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.
I've been thinking about place and space in fiction lately -- I, it's sad to admit, don't currently own any LOTR texts, but I'd be willing to bet Tolkein's use of sensuous concrete and specific details create a _particular_ version of the world . . .
ReplyDeleteI'm not much for discussing cinematography, but I'd also guess that PJ's films create huge sweeping generalizations (maybe because of the epic nature of the movies) . . .
Though we might discuss life generically in sweeping terms, we live in the particular. We experience and remember in the particular. When artists create the particular, we experience with them, rather than being told what they want us to know.
Yeah. I agree. Novelistic style (by which I mean modern fiction in general) necessarily intensifies the particular. I'm thinking of how in *Robinson Crusoe* Robinson spends time listing, in sometimes torturous detail, all the supplies he has, the dimensions of his house, etc. etc.. He refers to his "little island," but he rarely talks about "the whole wide world." In Jackson, I agree, there seems to be an impulse to bring the whole world of middle earth into the shot. This "totalizing" impulse is def. *not* was Tolkien is doing.
ReplyDeleteHope all is well!