Production Memo for The Hobbit

The news for hobbits (and people who like hearing about them) is ambivalent. It is morose for some: there is a tit for tat tiff going on between Director Peter Jackson and New Line Cinema. Either tat or tiff will certainly delay the film production of Tolkien’s first novel of the milieu, The Hobbit (which the filmsters now call a “prequel,” because film trumps print, you see).

Rather blithe it is for others, because the delay is not such a bad thing. It means that it is less likely now that either Peter Jackson or Bob Shaye will stick their name, like a PostIt note, on the story. Shaye is the lionized doyen of New Line, and NPR-feted pander for cinematographical lodestars like Pink Flamingos, and chief cartoonist for that Oscar-shoe-in triumph, The Last Mimsy (okay, maybe just a little hyperbole here).

New Line sees myth either as entertaining bedside stories for bored ADD-addled children and children-with-adult-bodies (a particularly hypermodern achievement), or as a set of alternative narratives that can be waged simultaneously against the core narratives of the old moral order.

That is why it is possible for a single studio to produce an eminently Christian, indeed Orthodox-Catholic Christian, trilogy such as The Lord of the Rings, and then turn right around and produce (to be released this December), a profoundly anti-Christian sure-to-be-serialized adaptation like The Golden Compass.

As an aside, it should be noted that Philip Pullman, the one who admits to writing Compass, is at least honest and consistent about Christianity: he recently, during the release of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, came clean with his disgust over all things Narnian and Lewisian. The “Dark Materials” trilogist instructs the reader in not just the usual rejections of the Virgin Birth, the Resurrection and the Return (what we Orthodox call “economy”), but the deeper rejections of the nature and Person-hood of God (what we call “theology” proper).

Many readers have noticed that the tone, or mood, of The Hobbit “darkens” in The Lord of the Rings. A number of elements contribute to this. The characters become more mythopoeic, even Wagnerian, in the latter. Even Tom Bombadil, whom Jackson eschewed, and the Scouring of the Shire episode, which Jackson despised, take on apocalyptic resonance in that these things must be made either to survive the revolutions of external events, or to be cleansed at all costs from the corrosions brought home from outside cataclysms. The character of Elrond, in particular, is wise and powerful in The Hobbit, but he is also jolly. There is nothing of jolly in the grim figure that presides over the fateful council in The Fellowship of the Ring, and the tragic figure that takes his leave of his immortal daughter in The Return of the King (the book, The Two Towers, has little for Elrond to do – Jackson saw fit to correct this “mistake” of Tolkien’s in the film, thus making the weird Hugo Weaving earn his keep).

Of course, one must quickly add that if the tone darkens from The Hobbit to The Lord of the Rings, it turns to midnight in The Silmarillion, and even blacker – if that were possible – in the new tome just now coming out, The Children of Hurin.

The darker, more heroic and tragic dimensions in The Lord of the Rings, and that story’s essentially Wagnerian motifs, made it possible for the likes of Peter Jackson and the New Line people to do a half decent job. They produced something that a Tolkien fan like me paid money to see – in the theater, and in the purchase of all three collector DVD’s. I paid the money, and even enjoyed watching, despite my many grievances.

And there were many – grievances, that is. Permit me to list a few. The foppish assumption that the telling of the tale could leave off the scouring away of Sharky from the Shire (and the inane emendation of a quasi-Vladic impalement upon a wheel). The loss of the majestic Glorfindel, and his replacement by the Rock Princess Arwen (I pined, then, for Bakshi). The bypass of Bombadil in the Old Forest, and the beaming of cranky Old Willow into Fangorn. I guess the screenwriters couldn’t make much sense of Tom’s caprice with the Ring – flipping, spinning it, making it disappear, laughing and tossing the doomsday device of Aleister Crowley back into Frodo’s furry palm.

The Glittering Caves did not, well, glitter. Farmer Maggot was displaced by an accidental discovery of mushrooms, after the obligatory close brush with fecal piles and a priapic reference to a broken carrot. Lorien was imaged as a New Age midsummer’s encampment that went too far into autumn and outer space. The big battle, sans Imrahil but with Meriodoc, before the Black Gates gave new meaning to the word “encirclement,” and could have been choreographed only by people who really believed that WETA’s swords were better than those pesky museum pieces.

Steel armor. Arwen. Those schizophrenic rheumy-eyed “significant looks” of Frodo (toward the end, I kept begging the movie not to let Frodo see me). Arwen. The de rigueur “Night of the Living Dead” tribute at the Stone of Erech. Arwen. My feeling creepy about Gandalf’s slumber parties at Meduseld and Cormallen, especially after I find out that he’s been ripping out Leviticus 20.4-17 from the Gideon Bible in every one of his hotel rooms. Frodo/Elijah. Arwen. Orlando skateboarding down the banister, shooting orcs and never missing and doing that thing with the mumakil. Arwen.

Oh, I almost forgot. Viggo/Aragorn singing, and then treating us to his DNC Presidential Nomination Acceptance speech, probably the biggest cardboardy letdown piece of rhetoric in film history.

Please, please never again. That and Frodo looking. Significantly. With. Big. Wet. Eyes. While the Rock Princess wanders off, black-shrouded (Euripidean, Medean?, almost Fury-like), in the November woods of dying Lorien (doesn’t she have Eldarion to hang out with, btw?).

I guess I digress, but I really do not. It is these grievances which comprise the single reason why I, after having shelled out a number of bucks for the movies, cannot bear to watch them at all today. What draws me to revisit Middle Earth in the books are the very things missing in the movies. And the very things that made The Lord of the Rings the celluloid success it was are the things that will utterly blaspheme any production of The Hobbit.

The movies took the darker elements of the trilogy and inflated them. If you heard Wagner resonate in Howard Shore’s now-tiresome score, you were meant to. If you heard most of “This is My Father’s World” in the Shire theme, it was only because that melody could be floated atop the dark tide of Mordor music rather neatly indeed. Jackson concentrated the cinematographic focus on the Ring to catechize the non-Tolkien masses in Ring-lore, and did fairly well to his credit. However, he could not resist the temptation to add to the Ring-lore a soupcon (well, more than a soupcon) of nuthouse craziness. Theoden is enhanced from a disturbingly-familiar character that is marionetted by coddling minimalizations and rationalizations of a very PC Wormtongue, to a mucous-wheezing unwrapped mummy whose coroner hasn’t yet told him the bad news.

But there is more to Middle Earth than a few good guys trying to survive a Black Sabbath Jacksonian monster-bash. There is an easy-going, affable friendship forged in pipeweed, over a pint at the tavern, and lyricized on long walks in Shire woods and greens. There is the tempo of Yule and Midsummer, and the occasional eleventieth birthday party. There are the habits of regifting Mathom-worthy objets-d’art to the Sackville-Baggins. There is laughter – not that forced, arbitrary “someone must pay” stuff that tramps as laughter today, but real men-with-chests laughter that resonate from diaphragms that know how to sing songs with more than one verse, and certainly more than a Song of Myself, and lungs that breathe in mountain air freshened by snows and springs that pool in blue-silver meres.

There is also an appreciation for long songs warbled by good guys and bad. You don’t hear much of the latter sort warbling away in the trilogy, but you do hear goblins choiring rather grim foot-stompers in The Hobbit. The songs of the Elves are playful in the Hobbit, but poignant and mythical (almost terrible) in the trilogy. In both, the songs do what real poetry always does: it captures the light of the stars and leaves, and sets thought like a gem in foil and chain. The familiar traveling companion who snores, picks his nose, takes the best spots and tells the same gorblimey stories is recognized, by the clarion dulcet of poetry, as a Friend. Sartre is wiped away by song, and Aristotle and Plato are renewed. In one world, there are songs of playful creation wisdom, making and dancing, and recalling the original unity of poetry, which bound in a single word, once upon a time, the meanings of maker, singer and shepherd (Tom Bombadil). There are epics and elegies of lost ages, fallen cities, and dimming glories (Elrond). There are romances of love wrought over the centuries, and the sacrifice of death and self for love (which is ever the unavoidable price), even the possibility of the sexlessness of love (Aragorn). There are songs of the Journey, of there and back again (Bilbo and Frodo). There are celebrations of pipeweed, dinner (of course), copper bathtubs, fireworks, good beer, gardens and gaffers (Sam, Merry and Pippin – who, it should be said, was not forced by Tolkien to sing wretchedly about suicide missions and demonic filiocide).

Laughter and singing, and that Chestertonian ideal of the glorious-mundane-and-discernment-of-eternity sort of poetry are what Tolkien understood and well.

Jackson and New Line did not, and will not.

The monsters, especially Smaug, are corrupt, but not the mindless snot-gobbed bestowers of experience points that jump out of Doom or Halo, or  out of WETA's latex vats. Tolkien's monsters are grotesque, but they are also familiar. Goblins are depicted as industrialists. Dragons are corporate raiders who pillage every cent out of a community until the gold lines their caves like dust.

What's more is that dragons, and other monsters, are read in the book as projecting their evil very smartly indeed, through rhetoric, of all things. Their speech is not the boorish Satanistic sampled stuff that splotches the silver screens (recipe for movie evil: 1 inverted 5-point star; 1 skeletal goat's head; metal soundtrack backmasked from the defunct Hot Wheels cartoon show; a gazillion candles; ketchup; jock; not-so-innocent cheerleader; creepy guy ... oh, I almost forgot -- a half-Windsored kid with silver eyes).  It is not even the haranguing sweat-raining annual-meeting-worthy hijinks of Hitler.

No, it is elegant. Smaug would eat Bilbo, but not before a nice pre-prandial exchange of views, including an apology for finance capitalism. Gollum would eat Bilbo, too, but not before a riddle contest: here’s my riddle, by the way – how many riddles will show up in the movie? Three, or at least “What have I got in my pocket?” Or none?

Let’s remember that Tolkien was a linguist, and one of the first self-aware ones: moreover, as one of the symposiasts at the Eagle and the Child, he was a deft and jocund wit in the art of colloquy. I contend that conviviality (today, R.I.P) is even more important to The Hobbit than it is to the trilogy. I contend, too, that the affable, smoke-ring flow of soul was a frequent casualty in the film trilogy. It will be aborted in the next film, just as it is dead in the West (which is, I think, a sure sign of the dark years, deathworks and Melkor unchained).

With Jackson out of the picture for The Hobbit, we may not have to be anxious about the King Kong director’s garish love affair with monsters (he felt sorry for the cave troll in Moria: he probably wept over Shelob: and Sauron’s eye looked too Wellsian/Martian), but we wring our hands over New Line Cinema, still in the picture.

If they set to work on the book, which they must before the end of 2008 or they’ll lose their option, they will produce a Hobbit in keeping with the box office recipe used for the film trilogy. Now while the film version lay within a possible range of interpretations for the trilogy, the same sort of film treatment will lay completely beyond the range for the Hobbit. What you will get in a New Line movie is a lot of “Back to the Future” calendar-hopping, to underscore the “prequel” role of the 1936 volume in its relationship with the film trilogy -- a relationship which is not at all important in the real story. You will get a lot of monsters, but you won’t hear goblins singing rude drinking songs about hobbits and dwarves in trees. Neither will you be able to recognize the trolls (Bert, William and Tom) as people you know (a phenomenon Tolkien intended for this book). You will see dwarves like Gimli, but you won’t see the sophisticated mix of sardonic humor, dour outlook, Victorian 300 lb. fat uncle purveyor of the second breakfast and master fashioner of gem and silver that makes up a dwarf. New Line will make them dour and good for comic relief (watch for the obligatory flatulence), but they will miss, utterly miss, the ubiquitous tragedy of Moria and Nargothrond lying just behind every Khazad brow. You will see good fight scenes, without a doubt, but New Line will muff the absurdity of allies coming to near blows: New Line will fail to make the clear distinguishment of the real enemy as the warg-ridden orcs streaming onto the Lonely Mountain. There will be few songs, except those wanly composed and sung by Billy and Viggo: I know they don’t have a part, but somehow Aragorn at least will be wedged in. With the music score, you will get the unhappy mental image of Brunhilda batting eyes at Bilbo: there is Wagner in the trilogy, but not in The Hobbit, and the resulting music will be as jarring a pairing as Sibelius would be with Pooh.

You may say that the trouble here arises from the difference between the Hobbit and the trilogy -- a difference which lay chiefly in the fact that the Hobbit is a child’s tale. And if you say this, I'd say you’ve beat me to the punch.

I will also say that this is precisely the reason why New Line cannot do the Hobbit. Not because they cannot make anything fit for children, but because they haven’t a whit of understanding what goes into a child’s tale – especially a tale that only adults can truly understand.

They are, rather, morally unfit.

Please, please dear folks at New Line, give Tolkien a break. Let 2008 come and go, and drop the Hobbit in a mathom house in Michel Delving where it can stay safe until another production company might pick it up, and be true to the Christian vision that Middle Earth really is.

Comments

[Anon]

I gift this meme to you in thanksgiving for a marvelous post:

The movies were made by...

AOL Time Mordor

[Paul S.]

Great essay. I agree wholeheartedly with your assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of Jackson's films.

However, Tolkien had given some thought to putting a new light on the events told in "The Hobbit" after getting some way into his trilogy. He now regarded the novel "The Hobbit" as Bilbo's account of what happened, with Bilbo cast as unreliable narrator.

Gandalf relates an altogether non-childish account of Bilbo and Company's adventures in "The Quest for Erebor" in "Unfinished Tales". Though Tolkien decided not to include either of the two drafts in "Return of the King" as planned, they offer a fascinating window into his latter day view of "The Hobbit" as seen through the lens of his greater work.

Here's a snippet of Gandalf's tale:
"Better and better!' I thought. 'I think I shall risk it.' Time was getting short. I had to be with the White Council in August at the latest, or Saruman would have his way and nothing would be done. And quite apart from greater matters, that might prove fatal to the quest: the power in Dol Guldur would not leave any attempt on Erebor unhindered, unless he had something else to deal with.

"So I rode off back to Thorin in haste, to tackle the difficult task of persuading him to put aside his lofty designs and go secretly - and take Bilbo with him. Without seeing Bilbo first. It was a mistake, and nearly proved disastrous. For Bilbo had changed, of course. At least, he was getting rather greedy and fat, and his old desires had dwindled down to a sort of private dream. Nothing could have been more dismaying than to find it actually in danger of coming true! He was altogether bewildered, and made a complete fool of himself. Thorin would have left in a rage, but for another strange chance, which I will mention in a moment.

"But you know how things went, at any rate as Bilbo saw them. The story would sound rather different, if I had written it. For one thing he did not realize at all how fatuous the Dwarves thought him, nor how angry they were with me. Thorin was much more indignant and contemptuous than he perceived. He was indeed contemptuous from the beginning, and thought then that I had planned the whole affair simply so as to make a mock of him. It was only the map and the key that saved the situation."
http://ttt.by.ru/prtrans/erebor/er_orig.shtml

It is very much a Lord of the Rings version of the adventure, and one suspects there were few if any elves "tra-la-lalling" in it. In fact, I suspect that the Gollumn that would appear in Gandalf's version is the LotR creature that stole babies from their cribs and ate them as he sought news of his ring in Erebor, and not the riddle-spouting sprite of Bilbo's tale.

Based on Tolkien's own work in revising his earlier narrative, I think a somewhat "grown-up" approach to the film would not violate the spirit of Tolkien's vision, though I would not like to see the tale twisted too far into a Jacksonian shape.