The Capturing of Myth

[Lalwendë]

A few people have said that they felt somewhat 'detached' from the films and this got me thinking that by and large, watching a film is a passive experience whereas reading is an active experience. Films present us with information in many forms, visually, verbally, from the landscape and setting, and the body language and facial expressions of the actors. Books on the other hand are simply text and it is up to us to make the effort to visualise what the text says. This is perhaps why there are those peculiar people who "can't be bothered" with reading, or find it "boring"; reading takes effort. Obviously, there are exceptions to this; Donnie Darko is a good example of a film where we are made to participate more actively, as the meaning is deliberately made obscure.

I have also been thinking about how I was able to engage fully with the films, and I think one of the reasons was that the visual scope was beyond my own experience as a reader. Not being very well-travelled, my 'pictures' of Middle Earth were a lot more provincial; more on the scale of Scotland (which is the ultimate in 'awesome' to me), as opposed to Mount Cook. So the films did offer a different sense of scale to me, not always a welcome one, as some of the magic in the books for me is in my personal images of an intimate, almost fairy-like quality to some of the landscapes. For me, the film was more 'epic' whereas my own images are more 'folklore'. Hmmm, if you see what I mean.