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Old 05-06-2004, 10:23 AM   #37
Bęthberry
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Boots Worth a thousand words?

Fair enough I suppose, Mr. SaucepanMan, to posit a difference between appealing to the senses and appealing to the imagination, although there was a time in European culture when images and symbolic representations stood in place of reading and I wonder if that more sensual experience involved less imagination. I am thinking particularly of my (limited) experience of European cathedrals--the Gothic use of light. Certainly Verseilles the palace requires reading as a narrative. (Well, maybe that is more like joining the dots. ) And modern performance art in my experience places great demands on what I would call my imagination, although what is going on there likely would fall into the category of 'making meaning' rather than 'forming images in one's mind'.

But this is to belabour a point which takes us away from the issue here of the nature of the enchantment in the movies and the books. I'm not sure, though, that I would agree that the enchantment works best on a first read. Tolkien said that it was war and the experience of war which brought him closer to his idea of Fairie. I can say that a rereading twenty years or so after my first, at a dying person's bedside, made me experience in far greater poignancy many of the passages in LOTR. Perhaps this takes us into definition of 'reading', 'meaning', 'creating.' Or perhaps it suggests I was a lousy first time reader of Tolkien

Child, I would agree with your point that Jackson's great accomplishment is his visual recreation of Middle-earth. Can we generalise that this applies more to his use of landscape than character? I would agree that his depictions of The Shire, of Rohan, of the plight of the refugees, of Gondor are very satisfying (and of the Grey Havens is less so). I am, however, on the whole less satisfied with the visual depictions of characters. (Perhaps this harkens to your point that you are most dissastified with character and plot in the movies.) Gandalf and Sam seem to me to capture an essence I feel in the reading and Boromir I think is better done in the film than the books because he is placed differently in the narrative. But the aching agony of Frodo and Sam (I would call this magic) which I feel when I read the the book was missing in the movie and as the movies progressed I felt less and less I was seeing the Frodo I had imagined. Seeing the representations of the orcs and oliphants--generally the villains--was bothersome to me--and this was in the watching, not afterwards. I wonder if this suggests something about Jackson's own imagination and powers as a film-maker or if it tells us something more about the nature of the enchantment Tolkien created.

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I only wish the Grey Havens would have lived up to that. (Sometimes I wonder if PJ actually understood the ending of the book....) Child
Do I hear a tiny bell ringing the possibility of a thread? Or at least, to discuss the varieties of interpretation.
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