setsuled | Entries tagged with lord of the rings

If I had a nightmare after staying awake for two days spent drinking and reading Tolkien it might be something like Ralph Bakshi's 1978 Lord of the Rings. I have a lot of respect for Bakshi and there are a lot of good ideas in this movie. It is often effectively frightening but it comes nowhere near being all the things a Lord of the Rings adaptation needs to be.

I don't think all the horror is intended. Bakshi's extensive use of rotoscoping gave some of his films the infamy to make them the Final Fantasy: Spirits Within and Polar Expresses of their day. It's been pretty well covered so I won't harp too much on it except to say it's one of the aspects of the film that makes it feel like a curiously degraded transmission. Almost like a found footage horror film. Watching the silhouettes of Ringwraiths stop across the river from Frodo (Christopher Guard), himself a man obscured behind flat, unshaded moving illustration, the figures' separation from the abstract or washed out backgrounds not only prevents anyone from seeming like they're actually in any of these places but combines to give one the constant feeling of inaccurate perceptions. Maybe it's the effectiveness of Bakshi's compositions and the anxious energy he succeeds in bringing across that makes this inability to see so disturbing. It's like going downhill blindfolded in a cart with no brakes.

There was clearly a lot of work put into the backgrounds. There's a lovely Arthur Rackham quality to a lot of them, with muted colours and dark contours. This was likely part of a 1970s reaction against the myriad colours found in Disney movies of previous decades but unfortunately an expansive Disney palette would have been pretty useful in conveying the sense of a fully realised Middle Earth. Still, these chromatically restrained backgrounds might had worked fine if the characters actually seemed to inhabit them.

And yet there is a weird charm to it. It kind of reminds me of Lotte Reiniger's 1926 film The Adventures of Prince Achmed, the oldest surviving feature length animated film. Composed entirely of black silhouettes against solid colour backgrounds, it has some of the same mystery about it, though Bakshi's film seems to jar with his subject matter and intentions.

I hadn't seen the movie since I was a kid and I barely remembered it. Watching it last week, I was surprised how many times I spotted compositions Peter Jackson had borrowed for his film. I hope Bakshi's not bitter about that because it's nice to think something about his film endured in a good way.

Twitter Sonnet #1058

Divined in crumbs, a hasty message lost.
Departure took the books and princes up.
A crown confers a long and heady cost.
Reflections top the toxic metal cup.
Recumbent cloaks assign a party hat.
To ev'ry infantry the air's a lance.
In troughs of charging lamps there swung a bat.
The trees in silhouette begin to dance.
A jacket kept from dust and sight the book.
Amassing drapes, a rain of cherries fell.
The curtain call compelled another look.
Again unheeded rang the broken bell.
In decades claimed for starchy billing rooms
A baking shroud in foil softly looms.

Current Mood: tired
Current Location: 小さくて赤くて黒い部屋
Current Music: "The Coffee Song" - Cream

Lord of the Rings is really an underrated book and it seems to be getting more underrated as time goes by. I've finished reading it again last night and maybe I'm just in the afterglow of that beautiful, perfect ending but I think it deserves a place among the greatest works of literature. Not just for the power of the writing itself, which is both beautiful and intelligent, but for the place it occupies in the chronology of English literature. What Tolkien sought to do, and succeeded in doing, was to create an inspiring myth for a post World War I world.

I've read it through three times now--first in high school, then again just before Peter Jackson's film adaptations came out, and then over this past year. Between 1999 and now I've read The Silmarillion, Children of Hurin, and I've reread The Hobbit a couple times. In that time I've also read a lot more and now I find myself fascinated by the implications in the story Tolkien chose to tell when placed alongside the shifting attitudes in literature over the course of his lifetime. When I took British Literature II in college, the narrative I heard was of how the innocent idealisation of valorous warfare in works by Alfred, Lord Tennyson was made obsolete by the vividly portrayed reality of dehumanising warfare by Wilfred Owen. But what Tolkien gives us in Lord of the Rings are both perspectives in a single work. You have the glorious, doomed ride of the Rohan cavalry not unlike "Charge of the Light Brigade" and you have the horrific, day to day reality of Sam and Frodo's grim trek through Mordor in which it is difficult not to see something like No Man's Land in trench warfare.

It is especially inappropriate to look for allegory or precise ratio interpretations in Tolkien's work because he specifically rebuked such attempts throughout his life. "As for any inner meaning or 'message'," Tolkien wrote in a forward to the second edition, "it has in the intention of the author none. It is neither allegorical nor topical." I tend often to quote Tolkien's disdain for allegory because I think he's right, not just in referring to his own art but any other. Lord of the Rings is great because it can be interpreted as being about addiction, or a specific war, or a specific political conflict, or none at all. Its power is in its ability to have different personal meanings for different people--and yet, at the same time, because it is the same work, it unites people as a reflection of common human experience in infinite manifestations. So although Tolkien was himself anti-Communist, it's no wonder he so vigorously insisted there was no ant-Communist allegory in "The Scouring of the Shire"--not because he had no wish to insult Communists but because he didn't want to codify any one interpretation.

It is striking, though, how like the miseries of Communist countries are those depicted in that penultimate chapter in the Shire. The ubiquitous, ugly, crudely constructed brick houses, the "ruffians" who take everyone's food for "redistribution" that ends up just fattening the bosses. But one could as easily say that the normal state of affairs in the Shire, without any real central authority, and with generous gift giving and feast providing traditions, represent an idealised Communist society. Tolkien doesn't present any logical arguments about how feasible any specific form of government is, his writing mostly focuses on the sensory and on specific characters.

As we're in an era where political interpretations are vigorously enforced on works whether the authors like it or not, The Lord of the Rings presents several contradictions that must be maddening to interpreters unable to keep their vision sufficiently narrow. Tolkien spends a great deal of time describing the beauty of a divinely ordained inherited rulership yet also talks about the virtues of freedom and arguably his most human character is Sam. One could say Lord of the Rings presents an affectionate praise of the working class in an intricate ode to fascism. Tolkien disliked his friend C.S. Lewis putting clear references to Christianity in the Narnia books--and one could argue Tolkien is vindicated in the much wider appreciation garnered by Lord of the Rings--though it seems likely Tolkien's Catholicism, specifically in contrast to anti-Catholic attitudes he encountered through much of his life, made him a natural booster for divinely ordained figures of authority and for the ability of such figures, like Aragorn or Theoden, to unite a populace by inspiring them. A modern reader might scoff at Eomer and Gimli arguing over whether Arwen or Galadriel is the more beautiful but this is isn't two guys rating babes on a scale of 1 to 10, it's two people discussing figures whose beauty and grace have inspired them and motivated them through bitter experiences.

So if there is any argument being made by Tolkien in the book, it's in the value of beauty. The despoiling of nature by Sauron and Saruman, the reckless destruction of forest and works of art, like the beheaded statue Sam and Frodo come across, aren't merely the signs of evil but the purest manifestation of it. By contrast, the light of Galadriel, the beauty of Rivendell, inspire and therefore are the sources of peace.

Current Mood: busy
Current Location: 緑の森
Current Music: "Foundations of Stone" The Two Towers OST - Howard Shore

This is the famous Wall Drug Dinosaur in Wall, South Dakota, and it features in "THE DINOSAUR TOURIST", a lovely new Caitlin R. Kiernan story in the Sirenia Digest. It may be the story in the Digest to feature the least amount of weirdness, being a simple tale of a man who picks up a guileless young hitch-hiker who's on his way to meet his internet boyfriend. A subtle chemistry develops between the driver and the hitch-hiker with interesting exchanges based on differences in breadth and kind of experience. It showcases Caitlin's fine ability to create the sensory elements of an experience and has the slow, nice pace of all good road stories, which this one is.

I've been reading a lot lately, maybe because I'm in a Japanese class now I suddenly have a contrary urge to read a lot of English. I'm still re-reading The Lord of the Rings and on Saturday or Sunday I reached chapter 4 from Book Four, or the second book in The Two Towers, "Of Herbs and Stewed Rabbit". And speaking of a slow and easy atmosphere, this is a wonderful chapter which Peter Jackson's film version really doesn't attempt to capture. Most of the basic elements of the chapter are present in the extended version of the film--Gollum fetches some rabbits and Sam decides to cook them, much to Gollum's indignation, who prefers raw meat. Gollum's "What's taters. precious?" line is even reproduced in the film. But there are many differences that completely change the tone and purpose of the scene.

Because Jackson was so focused on creating a film with constant momentum, it's easy to see why he reinterpreted it. But in the book, it's one of the moments that most clearly reminded me that Tolkien was a World War I veteran. After the Dead Marshes and grey, featureless lands of Mordor, the Hobbits and Gollum come to a place that's strangely beautiful.

So they passed into the northern marches of that land that Men once called Ithilien, a fair country of climbing woods and swift-falling streams.

It's easy to imagine soldiers, accustomed to the hellish landscape surrounding trenches, suddenly coming across areas not yet spoiled by the war.

Many great trees grew there, planted long ago, falling into untended age amid a riot of careless descendants; and groves and thickets there were of tanmarisk and pungent terebinth, of olive and of bay; and there were junipers and myrtles; and thymes that grew in bushes, or with their woody creeping stems mantled in deep tapestries the hidden stones; sages of many kinds putting forth blue flowers, or red, or pale green . . .

It's after Frodo has fallen asleep that Sam slowly starts to remember the cookware and formulates his plan to make a decent meal for his master. The wonderful thing about the scene, and the reason Sam quickly takes over the narrative, is that we see him, much more than simply cooking a meal, single-handedly creating a familiar domestic atmosphere, motived both for himself and for the love he feels for Frodo watching him sleep.

Frodo's face was peaceful, the marks of fear and care had left it; but it looked old, old and beautiful, as if the chiselling of the sharping years was now revealed in many fine lines that had before been hidden, though the identity of the face had not changed. Not that Sam Gamgee put it that way to himself. He shook his head, as if finding words useless, and murmured: 'I love him. He's like that, and sometimes it shines through, somehow. But I love him, whether or no.'

After all the time Tolkien spends describing their slow, grim, and hopeless journey, it's wonderful that Sam instinctively wants to spend a lot of time and energy cooking and in the process he even turns Gollum into a familiar domestic figure, the lazy and surly servant lad.

'Smeagol'll get into real true hot water, when this water boils, if he don't do as he's asked,' growled Sam. 'Sam'll put his head in it, yes precious. And I'd make him look for turnips and carrots, and taters too, if it was the time o' the year. I'll bet there's all sorts of good things running wild in this country. I'd give a lot for half a dozen taters.'

The beauty in this scene is an interesting contrast to the impatience Frodo expresses regarding Hobbit culture at the beginning. It's easy to think again of men itching for glorious and worthy battle and then finding something horribly different in the first World War and suddenly foolish homebodies don't seem so foolish after all.

Current Mood: busy
Current Location: Ithilien
Current Music: "Autumn Leaves (Take 1)" - Bill Evans Trio

Coming to the end of the semester, I find myself indulging in reading more things that haven't been assigned for a class lately. I started reading The Fellowship of the Ring again, getting quickly and very happily drawn in. I've probably watched the Peter Jackson movies about twenty times since the last time I read the books but I'm surprised to find I generally don't picture the characters as the actors who played them in the movies. It's not to say I don't like Elijah Wood or Sean Astin, but Frodo and Sam are so different in the book. Frodo's older, of course, and he comes off that way in the way he deals with people. The man I picture is something like Ray Milland. I understand the reasons for the changes Jackson made to pick up the story's pace and give an audience hungrier for young faces someone to be attracted to. But the feeling of a man with years of life experience having contemplative, intellectual conversations with Gandalf by the fire is a nice vibe. I suppose I could say I wish the movie were more like that, but then I do have the book, after all.

The Hobbits as a people are a bit more three dimensional in the book, too. I was surprised by this level of contempt Frodo expresses for his people:

"I should like to save the Shire if I could--though there have been times when I thought the inhabitants too stupid and dull for words, and have felt that an earthquake or an invasion of dragons might be good for them."

Earlier, Tolkien mentions how the Hobbits have grown complacent due to the Shire's isolation from war. Like so many things these days, I look at this through the prism of Trump. Here's the virtue of Tolkien's dislike for allegory--one can see how Tolkien was likely inspired by the state of England before World War I, but because he doesn't explicitly tie it to that, it invites the reader to look for commonalities in human nature to-day or in any other time. If I think of the people who didn't vote in the last election or were mentally complacent enough to think they could vote for Trump in the name of trolling reality, I can apply Frodo's frustration, which leads me to attempt finding also his love for his people. That's a lot harder.

Considering what happens with "The Scouring of the Shire" in the end, and, from what I remember, the Hobbits' complicity in that, it works as an inversion of the connexion dependence on assembly line, steel working, and coal mining blue collar industry Trump's campaign hearkened back to, and which also seemed to have been a big motivating factor for Brexit. Tolkien was writing about the waste and ugliness of it at the beginning, and here that ugly thing exerts its influence even as it grows undeniably obsolete.

I've always liked how the journey in The Lord of the Rings seems to be from a sort of Victorian world in the Shire into a more mediaeval world to the east. If one does apply Tolkien's experience in World War I, it's an interesting contrast to the progression of poetry from idealised odes to valour in war by Alfred Lord Tennyson to the grim reality of the trenches composed by Wilfred Owen. Tolkien seems to stand in direct opposition to that trend. It's oddly heartening that he could see the incredible horrors of the World War I battlefield and somehow digest it and produce years later a work about beauty and magic.

Current Mood: sleepy
Current Location: Bag End
Current Music: "九月の雨" - 太田裕美