be bouyed by a soundtrack of emotionally charged music.

Long story short: two seperate experiences.

But I will give you this: rereading LOTR makes me realize how much the various film versions of Tolkien's masterpieces have taken liberties with the narrative.