World Fantasy Awards and Jackson's Middle Earth

[deborahjross]

First and foremost, congratulations to the winners of the World Fantasy Award, and also to the finalists. Many splendid creations here.

Now this post will veer off in a highly personal direction, applying to no one but myself. I have read one of the winners and when I saw the title, I felt a little sick. Do not get me wrong -- the work absolutely deserved the award. It was highly original and superbly executed, a stellar addition to the field.

And it gave the the absolute shakes. There's no way I can see myself ever reading it again. Our local library got my copy.

I've talked with folks who write and love horror about my aversion to it, and I appreciate their point that horror gives us a way of regaining power over the things that terrify us. Once upon a time, I got a delicious thrill out of that adrenaline jolt and the weird, fascinating dark stuff. I don't anymore. I think my threshold has been permanently re-set, and the consequences of exceeding it are more tenacious.

So why am I not pushed over that edge by the violence in the Peter Jackson Middle Earth films? There's plenty of excitement and twenty ways to kill an orc, each sillier and bloodier than the one before, and characters I love in dire peril. Is it the fantastical setting? The characters, even nonhumans like Elves and Dwarves, don't feel unreal. Is it the knowledge that all will be well in the end, or as well as can be, given the price various characters play? I still cry at Boromir's death -- he didn't have a happy ending.

And yet, as I wrote in an earlier, watching the films, with all their flaws -- and also reading the books, albeit less vividly -- leaves me with a feeling of peace. Emotionally wrung-out, but brought to a good place by all the adventures I've gone along on.

Truly, we each see and read a different story. They are all colored by what we as individuals bring to them.

Comments

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

It's sort of the same for me with the book LOTR-- Shelob, the paths of the dead, the dead marshes, and the Nazgul should be horror elements, but somehow, emotionally speaking, they aren't horror.

[deborahjross.livejournal.com]

In some ways I found the books spookier than the movies, although the movies were more exciting. I suspect this is because of the way the imagination fleshes out the words on the page.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

LOTR doesn't register as horror as a movie, any more than the book does, for me either. I've rarely seen horror movies, and when I have I've been struck by an exceedingly exaggerated affect that Jackson, who in this film at least is merely out to scare you, doesn't even approach. With true horror films, "scary" doesn't even begin to describe it.

The difference for me between book and movie in this area is a related but distinct matter. Tolkien loves Elves and treats them with care and some of his finest prose - a real accomplishment when you consider that writing of simple beauty and passivity is one of the hardest things in fiction to do well. Whereas he's not very interested in orcs - even in the Ugluk/Grishnakh scenes, which have some real characterization (Shagrat and Gorbag do not), they sound, as one critic put it, like stereotyped British burglars with bags marked SWAG.

Jackson, by contrast, is really interested in orcs and puts all his richest imagination at work on them, but he doesn't get Elves at all. His scenes of Elvish beauty (like Bilbo wandering around Rivendell in the extended Hobbit, which I saw clipped in a put-down video) feel like a man who doesn't like art peering at an art museum because he thinks he should, and the transformation of Galadriel is one of the worst movie sfx scenes of recent decades. My joke is that Jackson read the description of Galadriel as "beautiful and terrible" and followed the common modern meaning of "terrible", because terrible it is!

I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that those who found Jackson's Elves successful are letting their memory of the book overlay the movie. I wish I could do that.

[deborahjross.livejournal.com]

I think it's as hard to force oneself to love something by an act of will as it is the reverse. Does it seem to you that folks like or dislike the Jackson films with unusual passion? Maybe because the books were such icons to fandom, and everyone had strong opinions about how they should be translated into film?

The important thing is that both camps find much of beauty and meaning in their preferred version of these stories. I'm so glad the books speak so deeply to you! I know folks -- non-genre readers -- who never make that connection, which strikes me as sad.