Of Movies and Books

Kevin Wolf didn’t like Peter Jackson's King Kong. I haven’t seen it. The main reason I didn’t go is that 3 hours in a movie theater is too much for me. I’d rather watch a movie of that length at home, perhaps over two nights. I expect that I will eventually rent the DVD and watch it. I will probably enjoy it on a certain level, but part of the reason that I believe that is because I don’t expect more than it can deliver.

It’s difficult to discuss any Peter Jackson effort without mentioning “The Lord of the Rings.” I’m going to admit right here and now that I can’t be objective on the subject, because I’ve read “The Hobbit” and the “LOTR” trilogy more times than I care to admit, and I thought that Jackson did a fantastic job of bringing the story to the big screen. (I choose those words carefully. He brought the story to the big screen.)

I mentioned that I liked the film version of “LOTR” in the comment section of Kevin’s original post, and the erudite Simon responded in the comment section with this:

“I guess everyone has different interpretations of things, luckily they captured the essence of the books to your eyes. It was so far from my own personal concept that I wondered if they'd even read the last two books, let alone understood them.”

“For example, this is a small detail, but *very* important. At the end of their journey Jackson shows the hobbits returning home to an untouched shire. I'm not pedantic enough to be too fussed that the 'Scouring Of The Shire' has been removed, but the *emotional weight* of the cost of the war to the hobbits is downplayed. After a brief sense of feeling like outsiders, the hobbits slip back into their old roles. The concept becomes "everything can be exactly how it was again" where the books make it quite clear that the experiences of war have changed them and their world, and gives the books greater weight than being just a silly fantasy story.”

I started to respond to Simon in the comments section, but I realized that his thoughts prompted more than just a couple of sentences.

Movies are linear; books are not. Movies are two-dimensional; books are not. When we read an excellent book, we disappear into the book. We feel as if we are active participants. We experience the story, instead of merely being told the story. The story happens to us. Not so with film. In the best books, the characters become real in a way that is just not possible in a film. You often become privy to their thoughts, their motivations and their emotions. The medium of film is different. We are watching the story. In the best films, we connect with the characters, we feel their emotions on a certain level - but we are being shown and told the story. It is a completely different form of communication than the written word.

When a filmmaker decides to bring a book to life in the form of a movie, he has to accept up-front that he is retelling the story in a different form, and has to choose which themes he is going to attempt to preserve. Now I’m not a literary professor, nor am I an expert in film, but I believe that the medium of film has a limit to the number of themes it can adequately convey, and that number is somewhat smaller than what can be conveyed in a book. When a filmmaker attempts to translate a book as thematically complex as “The Lord of the Rings,” he has to make those choices, or he is destined for failure. I think a fair discussion would definitively include the question, “Did the filmmaker choose appropriately?” In this case, I think he did. Sometimes a movie version of a book will actually prompt me to read (or re-read) the original, and I think this is a good thing.

I can infer from Simon’s original comments that Peter Jackson’s choice of implying that the Shire was untouched by the war was a cop-out, done to make the film more palpable to the American audience, and perhaps he is correct. The cost of war -- in terms of human suffering, damage to the culture and the land -- is certainly something that many Americans need to learn more about, but is it realistic to expect a film to teach us that lesson? I don’t think so. Besides, I believe the cost-of-war theme is not entirely absent from the film to begin with, so his choice of omitting the war's effect on the Shire is at least defensible as an artistic one, especially when you consider the length of the films.

One of themes that Jackson did preserve from the book was at the end of the first installment, where Samwise tells Frodo that there is good in the world that may be worthy of their suffering and perhaps their deaths. I often think of that scene when I become jaded and pessimistic and I feel like giving up the fight against the neo-conservative movement.

As I’ve gotten older, I look to different art forms for different reasons. More and more I watch a movie for its pure entertainment value. Some of my favorites are “Men In Black, “ Galaxy Quest,” and “Dodgeball.” For classics I like “Casablanca,” “Double Indemnity,” and “12 Angry Men” to name a few. I love those movies, but they aren’t as important to me as my favorite books, which in addition to the “Lord of the Rings” include “The Glass Bead Game, “Siddhartha,” “Zen in the Art of Archery” (which I really need to read again soon,) “Huckleberry Finn,” and (dare I say it) some of Stephen King’s novels. Though I believe that film as an art-form is capable of enlightening an audience as well as entertaining it, due to the realities of the business I don’t think it is reasonable to expect both. Some may view this as tragic or at least disappointing, but I choose to accept it as a product of our fast-food culture. While I’m delighted when I come across a film that delivers on both (“A Clockwork Orange” comes to mind, and more recently “The Remains of the Day” or “13 Conversations About One Thing”) I’m quite content to just sit back and enjoy a good old-fashioned Hollywood movie purely for entertainment. When I want more than that, I reach for a book.