In our troubled times, I find comfort in these three Peter Jackson films, a sweeping epic that miraculously succeeded in capturing the essence of the classic novels onscreen.
(top photo credit: WallpaperCat Creative Commons)
When I was young, for years I fell into the habit of rereading Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings novels in a marathon over the Christmas holidays. Somehow, I always got swept up in the high stakes and beloved characters. When the word of Peter Jackson’s ambitious plans to film all three novels with live action, I was dubious, but fell under the spell with the viewing of the first film, “The Fellowship of the Ring.” Getting a bit of a crush on Viggo Mortensen as Aragorn didn’t hurt. So eventually I bought the discs for all three extended director’s-cut films, and switched over to watching the films during the winter break from teaching.
Once Thor and I got together, I had my work cut out to convince him to watch with me. A scientist with a sharp eye for the absurd, he liked to write “Thorations” that spoofed popular entertainments. Sure enough, he soon emailed a satirical summary of the films to a couple of our friends who also taught at the university and shared his “merry, mocking ways.” (From another favorite novel of mine, “Precious Bane,” and I plead guilty to being sometimes sentimental.) Thor’s summary, which seems to have drifted away in the sands of time, included new names for characters such as Bore-Me – “a glass half-empty kind of guy.” It took me some time to forgive Thor for interrupting Boromir (Sean Bean) with that comment during Boromir’s dying speech, “…and the world of men will fail.”
There was also Glad-You’re-Real (Galadriel), Lord Cinnabon (Celaborn), the Sour One (Sauron) and Samwide Ham-Cheese (Samwise Gamgee). The Nazgul rode horses with “really sucky horseshoes,” and Aragorn had “serious daddy issues” going back millenia. You get the idea.
But as the years rolled along, Thor filed his edges a bit and agreed to watch. He even wore a wizard robe on campus when he was invited to give the university’s “Wizards of Western” science lecture for the community. And joined me in cosplay at the Portland Westercon.
What with a lot of upheaval in our lives during the past five years, somehow the annual viewing got shortchanged, but this year Thor surprised me by suggesting that we watch the films in entirety again. He even agreed to watch “all of the half-dozen endings.” It was lovely to visit the elves, ride along with the riders of Rohan, and chuckle over the pontifications of beloved Treebeard, among many other vivid moments brought to life in the spectacular settings of New Zealand standing in for Middle Earth. And it was a timely escape from our depressing weather (months of nonstop rain and repeated atmospheric rivers with flooding disasters in our Pacific Northwest) and the larger disasters that our corrupt U.S. Administration is wreaking in our country and the world. In one of my favorite scenes from the second film, “The Two Towers,” Sam reminds an exhausted Frodo that they must hold onto to hope:
Frodo: I can’t do this, Sam.
Sam: I know. It’s all wrong. By rights we shouldn’t even be here. But we are. It’s like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger, they were. And sometimes you didn’t want to know the end. Because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened? But in the end, it’s only a passing thing, this shadow. Even darkness must pass. A new day will come. And when the sun shines it will shine out the clearer. Those were the stories that stayed with you. That meant something, even if you were too small to understand why. But I think, Mr. Frodo, I do understand. I know now. Folk in those stories had lots of chances of turning back, only they didn’t. They kept going. Because they were holding on to something.
Frodo: What are we holding onto, Sam?
Sam: That there’s some good in this world, Mr. Frodo… and it’s worth fighting for.
(The version of this speech in Tolkien’s novel is different. But I love this film version that actor Sean Astin performed beautifully.)
May we all hang onto hope and keep fighting for an end to corruption and tyranny!
*****
You will find The Rambling Writer’s blog posts here every Saturday. Sara’s Book View Cafe Greek islands novel is available in print and ebook: The Ariadne Connection. “Technology triggers a deadly new plague. Can a healer find the cure?” The novel has received the Chanticleer Global Thriller Grand Prize and the Cygnus Award for Speculative Fiction. Sara is back at work on the sequel, The Ariadne Disconnect. Sign up for her quarterly email newsletter at www.sarastamey.com
