In 1977 Steely Dan recorded a landmark album in the history of Rock'n'Roll. "Aja" is Steely Dan at the peak of their career. "Aja" was polished, sophisticated, thoughtful, even for a band that already set the standard for those traits.
I remember the first time I heard a cut from "Aja", back in the days when album rock still existed on radio, and you could hear cuts other than the current "single". I remember being completely arrested by these lyrics:
Who wrote that tired sea song Set on this peaceful shore You think you've heard this one before Well the danger on the rocks has surely passed Still I remain tied to the mast Could it be that I have found my home at last Home at last
It took me a moment to realize that what I was listening to was a rock band with the audacity to "do" Homer, and, in their own way, to pay homage and do justice to western civilization's original epic, "The Odessy".
The mind boggles at what Homer would actually think of this rendition. Half the time I think he'd hate it, and half the time I think he'd be thrilled. Here are the lyrics in their entirety:
I know this superhighway This bright familiar sun I guess that I'm the lucky one Who wrote that tired sea song Set on this peaceful shore You think you've heard this one before Well the danger on the rocks has surely passed Still I remain tied to the mast Could it be that I have found my home at last Home at last She serves the spoonbread She keeps me safe and warm Its just the calm before the storm Call in my reservation So long hey thanks my friend I guess I'll try my luck again Well the danger on the rocks has surely passed Still I remain tied to the mast Could it be that I have found my home at last Home at last
Reworking a classic takes bravery. No one has had greater audacity in that regard than John Milton. The Holy Bible, circa 1667, in post-Cromwell England, is about as "sacred" and untouchable as a classic gets. It was in that year that John Milton published his retelling of the Book of Genesis, with Satan as the hero, in "Paradise Lost."
Interpetations of classics take many forms. Steely Dan's "Home at Last" is a bit of musical impressionism on "The Odessy." We get a very different take on the same story from the Coen brothers in "Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?" Here the setting and time are changed, and characters transformed into twentieth century form, yet the story is still clearly recognizable as Homer's. Milton has kept the time and setting the same, and, in a sense, even kept the characters the same, yet he is obviously telling a different story than that told in the Book of Genesis.
Are we appalled by Milton's tampering? Clearly in his day many people were, yet even in that time, a time utterly hostile to the very idea of Milton's endeavor, he received praise from some of his contemporaries. Today Milton's audacity has made him a literary giant. And today we do not see him changing the story of Genesis so much as opening up a different aspect or different perspective on it. We are not departing from the original story; we are allowing Milton to enrich the original story.
A classic well retold always leaves us with that feeling of enrichment. The challenge for any artist tampering with a classic is to find a way to enrich the original, and bring something fresh to it. The line between success and failure is subtle, and often hard to define.
Bernard Malamud does justice to Malory's "Death of Arthur" in his novel "The Natural". Barry Levinson, however, falls short of the mark in his movie "The Natural". It's tempting to say that the problem is Malamud's willingness to embrace the Arthurian sense of tragedy right to the end, while Levinson opts for an ending of overdone sentimentality, but the problems are both deeper and subtler than how each artist interprets the ending.
Milton's "Paradise Lost" is such a classic in its own right that a retelling of it seems almost as audacious as Milton's original endeavor. And yet, few students today will wade through 10 volumes of Milton's archaic prose unless forced to by the requirements of an English professor. How then to bring Milton's insight to an impatient, modern audience? Science fiction author Steven Brust handles this challenge admirably in his novel, "To Reign in Hell".
What then, are we to make, of Peter Jackson's film, "The Fellowship of the Ring"?
The first point to understand is that it is a retelling of a classic, no less so than "The Natural", or "Paradise Lost", or "Home at Last". Jackson isn't giving us the original, and at no point in his pre-release discussion of the film does he ever claim to do so. In fact he's gone out of his way to set expectations that this is a different story.
The questions, then, are:
I want to answer those questions by posing a different question, namely "Who are the main characters in the story?"
To answer this question, I want to embark on a different line of thought.
What do we mean when we say that a novel is an example of genre fiction? In other words, when we describe something as a mystery novel, or a romance novel, or a science fiction novel, what does that signify?
Part of what it means, of course, is that the story will follow a certain structure, and contain certain elements specific to the genre. A mystery novel always has a crime committed, a criminal, a sleuth, and reaches its resolution when the criminal is exposed.
None of these elements are necessarily set in stone. One of the things I always loved about the old "Columbo" TV series was that it took the traditional mystery format and inverted it:
But "Columbo" is a perfect example of genre fiction in another sense. Intellectuals often think of genre fiction in inferior terms, as falling more under the heading of entertainment than literature. A big part of that denegration has to do with character development, or the lack thereof.
One of the limitations of genre fiction, and indeed one of the expectations by its audience, is that the main characters will be presented fully developed, that they won't change. Columbo doesn't evolve as a character. Neither does Sherlock Holmes. Holmes is dependably the same in story after story. Readers would be shocked and indeed disappointed if Herclue Poirot went through some radical transformation, and grew into a different person. That's not why readers come to Agatha Christie; they come for the dependability of the same characters succeeding in the face of predictable challenges. Indeed that sense of comfort is part of the huge commercial success of genre fiction.
Authors are often uncomfortable with this expectation and limitation. Arthur Conan Doyle, during his lifetime, never thought the Sherlock Holmes stories were terribly important; they were just a way to make money. He thought the work he would be remembered for was his novel "The White Company". John Le Carre expresses frustration to this day that readers want him to write more "Smiley" novels.
What the readers overlook about Le Carre's work is that it transcends the spy novel genre precisely because George Smiley is transformed through the three novels that center around his character, "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy", "The Honorable Schoolboy", and "Smiley's People". The very thing that makes those novels uniquely appealing -- character transformation -- makes another Smiley novel impossible.
Note also that character change and character development are not the same thing. I'm a big fan of historical fiction, and read with great joy, long before anyone had heard of Patrick O'Brien, a series of British naval novels written by Alexander Kent. Kent's main character, Richard Bolitho, starts out as a midshipman in the first novel, and reaches the rank of admiral by the final (I believe 12th) novel. Nonetheless I would call this pure genre fiction and pure entertainment. Bolitho may age, and may change rank, but he is essentially the same character throughout. Once the reader gets to know the character, he never does anything unexpected, and indeed a big part of the pleasure of the novels is seeing how this character, in his predictable ways, will act as the author moves him through the whole panoply of Napoleonic naval warfare.
Many novels that superficially fit the genre description in fact achieve something more like literature than entertainment, and they do so on the strength of character creation and character development. In the realm of historical fiction -- my favorite genre -- I commend Dorothy Dunnett's novels, "The Lymond Chronicles" (six books), the "House of Niccolo" series (eight books), and, if you don't have time to read fourteen books (it has taken me twenty years and I'm not done yet), her standalone novel "King Hereafter". "King Hereafter", by the way, is a novel about MacBeth, and based very closely on the historical MacBeth, rather than the Shakespearean MacBeth, and is a nice example of reinterpretting or reinventing a classic.
Many people regard "The Lord of the Rings" as genre fiction, as belonging to the genre of sword and sorcery tales. I had a high school buddy who went on to get a masters degree in English, and had the worst time trying to get his professors to let him write a masters thesis on "Lord of the Rings". Their point of view was that a thesis should focus on a work of literature, and that Tolkein wasn't literature.
To a point, I understand their perspective. Good and evil are not remotely subtle or complex in Tolkein, and the Christ-figure symbolism of Gandalf is far too blatant. To my mind all of this misses the big picture.
First, let's note that calling "Lord of the Rings" merely part of the sword and sorcery genre doesn't do justice to Tolkein's impact. Tolkein single-handedly created that genre. Yes, there were other writers working in related areas in the first half of the twentieth century, C. S. Lewis on the more literary side, Fritz Leiber and Robert E. Howard on the swashbuckler side. But Tolkein's impact goes far beyond, and has little to do with the work of others.
Without Tolkein we would not have the entire genre, from Ursula Le Guin to Robert Jordan. We would not have "Dungeons and Dragons". We would not have an entire category of video and arcade games. We would not have an entire genre of movies. Saying that Tolkein is merely part of the sword and sorcery genre is a little bit like saying the Magna Carta is just another part of English law.
Tolkein is in one sense part of a different tradition, and in another sense Tolkein stands alone.
Tolkein is a mythologist. Reading the "Lord of the Rings" is much like reading the Greek myths, the Norse myths, or that great mythological work in which Milton took such delight, the Bible. Indeed many of the names, places, and themes of "Lord of the Rings" are drawn directly from Celtic, Nordic, or Germanic mythology.
So Tolkein is certainly part of that tradition. But he isn't merely part of that tradition. What Tolkein did was unprecedented: he not just told, but created an entire, complete, mythos: the names, the stories, the places, the heroes, the cultures, even the languages. No one has been able to duplicate that feat, though perhaps Frank Herbert and Robert Jordan have come the closest.
What made Frank Herbert so successful was that he did incredible, detailed work on making a working ecosystem for Dune, and then had an incredible, rich story to tie it to. What Tolkein has done is even more remarkable, creating a set of interlocking linuistic "ecosystems", complete with the history and stories to bring them to life.
That's what is so obvious that it's easy to overlook: in Tolkein language comes to life as a character in the story. What Faulkner did to explore and develop narrative point of view, Tolkein has done, not with uses of language, but with language itself.
Part of what makes this work is keeping characters fixed so that language can change around them. This fixedness of character is what misleads academics into thinking of "Lord of the Rings" as simple in the way of genre fiction.
Consider Elrond, Galadriel, Gandalf, and Aragorn. These are clearly the most powerful individuals aligned actively in the struggle against Sauron. Each, in their own way, faces their life's greatest challenge as "Lord of the Rings" unfolds: Elrond and Galadriel to endure and indeed help bring about the passing of their realms; Aragorn to finally lay claim to his realm; and Gandalf to fully match himself against Sauron as leader of them -- but not over them -- all.
Yet as characters, these four do not change and evolve. They are fixtures. We, the reader, come to know them better, and see those characters played out against their penultimate challenges, but those challenges do not change those characters. Gandalf has been ready for this time for thousands of years. Aragorn has already become a man, discovered his destiny, and found the great love of his life, all before the first pages of "The Fellowship of the Ring".
The language that surrounds these characters reflects this. Here's an excerpt from one of the final chapters, "The Steward and the King":
"In the days that followed his crowning the King sat on his throne in the Hall of Kings and pronounced his judgments. And embassies came from many lands and peoples, from the East and the South, and from the borders of Mirkwood, and from Dunland in the west. And the King pardoned the Easterlings that had given themselves up, and sent them away free.... And there were brought before him many to receive his praise and reward for their valour; and last the captain of the Guard brought to him Beregond to be judged."
This reads almost exactly like a passage from the King James Bible, right down to the long, comma-delimited sentences and the frequent choice of "And" for starting sentences. Were the entire "Lord of the Rings" written this way it would indeed be the dry, stodgy, predictable story that English professors are so eager to view it as.
But this choice of King James-style language is deliberate. It is a stylistic device that Tolkein uses to demarkate the mythic structure in which the real story is set. The characters who are part of that mythic structure are fixtures, unchanging, in which the real story is set. Thus this is not, ultimately, a story about Elrond, Galadriel, or even Aragorn or Gandalf. If it were, then the story would conclude with coronation of Aragorn.
Instead the story concludes with the Grey Havens and has not even reached its climax by the coronation. The climactic chapter is, without question, "The Scouring of the Shire".
Look, for one thing, at the change in language when the "real" story comes to the fore. The language is alive, fresh, colloquial, and above all human, not mythic. Here's a passage from the very end of the "Fellowship of the Ring":
With a few strokes Frodo brought the boat back to the bank, and Sam was able to scramble out, wet as a water-rat. Frodo took off the Ring and stepped ashore again.
'Of all the confounded nuisances you are the worst, Sam!' he said.
'Oh, Mr. Frodo, that's hard!' said Sam shivering. 'That's hard, trying to go without me and all. If I hadn't aguessed aright, where would you be now?'
Sentences shorten and become more active here. The verb "scramble" probably occurs nowhere in the King James Bible, and the words "water-rat" and "aguessed" certainly do not. Here we confront the real story, and the real main characters: the hobbits.
The hobbits serve a clever narrative purpose. Their knowledge of the world around them, and the history behind it, is limited. By centering the narrative on them, Tolkein enables the reader to discovery the mythos, discover the history, as they do. He's revealing to us without simply explaining to us, showing not telling, and these are important traits of good writing.
But more importantly the hobbits are the main characters, the heroes. They are the ones who grow and change, who follow all the wonderful paths of character development we expect of a great novel. That is why their climax -- the scouring of the Shire -- is the climax of the story, rather than an event of greater worldly significance -- the destruction of the Ring.
Yet an enormous part of the hobbits' character development is tied up in their realization and recognition that the world around them is changing, and that an Age is passing.
The "Lord of the Rings" is ultimately a tragedy. What the hobbits discover, and bear witness to, is the death of language. What Tolkein means by that is so simple that it is hard to even express.
In the world of the First and Second Ages, words themselves have metaphysical power over the world around them. That is a large part of what magic is: the power of words to be, directly, the things they stand for, and thus to change the world. After the Third Age, we can utter the words, but they no longer have that metaphysical force behind them.
In the beginning even a lowly, uneducated hobbit can utter the words "Elbereth, Gilthoniel" and have the very power of Elbereth and Gilthoniel stand behind those words, power enough to stop, if just for a moment, one of the Third Age's greatest evils: a ring-wraith.
Nor is it only the high Elven tongue that has such power. Merely using the tongue of Mordor can literally cause a shadow to fall.
And the nadir of the entire story turns upward to the rising events leading to the climax with a song, indeed a simple hobbit song. Here is the dramatic passage from "The Tower of Cirith Ungol"; at this point in the story Frodo and Sam are separated, Sam has turned aside from the quest to rescue Frodo, and has now given up any hope of finding him:
"At last, weary and feeling finally defeated, [Sam] sat on a step below the level of the passage-floor and bowed his head into his hands. It was quiet, horribly quiet. The torch, that was already burning low when he arrived, sputtered and went out; and he felt the darkness cover him like a tide. And then softly, to his own surprise, there at the vain end of his long journey and his grief, moved by what thought in his heart he could not tell, Sam began to sing.
His voice sounded thin and quavering in the cold dark tower: the voice of a forlorn and weary hobbit that no listening orc could possibly mistake for the clear song of an Elven-lord. He murmured old childish tunes out of the Shire, and snatches of Mr. Bilbo's rhymes that came into his mind like fleeting glimpses of the country of his home. And then suddenly new strength rose in him, and his voice rang out, while words of his own came unbidden to fit the simple tune.
In western lands beneath the Sun
the flowers may rise in Spring,
the trees may bud, the waters run,
the merry finches sing.
Or there maybe 'tis cloudless night
and swaying beeches bear
the Elven-stars as jewels white
amid their branching hair.
Though here at journey's end I lie
in darkness buried deep,
beyond all mountains steep,
above all shaodes rides the Sun
and Stars for ever dwell:
I will not say the Day is done,
nor bid the Stars farewell.
'Beyond all towers strong and high,' he began again, and then he stopped short. He thought that he had heard a faint voice answering him."
Sam still faces another confrontation with Snaga, and a desperate rooftop search, before he is reunited with Frodo, but it is this, a simple strand of song, the power of words that reach out to each other, that brings them together. And it is from this point that Sauron's downfall, and the scouring of the Shire, are inevitable. It is also from this point that the passing of the ring-bearers to the Grey Havens, and the death of language, in Tolkein's very particular sense, is inevitable.
There has never been a work like the "Lord of the Rings," that is both a use of language and about language in such a remarkable way. And there never will be such a work, particularly in any domain of art other than the written word.
Which brings us to Peter Jackson's dilemma. How can one take a story, which is so thoroughly embodied in the written word, and make a movie out of it?
A few times the genre of film has taken on this kind of challenge. By far the most successful endeavor is Michelangelo Antonioni's 1966 film "Blowup", based on the famous short story by Julio Cortazar. Cortazar had already undertaken a breath-taking challenge by taking the most action-oriented form of the written word -- the short story -- sucking all of the action out of it (the entire story is about a photographer developing a picture), and still creating a work of powerful dramatic tension and deep insight. To take such an interior story and make a film out of it seemed impossible, but Antonioni succeeds, and brilliantly.
A more relevant example is Ken Kesey's novel "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," adapted to film under Milos Forman's direction in 1975. The novel is told from a completely introspective point of view, that of mute patient Chief Bromden. In the movie, Forman relegates the Chief to a minor part, thus transforming the entire narrative, and yet still managing to tell a story that is true to the essence of the novel.
Peter Jackson could not, and would not make a movie that is fundamentally about language, in which the written language takes on the vibrancy of a character in the story. Like Forman, he has to approach the story in a different way.
Right from the start of the movie Jackson makes it clear that he understands the challenge and is willing to take the story in a different direction. The first element to disappear in the transition from novel to film is the poetry. Except for the necessary "One Ring" incantation inscribed on the Ring itself, all of the poems and songs, from rich Elven ballads to simple hobbit ditties, have been removed. This is a necessary omission. No particular rendition of these poems, presented starkly onscreen, can compare with the way they play in the imagination of the reader. Language, the whole theme of language and the tragedy of its demise, has quietly dropped from view.
To be replaced by what?
An obvious choice would have been to go for visual effect, to make a story as visually striking as Tolkein's novel is linguistically striking. And to some extent Jackson has taken some careful steps in this direction. The film handles some delicate visual challenges gracefully. Jackson's ring-wraiths do not look exactly as I had pictured them in my mind's eye -- how could they -- but they look authentic to how I had pictured them. The same with the transition to Frodo's "spirit world" view whenever he puts on the Ring. Not exactly as I had imagined it, but consistent with, and compatible with how I had imagined it. And certainly Jackson must be given credit for his insight in choice of location. New Zealand's rugged, beautiful landscapes are a perfect fit for the imagined vistas of Middle Earth.
What Jackson cannot escape, however, is that Tolkein has gone before him. "Lord of the Rings", the novel, created a genre. "Lord of the Rings", the movie, can never hope to be more than part of it. For all its visual achievements it cannot escape being compared to, and judged as part of, other "sword and sorcery" movies. From the great ("Excalibur") to the pleasant but mundane ("Beast Master") decades of film already stand before Jackson's film defining the genre.
This is not a short-coming on Jackson's part. It is simply a fact of film history.
Yet Jackson understands that to have the audacity to attempt a "Lord of the Rings" film he must also have the humility to accept the limitations within which he must work. He must find an original story to tell, or else he does not enhance the work he tries to honor, and yet he must accept the places where originality has been denied to him.
And so Jackson does what all good story-tellers must do: he looks to his characters to bring the story alive for him. And here a peculiar thing happens to him. By moving the story from the written to the visual medium, we find that those characters fixed in place by Tolkein's mythic, almost Biblical language, suddenly become unfettered.
Gandalf and Aragorn are no longer larger than life, but strangely human. And so Jackson changes the story. He embarks upon a daring "what if?" What if, indeed, Gandalf and Aragorn are as human any of the others, what if they are no more sure of themselves than Frodo and Sam? What if they are not fully developed characters, fixed in place for the story to weave around, but characters of a kind with Frodo and Sam, waiting to be tested, yes, but also waiting to grow and mature?
Doubtless the very idea has offended many true Tolkein fans. But I suspect that it offends in much the same way that Milton offended, or that George Clooney offends when playing his version of Odysseus. We can only be offended if we treat our myths as sacrosanct, untouchable. And if that is what we think, then we should never want to experience anything but the original.
And yet we so clearly do want something more, we want our myths to come alive, to evolve, to show us something new. To see something new, we must accept change, even where it makes us uncomfortable. We must not just accept, but embrace the heretical in Steely Dan riffing on Homer, or Steven Brust revising Milton revising the Bible. And we must let even our beloved Storm Crow and Strider change in Jackson's hands.
I, for one, am intrigued. The idea that Gandalf would feel, initially, so obviously inferior to Sauruman, that he would feel so relucant to supplant him, and so unsure of his ability to do so... this idea fascinates me. The idea of an Aragorn so equally unsure, a man tortured by the flaws and the tragedy of his ancestors... this idea too fascinates me.
And Jackson hasn't entirely made this up. The seeds of this approach are in Tolkein. Consider Gandalf and Sauruman. To call it a flaw in Tolkein would be too strong, but it is certainly a puzzle how someone of Gandalf's age, power, and wisdom could be deceived so effectively for so long by Sauruman. Jackson is well within creative license to seize upon this puzzle as a story-line opportunity.
Similarly, in Tolkein Aragorn clearly struggles with the mantle of leadership after the bridge at Khazad-Dum. Jackson has simply amplified Aragorn's apparent angst at coming into his own.
Thus, at the very end of the film, when Aragorn first battles the Uruk-hai, there is doubt. He is not a hero. He is just a man. And maybe, just maybe, he is overmatched. When he emerges, bloodied but triumphant, to begin the hunt for Merry and Pippen, there is a tangible change in his carriage, a feeling of greater confidence.
In short, there is character development. There is a new way to tell the old story, and something new to be gained.
Can Jackson pull this off? I have no idea. He has two more films to take us through. In the end he must resolve what the climax of the story shall be, whether it is still the scouring of the Shire, whether it is the coronation, or whether it is something else entirely.
Frankly I don't know if he can do it. But I've enjoyed the ride so far, and I'm certainly willing to give him a chance.