movie colonization, again

John Scalzi is occupying December by writing daily essays on his comfort-watch movies. I'll have more to say on his choices after the month ends, but here I want to note that his choice for the 25th was The Lord of the Rings trilogy of movies.

In it, he makes some sensible remarks about the movies as movies (including sharing the opinion that the theatrical versions are better than the extended editions, with which I think I agree), but he also defends the movies as adaptations of the book on the assumption that what people who dislike the adaptation dislike about it is that some material was cut, in particular Bombadil.

Apparently everybody who loves the movies thinks that's the objection of those who dislike the movies, but it's not mine and not that of anybody else I know among movie-detractors. Condensation as such is necessary, we know that, though some choices in the process of condensation may be unwise. And Bombadil has been left out of many adaptations before. He's essential to Tolkien's conception of Middle-earth, but he's not vital to the raw storyline from a practical functional perspective. He's a relic from when LR began as a sequel to The Hobbit and would have replicated The Hobbit's episodic first half. But then Strider entered and the story took a different path.

I'm just as happy, from the perspective of somebody feeling obligated to sit there and watch the movies (if I hadn't, how could I critique them?) that Bombadil was omitted, because considering the ineptness of Jackson's Lórien or indeed just about anything else that wasn't about danger or monsters, his Bombadil would probably have been truly dreadful.

Instead, as I've explained whenever this comes up, what's painful about the adaptations is not what they left out, but all the nonsense and garbage they added instead, none of which is necessary for the adaptation and much of which flaws the movies even purely as movies, disregarding the adaptations. I won't go into much of that here, but I will note the last point in regard to an older essay Scalzi links to, which he describes as arguing "that the film trilogy was better than the book trilogy, in terms of storytelling."

Actually, the article makes no argument as to why these particular movies are better. It's a theoretical argument as to how it's possible for a movie adaptation to improve on a good book. That's possible, Scalzi says, when the book, although good, is not "great literature," which he defines as books whose literary style, whose sheer prose, is so fine that no other version could improve on it.

Claiming that Tolkien, although a good writer with a fine story and a brilliant world-creation, is not a great stylist requires a lot of gratuitous and unfair slams at Tolkien, and ultimately rests on Scalzi personally finding reading the book to be "a slog." True, he's not the only one, but many of us find the book captivating from end to end, even the poetry which, no, isn't "great poetry" but is a great reading experience. And I defy you to find any work of "great literature" which hasn't been a slog to numerous readers. Scalzi's prime example of great literature is Nabokov, whom I haven't read, but would he so classify Moby-Dick and Paradise Lost, two acclaimed masterworks I was entirely unable to finish?

Lastly, what kind of standard of literary judgment says that, as prose, The Lord of the Rings isn't great writing but that Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four is? A wrenching, memorable story, yes, but acres of dull and flat prose - deliberately so, I'd have thought, to convey the nature of the setting.

But when a good but not-great book is made into a movie, Scalzi says, a great movie can result because it's a better telling of the story. He gives examples, including Gone with the Wind, of which all I can say is that if that overlong and tedious movie is better than the book, the book must be really deadly. He also names The Wizard of Oz.

And then he says that, in all of these, "the film version of the story is the definitive version - the original text is, at best, complementary to the film. This is because the film is the better telling of the story."

Thank you; you've made my argument for me. Whenever anyone objects to a movie adaptation of a book, there's always some fool around to say smugly, "The book is still on the shelf." But it doesn't matter if the book is still on the shelf if nobody takes it down and reads it because they've listened to some other fool who thinks that the movie is better. Even if - especially if - they're right. (How about Bambi?)

The Wizard of Oz - and Frankenstein, which Scalzi doesn't mention - are my prime examples of movies that have completely drowned out the books they're based on, even though the book is still there. People think they know the book because they've seen the movie, but they're mistaken. The necessity to explain, for instance, that Baum's Oz is not a dream, and Shelley's creature is not a mute dumb monster, is endless. Although Scalzi says there's no danger of the Lord of the Rings movies supplanting (his word) the book "because the books have had an unusual 50-year head start," that head start gets less overwhelming as time goes on, and the movies are already supplanting the book. Look at this guy, a serious scholar, who nevertheless says that "We cannot return to a purely literary Middle-Earth independent of, primarily, Sir Peter Jackson's extraordinary films." In other words, he's saying that we can't take the book down from the shelf as if there were no movie, we can only read it in the context of the movie.

The prime specific example of this supplanting is turning out to be Jackson's decision to depict Sauron as a giant eyeball on top of Barad-dûr. Leave aside that Tolkien's Sauron had a physical body; that's not important to my point. What's important is that viewers get this giant eyeball which can do nothing but see and make absurd double-take reactions to what it sees, and they think of Sauron as impotent, helpless, even powerless. I don't think that's the reaction Jackson intended. But worse, commentators have begun thinking that even of Tolkien's Sauron, who is extremely powerful and is the effective master of many tools and is altogether terrifying.

Here we see the movie actually ruining people's reaction to the book, and it doesn't matter if the book is on the shelf, the book that exists in the world is the one in people's heads.

But that's just a mistake, an unintentional misreading of the movie by viewers. It's worse when the movie intends it. Scalzi concludes, "Jackson is the better teller of this particular tale." That is complete nonsense. The movie flails around trying to tell the tale, especially when Jackson is torn between telling Tolkien's tale and telling his own. It's one thing to change the source material to fit the film medium: for instance, folding the briefly-appearing Glorfindel into some other character (Bakshi did this too; he used Legolas). It's another to change the story because you don't understand why the author wrote it that way.

And this is most clearly shown with Faramir. Jackson says in the commentary that if the Ring is so powerful and tempting, that it makes no sense for Faramir to be immune to the temptation. He has failed to read the book very carefully. Faramir says, "I am wise enough to know that there are some perils from which a man must flee." As I've written before, his reaction doesn't diminish the Ring's power, it underlines it. Look, here's a weapon that could by itself win the war, a war which at this point the good guys are losing badly. And yet any good characters who have the power to wield the Ring adequately won't touch the thing. I think that avoidance conveys the danger of the Ring a lot more vividly than an endless series of Boromirs and Gollums falling victim to its lure would.

But look at what the movie does. Jackon is telling his story: Faramir is lured by the Ring. But if Faramir seizes it and takes it back to Minas Tirith, it would change the story utterly. (And not in the way Jackson probably expects. As Gandalf tells Denethor about Boromir, had he seized the Ring "when he returned you would not have known your son.") But Jackson doesn't want to change the story utterly: he still has some affection for Tolkien's. So he has to return the story to its basis by having Faramir give up the idea of taking the Ring. But that's purely for plot reasons, not for Jackson's internal idea of Faramir. He can't think of any reason for Faramir to do this, so it happens inexplicably.

The whole movies are full of scenes like that, where the plot falls off the rails because Jackson doesn't understand the story he's trying to tell, but then he has to drag it back on the rails again by main force. It's inept. It's a poor telling of the story.