A baker’s dozen short
On “The Hobbit,” dwarves and why Peter Jackson is right to deviate from Tolkien’s classic
As a fan of literature, I rarely root for a film adaptation to make wholesale changes to a beloved book. And yet strangely, for among my most-beloved books, those of J.R.R. Tolkien, I’m in the position cheering for major changes to plot, theme and tone in the upcoming adaptations of “The Hobbit.”
I was a huge fan of Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings,” both books and movies. Peter Jackson’s movies took a lot of liberties with the books, generally focusing more on action than the often meandering travelogue of Tolkien’s prose, and cutting out sequences both extraneous (Tom Bombadil) and cool but probably unworkable (the Scourging of the Shire). Characters were tweaked and plots rearranged, with battle sequences extended far beyond Tolkien’s brief descriptions and characters given extra adventures and conflict.
While some purists complained, I largely didn’t mind. For the better part of four years I obsessed over the films, tracking news as they were shot and produced and then watching them multiple times, in theaters and on DVD, after release.
But anyone who thought Peter Jackson’s adaptation of “The Lord of the Rings” played fast and loose with the original had better hurry up and hook up a dynamo in Wolvercote Cemetery, because Professor Tolkien is about to be spinning madly in his grave.
“The Hobbit,” Tolkien’s first novel, was written as a children’s story, and it shows. For most of the book, the tone is light and fanciful, with the main characters bickering and singing and getting into trouble and out again without much more to show from it than a little discomfort. Tricks solve most of the obstacles the titular hobbit Bilbo Baggins and his companions face, not force of arms, and all the main characters except Gandalf are marked by varying degrees of folly.
When “The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey” arrives in theaters in December 2012, viewers will not see a film for children. Instead, they’re likely to see something more akin to the adult “Lord of the Rings” movies Jackson directed a decade ago. Compared to the novel, the tone will be grittier and the action more violent. Moreover, massive sections of plot not in the novels will make up the film, filling in the gaps around the adventure wherein Bilbo Baggins finds a magical ring and a dragon’s treasure. In the book, the wizard Gandalf disappears for long chunks of the novel, pursuing other schemes; we readers only learn what he’s up to at the very end of the book. In films, Jackson will reportedly cut back and forth, showing the struggle of Gandalf and others against the Necromancer of Mirkwood while Bilbo and his companions trudge east towards the Lonely Mountain. (This is why “The Hobbit” is going to be two movies, not one.)
I don’t mind this. It’s a little disappointing that the production of “The Hobbit” won’t be the great children’s movie it could be, but in doing so I fully expect Jackson to produce a worthy companion to his epic “Lord of the Rings.”
Earlier this year, I wasn’t so sure.
In my mind, the biggest unknown — and biggest concern — about Jackson’s “Hobbit” adaptation was how he would handle the characters who set off with Bilbo on the quest to slay the dragon Smaug: 13 dwarves.
This was cause for concern for a number of reasons. For one, simple logistics. Thirteen is a LOT of characters to introduce and develop. I knew Tolkien novices who couldn’t keep the nine members of the Fellowship of the Ring straight, and they were all different shapes and sizes — dwarves, elves, hobbits, humans, and wizards.
The company of Thorin Oakenshield are all dwarves. That means they’re all short, stocky and bearded, generally hard-working but proud. Even in the novel, Tolkien didn’t spend a lot of time giving the dwarves individual personalities. There was Thorin, the leader (and most competent); Bombur, the fat dwarf; Balin, the kindly, older dwarf; Fili and Kili, the younger dwarves — and then they start to blend together.
That worked in a children’s book. But in a movie that’s ostensibly a prequel to the epic “Lord of the Rings” trilogy, the dwarves would swiftly become a laughingstock. The dwarves will provide plenty of comedy, that’s for sure — much of it is written into the plot, and in the Lord of the Rings Jackson used the dwarf Gimli as his go-to comic relief source. Comedy, though, can’t be their raison-d’être.
And I wasn’t certain that Peter Jackson would successfully steer the dwarves away from comic relief. That was my second concern — Jackson’s increasing misuse of the dwarf Gimli in the Lord of the Rings. In the first Lord of the Rings movie, Gimli provided some laughs by virtue of his fierce pride. But over the next two films, that pride slowly became less noble and more clownish, as Gimli has Aragorn toss him into battle, hops up and down because he can’t see over the Helm’s Deep battlements, and (worst of all!) loses a drinking contest to Legolas, the graceful elf warrior to whom Gimli was increasingly relegated to being a foil.
This galled me because as a fantasy reader I’ve always been a fan of dwarves. This was and is distinctly a minority opinion — by far the most popular fantasy race are the elves. Graceful, beautiful, intelligent, skilled craftspeople and artists, lovers and defenders of nature, it’s no wonder so many fantasy fans love elves. (Just look at Tolkien. The great philologist invented two distinct elven languages, but didn’t even fully flesh out his one dwarven tongue.) Dwarves, in contrast, are stubborn, gruff, hand-working, greedy, insular, clannish, and prone to being the architects of their own destruction. (Dwarves ALWAYS delve too deep…) Instead of living in verdant forests, they carve out their homes in caves. And then there’s the beards — dwarves all have them.* Things may have been different in the mid-19th Century, but this day and age, people consistently express aesthetic preference for clean-shaven men.
*All dwarf men have them, at any rate. The question of dwarf women is one that fantasy world-builders can’t agree on. In some versions, dwarf women are bearded just like the men. In others, dwarves share the human trait of women not growing facial hair. In either case, it’s rarely an issue because of all the fantasy races, dwarves are the most male-centric in their portrayal. This is one of the less attractive aspects of dwarves.
Elves are perfect. Dwarves decidedly imperfect. It seems no contest.
And yet, it’s the imperfections that make them so compelling. Angels are boring; watching people with flaws, who make bad decisions, is where real drama comes in. Dwarves make incredible things — whole cities carved out of the insides of mountains, weapons and crafts of surpassing beauty, mines tunneling deep into the earth with medieval technology. But in true dramatic fashion, it’s their very greatest gifts that prove their downfall. The accumulated wealth from dwarf craftsmanship lures raiders, none deadlier than the great dragons who, like Smaug of “The Hobbit,” pillage dwarf strongholds and seize their treasure. And their deep mines awake fell powers like Moria’s Balrog, which rise up from the depths to wreak havoc. Even in the best case scenario, when the dwarves don’t die, they inevitably turn inward and cut their underground cities off from the rest of the world.
I once heard a shorthand description of the classical genres of comedy and drama. In a comedy, everyone gets married at the end. In a drama, everyone dies at the end. (Which you laugh at more is a matter of taste…) Well, in this sense, elves are comedy. Dwarves are drama. The elves fall in love and have parties and eventually get bored and sail off into the sunset. Dwarves all die, or bury themselves in the earth — cursed from the start by the very things that make them distinct.
A monument to this conception of dwarves is the esoteric computer game Dwarf Fortress. This is a simulation game where you control a colony of dwarves and guide them to carve out a city from the mountains, mine for precious materials, and fight off enemies from goblins to dragons. The game is infamous for having perhaps the steepest learning curve ever — what passes for graphics in Dwarf Fortress are simply ASCII characters spilling over the page, like the screen of text from “The Matrix.” But like “The Matrix,” if you stare at the text long enough, the jumble of symbols begins to take on meaning — this letter “d” is a dog, that solid tan block is a rock wall, that cross is a gate. It’s not a game for the faint of heart. (For a look at the game and the philosophy behind it, read this New York Times Magazine article.)
The second thing Dwarf Fortress is infamous for is its difficulty curve. Most computer games you play to win. In Dwarf Fortress, that’s not going to happen. In true dwarven fashion, every dwarf fortress inevitably collapses. If dragons or demons from the deeps or orcish armies don’t crush the fortress, the ordinary feuds and conflicts of your growing society will lead to civil war, or your population will outstrip its food supply and mass famine sets in. The game’s unofficial motto is “Losing is fun” — you’re going to lose, so you might as well lose amusingly.
Fans of the game have posted all sorts of recaps and summaries of their adventures that capture this spirit. For an accessible look at the spirit of the game, take a look at Bronzemurder, a dwarf city that an artist illustrated so you don’t have to pore through the Matrix to follow along. The basic story of Bronzemurder is a small, thriving fortress gets slaughtered in a comedy of errors by a slumbering monster awoken by an engineering flaw in the fortress’ water pump system. It’s tragic and morbidly hilarious and even a little uplifting at the same time — and that’s what dwarves are about.
But is the same filmmaker who brought us Gimli the clown going to capture that spirit when tasked with an adventuring party of 13 dwarves? I didn’t think so until Jackson released pictures of his dwarf characters to the world this summer:
The twelve supporting dwarf characters from Peter Jackson's upcoming "The Hobbit" films. Image from http://www.geektown.co.uk/2011/07/16/see-12-dwarves-from-the-hobbit/.
The first thing that does is satisfy my worry about the dwarves being distinguished. Yes, plenty of people will still have trouble keeping them straight because there’s a lot of them. But this isn’t going to be 13 Gimli clones wandering around. You’ve got dwarves with axes, dwarves with hammers, dwarves with swords and dwarves with polearms. Some are fat, some are thin. Some old, some young. Some have a working class demeanor, others a noble bearing. Some have long, flowing beards, others neatly trimmed beards or goatees. (One appears to just have a five-o’clock-shadow, which I’m not the biggest fan of, but whatever.) Just from the visual design, their character traits come through — this one is bookish and shy, that one old and wise, this one a badass warrior, that one a slightly odd duck.
And that more or less allays my secondary concern. From this one photo, you’ve got more thought put into character background than Gimli got in three whole films. These are characters with history, with personalities. You’ve got, in other words, great building blocks for a movie in these characters. Now, the script could do great things with them, or mediocre. But Peter Jackson is starting in the right spot, and it’s a lot harder to end up in the wrong spot with a good start. He had to deviate from Tolkien to get there, but seeing these images makes me confident that “The Hobbit” will live up to the spirit of the Lord of the Rings movies I love so much.
The first “Hobbit” movie will be released in December 2012. The first trailer for the movie premieres in from of the Jackson-produced “The Adventures of Tintin” tomorrow.
Monday night miscellany, part 4
In which I really mean it when I say I’m going to be (relatively) brief:
— As a left-handed person, I was morbidly fascinated to see a throwaway paragraph in a review of a book on left-handedness with a theory on the origins of the southpaw-dom that I hadn’t heard before. There are, researchers say, odd connections between left-handedness and twins:
Not only is left-handedness twice as common among twins as among regular siblings, but left-handers are twice as likely as right-handers to produce twins.This eerie link lies at the heart of another modern theory: … that “being a monozygotic [from the same zygote, or "identical"] twin is a precondition of being left-handed.” In other words, only someone who has had a twin in utero can be truly left-handed. The twins are mirror images of one another; one is left-handed, and the other right-handed. Of course, left-handedness doesn’t require that one ultimately be born with a twin. If only one fetus results at the end of term, that means the other died in the womb and was absorbed by the mother: a “vanishing twin.”
In other words, if you’re a lefty and don’t have a twin, it means you DID in the womb — but your twin embryo didn’t make it. Plenty of fertilized embryos don’t make it through the early stages of pregnancy, for whatever reasons, though scientists don’t know exactly how common this is. As the book (summarized by the reviewer) notes, there’s major reasons to doubt this hypothesis and a very real lack of evidence to back it up.
But in the absence of conclusive evidence one way or the other, I may run with this: being a lefty means I had an identical twin for a few days or weeks until he fell off the mortal coil. OR WAS PUSHED… (Hat tip to Andrew Sullivan.)
Monday night miscellany, part 3
Short thoughts (EDIT: after finishing, I can say my expectation of brevity was clearly unfounded) on interesting things:
— Many people, when I tell them where I went to college while making small talk, immediately ask the same follow-up: “Oh, and you majored in journalism at Grinnell?” Well, no, actually, I didn’t. Grinnell, as it happens, doesn’t offer a journalism program. It doesn’t even offer any classes in journalism. My education in being reporter came from throwing myself headlong into the student newspaper (one year as a writer, three as an editor) and then taking internships in the summer. Did my lack of a journalism degree impede my search for a job out of college? Perhaps a few hiring editors shuffled my resume into the “no” pile using “journalism degree?” as a filter, but enough didn’t that I got a second look. My clips and an interview made it clear that I knew what I was doing, or as much as a typical recent graduate does, and I got a job.
Moreover, when I speculate about the sometimes-dismal state of our industry, I’m never terribly worried. Even were I to end up unable to find a reporting job, I’m sure I could find a job someplace. I majored in political science, but the real skills I came away from Grinnell with were thinking and writing quickly and clearly. Those skills can take you a long way in a wide variety of fields.
I indulge in this tangent by way of introduction to an interesting article from Josh Barro in the National Review. Responding to a writer making a defense of classics majors who writes, “students of Arts and Letters do get hired, and they do go on to better jobs as they gain experience,” Barro agrees — to a point:
This is reasonable advice for students at certain colleges–highly selective ones–but is bad advice for the general public. Only if you’re at a top 10 or 20 school do you have the luxury of picking a major that does (not) give you job-specific skills and still being confident that you will find a good job after graduation.
Hollywood’s Rule of Pairs
Anyone watching the recent glut of sequels and remakes pouring out of Hollywood lately doesn’t need to be reminded that the movie-making capital of the country is sometimes a little starved of original movie ideas. It’s so bad that the rare idea gets immediately snapped up — snapped up, I’ve observed, by more than one studio.
It’s what I call the “Rule of Pairs.” Inevitably, Hollywood will take two bites at the same apple if it looks good enough.
I think I first noticed the Rule in 1998, when “Deep Impact” and “Armaggedon” hit theaters within months of each other, both about giant space rocks on collision courses with Earth. That same year, Pixar’s “A Bug’s Life” and Dreamworks’ “Antz” were each released, both computer-animated films about insects.
In 2001 Hollywood made the move into epic fantasy with two simultaneous franchises: “The Lord of the Rings” and “Harry Potter.” In 2004 the ancient Greeks were on the menu, with “Alexander” and “Troy.” Flash forward a few years and there were two movies about, of all things, author Truman Capote (“Capote” and “Infamous”).
What’s in a league?
Major League Baseball is currently discussing the contentious issue of “realignment” — whether to change the current alignment of teams into two leagues with three divisions each. It’s a debate with significant implications. In addition to the American League having the Designated Hitter while the National League makes pitchers bat, teams play their divisional cohorts more frequently. This means that a team in a tough division, like the AL East, might have a tougher time making the playoffs than a team in a weaker division, which in recent years has usually been one of the Central or West divisions.
The current thinking appears to be to move the Houston Astros from the NL Central to the AL West, giving 15 teams in each league and balancing out the current alignments where the NL Central has six teams and the AL West four, with every other division having five teams. Under this schema, there would essentially be interleague play every day, rather than it being a feature of a few summer weeks like it is now.
I’m here to say, half-seriously, that MLB should think bolder: Throw out the baby with the bathwater, recognize that some of the game’s historical relics like leagues have no functional purpose, and take advantage of the clean slate to come up with a more coherent system than the one that has a team in Dallas playing an eighth of its games against a team in Seattle, 1,670 miles away.
Movie review: “Contagion”
The title of the 2011 movie “Contagion” refers to the deadly infectious disease sweeping over the world that drives its plot — but also to the social contagion that spreads even farther and faster than the killer virus.
In fact, it’s this second aspect of “Contagion” that’s by far the most interesting. As an enemy, the virus is about as inhuman as you can get — it infects you, or it doesn’t. People with the virus die, or they don’t. Treatment appears to be largely ineffective — the drive of the movie’s plot is towards finding a vaccine to prevent transmission of the MEV-1 virus, not finding a way to keep people with the virus alive.
But the world’s population who are not infected still have to survive until they can be inoculated. And for many, the social contagion proves a more immediate danger than the actual virus.
Get off the reading rainbow?
It’s never an easy thing to hear someone suggest that something you love and value isn’t actually worth very much. But that’s the experience I had reading the most provocative article I’ve seen in some time, Marshall Poe’s “Death to the Reading Class.”
By way of background, if any word can be said to describe me, it would be reader. I learned to read very early, before starting kindergarten, and read heavily throughout childhood. While much of my reading then was mass market fiction rather than “Great Books” or interesting nonfiction, I still probably could have been characterized the heaviest reader in any school I went to. I read after school, before school, and during school — and not just in recess, to the eternal frustration of my teachers. I would rush through my assignments as fast as possible to pick up a book again.
Monday night miscellany, part 2
More spare thoughts from a day off work:
— I don’t own any iOS devices (an interesting subject worthy of another post given my general appreciation for Apple products) but that doesn’t mean I’m not fascinated by the implications of the new Siri software Apple included with the latest version of its iPhone. The witty responses Apple has built in to its digital “personal assistant” are well worth all the tumblrs that have sprung up to chronicle them (my favorite, though it’s hard to choose). But Wired takes a look at the bigger question: does a computer system capable of parsing speech and providing appropriate responses to millions of potential questions and statements could as genuine artificial intelligence?
“Arrested Development” fans protest series changes
Fans of the cult classic television show “Arrested Development” went from ecstasy to agony Monday when series creator Mitch Hurwitz announced the revived show would have some significant changes from the original version many people came to love.
Among the changes for the upcoming TV season and movie include a laugh track, the addition of a new, computer-animated character, and a political subplot where eldest Bluth son Gob tries to persuade the U.S. Senate to get the American Federation of Trade to lift an embargo on Iraq.
“Arrested Development was a classic for its time, but technology has advanced since then and it’s time to take full advantage of what’s out there,” Hurwitz said. “This is the version of Arrested Development I always wanted to make but was never able to.”
Particularly galling for fans is the decision to introduce the Loose Seal as a fully animated additional character to the show. The CGI character’s bumbling exploits are designed to create comedy, and to drive home the point Hurwitz gave the Seal a goofy accent from voice actor Ahmed Best.
Real road-tripping: Heartland loop
A month and a half ago, I posted a look at a hypothetical road-trip vacation. It was, I said, a replacement for going on an actual vacation, which costs money I would prefer not to spend.
Just kidding!
With a week of vacation to burn and both friends and family calling my name from around the country, I packed up my car, filled up the tank and set out to take a big loop around the American Heartland.
My destination was southern Texas, but I’d spend a lot more time going to and from the Lone Star State than actually staying there. At the end of the road in San Antonio were my aunt, uncle, and sole cousin not currently away at college, as well as other friends just up the road in Austin.
Along the way, I would shape my trip for convenience, to meet up with friends, to find good (and preferably free) places to sleep at night, to see interesting sights and take fantastic photos. Overall, while nothing on the trip stood head-and-shoulders above anything else, it was full of lots of nice, simple pleasures and didn’t end up costing me too much money.
Unlike my previous venture into deepest, darkest Canada, this was all familiar territory. I’ve visited every state on the trip before. So no long preamble about various things I’ve learned. Instead, straight into the trip!
Day 1: Rapid City, SD, to Denver, CO (395 miles, 7 hours)
After putting in a morning at the office, I hopped in the car shortly after noon for the first leg of my journey, to the Denver metropolis where a friend’s air mattress awaited. The roads were largely deserted (though I still went largely the speed limit, not wanting to blemish my trip with a ticket). Read the rest of this entry »
