ACM Interactions

After the first Lord of the Rings (LOTR) movie came out, Louis Menand wrote a review, probably in NYRB (the New York Review of Books), in which he mentioned that he had taken a particularly thoughtful 14 year old to see it. Afterwards, he asked the young man whether the battle scenes were portrayed as he had imagined them, particularly with respect to scale. The young man said "yes," and Menand went on to reflect on how, when reading the books himself as a youth, he had envisioned much smaller battles. He acknowledged that Tolkien's own descriptive terms were fulfilled in the movies: the armies filled the plains, the valleys teemed and roiled with orcs as far as the eye could see. Yet, somehow Menand had not seen it as so...much. Menand, if I remember correctly, credited this difference to the differing visual experiences of the young. I was struck by this comment, which is why I remember the article so vividly.

Recently, my 17-year-old son came home from college for Christmas. He and his friends had seen The Hobbit between his last final and catching the plane home, and he now wanted us to see it. He wanted us to share it because it was, as he said, the worst film in the world. Interestingly, what bothered my son (besides the soap opera quality of high frame rate) were scenes that seemed silly to him. That the monsters in the mountains looked like Transformers was the worst. The odd thing is that he is the target; he no longer owns Transformers, but he owns the visual space of Transformers. The endless battle scene from The Avengers ("Let’s whack at great huge machines!") that made me fall asleep was thrilling to him. 

LOTR and The Hobbit are interesting case studies because they bear a different relationship to narrative than most movies. Much of what we typically notice about movies has to do with the unfolding of an unknown plot. But the most important audience for LOTR and The Hobbit already knows the plot, often in great detail. Indeed, it is virtually impossible to understand the movies unless the viewer is already familiar with the characters, plot, and settings. I spent a lot of time in the first three movies whispering explanation to my husband ("No, that’s a different elf").

When plot is less important, realization is more important. My son—and Louis Menand—remark on visual culture. But in LOTR and The Hobbit, is it precisely visual culture that is at stake? Maybe it is the capability of being seen folklorically. Willy-nilly, as a child, I read the account of the fight of the mountain gods in The Hobbit in the same spirit as the story of Rip van Winkle and "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," the idea that thunder is caused by the gods bowling. I imagined swirling mists allowing a dimly perceived vision of occasionally emergent forms. That was my experience. 

But I suspect that it is possible to access that that world view directly through The Hobbit without having learned in elementary school about the Dutch heritage of the Catskills and Adirondacks, or even without having heard very often the rich rolling sounds of thunder in those low mountains, so reminiscent of plummy male voices like Paul Robeson’s or James Earl Jones’. Some people might think about these connections as archetypes. In fact, I'm almost certain that Tolkien’s interest in Anglo-Saxon literature meant that he was interested in archetypes. I only had one lecture in Anglo-Saxon in college before switching to Middle English, but that one lecture clued me in to the fact that mastery of Anglo-Saxon would allow me to read the two extant bookshelves full of highly repetitive sagas and eddas. There would be a lot of table thumping. Chaucer is more fun and the accent is more impressive at dinner parties. 

I liked the movies but I was really glad that I had not seen them as a child. Starting upper elementary school and extending into my college years I read the books many times over. Why? I now believe I returned to them over and over again because they were safe. They showed that a person did not have to be grand, strong, clever, or sexy to have worth. You could be Jack with your valueless beans; you could be the younger neglected son in the folktale—maybe you could even be a girl, like me. Bruno Bettleheim talked about these ideas long ago in The Uses of Enchantment and, of course, Joseph Campbell, in The Hero with a Thousand Faces. But for me, Tolkien was better than folktales: Folktales cannot usually afford kindness, but kindness and loyalty were paramount touchpoints. Even better, the element that made these operant for me was the background complexity that made the stories modern. Like me growing up, Bilbo, Frodo, Sam, Merry, and Pippin learned that the world was more complex than their part of it. The world was complex, but you could Do the Right Thing without having to think about it too much. The world was scary, but the fear was made bounded and manageable. The structure meant that you knew that the Hobbits would, in fact, prevail. The moral simplicity, the fundamental reassurance, was related to the morality inherent in the pastoral vision of simple British life so nicely recreated in the opening to the 2012 London Olympics. And that moral simplicity was echoed in the way I imagined grave threats. Grave, indeed, but not beyond understanding.

Interestingly, I did not experience The Hobbit as the worst film in the world. I experienced it as pretty much the same as lots of others. Peter Jackson had to realize the story elements somehow, and he drew on visuals at hand. The Transformers in the mountain were one element. The Shire's resemblance to a set from the Teletubbies was another. Rivendell's peculiar resemblance to Niagara Falls was a third. And by emphasizing the connection between LOTR and The Hobbit, Jackson found permission to relax into the proven trope of battles that Menand had earlier remarked upon. But none of these are safe to me. That is, they are on the edge of creepy, imponderable, and truly overwhelming. "Truly overwhelming" meaning that only magic could prevail and ordinary human values are lost without a moment of dramatic focus. In the old spoof, "Bambi meets Godzilla," the deer is grazing peacefully in a meadow, a large green foot comes down, and, splat, that's the end. A very short story.

Note that the Narnia movies, inspired by Tolkien's good friend, C.S. Lewis, were different. They also showed battles described in the text as against overwhelming odds, but the odds were more at the level of my imagination (and, I hazard, Menand's). One crucial difference was point of view. In a videogame or in violent movies, the battles truly fill the screen. But it doesn't take as many enemies to fill the mind as the screen. One of my students was recently stunned to find out that the term decimation, which he correctly thought meant utter devastation, comes from the Latin word signifying (only!) the loss of one in ten. Really, losing one in ten is quite a lot. But we can imagine much worse. Unhappily, the battles in the Narnia movies were also, and separately from this discussion, anemic. They were too familiar, too safe, too much "capture the flag with werewolves." 

It is no surprise that we are, all of us, thoroughly mediated, and that we have, indeed, a visual culture. But the details and differences in our experiences may also give us a bit to think about; there are simple things that are difficult to say in this culture, simple things in the background, simple things in books about violence that for example make the world still seem safe. Of course, The Hobbit never says that the world it describes is safe, yet that was a crucial part of the story to me, lost in the movie. If the Harry Potter books started with the end, they would not have been nearly the successes that they were. 

As this blog goes on, I will be talking about backgrounds and foregrounds, and the relationship between them. This is dangerous stuff! My husband used to like the joke about the centipede that could no longer walk after it was asked how it coordinated its legs. When we talk about the background, we bring it to the foreground, but there are often reasons that certain elements are background. Designers, like centipedes, cannot function if everything is foreground. Yet we're called upon to get the background right too. 

Deborah Tatar