Film vs. Book: A Rationalization

Rating: 10/10 (17 March 2003)

Looking over the IMDB comment board for 'The Lord Of The Rings: The Two Towers', I see that in general, it is as beloved as the first one. There is, however, a fairly large group of avid Tolkien fans who feel the removal of the ending to the book would have been unnecessary if Peter Jackson had simply cut out the Aragorn/Arwen scenes. What I hope to offer here is a rationalization as to why Jackson did what he did, and the perfectly valid justification he had for doing it. To begin with, despite many crossovers between medias of film and literature, the two rarely mix entirely. Literature is an expression of a writer's views and ideologies on the page, and film is a visual expression of the combined vision of several people. Many books are perfect fodder for adaptations, but few pieces of literature. Imagine someone trying to adapt Joyce's 'Ulysses' to the screen, or Proust's 'Remembrance Of Things Past'. It simply could not be done. In most works of great literature, Dostoyevsky, Joyce, Tolstoy, Flaubert etc., the artists express themselves through the writing as a style. Tolkien, while perhaps not on par with the supreme literary brilliance of the aformentioned authors, is still the father of fantasy, and it is his book that will be remembered as the most popular and, outside of the scholarly world, influential book of the 20th century. So how do you make it into a movie? Up until a few years ago, no one believed it could be. And then Peter Jackson released 'The Fellowship Of The Ring' last year, and everyone, even the most discerning Tolkien neophytes were satisfied. With this year's installment, 'The Two Towers', Jackson has become more daring, and has taken several liberties with the story line, most notably, excluding the last 5 chapters. Yet I want to specify something to all the Tolkien addicts who are most enraged by this blatant cut: word-for-word adaptations rarely ever work. In adapting a novel to the screen, something is invariably lost if the director does not have the wits to put the film in his vision rather than the author. If the author wanted to make a film he would have instead of writing a book. I believe, most strongly, in a dapting a book to the screen, one must take the general emotions the book generates, and do everything possible to bring them to the audience. In Tolkien, these emotions are invariably a sense of joy and wonder, something he certainly instilled with the first volume. Yet now, it has been a year, and many people (like me) have seen the fellowship so many times we can recite it line by line. The wonder is no longer new, and the joy somewhat dimmed by our familiarty with the perils of Middle-earth. In 'The Two Towers', Jackson takes our familiarty, and enhances upon it, bringing us deeper into the characters and the realm of Tolkien's universe. It's not the same as the book, but it most certainly works.