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it's only a book
Feb. 5th, 2005 09:17 amIt was just about a year ago now that my friend Janet asked me to write an essay for the collection she was editing on Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings and its relationship to a novel of the same title. I was reluctant; I'd been discussing this for over three years and I was sick of it. On the other hand, here was a chance to pickle my thoughts for posterity.
So I went through my e-mails and the archives of a couple Tolkien mailing lists, and noticed that the focus of the dispute wasn't on the films themselves but over whether it was legitimate to criticize them as an adaptation. Every time someone complained that the script eviscerated the spirit of the book, some Jackson-enthusiast would reply dismissively, "They had to cut something" (when the complaint had clearly been not about what was cut, but what was added) or declare that "A movie isn't like a book," as if that were the end of the argument: without being willing to consider how a movie must be unlike a book, or why it must be unlike it in this particular way. And strange how they didn't apply that stricture to their fellow enthusiasts who boasted of how faithful the films were to Tolkien, notably Jackson himself and his co-screenwriters. Considering that William Goldman's first law of screenwriting is that "Nobody knows anything" about what will succeed or fail, I was doubtful about all declarations of what were necessary changes for screen adaptation.
Worse yet was when they said, "If you don't like the film, ignore it." As if one could, without becoming a hermit, ignore the publicity din, the chatter on the mailing lists, the film tie-in book covers, the way that films stick to one's mind as smoke does to one's clothes, and worst of all the ever-growing tendency of people writing about the book to confuse the two and attribute to the book things that are only in the movies. (I'm keeping a collection of these: send me your findings.)
I decided my best task would be to clear the ground here. So I cobbled together my replies to these defenses into the shape of a couple articles from Aquinas's Summa Theologica, a great format to use if you have a lot of targets to line up before shooting them.
And now the book has been published. Most of the articles are pretty good: piercing in their analysis and criticism of Jackson, and praising what's praiseworthy.
Well, thank goodness that's over. But you can go read it if you want.
So I went through my e-mails and the archives of a couple Tolkien mailing lists, and noticed that the focus of the dispute wasn't on the films themselves but over whether it was legitimate to criticize them as an adaptation. Every time someone complained that the script eviscerated the spirit of the book, some Jackson-enthusiast would reply dismissively, "They had to cut something" (when the complaint had clearly been not about what was cut, but what was added) or declare that "A movie isn't like a book," as if that were the end of the argument: without being willing to consider how a movie must be unlike a book, or why it must be unlike it in this particular way. And strange how they didn't apply that stricture to their fellow enthusiasts who boasted of how faithful the films were to Tolkien, notably Jackson himself and his co-screenwriters. Considering that William Goldman's first law of screenwriting is that "Nobody knows anything" about what will succeed or fail, I was doubtful about all declarations of what were necessary changes for screen adaptation.
Worse yet was when they said, "If you don't like the film, ignore it." As if one could, without becoming a hermit, ignore the publicity din, the chatter on the mailing lists, the film tie-in book covers, the way that films stick to one's mind as smoke does to one's clothes, and worst of all the ever-growing tendency of people writing about the book to confuse the two and attribute to the book things that are only in the movies. (I'm keeping a collection of these: send me your findings.)
I decided my best task would be to clear the ground here. So I cobbled together my replies to these defenses into the shape of a couple articles from Aquinas's Summa Theologica, a great format to use if you have a lot of targets to line up before shooting them.
And now the book has been published. Most of the articles are pretty good: piercing in their analysis and criticism of Jackson, and praising what's praiseworthy.
Well, thank goodness that's over. But you can go read it if you want.
