Steve Mohn & Peter Watts
Choosing the Way of Pain: a dialog on Lord of the Rings
Much has been said of Peter Jackson’s take on J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings , and to say more may feel a day late. DVDs wold with the films are crammed with extras, and websites abound. It had made more money than anything else, ever, and everyone loves it. So when the relevant essay I had promised On Spec crumbled like stale cake in my clumsy hands, Jena Snyder, our production editor, suggested a dialoge with Peter Watts, author of the sf trilogy Starfish, Maletsrom, and Behemoth, and a guy who, Jena assured me, really knew his Tolkien*. I leapt at this since I don’t know anything and can always afford to learn something new.
New because this would not be two guys sitting at a table, nor even two e-mailers batting epistles back and forth in shuttlecock imitation of a transcripted dialogue. Days, not minutes, passed between replies. Each is a small essay, not so much worked as meditated on, with scarecely any cuts. We could go where we wished, yank the discussion in whatever direction. The only rule was that we had to have seen the films.
You may have to chew your way through parts of what we ended up with but, between my own solemn trench-digging and Peter under full sail, running before the wind, we have talked about Jackson’s Rings in a fashion unlike what you are liable to find elsewhere. And so then...
* Retroactive co-authorial footnote: I don’t know why Jena thought this. I do not, nor have I ever, pretended to be any kind of scholar or expert on Tolkien or his trilogy. I certainly have opinions to burn, but then, I have opinions on just about everything under the sun; and Jena would be the first to point out how ill-founded many of them are.
First printed in On Spec 16(1), 2004, pp21-27.
Steve Mohn: It may seem unfair to complain that The Lord of the Rings is not an important film, even if it is a terrific movie, but I think it has to be faced that, in a lot of ways, LotR isn’t really a film at all, and that Peter Jackson is not our Kubrick even if LotR is his Spartacus. LotR is an ordinary epic. It doesn’t have style so much as production design, and lots of films have that. You never get the sense with LotR that you’re watching a man work with film, unearthing inherent cinematic problems the way composers leave musical problems for later composers to pick up and solve. Jackson’s camera rarely finds where it has to be in order to fulfill some purpose greater than scene coverage. Think of Kubrick’s dolly shots, those long takes prefiguring so much New German Cinema, and his rare resorts to close-ups, so that every close-up punctuates the scene. Or think of how, in A Clockwork Orange, Alex is held head-underwater by former Droogs, now cops, as they beat him with truncheons. It’s a direct violation of Chaplin’s maxim: Close-up for tragedy, long shot for comedy — the Kubrick shot is a long shot, yet it’s a tragic moment for Alex, but at the same time darkly comic for us. This friction between stylistic imperatives is devastating. Kubrick often violated film to make us laugh at what was not funny, to make us sit through a nightmare. He was film- making, and LotR never quite does anything like that. Instead, it faithfully illustrates a much-beloved novel, which, incidentally, I’ve never read. I have to lay those cards on the table.
Peter Watts: Stop. Rewind. Ask yourself: why should a mere “movie” aspire to the exhalted status of “film” in the first place? So that viewers can be yanked out the story and forced to dwell upon the precious technicalities of camera technique and inbred homage? What is the director’s job, ultimately: to immerse us in another world, or to to show us how clever he is? Is that the difference between “movies” and “films”—one aspires to engross us into forgetting that it’s an artefact, while the other keeps reminding us of that same fact? Don’t misunderstand. I creamed my pants at the sight of 2001’s bone/spaceship cut. Alex’s myopic glower sent chills up my spine. I’m even willing to appreciate the little red staccatoes punctuating every other shot of Eyes Wide Shut, although I don’t know what the fuck Kubrick was trying to prove with that. But I was also blown away by the lighting of the mountain beacons in Return of the King. To me, that sequence is no less masterful for not having prefigured New German Cinema, or for not having tipped its hat to Fritz Lang. It moved me, on a gut level. It took my breath away in the same way that Kubrick’s bone-cut did.
It’s the goal that matters, not the tools used to achieve it. If the impossible operation succeeds—if the patient recovers and thrives against all odds—who are we to complain that Bergman would have used a different scalpel in the third act?
There are so many things you could have done, so many real weaknesses you could have exploited. You could have attacked Tolkein for his reliance on deus ex machinas like giant eagles and dead armies, none of which we ever heard of until they conveniently appeared, like gizmos from Batman’s utility belt, to save Fellowship asses in the nick of time. You could have attacked Jackson for the changes he wrought—the Ents’s peculiar ignorance of a clearcut only thirty seconds’ walk away, or the movie’s trivialization of Sarumen’s “work for good within an evil system” rationale—seductive and reasonable—down to bwa-ha-ha cardboard villainy. You could have attacked plot holes, inconsistencies, even the military absurdities rife in both book and films: no drawbridge at Helm’s Deep? Defensive gates that swing inward? A catflap in the Hornburg?
But no. You have chosen to fixate on some arcane distinction between “movie” and “film”, a trifle that matters only to film-studies undergrads and fact-checkers for the Boomer’s edition of Trivial Pursuit. You have chosen— the way of pain.
SM: The director’s job is whatever he says it is but increasingly all directors do is illustrate, and Peter Jackson’s doting on the source material ultimately does it a disservice. After a while, all those guys on horseback, galloping like mad past picturesque mountain ranges, start to feel the same. And I’m not looking for something artsy here: let’s remember that the bone-to-satellite cut in 2001 is just a scene change striking for its economy, eliminating the march-through-the-ages montage Kubrick originally intended: his desire to get rid of that resulted in the metaphor of progress supported by the bones of murder.
Here’s the thing I’m really getting at, and where I think Jackson truly let us down. It’s about silent film as the Base Language of cinema, and how it’s disappearing. Guys like Kubrick and David Lean learned cutting and camera work from watching silents, and it shows in things like 2001 and Lawrence of Arabia. And it’s interesting that Jackson did so much digital tinting of the images in LotR — making the night scenes almost monochromatically blue, the Rivendell scenes golden, while desaturating the daylight scenes nearly to the point of their becoming black and white. The tinting is old silent technique from before the days of color — they did it by hand. (Jackson did a mock-umentary for New Zealand TV, proving that film was actually invented there, so he knows all about this stuff.) But Tolkein’s text is such a straightjacket, and so driven by the spoken word, that the film has no choice but to hack its way from scene to scene with a broadsword of stated intentions.