Will The Hobbit do damage to the books?

[Zigûr]

Originally Posted by Morthoron

I don't agree with apologists who make the imbecilic claim that film is a different medium than books, and therefore license must be allowed for offering the story as a visual presentation. This half-hearted defense for making a mockery of a movie does not stand up to intelligent scrutiny.

The apologism I've noticed most prominently in recent months is that The Hobbit is too light/short/whimsical/childish/delete-where-applicable to be rendered successfully on screen, but I think that entirely depends on how the responder treats the material, in their own imagination or on film. Peter Jackson and the faceless executives at Warner Bros. seem to me to have a similar perception of the books, however, and the means by which they can most profitably be exploited. I once saw someone outraged at the suggestion that these were "Hollywood" films, despite the fact that this means produced by Hollywood companies and funded with Hollywood money, because the films were made in New Zealand by a New Zealand director. So in my experience people often simply don't know what they're talking about, but shared public ignorance has its own impact. In this case it is seemingly a belief that Jackson's way is the best and only way that Tolkien could be realised onscreen. The intrusion of the films into our culture has, I would argue, exposed the books to a certain potential degree of damage in terms of how their content is perceived as certain fans of the films resort to attacking the book to justify the changes.

One might also consider the Facebook pages of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings for the books, the books mind you, which are currently asking fans trivia questions to advertise some smartphone app, and after a while the questions shifted to entirely being film-based questions, sometimes in complete contradiction of the books, e.g. what instrument does Bofur play? The clarinet of course, but the only correct answer is 'the flute' because that's what he plays in the films. This is on the book page, and there is no disclaimer that this is film material. The film adaptation in the minds of the mainstream audience pastes over the top of the book. It is a palimpsest effect.

To return to the matter of the tone of the book versus the tone of the films, the idea which strikes me considering The Hobbit is the presentation of the narrative and design. I think that in the film adaptations of The Lord of the Rings, for all their numerous failings, we might just barely glimpse, through a glass, darkly, as it were, an image of the high seriousness of the original text. This is perhaps only something I feel in hindsight in contrast to the film adaptations of The Hobbit, which replace the arguably childish tone of the book with a bizarre sense of the grotesque. Everything in The Hobbit is overtly, whether pleasant or ugly, strange: the Dwarves (especially their bizarre attire and weapons), Radagast, Goblin-town, Dol Guldur, and Esgaroth come to mind. The narrative does the same thing, of course, with additions like Ringwraith-tombs and Orc hunts and stories of 'forbidden love'. Yet I think in the book that seriousness is there, and increases as the tale progresses. The films, to me, feel out of place in regards to both the book and Peter Jackson's earlier films.