LOTR Jumps the Shark

eggoeater writes "The latest incarnation of The Lord of the Rings is here in the form of musical theater and, as reported by Yahoo News, the reviews are not good. The Toronto production puts less emphasis on plot, character, and music, and concentrates more on hi-tech theatrics. The production uses a 40-ton, computer controlled stage with 17 elevators and the cast of 55 goes through 500 costumes in the 3 hour performance. Despite this, the same critics say it will be a big money-maker."

Comments

High tech stage?

[ChowRiit]

It sounds to me that they're trying to cash in on the films, rather than make a fitting tribute to the books themselves...

Re:High tech stage?

[nostriluu]

It's funny, but the interview I read, which was in a newspaper, said they were basing the play on the books, not the films, and the technology was taking a back stage to the performance. I guess Slashdot's chosen spin doesn't quite agree. They also said, as most of these things go, that they would use the first few productions to tune the play.

Re:High tech stage?

[hey!]

Agreed.

In fact, you could argue that a play based on LotR must either be avante garde in the extreme, or an artistic failure. The barriers to dramatizing LotR are not in stagecraft, they're deeper than that.

IIRC, one thing that Tolkien felt was that literary values derived from drama were hostile to myth. Drama works in thoery by Mimesis -- creating a kind of toy model of reality. Especially given Shakespeare's dominance in English literature, it's not surprising that "realism" has become a kind of critical gold standard for all forms of literature. Cultural snobs who would never be so provincial to require painting to be representational, will nonetheless require that stories be representational to be "interesting".

Myth, on the other hand works on an archetypal level. It's not that myth and drama can't do the same things, they just do them differently. Mixing the two models is very difficult.

Arguably the weakest parts of the movie version stem from this problem. For example, the movie script tries to give Faramir something indicative of an interior life: he must change his mind. In dramatic terms this is sometimes cited as being "more interesting", but really I think the issue might as well have been practical. Tolkien assiduously provides us with parallel iconic examples (Theoden/Denethor, Faramir/Boromir, Frodo/Gollum) representing the consequences of choices and character. But this takes space. Drama for reasons of economy has to collapse as much as it can into fewer characters, which in turn demands that characters evolve.

Indeed, change is the very essence of drama, and timelessness the essence of myth.

Collapsing the film trilogy into a drama would only increase the pressure to compress the conflicts of the work into a smaller number of individual psyches. Tolkien and his crowd detested the social sciences as much or greater as their more modern counterparts loved them. Indeed, for C.S. Lewis, sociologists were practically the devil incarnate. But psychological inference is a critical tool of the dramatist and novelist. For the mythologist, symbolism plays this role, and he prefers a larger canvas and a simpler story, because his greatest tool is repetition (e.g., the three brothers/sisters of the fairy tale). It's not that one form or the other has a monopoly on psychological truth; it's just that one peers inward, the other outward.

Re:counterexample

[ifdef]

I never could understand this. My wife and I saw Ishtar when it came out, and found it hilariously funny. Casting Warren Beatty and Dustin Hoffman directly contrary to their "usual" types made it all the funnier. Did most people who saw it not have the intelligence to see that it was all tongue-in-cheek?

Sometimes I really wonder about the comments people make about movies and books.

I've seen a discussion about possible future movie versions of the rest of the Chronicles of Narnia, where somebody said that they need to get rid of all the religious allusions.

I saw a discussion of a science fiction novel by Lois McMaster Bujold (I forget the title right now), whose entire THEME was coincidences and whether they were somehow manifestations of supernatural intervention, whose plot hinged on these coincidences and how unlikely they were, yet how they all fit together, and some bright person commented about how he liked the book, but he felt that it just seemed like too much of a coincidence that (some event) and (some other event) both happened to the same person. Well, DUH!

Along the same line, one of my problems with, say, movie adaptations of books, is that sometimes the screenwriter or director or somebody, I don't know who, don't really understand some aspect of the book. There are some changes that need to be made, because movies do much better at portraying things visually, whereas they are much worse than books at other things. For instance, the air raid scene at the beginning of LWW was excellent, and gave background that would not have been necessary in the book. Gollum was great in LOTR. The ideas were preserved, yet presented in perhaps different forms. There are other changes that seem to be made for dramatic effect, yet seem to betray a lack of understanding of the original: In LOTR, the scene where Faramir is tempted by the ring, yet he resists the temptation, commenting about how Frodo is lucky that he is not that kind of person, gets changed in the movie so that Faramir in fact does NOT resist the temptation, and is only stopped by external events. This makes the whole contrast between the characters of the two brothers not make any sense (as it is no longer a contrast), and it makes their father's different feelings about the two of them not make any sense either. So you end up changing what is both an adventure story and a psychological drama into just an adventure story -- you lose a whole level of meaning, unnecessarily.

I can think of more examples, but I think I'd better stop here. Some of the examples that spring to mind, of people missing the whole POINT of something, would be wildly off topic (although, after all, this IS Slashdot) and/or controversial.