The Ring Goes South -or- A Grumpy Old Man Complains About Hippies

Despite the fact that I have contracted a virulent and miserable cold and that my throat is swelling closed as we speak in apparent mockery of the healing orange juice I've been consuming and the salt water with which I have recently gargled, I am intent on making a post today! The days blur together when you're a chronic insomniac, but I'm relatively certain that I haven't missed a week since I agreed to contribute. (Feel free to correct me.)

I recently watched all 3 movies in Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings super extreme blockbuster trilogy, the extended editions, for what is roughly the twelve-thousandth time. My father read The Hobbit to me when I was a child, and I have been fascinated with Tolkien ever since. I'm such a Tolkien dork that I pronounce his last name as he did - toll-KEEN - even though I know it makes me sound like a hipster doofus. I love the movies, I really do; the visuals are stunning, the casting is great, and the music is excellent. There is no question that Peter Jackson knows how to make a good movie. (Hipster doofus says: see The Frighteners.) I squirm a bit at the changes made, though I understand most of them. The book as it is would be unfilmable. Part of me wants to cry out that it is Glorfindel who faces the Nazgûl at the Ford of Buinen, that the Argonath should depict Anárion and Isildur and not Isildur and Elendil, that Haldir was not present for the Battle of the Hornburg, and that Aragorn actually summons the Oathbreakers from the Stone of Erech, but I'm not a purist by any stretch. I understand that, in any adaptation, there will be deviations from the source material. There is, I admit, a certain galling conceit when drastic changes are made; Faramir is shown to covet the Ring of Power in the movie when he never does so in the book, and Jackson's explanation for this is that Faramir "needed a character arc." To make judgments upon the work of Tolkien, as if one could write The Lord of the Rings better than he did, seems to require a rationalization that I cannot even imagine anyone making. Still, I watch. I watch the films again and again. I love what I love about them and I try not to gripe.
But there is one aspect of the movie that I cannot help but complain about every time, in spite of myself: the anachronistic dialogue.

Some of the lines in the movie are pulled directly from Tolkien's story. Many, of course, were written by screenwriters Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens, and Peter Jackson. When you must compare Tolkien's lines with theirs, Tolkien ends up blasting them out of the water, which is only understandable. Tolkien had a unique voice; his narratives read like history, and he had a way with words that one would expect from a professor of philology. He had the unique ability to make himself disappear from the story almost entirely, leaving the reader with only elves, hobbits, dwarves, and other such creatures to escort you though his imagination. But his characters do not speak in normal ways. Their diction is outmoded and, apparently, unsuitable for blockbuster crowds. When you hold lines like "You cannot pass, I am a servant of the Secret Fire, wielder of the flame of Anor," up to such gems as "Let's hunt some orc," or "Nobody tosses a dwarf," the comparison almost seems unsporting. And I'm not just talking about corny lines here: I'm also talking about sentiments that Tolkien very probably never intended to convey.

In the mid 60s, The Lord of the Rings became wildly popular in the United States. It was embraced by many followers of the burgeoning hippie movement, who saw it through their particular lens and occasionally touted it as a kind of hippie manifesto. As is common when a work is embraced as a cultural phenomenon, the book was reinterpreted by biased parties who projected their own values onto it. The hippies saw in The Lord of the Rings messages and ideals that seemed to coincide with their own, and that has left its mark on certain individuals who might be referred to today as neo-hippies. Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens definitely fall into that category, and it is evident in their treatment of Tolkien's intellectual property that they are either unable or unwilling to separate the work from the movement that embraced it. Tolkien's work did have allegorical elements, despite his claims that he despised allegory and did not intend The Lord of the Rings to be allegorical, but the parts of this great novel that seem to refer to modern society are merely reflective, being designed not to comment on any contemporary issue but to bind his expansive mythology to the vaguely remembered names and stories that seem to linger in our collective consciousness. It's not so much allegory as it is allusion that we see in The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien's worlds seem strangely familiar, and, unfortunately, this has led many an interpreter to conclude that the author intended to take sides in certain argument. Peter Jackson's films carry moral themes about following one's heart and believing in one's ability to affect change in the world: "Even the smallest person can change the course of the future." There is a floweriness to their message which is entirely modern, and I may be alone in saying that this is pretty obnoxious. The fact is that The Lord of the Rings has no more of a moral than a history documentary might have, and it detracts from the story when the literary voices of those who adapted it blare so unabashedly out at the audience.

I maintain that The Lord of the Rings was not written to be a series of super blockbuster films. No, the characters do not speak in a normal-sounding way, but neither do those of Shakespeare. The book has been in publication since 1954; it clearly does not need to be dumbed down to appeal to a larger audience. That may seem unfair, because Jackson's film really is masterfully-crafted and it fully lives up to Tolkien's high-fantasy in many ways. But so much of the dialogue is grating and out of place that, try as I might, I cannot enjoy the film as much as I feel that I should being a fan of all things Tolkien.

-Namárië-