Filed under: General Musings | Tags: Aromathus, Desolation of Smaug, Jeff, Journal, Movie, Novel, Offringa, Personal, Spec-Fic, The Hobbit
Well Aromathians, I had originally intended to write up a Christmas list for this post – i.e. things that I hope to see in the realms of speculative fiction, both in print and on television in the coming year; I honestly still plan on doing that before Christmas. However, then something happened, something I hinted at in my last post: Strangely to me, a great many people I know are ripping on the new Hobbit movie.
Now, I have to say up front that I haven’t seen the movie yet. I hope to go with my nephew this week now that he’s done with exams, but between his job and my Pathfinder campaign, we haven’t had time yet. In other words, I can’t fully prove or disprove some of the comments I’ve read.
Saying that, though, I move onto my topic. It started when a friend of my posted on Facebook that she and her husband were waiting in line for the midnight showing of Hobbit Two. One of her friends, whom I have never met, made the comment that he would never see the second movie after “the travesty that was the first one.”
Really? Now, as I said in my response, I have my issues with the first movie, but… the first movie was anything but a travesty. It added some stuff in, sure, and it was a little too long, IMHO, but it was a good movie.
Yet when I pushed for this person to explain what they had wanted, and more importantly, what he’d expected the movie to have been, her prevaricated. After several attempts (and verbose responses), the best I could get him to say was that the movie was “action porn.” Lots of stuff going on, you know – making it “action porn, and porn makes everything better.”
At this point, (and four posts going each way) I gave up. As far as I could tell, what he seemed to want was a literal, word for word translation of the book into a movie. All the things he objected too were in the book – stone giants, trees burning brightly, battles with goblins, etc. Yet they all occur “off camera.”
Could you make a movie without these things – without the “action porn?” Sure you could. But face it – it would be, well…. pretty boring. Especially to the average fan. Or, as I put in a response to another post by another disgruntled fan, the person who doesn’t eat, breathe, sleep, and poop Tolkien.
Most of their responses, it seems to me, seem to be objecting to the fact that the richness and depth of Tolkien’s writings and world don’t come through in the movie; his philosophies, his morality tales and allegory, etc. The problem with this argument, IMO, is that most people watching these movies neither know nor care about these.
Think about it: Peter Jackson’s movies take a written story, one written for a very different time than out fast paced one of today, and convert them to a visual medium, where the entire story has to be told on screen. There is no background, no narration or inner monologue. Just what we see. All that stuff that makes Tolkien great? It’s not there. It can’t be. Is this action porn? Sure, I suppose it is. But the alternative? You could do a literal, line-by-line copy of the book. Again, that would be a very dull and slow and movie.
What makes Tolkien great? It’s not his story telling; it’s his world-building. The depth of Middle Earth and its culture and history and so much more. In short, all the stuff that the purists and lore junkies love that the casual Tolkien fan (your truly) is only peripherally aware, and that the non-fan neither knows or cares about. I know this is hard for the “Tolkien is a god” crowd to accept, but it’s true. Moreover, Peter Jackson isn’t making his movies for the purist. The purists are going to see the movie, or they aren’t, regardless if how true the adaptation is to the book. No; Jackson is making his movie for the 99% of the world that has never read Tolkien, and doesn’t care too.
We spec fic fans need to realize this, yet many of us seem not to. This is best exemplified by another comment I read on facebook: “Why wouldn’t you want to eat, breathe, sleep, and poop Tolkien?” Why? Because, as I’ve said many times before, Tolkien is a wonderful world builder, but a pretty average author. Jackson’s changes, IMHO, make the story better. The STORY, not the world.
Feel free to disagree with me on this, I know many people do. In closing, though, I will make one more point, and that is another example my GM gave me when we were talking about this. He is a HUGE comic book fan, and he agreed with me that many people expect too much of Tolkien. He went on to say that “Tolkien purists have nothing to bitch about. After all, I’ve been sitting through comic book movies for YEARS that butcher and destroy character after character in movie after movie – and with less reason for the changes than the changes to Tolkien. Yet we all still go watch them.”
Are the Hobbit movies action porn? Sure. Is that bad? Not really. After all, what do you purists expect? Oh, right – a Tolkien musical with all the songs and very little action, Or, put another way, a boring movie that would never get made because the average fan would NEVER see it.
I’ll take action porn any day over that. š
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Jeff Offringa's Journal 
Tolkien purist alert! Battlestations!
I don’t begrudge Jackson wanting to write an action-comedy movie that tells a different sort of story than the Hobbit. I do object to him creating that movie and then trying to market it by cashing in on Tolkien’s reputation. At some point, this becomes the equivalent of making “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies”, which isn’t necessarily horrible, but certainly isn’t Austen either. With the Hobbit, Jackson is embracing an identity as a parody director. (Honestly, go watch the rabbit sled scene, and tell me he’s playing this one straight.)
The point is that… well, you’re objectively wrong about Tolkien’s merits as an author, in the sense that you’re mixing up the ability to WRITE (something he cared deeply about) with the ability to PLOT (something he cared little about, except to subvert). Tolkien’s precision and conciseness as a prose stylist puts the majority of American doorstop-fantasy writers to shame, and the brevity of the Hobbit (and its light touch) are a cut above hackwork like, well, the thing that Jackson turned his pocket-sized classic into. This movie is ignoring the thing that Tokien does well (dry British humor and understated “keep calm and carry on” characterization), and making it all into a neon psychedelic hot mess.
Jackson wants his movies to have a plot with scenery-chewing villains and overbaked internal psychodrama and endless dwarf jokes, instead of just being isolated episodic events from a travelogue. That’s good marketing, but it’s definitely crushing the life out of the original story, and I reserve the right to regard this as a Spaceballs to Tolkien’s Star Wars.
Comment by Edward Hamilton December 18, 2013 @ 4:05 am