The Eye of Sauron
May. 5th, 2007 09:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
calimacMike Foster, one of the more dedicated and imaginative college instructors in Tolkien studies, gave a good reply when asked how he responds when student papers include facts that are only true of the Jackson films and not of the book. He tells them, "This came from the movie you saw, not from the book you were supposed to read."
It's about time to start keeping a tally of the kinds of mistakes made by so-called Tolkien scholars who do the same thing. It's especially egregious when they're writing just about Tolkien, but those who are comparing Tolkien and Jackson have a particular obligation to keep track of which one said what.
I found an article as early as 2003 that quoted from Jackson's Saruman and attributed it to Tolkien (see Tolkien on Film p. 41), but by this point we might as well begin classifying the prominent confusions.
The most common seems to be the identification of Aragorn as a reluctant hero. Jackson's is; Tolkien's isn't. I was particularly amused by the National Geographic "Behind the Movie" documentary narrated by John Rhys-Davies, who intoned "Aragorn's reluctance is surprising," as indeed it is to anyone who's read the book. Of course the documentary mixes the book and films indiscriminately and isn't scholarship at all, but that was too golden a moment of irony to miss.
But I have another candidate for an equally widespread confusion, this one even more insidious because fewer people realize that applied to Tolkien it's an error. I've seen it several times now, and its latest appearance is the most appalling yet.
In the new issue of Mythlore, the journal of the Mythopoeic Society - Mythlore, which really ought to know better - is an article by Allison Harl contrasting the use of the visual gaze of evil watchers in Tolkien and Jackson. First she discusses "The Gaze in the Book" (p. 62-65), then "The Gaze in the Movies" (p. 65-69). OK, that's clear enough. But on p. 63, when she's still discussing the book, she writes, "In his disembodied state, Sauron is reduced to a single large, unblinking eye".
No, no, no! This came from the movie you saw, Ms. Harl, not from the book you were supposed to read.
Did anyone, before Jackson, ever mistake the phrase "The Eye of Sauron" for meaning that Sauron was physically a disembodied lump of vitreous matter? I can't recall that they did, but they do it all the time now. Applied to the book, it's a mistake. (And apparently it was Jackson's mistake: this isn't a change he made deliberately but his sloppy misreading of the book; see Tolkien on Film p. 31). "The Eye of Sauron" is a synecdoche; "of" here means "belonging to." In the book, Gollum twice refers to Sauron as "The Black Hand", and that doesn't even have "of" in it - does anyone reading that imagine Sauron as Thing from the Addams Family movies, a disembodied hand running around on its fingers?
When would Sauron have been reduced to eyehood anyway? His body was destroyed in the wreck of Numenor, but as an Ainu he constructed a new one and wore the Ring on his finger. We see Jackson's version of that body in its armor in the prologue scene, wielding its +10 Mace of Power. Isildur cuts the ring finger off and takes the Ring, but he doesn't have the capacity to destroy the body. "He has only four [fingers] on the Black Hand, but they are enough," says Tolkien's Gollum, and one wonders if he'd seen that hand personally.
To my mind, the vague, undepicted image of Sauron crouched over his palantir, peering into it, sending his gaze out in the form of his Eye even to such safe havens as Galadriel's Mirror, is evocative and terrifying. But Sauron the physically helpless - no hands, no legs, no mouth [did anyone imagine that the guy who calls himself "The Mouth of Sauron" meant anything other than the Mouthpiece of Sauron? That he was literally his mouth and that his boss couldn't speak?] - a big lump of vitreous humor stuck up there at the top of Barad-dur, is comic, ridiculous, absurd. That big comic double-take it takes when it realizes it's been fooled - it's one of the silliest things in the movie.
This image of comic helplessness clearly infected Ms. Harl: note her use of the words disembodied and reduced, strange diminishments to apply to a being of Sauron's power. This would surely not be the first thing that occured to someone who thinks of the Eye of Sauron in terms of the the very active, aggressive Eye that the characters feel searching for them - something that Jackson tends to depict just in the form of sudden flash cuts to something that looks less like an eye than like a body part not usually mentioned in polite company.
Also large: The size of the Eye is not really at issue in Tolkien; only when you see Jackson does the immensity, and the equally immense absurdity, of it really strike.
And I wonder: If the giant eyeball ever got the Ring back, where would it put it?
And there are people out there who actually think this is Tolkien's idea? Shame, shame. Let Jackson be Jackson, but let Tolkien be Tolkien. Shame for writing it, shame for publishing it.
It's about time to start keeping a tally of the kinds of mistakes made by so-called Tolkien scholars who do the same thing. It's especially egregious when they're writing just about Tolkien, but those who are comparing Tolkien and Jackson have a particular obligation to keep track of which one said what.
I found an article as early as 2003 that quoted from Jackson's Saruman and attributed it to Tolkien (see Tolkien on Film p. 41), but by this point we might as well begin classifying the prominent confusions.
The most common seems to be the identification of Aragorn as a reluctant hero. Jackson's is; Tolkien's isn't. I was particularly amused by the National Geographic "Behind the Movie" documentary narrated by John Rhys-Davies, who intoned "Aragorn's reluctance is surprising," as indeed it is to anyone who's read the book. Of course the documentary mixes the book and films indiscriminately and isn't scholarship at all, but that was too golden a moment of irony to miss.
But I have another candidate for an equally widespread confusion, this one even more insidious because fewer people realize that applied to Tolkien it's an error. I've seen it several times now, and its latest appearance is the most appalling yet.
In the new issue of Mythlore, the journal of the Mythopoeic Society - Mythlore, which really ought to know better - is an article by Allison Harl contrasting the use of the visual gaze of evil watchers in Tolkien and Jackson. First she discusses "The Gaze in the Book" (p. 62-65), then "The Gaze in the Movies" (p. 65-69). OK, that's clear enough. But on p. 63, when she's still discussing the book, she writes, "In his disembodied state, Sauron is reduced to a single large, unblinking eye".
No, no, no! This came from the movie you saw, Ms. Harl, not from the book you were supposed to read.
Did anyone, before Jackson, ever mistake the phrase "The Eye of Sauron" for meaning that Sauron was physically a disembodied lump of vitreous matter? I can't recall that they did, but they do it all the time now. Applied to the book, it's a mistake. (And apparently it was Jackson's mistake: this isn't a change he made deliberately but his sloppy misreading of the book; see Tolkien on Film p. 31). "The Eye of Sauron" is a synecdoche; "of" here means "belonging to." In the book, Gollum twice refers to Sauron as "The Black Hand", and that doesn't even have "of" in it - does anyone reading that imagine Sauron as Thing from the Addams Family movies, a disembodied hand running around on its fingers?
When would Sauron have been reduced to eyehood anyway? His body was destroyed in the wreck of Numenor, but as an Ainu he constructed a new one and wore the Ring on his finger. We see Jackson's version of that body in its armor in the prologue scene, wielding its +10 Mace of Power. Isildur cuts the ring finger off and takes the Ring, but he doesn't have the capacity to destroy the body. "He has only four [fingers] on the Black Hand, but they are enough," says Tolkien's Gollum, and one wonders if he'd seen that hand personally.
To my mind, the vague, undepicted image of Sauron crouched over his palantir, peering into it, sending his gaze out in the form of his Eye even to such safe havens as Galadriel's Mirror, is evocative and terrifying. But Sauron the physically helpless - no hands, no legs, no mouth [did anyone imagine that the guy who calls himself "The Mouth of Sauron" meant anything other than the Mouthpiece of Sauron? That he was literally his mouth and that his boss couldn't speak?] - a big lump of vitreous humor stuck up there at the top of Barad-dur, is comic, ridiculous, absurd. That big comic double-take it takes when it realizes it's been fooled - it's one of the silliest things in the movie.
This image of comic helplessness clearly infected Ms. Harl: note her use of the words disembodied and reduced, strange diminishments to apply to a being of Sauron's power. This would surely not be the first thing that occured to someone who thinks of the Eye of Sauron in terms of the the very active, aggressive Eye that the characters feel searching for them - something that Jackson tends to depict just in the form of sudden flash cuts to something that looks less like an eye than like a body part not usually mentioned in polite company.
Also large: The size of the Eye is not really at issue in Tolkien; only when you see Jackson does the immensity, and the equally immense absurdity, of it really strike.
And I wonder: If the giant eyeball ever got the Ring back, where would it put it?
And there are people out there who actually think this is Tolkien's idea? Shame, shame. Let Jackson be Jackson, but let Tolkien be Tolkien. Shame for writing it, shame for publishing it.
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no subject
Date: 2007-05-06 01:21 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-05-06 03:31 pm (UTC)There you are. There's the difference. Jackson's giant eyeball is very physical. Tolkien doesn't show Sauron at all, so you're free to think of the Eye as representing him without trying to imagine it on a physical plane.
The problem with the giant eyeball is that it looks ridiculous, and even more that it looks helpless. Read Harl's line again: "In his disembodied state, Sauron is reduced to a single large, unblinking eye".
Look at those two words I've italicized. They evoke an idea of Sauron being diminished. This is totally wrong for an Enemy of nearly unstoppable power. Notice also the word "large", as I noted above.
No, thinking of the Eye as representing Sauron, which is what you did, and thinking of it as being Sauron, which is what Jackson does, are hugely and fundamentally different.
no subject
Date: 2007-05-06 03:42 pm (UTC)The Sauron eye in my reading view is 'felt' and not seen, but I translated the movie one as one that would be felt, not seen, as the cinema is a visual medium, not sensory. In other words, the big eye between the tower horns didn't bother me, though if they'd stayed with it longer than a second or two per shot, it would have.
no subject
Date: 2007-05-06 04:56 pm (UTC)The eyeball is so alien to Tolkien that it wasn't until reading reviews of the third movie that I realized that Jackson meant the eyeball to be Sauron. I thought it was just a tool, some sort of seeing device that he'd stuck up on top of the tower.
no subject
Date: 2007-05-06 05:28 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-05-06 05:32 pm (UTC)I don't recall how I came to it, but I was under the distinct impression, watching the flicks, that when Sauron regained the ring he would once again take a "humanoid" corporeal form, one no doubt complete with ring fingers.
I actually found the films' "Eye of Sauron" to be an effective literalization, and no more silly, assuming one is looking for silliness (which I mostly wasn't), than any number of other things in the movies, however true or false to their source.
no subject
Date: 2007-05-06 05:47 pm (UTC)But how much better, and equally visually depictable, would be Tolkien's own!
assuming one is looking for silliness (which I mostly wasn't)
One doesn't have to look for it. Silliness is thrust forcibly upon one.
no more silly ... than any number of other things in the movies
Indeed, and that is exactly the problem. The whole epic film saga is on that level.
no subject
Date: 2007-05-06 10:37 pm (UTC)Ow, ow, ow! You've got me visualizing an eyeball piercing now!