Swords and Sandals

So as maybe a few of know I have never seen RETURN OF THE KING. This was because I missed its showing at THE UPTOWN in Washington, D.C., the greatest movie theatre to see a Big Extravaganza Motion Picture. I saw the other two there, and so I just kind of let it slide.  I never really cared all that much; I felt THE TWO TOWERS contained enough closure in a weird way.

Well, recently that changed. I borrowed all three films from a friend (Anne wanted to watch them all again) and we just finished ROTK tonight.  We watched (accidentally) the Extended Versions.

What I want to talk about here is Hollywood Swords and Sandals Epics and how they work because... okay, this is the weird thing, they really shouldn't work and yet they do.  Movies like Gladiator (which I actually really love) and the LOTR films are filled with bad performances, one-note characters*, convoluted plots, terrible jokes, and really simplistic thematic content (Honor is good; greed is bad). The dialogue is meant to be Intoned instead of lived in (I AM NOT A MAN) and generally they have very little to say beyond the hermetically sealed worlds of their stories (this by the way is the reason Philip Pullman gives for hating JRR Tolkein as a writer, I don't agree with him and I think there's certainly some Anxious Influence at work there but I understand where the critique comes from)

And yet!  And yet!  THEY ARE AWESOME.  I say none of the above to slag off LOTR.  Watching someone shout something righteous (but preposterous) before turning their horse into battle is totally righteous.  I think all of it goes with the territory of doing a Big Hollywood Swords and Sandals Fantasy Epic.  If anything they should in general be applauded for doing it as well as they do (although, honestly Peter... the general of the bad guys in the final film looks like Grawp from the Goonies and talks like the bad guy from Inspector Gadget and really, dude... side wipes? Is that supposed to be some kind of clever Star Wars homage?).

Oh, speaking of Star Wars, there's another great example. Terrible dialogue, many weak performances, it's not really about anything underneath all that etc... and yet the original trilogy is totes awesome.  Why does the original trilogy work but not the prequels? Why do the LOTR films and Spartacus and Gladiator and Ben-Hur work? What marks the difference between a good one and a bad one? 

What really great Epic films do is totally overwhelm you, they in a way pummel you into submission, they subsume you into their own version of the sublime.  They're not exactly escapist... we don't go to them to escape, to go on vacation... we go to them to be conquered by their mastery**. In a way they have to not work on certain normal-cinematic-judging levels, because they have to force us to operate by their rules; it's part of the game.  If Gladiator had nuanced characters and an interesting plot and great acting and moral ambiguity it would be... well, I guess it would be I, Claudius which is great but  a totally different experience that you go to for different reasons.

I will also just say that The Fall, which is in many ways about these kinds of stories and our relationships with them, was one of my favorite movies of 2008.

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*There are as far as I can tell, two non-one-note characters in all three LOTR films.  The first is Gollum who isn't one note because he has dissociative identity disorder and thus has two warring notes (both excellently executed by Andy Serkis who come on people give that guy an Oscar for something would you?). The other is the King of Rohan who for me is the only really compelling character in all three movies because he's torn between multiple impulses and- unlike Gandalf, Sam, or many of the other characters- has internal faults and flaws. You actually wonder from moment to moment if he'll do the right thing. It's not like you're ever really in suspense about whether or not Arwen will forsake her Elvish heritage to end the dullest love triangle in cinematic history. This is not to say that other characters don't have compelling moments, or that you don't worry about them being stomped by a giant elephant or whatnot, just that the Rohan King is the only character you could pluck out of that story and make interesting. Some people in the comments are probably going to say "What about Gandalf?" to which all I'll say is that I think Ian McKellen's truly superb performance adds lots of shades and nuances (particularly sadness and pain)  to a character who is not actually all that interesting. 

**A good example of how this particular viewer was overwhelmed by Peter Jackson's mastery is that although both 300 and ROTK have moments where the film literally becomes about White People Saving Civilization From Darkened Savages, I thought the former of the two was the Triumph of the Will for the Bush Years while the latter of the two was totally awesome.

Comments

[Aaron Riccio]

I think "The Fall" is one of my favorite movies, period. But that, as you well know, is because I'm a sucker for visual flair and a general sense of aesthetics. (That's why I can keep watching "Requiem for a Dream.") However, perhaps that's part of what you're speaking of: epic films, being given increasingly large budgets, have an ability to overwhelm story with set. I haven't seen "Australia," so I'm not sure why Luhrman wasn't able to succeed, but all of the other instances you cited (including 300) were visually striking films that in many ways allowed the rest of the film to be sparse.

[Alison Croggon]

Bizarrely enough, I watched TROTK last night, after a holiday revisit of the trilogy. And yes, it's awesome. For my part, I think Theoden is a great character (and beautifully played by Bernard Hill) because he has the most lines from the original book: they're some of the sequences that raise goosebumps for me. Poor JRR would have had several fits at what they did to his story, in fact predicted most of what would happen; what he wouldn't have known is that film design and CGI could reach such levels of realism. In any case, it's worth not conflating Tolkien (neo-Platonic Catholic and AS scholar) with Peter Jackson's film; they are quite different things, and Tolkien's writing isn't simplistic in the ways the film is forced to be. One of the weird things about the adaptation is that although the writers soften the book's masculinism in the men, in what I think are rather boring ways, they totally destroy the most interesting woman, Eowyn, turning her into a sonk. I really can't stand Miranda Otto's performance, for which she deserves a pie in the face. What kind of shieldmaiden is she, I ask you?

Yes, there are things to question about racism and empire and class (Michael Moorcock's famous essay puts them all most pertinently), and those questions are justified. But in my view, these things are mitigated by an undeniably humane vision; the book is infused by Tolkien's experience in WW1, and that seems to me a crucial hint to understanding his fantasy.

Maybe what I most enjoy about Jackson's films is his unashamed going for the emotional throat. Big, melodramatic, for sure, but beautiful all the same. That's about story and performance, and nothing to do with CGI. The movies that miss the point forget that the story and the performances do really matter.

[August]

I agree with Allison that the books are in most ways more complex than the movies, though Jackson invests more energy than the books do in the true love triangle of the story, Sam, Frodo and Gollum/Smeagol (do his two personalities make it a love square?)

One of the reasons that LOTR is so powerful is it is actually an elegy for itself. The elves, in the books a source of beauty and awe the movies only falteringly convey, are leaving Middle Earth. The elves are the mirror image of Sauron - an elite enduring good kept secret from most of the world, as unwilling to use their power as Sauron is eager. The childlike awe that Samwise shows the elves is the mirror of the childlike fear shown Sauron. Their beauty and mystery can only be sustained by the power of the rings (the elves have three lesser to Sauron's One). To destroy Sauron is to destroy magic as the central power of this world; and with the defeat of Sauron,the elves must leave to, and Middle Earth passes into an age more like our own - fewer heroes, less magic, more complexity and contradiction.

And there is no going back. Frodo and Bilbo must leave the Shire because both have been touched by the magic of the ring so deeply, they no longer belong in a world without it. The passing away of magic, the ships full of elves leaving the Grey Havens, this is not the triumphal vision of unequivocal victory that colors so many action movies. It is an elegy for the magical clarity of good against evil, no longer possible in a world without supreme power. It would be as if there were no more Jedis at the end of Star Wars, rather than benign ghosts hovering as Ewoks sing.

Though I should add I was read these books as some kids are read the bible, so they go deep for me.

[isaac butler]

Hey All,

These are great comments! I'll just note that I was really only talking about the films except for the sentence about Philip Pullman. I haven't read the books in so long I feel completely incapable of commenting on them. THey were not the fixtures in my childhood that A WIZARD OF EARTHSEA and THE PHANTOM TOLLBOOTH and THE HITCHHIKER's books were for some reason.

Oh and Alison, I will say that I do think that WWI is to some extent present in the movies. Particularly where Faramir and his men storm what are essentially machine gun batteries on horseback (a thing that famously happened in WWI) because his father ordered him to out of grief, madness, ego and spite. It reminded me of Wilfred Owen's Parable of the Young Man and the Old Specifically (But the old man would not so, but slew his son / And half the seed of Europe, one by one.) I was like "oh right, wasn't this thought up while Tolkein was fighting in WWI?" It was also, I feel, one of the few moments in the films that problematizes machismo and warfare in any serious way.

[Joshua James]

The characters of Frodo and his ilk (and, by extension, Harry Potter, etc) are what many call Mary Sue characters.

Background here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_sue

Interesting you bring this up, Kay over at Seriocity was just discussing the same thing recently (tho' she focused on Twilight.)

[herxanthikles]

I just want to say that Shelob=vagina dentata

[Aaron Leichter]

"If 'Gladiator' had nuanced characters and an interesting plot and great acting and moral ambiguity it would be..."

'Spartacus'? Maybe not great acting, but otherwise...

Does the cardboard melodrama have to be a part of it though? Or the classical era? Someone above mentioned 'Australia'; what about 'Lawrence of Arabia' or 'Reds'? 'The Godfather', 'Once Upon a Time in America', 'The Seven Samurai', 'Alexander Nevski'?

I think you're on to something with the overwhelming. In all these cases, the film overwhelms you with epic length, enormous canvases, & titanic themes. You gotta see 'em in the theater. But some historical epics do delve into the relationship betw. character & era, feature artful performances & superb cinematography.

[August]

I'm not sure the character of Frodo deserves being called a Mary Sue. After all, he fails in his quest over and over again, only to be rescued again and again, and in the end, he is unable to throw the ring into the fire; and it is only through Gollum's greater lust for it that it is destroyed. The only reason he is given the ring in the first place is because he is so powerless, and he fails even in being that. Then he returns to the Shire to discover he no longer belongs. If Frodo is loved by Tolkien too much, it is a hard kind of love.

Asked by Sam in the shadow of the Mount Doom if he remembers the last good meal they shared, Frodo answers "No, I am afraid not, Sam. At least, I know that such things happened, but I cannot see them. No taste of food, no sound of wind, no memory of tree or grass or flower, no image of moon or star are left to me. I am naked in the dark, Sam, and there is no veil between me and the wheel of fire. I begin to see it even with my waking eyes, and all else fades."

Genuine goodness and courage in a human being are as failing and conditional as any other trait. The fact that Frodo's endure a little longer than most doesn't make him a Mary Sue.

Harry Potter, on the other hand, is a very powerful student wizard, and so doesn't need me to defend him.