Film Review by John Demetry
"History became legend. Legend became myth," explains the narrator in the
prologue to The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring. That
introduces the overt theme - explored with willful shallowness - of the The
Fellowship of the Ring. It also describes the method hoisting this series
of films - raise-the-Titanic style - onto the contemporary movie audience.
Elijah Wood as Frodo in The Lord of the Rings
The history behind director Peter Jackson's production is well known. He
received backing for a projected 9-hour series by economically shooting the
three three-hour films of The Lord of the Rings simultaneously in his
native New Zealand. To make the financial gambit pay off, legend - hype -
has it that this is the movie event audiences have been waiting for and
audiences deserve. Rewriting film history, critics create the myth that this
represents great filmmaking - the myth that this is actually what movies are
all about.
No wonder castration anxiety engines Jackson's pseudo-Freudian
interpretation of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. The prologue
opens with the leader of the humans in man-to-demon combat with the wearer
of the cursed ring. He chops off the demon's hand, separating the ring from
master. Doing so, the human leader breaks his sword, but vanquishes the
demon. He replaces the sword with the ring, which brings out his inherent -
being human - desire for power. All this "fantasy" deflects scrutiny from
Jackson's own sinister power play, but it reveals his unconscious intent.
Jackson cuts from an immortal elf's flashback dramatizing the human fall
from grace to humanity's last hope: dour actor Viggo Mortensen as Aragorn,
the descendent of that disgraced King. Mortensen ponders the blood legacy he
must overcome by inspecting a painting that recreates the fateful dual
castration. Then, he handles the preserved pieces of his ancestor's broken
sword. With this brief sequence, Jackson details the process of
"history/legend/myth" through the act of spectatorship.
 Director Peter Jackson on the 'realistic' set of The Lord of the Rings |
Critics herald Jackson's "realism" in telling a fantasy story. The term
"realism" is misleading - a joke, really. Critics actually tout escapism.
Jackson's spatial idiocy matches his noxious storytelling. He structures the
narrative by explicating each character's reaction to the seductive powers
of the ring. More Freud: Those under the spell of the ring, a fetish object,
refer to it as "My precious." (Freudians should have a field day with the
superlatives heaped upon this film by critics!) |
To play Frodo Baggins, the hobbit hero of The Lord of the Rings, Jackson
casts Elijah Wood. Jackson's close-ups of Wood highlight his neck-and-chin
disease, making him appear appropriately squat without aid of makeup or
special effects. These close-ups, part of the heralded "realism" that
supposedly focuses on character psychology, position Wood/Frodo as the
figure of audience identification. Jackson means the characterization to be
instructive. Frodo's struggle against the ring's power pretends catharsis
for, but really diverts from, real-life struggle with temptation.
Jackson identifies the nature of that temptation in bogus modern terms,
while presenting Frodo's salvation through specious psycho-social
"motivation." Jackson's images of Frodo, having used the ring's power of
invisibility to escape danger, suffering from addiction and withdrawal mimic
pop visions of drug junkies. Frodo's skin becoming pale, his eyes sunken and
dark, he gets the shakes. He has demonic visions of an encroaching hellfire,
detailed in point-of view-shots that structure audience cognition through
hokey - meaningless - iconography.
Jackson positions this modern stereotype out of the socio-political context
- capitalism - that both engenders drug addiction and profits from it. Not
least of those profits are gained from the power structure's control of
visual discourse demonizing drug addiction and addicts - which Jackson here
exploits. It's the same system that peddles narcotic entertainments like
this one.
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Frodo, above all the other characters, is most likely to overcome the allure
of the ring. Jackson pointedly avoids defining why in any philosophical or
moral terms - is it will or faith or what? Instead, it is accepted as a
result of his lineage - Frodo is the blood relation of the hero of the
books' prequel, The Hobbit - and a result of the values of the hobbit
society - best described as pre-Freudian-Forrest-Gumpism: innocence and
simplicity.
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Related Stories from the GayToday Archive:
Planet of the Apes
The Adventures of Felix
Hollow Man
Related Sites:
Lord of the Rings
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Jackson works in accord with the historical legacy of American and Hollywood
hegemony. He visually impresses this ideology through the use of flashbacks,
cutting from past (lineage) to present (result), and the juxtaposition of
wide vistas (society) and close-ups (individuals).
The hobbits "ooh" and "aah" over a fireworks show put on by the wizard
Gandalf (played by Ian McKellen). Two of the hobbits steal one of the
fireworks and set it off. The explosion looks like a dragon swooping down on
the spectators. Gandalf reprimands the two hobbits for their hubris. The
sequence might be a Freudian slip. Equate Gandalf with Jackson, who controls
the film's fireworks displays and meaning, and the hobbits with the audience
- given Frodo's role as audience identification. Jackson elicits "ooh's" and
"aah's" instead of contemplation, thought, or imaginative wonder.
Note: the dragon is a firework. This film is all fireworks. That's the
nature of the punishing repetition, like structural bumper cars, of the
action sequences that make up the plot - the spatial incoherence of which
allows for multiple uses of the oldest trick in the movie book in which a
character unexpectedly jumps into the frame to save the day. That's the
intent of the impenetrable illogic of the endless dialogue, meant to provide
faux depth where the visualization of digital kingdoms fails to either
impress or express. The movie dulls audience perception and understanding
with the same lullaby effect of the pitiful New Age Enya score.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in the bludgeoning close-ups. When
Jackson isn't filming the actors' faces with his signature grotesque
wide-angle distortions, he erases expressiveness with washed-out, flat
lighting. Jackson's unflattering technique makes hottie Orlando Bloom as the
elf Legolas Greenleaf look bland. The soft-focus treatment Liv Tyler endures
as the elf Arwen Undómiel airbrushes the physical distinctiveness and
humanity that makes this miscasting so potentially wonderful.
 Ian McKellen plays the wizard Gandalf |
The audience suffers McKellen's bag of tics. Each of McKellen's actorisms in
close-up gets projected beyond the back row and into the streets. Indeed, it
is out of the theatre and into the world that Jackson hopes to extend his
stranglehold on the imagination. |
Jackson succumbed to Hollywood's temptations. He now has power and money.
Critics have inaugurated his achievement into the realm of legend and myth -
history be damned. But what is Jackson really after? He wants nothing less
than the souls of the millennial audience. As the ending of The Fellowship
of the Ring predicts, the true struggle between good and evil will
continue.
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