Two Towers
I saw Peter Jackson's the Two Towers over the weekend. I enjoyed it, I think all the more because until recently I had never read the books. I had read the hobbit back when I was in fifth grade, so I knew about Hobbitses and such. I did not know so much that I felt a pressing need to take great exception with anything Peter Jackson had done with Tolkein's story. Movies are movies, it's what they do. Either the camera or something the camera see's needs to be moving. Somebody or some thing has to be doing something. Film extracts action from a narrative, the over-arching rule of the filmaker is show, don't tell . Anything the audience needs to know must be recast into a language of visual symbols.
Tolkein's models were the Norse Eddas and Germanic legends, and the scholarship of studying them. All lists, extrapolation and exposition, and a vaguely third person cast to any actual event related. Tolkein's stylistic point of reference was born of this. In the film the story had to be in front of you, happening. Jackson also had the task of trying to make three movies of roughly equal length. This would require that he alter the pacing of the narrative in the final section - slowing it down in fact for the final section where generally stories begin to accelerate their narrative. Alternately he could depart from the scene blocking of the print volumes. Clearly much of the fun of there being a movie is considering the decisions made in bringing it to light.
Having read all but the last book now, I also am intrigued by the incredible comprehensiveness of Tolkein's mythopoetic creation. The creation of a world, its people and its story. Those educated and working in the twentieth century were modernists. Their work, whether in reaction or addition, part of the dialogue of modernism largely the world view and understanding of the self belonging to the technologically oriented west. Some of the things I've read on this theme recently such as David Brin's Article in Salon strike me as being somewhat off the mark, trying to pin Tolkein down to a simple dichotomy of perferring a romantic vision of kings and wizards; fonts of divine or natural goodness vs the political, manufactured realm of power relations. I find myself thing more in terms of what Benjamin Barbour or others might say about what stories like this say about how we want to live in a world that technology can't be removed from.
I think I'll finish reading it first, before I try to force any conclusions
9:49:23 AM  ;;
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