deviantART

Happy New Year! And... I have nothing much to say at the moment. I've been busy, though: I've been painting. I had a deviantART account back in the day, but after losing my job and getting flamed in the message boards, I closed it. Well, I've reopened it and am once again slaving away over my Bamboo tablet, struggling to reproduce the images in my mind without too much success. Here's the link, if anybody's interested:


You'll note that I really, really like trees.

Review of The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey

It's been two weeks since I saw the film, but I haven't had a chance to put my impressions into words until now. The following post is positively stiff with spoilers. Spoiler-free summary at the bottom.

Where do I begin? I take my Tolkien very seriously. I generally like his books the way he wrote them; yes, I am frustrated by the unfinished ones, but for the most part I'm a happy reader. I can't understand the point of view of those who grumble over descriptions of landscapes, whine that the pace is too slow, or gripe that certain scenes (eg, Tom Bombadil) seem out of place. For me, these are high points, virtues that never made it into genre fantasy. Some readers seem determined to judge the original by how much it resembles the imitations. I fail to see the appeal of these: they are generally too fast paced, too frenetically plot-driven, never pausing to let the reader become immersed in the world. The genre is too artificially smooth, lacking the cracks that give depth and meaning, cracks that mirror the ones always appearing in the rich but fragile fantasy world each of us knows as reality. Nope, none of that nonsense for genre fiction, but efficient, formulaic production with an eye on the clock, converting hours to dollars with all the soul of a Taco Bell employee.

Peter Jackson seems to have a knack for drawing together gifted actors, visual artists and composers. He seems to have enough respect for the serious Tolkien fan community to allow them to temper the worst of his impulses, and perhaps even has enough appreciation of the books to actually want to create the occasional faithful scene. In The Hobbit, I enjoyed seeing Bilbo run through Hobbiton carrying the dwarves' contract: his excitement was truly infectious. I liked the "Riddles in the Dark" scene very much, though the setting was not nearly as dark and impressive as I pictured it; Freeman and Serkis absolutely nailed it. So I'll give Peter Jackson that much: he seems to have some ability to recognize talent. Still, at heart, he's a Taco Bell chef: piling up tortilla, beans, cheese, and just a pinch of iceberg lettuce to appease the wholesome book fans; rolling it together with a little less care every time, and calling it a meal. Remember how I said the Rankin Bass film taught me goblins are scary and will eat your head? Well, that was not enough for Peter Jackson, who showed us that goblins are comical creatures who line up to be squished by a rolling rock or shoved off bridges with a handy stick, led by a scrotum-throated giant who cracks jokes whilst being disemboweled.

I seem to be alone in this, but I enjoyed the scene in the book. The chase down a pitch-dark tunnel with the flip-flap of goblin feet on stone drawing gradually nearer, the brief confrontation when the hunters round a corner to find two legendary swords glowing before their faces; the second meeting, where the goblins come up stealthily to grab the dwarves from behind in the dark. Perhaps all this "dark" makes it difficult to translate to a visual medium, but it was a genuinely scary scene and worth the trouble. But no, Peter "Subtlety" Jackson decided viewers would prefer to see multiple goblins squished by a rolling rock. Hey, I like references as much as anybody, but when it comes to Katamari Damacy tributes, World of Warcraft did it better.

As for my fear that there would be a "flattening" effect as the tale was stretched and made more similar to Lord of the Rings, that was well warrented. Sometimes it feels as though the filmmakers are running through a checklist, a sort of Tolkien blockbuster recipe: 1 tsp "dwarves are disgusting", 2 cups "archery is sexy" and a 5lb bag of "Galadriel poses dramatically". They even reused the music (though where the did spring for a new theme, the dwarves' song, it is one of the highlights of the film). The character development is also sped up in a way that will probably leave nothing for the other two films. Now, before ever meeting a spider and naming his sword, timid Bilbo has killed a warg, leapt between an unconscious Thorin and a murderous orc, slain the orc, and won the respect of the dwarves. Where can he go from here?

Spoiler-free summary: 2.5 out of 5 stars: a decidedly mediocre film. Good acting and a small amount of good (new) music, combined with classic Boyans & Walsh Velveeta™ dialogue and gratuitously silly video-game action.

A long-expected journey.

My introduction to the Hobbit was not that auspicious. When I was 3, I came into possession of a Fisher Price Record Player and a few records to go with it, including this one::

"Hobbit Book & Record: Rankin/Bass (1977)"

I set up the record player in my multicolored, foldable indoor playhouse (if I recall correctly, it came from Little Golden Books or Random House - something like that) and spent days listening to records. Mostly, to be honest, I was listening to other records: I forget which they were, but I had two that were identical with different B sides, and at first I thought the song changed by magic.  I solved this great mystery by teaching myself to read, which led to my real introduction to Tolkien four years later. As for the Rankin Bass record, the only impression it really made on me was "Goblins are scary and will eat your head!"

Yesterday I reread the Hobbit (for maybe the 7th time). Even after this many readings, I noticed new things, for instance this parallel between the Hobbit and LoTR, which made me smile:

"You asked me to find the fourteenth man for your expedition, and I chose Mr. Baggins. Just let any one say I chose the wrong man or the wrong house, and you can stop at thirteen and have all the bad luck you like, or go back to digging coal."

"Together we score one hundred and forty-four. Your numbers were chosen to fit this remarkable total: One Gross, if I may use the expression. No cheers. This was ridiculous. Many of his guests, and especially the Sackville-Bagginses, were insulted, feeling sure they had only been asked to fill up the required number, like goods in a package. ‘One Gross, indeed! Vulgar expression."

It seems being asked to fill up a required number is not such an insult!

I read it this time because I wanted to reinforce my own original impressions before seeing Peter Jackson's interpretation later this week. Though I think I read LoTR a total of nine times, I didn't reread it before seeing the movie, and this is something I regret. My Frodo and my Aragorn (among others), ones I liked far better than the movie versions, are now difficult to recall. Reading the books first meant my Middle-Earth was really my own, and though the longing to see those images realized is what brought me to the movie, what made them powerful was the degree to which they "matched" a world that had already existed for years in my mind's eye. The Shire, Gandalf, Gollum were much as I pictured them and this delighted me; hearing the songs set to music thrilled me, but it occurred to me just yesterday that if I hadn't read the book before seeing the movie I might not have read it it all..

The richness that sets Tolkien apart from the genre largely inspired by him, something I've spent a lifetime trying to put my finger on, does not really make it to the screen. The movie was mostly enjoyable because I had read the books. The world called to me, in part, because I'd found it the way Tolkien himself found it, starting with that intriguing sentence "In a hole in the ground there lived a Hobbit". It began as a world where the narrator joked with me and an ordinary person (who seemed, in size and experience, more like my 7-year-old self than like a middle-aged man) revealed himself to be a fellow "fan" of stories of dragons and elves, and this world evolved into a gradually darker, more epic, seemingly older one; a path taken in both the Hobbit and LoTR, but also spanning both. For me, Tolkien's anachronisms and changes in style are not a blemish (as some seem to think) but a key to what sets him apart. Most writers of fantasy take an ordinary character and thrust him or her over some threshold into another world - a classic part of the hero's journey - but Tolkien handled this in a more artful way, starting from an "ordinary" world that is itself fanciful and symbolic, a dream version of reality, and progressing from there into a deeper dream. I wouldn't call it escapist any more than I would say that of the dreams that keep us sane.

The movie on the other hand, taken by itself, is barely distinguishable from ordinary escapist mental junk-food; it would have entertained me but had no lasting impact. I would probably have scoffed and said something clever about male power fantasies, then promptly forget the whole thing. The striking contrast between the various parts of Middle-Earth, which even creeps into the voice of the narrator, would be gone. Tom Bombadil, who breaks the rules of the story (and the rules of storytelling!) so near the beginning would be gone, along with the philosophical weight he brings. The Scouring of the Shire, also "breaking the rules", would be gone, breaking the relationship between the Shire and the heroic world, and thus the implied relationship between reader and book. The movies followed the "rules", and in doing so take life out of the story. I still enjoyed them because I watched them with an overlay of meaning remembered from the books. 

I don't doubt the Hobbit movie will similarly smooth over the quirks and bumps, though in this case the story will be padded rather than condensed. Minimizing the differences in style between the Hobbit and LoTR (an understandable attempt to repeat a successful formula) will certainly have this effect. Following Gandalf might be interesting, but it violates the veil that is drawn around the story in the Hobbit and thus flattens the world, bringing the background into the foreground. I sometimes enjoy fanfiction, and I suppose that's what this amounts to, but fanfiction is not the best introduction to a work! I'll certainly enjoy seeing the characters, places and music "brought to life", but this phrase is misleading: they are already very much alive for me, which is why I want to see them.