December 24, 2003
Home, part two
So I'm thinking more about my post last night concerning Return of the King. I forgot something I should have mentioned.
If there is one thing true about the Lord of the Rings that anyone should be able to see, Christian or not, it is that the morality of the world is pretty unambiguous. The good guys are Good, the bad guys are Bad. As I discussed last night, Jackson is uncomfortable with the idea of people being unambiguously good, and introduces pettiness, doubt, and fear to temper the nobility of otherwise virtuous characters. But he is also uncomfortable with the idea of people being unambigiously bad. Tolkien does not allow us to feel sympathy for the orcs, or the Southrons, evil men who are vassals of the Dark Lord. He dispatches them without fear or doubts. He admits that they may be deceived, but there is no sense of misgiving about killing them. Jackson can't allow this. He has to temper the evil, just as he has tempered the good. In the Extended Version of the Two Towers, Faramir stands over the corpse of a dispatched Southron and muses over the poor sod who died so far from home.
Post-moderns object to the "dehumanization" of one's enemies, as it encourages a lack of perspective and charity. This can be true. But if one is not careful - and I feel that Jackson is not - it can also lead one away from a sense of the righteousness of destroying evil. Tolkien does encourage pity for Smeagol, but only because something far greater than that with which he could be expected to deal with unexpectedly thrown upon him to carry. He's out of his league. No one shed a tear for Gollum when he died, nor did anyone doubt that he deserved to. He was a wretched, evil, twisted specimen.
Jackson complicates even this moral situation by emphasizing over and over that we should not rush to judgment. Gandalf says, "Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them?" Jackson interprets this, like a good post-modern, to mean that we are not fit to exercise moral judgment or mete out justice. But he forgets the preceding dialog. Gandalf says that it was pity that stayed Bilbo's hand under the Misty Mountains, "Pity and Mercy: not to strike without need." But in saying this, Gandalf asserts that sometimes there is need to strike. Tolkien admits a certain degree of moral complexity, though not nearly the degree that Jackson foists upon him, but his characters are never paralyzed by this complexity. They all possess a keen moral vision in which the ultimate end is clear. Jackson has no moral vision, and thus neither to the characters he creates.
This is related to Jackson's failure to understand that Tolkien is not writing realisitic fiction, but mythology. We are not supposed to identify readily. We are not supposed to feel like Aragorn or Elrond, or even Legolas and Gimli. We are supposed to feel most like the hobbits, and only to a certain extent. Thus, Tolkien is writing a world in which moral lines are much clearer than they are in this one. And this world being as complicated and subtle as it is, we quite frankly need to be reminded that sometimes things are clear, and some things are evil, and that sometimes it is good to rejoice in the death of one's enemies.
We should pity, not the Southrons, but Jackson and his lack of moral depth.
Ok Dawg, I'm with you most of the way on this, but consider:
Tolkien allowed for the complexity of morality that Jackson was attempting, in terms of disliking violence even when it was necessary etc. Consider The Scouring of the Shire, when the hobbits return and Frodo is immensely saddened over the violence, albeit necessary violence, and insists that no hobbits are killed. Now something might be said for Frodo's, well, moral inconsistency there making wicked men worse than wicked hobbits...but whatever. That type of moral perspective, that Jackson showed throughout the movies, does exists somewhere in the Tolkien universe.
But it's like you said, I think the books are supposed to provide a world in which "good and evil" is more clear, more distinct than this one.
I've been reading through both The Unfinished Tales & The Silmarillion, and I'm starting to think that the Lord of the Rings was an incredible myopic, telescoped, narrow view of the world of Middle Earth. Incredible moral, thematic, and character complexity is introduced through the many expanded tellings of LoTR that appear through the other writings.
I fairly certain that on an expanded reading of the entire story one becomes far more certain that Sauron is evil, that it's far more difficult to figure out "how" his more evil, and it's definately nearly impossible to determine just what to do about Sauron.
All this makes me convinced the LoTR is really a story told brutally and blatantly from the perspective of The Hobbits with a little bit of Gandalf thrown in for flava. Hence the moral simplicity, hence the joy in it all, hence the sadness in it all. Tolkien has somehow managed to make you, the reader, a Hobbit in his telling of the story. It is unescapable that we have a simplistic view of Middle Earth and the events occuring because that's the position Tolkien manipulated the reader into.
Which, like you said, is what we're supposed to do, namely identify with the hobbits. Although I still wanna be Aragorn.
This is far to complex of a discussion to have via blogging. Damnit get back to town!
All that to say, I think Jackson lacked moral depth, but he didn't lack that much, what he lacked was the ability to tell the same story Tolkien was telling, which is why from the beginning I've said the movies & the books are telling 2 different stories.
Posted by: JosiahQ at December 24, 2003 09:30 AM