I realize that I'm not actually the last person on the face of the planet to see The Two Towers in the theater; it just feels that way. And I've got to say that I was... disappointed.
In the interest of talking myself out of this disappointment, I keep reminding myself of something which probably became obvious to any casual readers of this blog at least a year ago: I am fundamentally a text chauvinist. There are very few things I really love about movies or TV shows as compared to books. I cannot think of any movies or TV shows I prefer to the books which preceded them, although Fellowship of the Ring came as close as anything. (This attitude is probably related to my lack of fondness for translation, but at least in the latter case I agree that the change is very much worth making; I am simply not the person to do it. In the case of movies, I frequently wonder why people are doing such ridiculous things to a perfectly good source text. Perhaps I should learn to speak movie, because goodness knows I couldn't tell you the first thing about how they're put together.)
A second disclaimer: part of the problem here may be that I actively love the book called The Two Towers -- OK, to be precise, I actively love the first half of The Two Towers -- so I hold its adaptation to a fairly high standard. The thinly disguised literary Anglo-Saxons on horses Rohirrim have been my pals for years now. They're the part of the whole LOTR trilogy I'm most likely to turn to for comfort reading. But, even were this not the case, I think I'd still take issue with Peter Jackson's assertion in an interview that TTT is "the slightest of the books." I'm sorry, but any book featuring two epic battles, several minor skirmishes, a resurrection, and an elephant charge is not "slight." Now, since Jackson moved Boromir's death scene to FOTR and the confrontations with both Saruman and Shelob to ROTK -- decisions I didn't object to offhand -- I can see how he came up with that assessment. ("We kind of have all the memorable moments of the book in the film," my foot.) But Jackson's persistent conviction that there wasn't "enough" story for the second movie seems to have led him to make a lot of insertions, some harmless, some baffling, and some thoroughly wrong.
I didn't mind Eowyn getting a few more lines (mostly borrowed from ROTK), Arwen getting a lot more lines (although I'm sort of puzzled by Elrond's anti-human stance -- have these people read their own genealogy?), Erkenbrand's being written out, Legolas skateboarding, or Háma getting killed by a Warg instead of in front of Helm's Deep. Faramir carting the hobbits to Osgiliath instead of Henneth Annûn would have simply been "baffling," on a par with Frodo drawing a sword on Sam or Aragorn's near-death experience en route to Helm's Deep (yeah, OK, dramatic tension, whatever), were it not for the fact that Faramir sees Frodo about to hand the Ring over to a Nazgul and then tells him to skedaddle back into Mordor. It's one thing to emphasize that Faramir and the men of Minas Tirith are hardened and desperate, but I fail to understand why they should seem like idiots. (Oh, and Gondor has some strict laws, but the business of "releasing prisoners means your life is forfeit" smacks of unsubtle plot contrivance. I fear what this will mean for ROTK -- there are perfectly good reasons for tension between Faramir and Denethor without manufacturing new ones.)
You know what really bothered me, though? The Elves showing up at Helm's Deep. I was excited after the TTT movie previews; they had kept at least part of my favorite bit of verse in the book ("Where now is the horse and the rider?"), and I figured that TTT-the-movie would revolve naturally and brilliantly around the book's theme of "the age of Men is coming," already introduced in the first movie and sure to figure prominently in the third. For those who have not read the book The Two Towers (shame on you!), Gandalf mostly acts to rally the Rohirrim (he doesn't zap the Armies of Darkness single-handed), Legolas and Gimli (not to mention Merry and Pippin) are the only representatives of their respective kindreds within leagues of the battle, Frodo receives remarkably ungrudging aid from Faramir, and the Ents act only against Saruman and his orcs -- who are equally out of place in the coming Fourth Age. (Similarly, Gandalf acts directly only against the Balrog and Saruman's influence.) It sounded perfect for a coherent TTT movie, with great visuals when Gandalf convinces Théoden to shake off old age and bad counsel (nope, no possession by Saruman), when Théoden calls the Rohirrim to ride against Saruman (nope, no "let's all run and hide" -- are all human characters except Aragorn supposed to be idiots?), when the Ents decide to move against Saruman (nope, no "you somehow missed the destruction of trees till we showed it to you" -- excuse me, all the characters except Aragorn are supposed to be idiots), when Gandalf defeats the Balrog (there they left well enough alone, although the phrase "Endless Stair" to explain how they got from the water to a mountain peak would have been nice). And sure enough, we got all the quotes about the importance of Men in more or less the right places. But we also got a lot of vague pronouncements about hope (many of which properly belonged in ROTK). These messages should not have contradicted one another, because Elves were never supposed to be a source of hope in the Third Age -- those of you who've read the books will no doubt remember which character actually went by that name. Unfortunately, it didn't work out that way.
I didn't mind all the extra scenes with Elves -- I can see how the confrontations between Arwen and Aragorn, as well as Arwen and Elrond, might have been useful additions to the movie as such. But when the Elves from Lothlórien go outside the forest at all, much less turn up in the nick of time at Helm's Deep, it's not only ludicrous by all the internal logic of the book (Legolas tells Gimli that their respective kinfolk have their own battles to fight, and he's entirely correct), but it also directly contradicts most of the rest of the movie -- not only the issues already mentioned in the book, along with inserted scenes such as Arwen's near-departure for the Grey Havens, but also the movie version of FOTR, where the elves' passage out of world events was stressed from the opening monologue. The Last Alliance was, in fact, the last alliance between elves and men; Elrond said so himself in FOTR-the-movie, and in TTT he continues this theme of distrust. Tolkien once pointed out that "Legolas accomplished the least of the Nine Walkers,"* and at that, he does more than any other Elf in all three books; in the movies so far, Legolas's orc-killing antics do not disguise his fundamental lack of independent characterization. In the books, in fact, apart from contributing members to the Fellowship, the various elven (and dwarven, and hobbit) groups do virtually nothing but repel the attacks of Sauron on their own lands and show up for the parties afterwards.** It is only the Men (all the Fellowship members become, in effect, honorary Men) who go out to fight, who rush from one battle to the next, trying to save not only themselves but the kingdom next door. Why on earth would Jackson have decided to, er, change horses in midstream? Is he planning to have Dwarves turn up to save Minas Tirith in the final movie, followed by a scene in which the entire Fellowship takes up happy housekeeping together in Rivendell? The Elves' passage from Middle-Earth does, after all, constitute a fairly major plot point for the entire trilogy.
Now, I can deal with the patent fact that no director would or could adapt LOTR for the big screen precisely as it was written. I like to think that I'm being extremely mature about some of my "memorable moments" not making it onscreen.*** I am not making any sweeping declarations about how I'm not going to see the third movie (because I am, with bells on) or how all movie adaptations of books suck (because I know perfectly well that they don't). Moreover, I am reminding myself regularly that the panoramic shots of New Zealand scenery were lovely, if somewhat reminiscent of the Travel Channel special on New Zealand I watched (largely for the TTT excerpts, dammit) several weeks ago. But when Sam piped up with his big speech at the end of the movie -- a speech that I essentially liked and agreed with, although I think Tolkien did much better with pacing the growth of Frodo's weakness and Sam's open affection -- I found myself nodding at all the wrong places. No, by rights, they shouldn't be at Osgiliath, or Elves at Helm's Deep. It's wrong, and nonsensical, and my bending over backwards to compensate for my anti-movie bias doesn't improve it.
As Eomer and Aragorn said in an exchange that I dearly hope will be used in the final movie, since it didn't make it into this one, where it rightfully belonged:
"It is hard to be sure of anything among so many marvels. The world is all grown strange.... How shall a man judge what to do in such times?"
"As he ever has judged.... Good and ill have not changed since yesteryear; nor are they one thing among Elves and Dwarves and another among Men. It is a man's part to discern them, as much in the Golden Wood as in his own house."
...or as much in a movie as in a book. And I'm still disappointed.
* -- In Unfinished Tales, p. 395. There's a whole complicated metaphysical issue here about the elves' having already started to "fade," such that their power in Middle-Earth is already seriously diminished (and becomes more so with the destruction of the Ring, of course) -- but I won't even go there, because the absurdity of the movie plot point is quite evident without getting into Tolkien esoterica.
** -- One is reduced to checking through the ROTK appendices to discover that Galadriel tidied up at Dol Guldur after Sauron's fall. Mostly, though, Elves and Half-Elves (other than Legolas) affect LOTR only through gifts: Galadriel's, through which she plays an indirect part in the action throughout the three books; the palantíri, which were gifts to the Númenorean Faithful from their friends in Valinor back in the Second Age; Arwen's gift of a standard for Aragorn, conveyed via her brothers, who then fight alongside Aragorn but accomplish nothing on their own; Elrond's gift of both Arwen and the Scepter of Annúminas to Aragorn after the battles are all over; and Arwen's gift of her necklace and her place in Valinor to Frodo, also after the end of the action.
*** -- Have I complained about Eomer's reduced role, the irrationality of his taking a huge army away into exile, and Théoden's getting a good half of Eomer's best lines from ROTK, even though he had his own perfectly good speech to give? Well, OK, now I have. But, as with the omission of Faramir's being the only person in the entire trilogy who thought to follow Gandalf into the archives of Minas Tirith, I am dealing. My "memorable moments" include "Take this, dear lord, it was ever at your service," but I am remaining calm. Calm, I tell you.
[Edited to expand the block quote once I actually had a copy of TTT in front of me, because my memory only stretches so far.]
Dear Curator of the Walters Art Gallery Exhibit on "The Book of Kings,"
The thirteenth-century manuscript known as the "Crusader Bible" around which your exhibition was built is a gorgeous and fascinating cultural artifact, with ramifications in the fields of art history, military history, and theology just for starters. However, it is not a "picture Bible," no matter what the Pierpont Morgan people are telling you. It only shows pictures of patriarchs, judges, kings, and assorted kinglike events, especially battles, along with quickie Latin explanations (mostly in the form of "qualiter blah blah blah"). Indeed, the fact -- mentioned in your own exhibition literature -- that the Latin explanations were occasionally wrong, and were corrected in either Farsi or Hebrew by later annotators, should be a clue that this is not a Bible. In case you are still wondering, however, the facsimile you were kind enough to provide conclusively demonstrates that the manuscript ignores such minor narrative details as Moses getting anywhere near Mount Sinai and ends with Solomon in all his glory. My childhood comic-book-style Old Testament was about ten times more complete.
A suspicious person might wonder if there was a not-terribly-hidden message in these pictorial and narrative selections from the Hebrew Bible, especially as the "Crusader Bible" was most likely commissioned by King (not terribly competent Crusader, and eventually Saint) Louis IX of France. Even a not-so-suspicious person might wake up and smell the propaganda if they noticed your display on Louis IX's Sainte-Chapelle and your suggestion that there might have been artists in common between the two (contemporary) projects. The Sainte-Chapelle features tasteful stained-glass depictions of every coronation scene the royal party could dig out of the Old Testament, designed to house relics including Christ's crown of thorns and -- oh yes -- to act as a chapel for the then-somewhat-beleaguered royal family. Subtle, nu?
Returning to the "Crusader Bible," however, it would be smarter to call it a Biblical mirror of princes (and interesting -- if more difficult -- to build an exhibit around such a theme). Illustrated Bible manuscripts are a good enough comparison point, though, and I noticed there were plenty of books of hours and psalters scattered throughout your exhibit in any case. Still, somewhere in this exhibit, it would have been only sensible to contemplate the political and theological implications of commissioning a manuscript depicting lots of Israelites-cum-Frankish-knights laying into Canaanites on the eve of the Franks' departure for Yet Another Crusade. It would also have been interesting to speculate for a paragraph or two somewhere on the motivations -- and the marginal annotations reflecting said motivations -- of a seventeenth-century Catholic cardinal in Cracow giving it to a highly successful Safavid sultan in Isfahan, and of eighteenth-century Iranian (I think) Jews purchasing and once again glossing the manuscript.
Or, failing all of that... don't you think you could have translated a couple of the inscriptions somewhere in the exhibit?
Sincerely yours,
Dr. Naomi Chana
P.S.: Nice gift shop, though!
Sometimes I think we -- and by "we," I mean everyone not running for political office or otherwise invested in denying patent realities -- should collectively admit that the United States of America celebrates Christmas as a secular holiday combining gift-giving, feasting, family gatherings, and some bizarre superstitions about lighted trees and flying reindeer. It comes from Christian (and mostly eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English) roots, but it could just as easily have emerged as a less Afrocentric version of Kwanzaa, a more consumeristic take on Thanksgiving, or a differently destructive potlatch. (Nor is this a national secret; the United States Information Agency website notes that "decorating houses and yards with lights, putting up Christmas trees, giving gifts, and sending greeting cards have become traditions even for many non-Christian Americans.") This isn't to say that Christians can't, or shouldn't, celebrate the birth of their savior on December 25th as well, but since they have only squatters' rights at best to that date, and since it's been a U.S. national holiday for a little over 130 years (yes, in the U.S., that's considered a long time), we might as well face facts. Christmas is a nice, mostly harmless U.S. holiday; its only downsides are nasty traffic anywhere near a shopping center, stomachaches from eating too much candy, and the occasional personal bankruptcy.
Sometimes, though, I think that there must be a beautiful (and somewhat dangerous) idea hidden among -- not necessarily obscured by -- all the decorations and present-wrapping and cookie-baking. It all depends on how one's senses are tuned. Take "decorating houses and yards with lights," for instance. It's fairly obvious from a quick trip through the world's religions that midwinter festivals tend to involve light symbolism, and it's also fairly obvious from a quick trip through my parents' neighborhood that a lot of people run up their electric bills for no discernible reason other than illuminating their hedges/roof overhangs/wire reindeer outlines. Apart from the electricity, this isn't even a modern Christmas custom: if we look at the account of a Christmas celebration in Greccio in 1223, for instance, there was an ostentatious manger scene lit up by gratuitously purchased lights. And yet, the earliest chronicler of that celebration insists that even the lights had symbolic significance: "With glad hearts, the men and women of that place prepared, according to their means, candles and torches to light up that night which has illuminated all the days and years with its glittering star." Nor was the visual sense the only important one, according to our account: there were songs and a sermon, and the preacher in front of that lit-up manger scene found that speaking the words "Bethlehem" and "Jesus" gave him a feeling of such sweetness that he licked his lips each time he uttered them.*
I figure some of my readers would look at the Greccio celebration and see a Christmas service, while others might see a strangely Hee Haw-themed party and a guy in desperate need of some lip balm. (I, myself, would very probably see the fons et origo of the late medieval Franciscan tradition of inserting oneself visually into the life of Christ.) But I think it must be possible to see everything in a given Christmas celebration, even the rush for presents and the endless repeats of It's A Wonderful Life on TV, as somehow relating directly to the birth of Jesus. I just don't see -- or taste -- quite that way, as a rule. Truthfully, I'm not sure I want to -- I'm Jewish, which generally precludes the whole Jesus-as-savior thing, and since I have relatives who run the gamut from pretending Christmas doesn't exist to espousing versions of Christianity in which I'm preemptively damned, it's most practical for me to treat Christmas as a secular holiday. But I've had enough exposure to Christianity (in the very best possible sense) that I can't entirely avoid the awareness of what "Christmas" could mean. Occasionally I even feel like licking my lips. And the lights... well, they're really pretty.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to go finish sending out my non-denominational greeting cards. Merry Christmas, everyone!
* -- Actually, it was the first such manger scene, and the preacher was Francis of Assisi. The quote comes from David Burr's online translation of excerpts from Thomas of Celano's First and Second Life of St. Francis. (There are, of course, some problems with accepting Celano's account as historical fact, but let's not go there today.)
(With apologies to Dorothy Parker.)
Oh, is it horribly imprudent
To hope that I might have a student
Who, while plagiarizing, learns
To skip past Google's top returns?
This is the point I reach about halfway through every set of student papers. My intermittent awareness of professional ethics forbids my actually quoting from said papers -- also, it'd be fairly obvious what my classes were about, and I don't want to go there -- but I'm getting tired of thinking up tactful ways to express the following:
My father, unfortunately, is very little help in this regard. He tells me that I have it easy, that his students do things like quote entire paragraphs with only a single right quote and no punctuation or citation in essays where they were specifically told not to quote. He also has to write his final grades down on a special form and walk them over to the registrar. And his grades are due Monday morning, after which he is required to attend an Evil Workshop on, heaven help us, offering "customer-oriented" classes. (A certain tendency towards onedownsmanship runs in the family.) On the other hand, he's tenured and doesn't give a damn about student evaluations, whereas I kinda do. And there's that whole feeling-of-responsibility-for-people's-futures thing I've got going. But I think I'll get over that in another five or so papers.
Back to grading.
[Edited to, yes, correct punctuation. That'd be Murphy's Law of Complaining About Other Peoples' Writing Techniques. ;)]
Comment-on dit "unplanned" en français?*
I suddenly feel a need for an expanded version of AKMA's checklist in order to establish my reasons for the extended absence of Baraita posts. In very brief, there was Major Professional Conference #1, then a trip home (from which I made that one Thanksgiving post), then my last full week of classes (while I recognized that This Is When Students Finally Start Wanting To Talk To You, I hadn't entirely anticipated that every single moment I spent in my office would be busy) combined with the discovery that my home laptop modem had shuffled off this electronic coil, then this past week of ending classes/accepting papers/fielding explanations for late papers/writing exams. In my copious free time, I have triumphantly dealt with holiday parties, assorted departmental obligations, several religious services, a few overdue social engagements, a couple of requests for incompletes, a winter storm, and getting my toilet-tank floater replaced. You may have noticed that I didn't say "grading papers and exams," because I've barely begun that -- thank goodness grades aren't due till Thursday.
At any rate, I've got some back posts in mostly-written form on the laptop at home -- now supplemented with an old 28.8 PCMCIA modem from an older latop which I had my parents mail me -- and I'm going to try and put them up this weekend. Of course, grading papers is just a tad bit more pressing, but I'm also flying home on Tuesday, and I can grade plenty of papers on the airplane. Once that's dealt with, and once my grades are submitted, this blog should be returning to its usual 2-4 posts per week. And perhaps I should look into wireless service of some sort.
[Edited to keep a list of the posts I'm putting up, because I wound up sticking them in around preexisting posts: "Cut With Our Own Dust," "In Place," "Family Values." Still to come: the Hanukkah post, the one about academic attitudes towards teaching, and the one about Firefly, if I can bear to finish it.]
* -- (Yes, I could look it up.) Magritte isn't really the most precise cultural referent for the point I'm interested in making. A picture of a pipe is not a pipe, true, and there's a disjunction between symbolic representation and real object, but you successfully identify a pipe by the term "une pipe." A hiatus is probably closer to the problem of negative theology: you misidentify God when you name Her, and so "God" stops being God, just as you misidentify a hiatus when you post about it, so that it stops being a hiatus. But entitling this post "Mystical Blogology" would have given most of you the wrong idea about what was going on, whereas I hope all of you got the Magritte joke.
I sincerely hope that nobody looks to this blog for moral guidance. I'm not a moral relativist, but I hate doing things I'm not good at -- and, trust me, moral guidance is not my strong point, especially when it comes to telling people what they shouldn't do. It's not that I don't judge; it's just that I don't often judge in public, and I'd rather err on the side of mercy any day. Life is a lot more pleasant that way.
That said, I'm going to go ahead and issue a negative moral statement or two: incest is a bad idea. Also, it's icky.
I hasten to note that this announcement is based on fiction rather than fact. Over the past several months, many of the media fandoms of which I'm vaguely aware have developed followings devoted to one or more incestuous character pairings. There are the people who think Fred and George Weasley are together in Harry Potter, the people who write about Lex Luthor's relationship with his father in Smallville, and the people who've taken to pairing off Simon Tam and his sister River on Firefly. I'm half-waiting for someone to open the Incest Is Best multi-fandom fic archive.
Before anyone gets their knickers in a twist, though, I'm not saying that writing about incest is a bad idea. If you want to illuminate a really twisted family dynamic, there's certainly something to be said for envisioning family members getting sexual. (See my previous post on Jacobean tragedy -- it wasn't the incest-as-plot-device I objected to, although I think I may be having another attack of is-art-moral-or-not? anxiety.) Sometimes there's even strong subtextual support for writing incest storylines in fanfic, or so my Smallville-watching friends tell me. But writing incest as if it were any other pairing, which we're getting closer and closer to doing, is a bad idea. Judging from my fairly brief survey of this trend in fanfic, incest stories started out as "incredibly controversial." They have now dimmed to "slightly odd." (Bear in mind that we are not dealing with "canonical," i.e. on-camera, incest -- although an argument could be made for certain developments in Angel.) Of course, the precise boundaries of "incest" are highly variable across societies -- is marrying your deceased brother's wife a good deed or a horrible sin? What about marrying your paternal half-sister? Your first (cross-)cousin?* And royal families have always been a law unto themselves, whether they're Ptolemies or Hapsburgs. But I don't know of any completely endogamous societies (genetic problems would do them in rather quickly); there's always some category of "people with whom it is icky for you to have children" which overlaps with the category of "people who are closely related to you." The non-technical term here might be "family."
Sitcoms have been built around families for years, but dramas often tend to avoid them -- especially the ones aimed at a teen audience. (This is probably good marketing strategy; when I was a teenager, I frequently wished my parents would disappear.) Buffy, fond though I am of it, portrays parents as naive at best and abusive at worst -- when it does portray parents, which isn't often. Leaving aside Joyce -- who was only somewhat sympathetic before her S5 swan song -- parents on Buffy have proven entirely ineffectual at fighting vampires ("School Hard"), behaved more irresponsibly than their teenagers thanks to magic candy ("Band Candy"), shown up trying to burn their children at the stake ("Gingerbread"), and humiliated their offspring at a wedding ("Hell's Bells"). Yes, in some ways, Giles was a father figure, but he too has disappeared, and it really tests one's disbelief when Buffy's biological father is supposed to have calmly handed over custody of his younger daughter to his elder (21-year-old), who was being impersonated by a robot at the time, or when Willow arrives back in town from England to Buffy's deserted house and never once considers visiting her parents. Over on Angel, we have an assortment of characters whose families are abusive, negligent, or dead -- with the token exception of Fred's Good Parents, who appeared in precisely one episode and were never heard from again. One of the few things I like about Smallville is the emphasis it puts on the importance of good parenting, and the results of the opposite.
"But families don't have to be biological," some of you are no doubt thinking. Well, yeah. I have a large, extremely well-developed extended family in the biological sense, but I also have a solid handful of friends -- many of them my parents' age or older -- whom I also identify as "family." Still, while I suppose that most people want to find someone who combines the best of family and friend to spend their lives with, I can't imagine why you'd want to date someone who was already in your family, and that's what all these teen-drama self-proclaimed "families" wind up doing. I mean... huh? Perhaps I'm handicapped by not having grown up with any childhood friends or cousins whom I'd even consider dating (even leaving aside all issues of age, gender, and recessive genes). Families, at least in my world, tend not to include people you're considering dating. They may come to include someone to whom you are permanently attached (marriage or its functional equivalent), and they undoubtedly influence the sorts of people you wind up in romantic relationships with, but they're not a kinder, gentler type of singles bar. When a group of photogenic teenage and twentysomething characters proclaim that they are a "family" shortly before playing musical romances, I am... somehow not convinced.
I suspect that the fanfic trend I began by mentioning is accurately reflecting a wider cultural trend in which families (especially nuclear ones) are less and less important and in which the most important relationships in a person's life are romantic and/or sexual. As with many things on TV, it's exaggerated there, but it's still real. But it's a trend I don't like. And yet... how on earth does one talk about it without issuing moral pronouncements? "Family values" isn't really an option, because that's been hijacked by people with what I consider equally repellent notions about the nature and limitations of family relationships. Am I missing something here? Because, really... it's just icky.
* -- Examples selected, not at all randomly, from this terrible book chock-full of sex and violence called the Bible.