G. K. Chesterton on Peter Jackson’s Tolkien films

Here’s what G. K. Chesterton had to say about Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy:

Wherever his film is bad it is bad from some extravagance of imagery, some violence of comparison, some kind of debauch of cleverness. His nonsense never arises from weakness, but from a confusion of powers. If the phrase explain itself, he is far more a great film-maker than he is a good one. [...] Mr. Jackson was in a great and serious difficulty. He really meant something. He aimed at a vivid and curious image, and He missed it. He had that catastrophic and public failure which is, as much as a medal or a testimonial, the badge of the brave.

Actually, Chesterton was writing about the poetry of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, but the point stands. Jackson’s failures, and they are many, are the failures of over-ambition. For that reason, they are easy to forgive. All three films have moments where I want to scream at the TV in frustration. But they also all have moment of great beauty and real profundity. And that’s why, warts and all, they have so much more greatness than, say, The Bourne Identity, which I watched yesterday. That film is perfectly executed, but it’s not about anything. But Jackson caught a glimpse of Tolkien’s vision and reached for it. That he failed in part really seems neither here nor there.

A movie-piracy moral dilemma

We saw The Hobbit: an Unexpected Journey in the cinema when it came out, and with reservations loved it. Today I get notification from Amazon that the DVD is available for pre-order, at £17.20. That seems a bit steep, but it’s definitely a film we’ll watch repeatedly so I might buy it.

Except that Peter Jackson has confirmed that there will be an extended edition (with 20-25 minutes more screen time, and hopefully a shedload of documentaries). So it’s a dead cert that I’ll buy that when it comes out. We love the LotR extended editions.

My question is this: since the regular-edition DVD is a subset of the extended-edition DVD that I’m going to buy, is it morally acceptable to pirate the regular edition when it becomes available, watch that, and then buy the extended DVD?

A short post on Ralph Bakshi’s animated Lord of the Rings movie

Don’t ever let me hear anyone criticising Peter Jackson’s films again.

That is all.

 

Where the Council of Elrond went wrong

Granted that “there is no smith’s forge in this Shire that could change it at all. Not even the anvils and furnaces of the Dwarves could do that [...] nor was there ever any dragon, not even Ancalagon the Black, who could have harmed the One Ring, the Ruling Ring, for that was made by Sauron himself.”

And let’s assume that the obvious eagle hack can’t be done, for some reason.

But what they could have done was to drop the Ring into molten steel, shape it into a solid sphere, and bid Frodo cast that into Mount Doom.

I wish Jackson hadn’t ruined Galadriel’s speech

I bow to no man in my admiration of Peter Jackson’s fine trilogy of Lord of the Rings films (and indeed his ongoing Hobbit). I may not be able to disagree with any of the specific criticisms Andrew Rilstone makes in his fine reviews (Fellowship, Towers, Return), but I am a million miles way with agreeing with his downbeat conclusions. Yes, all the films are flawed; but they are mostly flaws of ambition, and so they are easy to forgive. And they are overwhelmed by the huge amount of good stuff. In fact, the three LotR films are arguably my three favourite films of all time.

That’s why this pains me so much:

It’s the scene in Lothlorien when Frodo has freely offered the One Ring to Galadriel. In the book, here’s what she says:

“And now at last it comes. You will give me the Ring freely! In place of the Dark Lord you will set up a Queen. And I shall not be dark, but beautiful and terrible as the Morning and the Night! Fair as the Sea and the Sun and the Snow upon the Mountain! Dreadful as the Storm and the Lightning! Stronger than the foundations of the earth. All shall love me and despair!”

She lifted up her hand and from the ring that she wore there issued a great light that illuminated her alone and left all else dark. She stood before Frodo seeming now tall beyond measurement, and beautiful beyond enduring, terrible and worshipful. Then she let her hand fall, and the light faded, and suddenly she laughed again, and lo! she was shrunken: a slender elf-woman, clad in simple white, whose gentle voice was soft and sad.

“I pass the test”, she said. “I will diminish, and go into the West and remain Galadriel.”

In the film, Galadriel’s speech is slightly rewritten — and I hope I will not be thought a heretic if I say that I think the Jackson/Walsh/Boyens version is, if anything, an improvement:

In place of a Dark Lord, you would have a queen! Not dark, but beautiful and terrible as the dawn! Treacherous as the sea! Stronger than the foundations of the earth! All shall love me, and despair!

But Jackson can’t accept the obvious metaphorical reading of the second paragraph. When we read that she stood before Frodo, “seeming now tall beyond measurement, and beautiful beyond enduring”, we immediately understand that the key word is “seeming”: Tolkien is describing what goes through Frodo’s mind as he understands what it would mean for Galadriel to take the ring. He is not saying that Galadriel flipped into photographic negative and her voice became deep, distorted and ring-modulated. But that’s how Jackson interprets it.

And I find this mystifying because Jackson’s touch is so sure elsewhere (not least in the condensation of the speech noted above). When Gandalf delivers the “and some that die deserve life” speech, Jackson trusts McKellan to do it right, and so he does. It’s half-whispered, spoken almost as much to himself as to Frodo, more a meditation than a lecture. Gandalf is not lit up in flourescent lights, and his voice is not artificially raised in pitch to chipmunk levels.

McKellan needs no such treatment, because (unlike some of the cast, it must be said) he can act. The thing is, so can Cate Blanchett. She’s perfectly capable of delivering such good lines under her own steam, and absolutely doesn’t need the flavour-enhancers that Jackson imposed — not even had they been done well, rather than in such a way that they obscure the words.

it was badly done, Peter. Badly done indeed.

No, Peter Jackson is not doing a George Lucas

I’ve read a couple of reviews arguing that Jackson is making the same mistake in the Hobbit that Lucas did in the Star Wars prequels — filling in details that the original only hinted at (“the Senate has been dissolved”, “the Clone Wars”, etc.) with concretised versions that aren’t as interesting as what we independently imagined. But in the case of Tolkien the exact opposite is the case, and the “back story” is actually the primary story that the well-known parts were made up to sit on top of and, if you like, act as an advertisement for. By foregrounding these, Jackson is arguably being more true to Tolkien’s original vision than J. R. R. was himself in writing The Hobbit.

The future of librarianship

I just had this discussion with my Index Data colleagues, and though the conclusion was worth writing up here. My boss, Sebastian Hammer, asked “So what is librarianship about in the 201Xs ?”

I gave three answers: one smart-alec, one practical, and one philosophical.

How I came to buy the DVD of series 2 of Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle

A true story:

• My favourite author in the world is C. S. Lewis. I’ve read everything of his that I’ve been able to find, most of it four or five times. I long ago lost count of how many times I’ve read the Narnia books.
• Long ago (in Internet years) I searched for a C. S. Lewis FAQ, and found one that was written by someone called Andrew Rilstone.
• I started reading the rest of Rilstone’s web-site (as it then was), then his blog once he started writing in that format. Highly recommended, by the way: full of insight, wit, and a gloriously eclectic mix of high literature and pop-culture.
• One of the more frequent commenters on Rilstone’s blog was Andrew Hickey, whose blog Sci-Ence! Justice Leak! I also started to read.

The Doctor, the Widow and the Wardrobe: first thoughts

Utterly, utterly brilliant.  I laughed, I cried.  Simultaneously, at times.

How rare is it that a long-awaited Christmas special lives up, or even exceeds, expectation?  Rare.  But tonight: yes.  Moffat pulled it off last year, and now he’s done it again.

That’s all, for now.  Just needed to get that out of my system.

More from C. S. Lewis on lowbrow and highbrow art

I know I shouldn’t keep just retyping passages from Chesterton and Lewis and calling them blog entries, but really — Lewis is just too clear-sighted not to use.

Another common way of using the distinction tends to fix on ‘popular’ as the best adjective for class A [i.e. lowbrow books].  “Popular’ art is supposed to aim at mere entertainment, while ‘real’ or ‘serious’ art aims at some more specific ‘artistic’ or ‘aesthetic’ or even ‘spiritual’ satisfaction.  This is an attractive view because it would give those who hold it a ground for maintaining that popular literature has its own good or bad, according to its own rules, distinct from those of Literature proper.  [...] And since I observe that many my highest-browed acquaintances spend much of their time in talking of the vulgarity of popular art, and therefore must know it well, and could not have acquired that knowledge unless they enjoyed it, I must assume that they would welcome a theory which justified them in drinking freely of that fountain without forfeiting their superiority

– C. S. Lewis, High and Low Brows.

And a little later in the same essay:

What survives from most ages is chiefly either the work that had some religious or national appeal, or else the popular, commercial work produced for entertainment.  I say ‘chiefly’ because the work of the ‘pure’ artists is not always ephemeral; a little, a very little, of it survives.  But the great mass of literature which now fills class B [i.e. works now considered highbrow] is the work of men who wrote either piously, to edify their follows, or commercially, to earn their living by ‘giving the public what it wanted’.

– C. S. Lewis, High and Low Brows.

It’s striking that that last quote is so near to be being exactly what Ian Harac wrote in his comment on the Chesterton post.