| Monday, September 30, 2002 |
16:09 - The Two Trailers
http://www.aintitcoolnews.com/display.cgi?id=13411
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Well, it's out: the full-length Two Towers trailer. And man, does it ever rock.
This link goes to AintItCoolNews.com and their link to a couple of Real versions (advertised there in some quite amusing editorializing as being of fairly poor quality) and a low-res QuickTime version that's purportedly still better than the Real ones.
Having watched the QT version, I can definitely say that my fannish interest is thoroughly piqued. The new characters (Éomer, Théoden, the Wargs, the Oliphaunt, and so on) are spot-on. The scenery is if anything more true to the books than the scenery in the first movie. And the plot, which we've all been speculating will contain a lot more love-interest stuff between Aragorn, Éowyn, and Arwen, appears to be bearing out that speculation just fine-- a bunch of shots in the trailer keep jumping back to Elrond and how he's emptying Rivendell as the end of the Age draws near, and he's admonishing Arwen that her time in Middle-Earth is limited as well. None of this stuff was in the book, but its inclusion here is going to flesh out the human (as it were) aspects of the story so much better than even Tolkien had in mind. (Aragorn's sword, Andúril, was reforged in Rivendell at the setting-out of the Fellowship in the book, but that plot point never appeared in the movie-- presumably because it's all going to be integrated into the newly enriched Arwen subplot in the second movie.)
I continue to marvel at how Peter Jackson is able to construct completely new dialogue that, while it never appeared in Tolkien's text, manages to perfectly complement the story and the characters who speak it. Éomer's "Look for your friends, but trust not to hope-- it has forsaken these lands" is as gold as Gandalf's first line in the first movie ("A wizard is never late, Frodo Baggins-- nor is he early. He arrives precisely when he means to"). Same with the exchange in the Emyn Muil in the trailer: "I don't think Gandalf meant for us to come this way." "Gandalf didn't mean for a lot of things to happen."
This is a movie about a world gathering for war, and naturally it's plenty applicable to these times. I don't know if anybody will be able to do much in the way of plausible allegory when analyzing the movie in the context of the WOT, as they no doubt will in the academic review circles. This story was written when the world was at war, but at a time when the "enemy" was all too domestic-- it was Europeans, the ancient near-relations of Tolkien's British heritage, who were suddenly locked into a terrifying battle for supremacy that sucked in the entire world. The spectre of "evil" had settled in to roost right there in the most "civilized" part of the world-- the richest countries, the proudest peoples, the teeth-gritted remnants of the 19th-century empires that had inherited the reverberations from the discovery of the New World and never yet seen them fully settle down. It wasn't until after WWII that the world fully moved past the Era of Discovery and took stock of the new nature of things.
But today's war is just as much fundamentally different as it is the same old damn thing. This time it's with a people and a mindset that we just don't seem able to relate to in anything like the same way as the British could see themselves relating to the Germans. They were old rivals, old friends, old enemies. They'd shared a common history. They'd all come from Rome and from the Teutons and from the Vikings. It was all the same people, and suddenly they'd found the pendulum of swaying popular thought had swung so far to the side that they couldn't get things back in order without war. I suspect that to the British, while they saw it as their duty to defeat the Germans for their clear transgressions of the limits of human decency, the act wasn't without its tragic pity-- how shameful that it's come to this. Why, Germany, I knew ya back in the day. This is what you've become, is it? Right, old boy-- for old time's sake. Have at ya, then.
If that's what Tolkien had in mind when he wrote of the Orcs and Mordor, it's all the more bracing to consider his concept of the Orcs and the Elves being congenitally related. If he was thinking of Hitler when he wrote of Sauron, he clearly did have a concept of "evil" as a floating black cloud that-- as Spalding Gray said-- moves slowly around the world, from time to time coming to rest in Japan... Vietnam... Cambodia... Indonesia... North Korea... Russia... Afghanistan... Saudi Arabia... Iran... Iraq... Germany... America.
Will it be applicable? Will people find it so? Very possibly. Maybe it's not so far-fetched as all that, to think that people will be able to apply TTT any way they like to the current situation in the world. Some will treat it as Gray did, in which any good people can go bad, and any good leader can become Hitler. But others will see it as pure Good and Evil, the righteous versus the profane, God versus the Devil. As with most fantasy, LotR's world is only "religious" in the sense that the supernatural is an everyday matter-- there's no "believers" and "nonbelievers". There are the cynical, and there are wrong sides to choose, and there is the motivation of power as well as that of righteous defense. But the issues we face today-- secularity vs. theocracy, and the racial-purity question that was so central to WWII but which gets mercifully little attention paid to its centrality to Middle-Earth-- just don't work in the context of Tolkien's world.
But this is going to be a movie about war, nonetheless; and righteous war, at that, a war that no viewers are going to step back and clear their throats at, saying, "Hey, wait a minute, we have no proof that Sauron actually has weapons of mass destruction. Can't we just impose some sanctions on Mordor or something?" Ain't gonna happen. Maybe seeing TTT will shock the public into a different mindset, one in which war doesn't seem so much like a political maneuver, but rather a duty necessary for survival. Or maybe the public will dismiss it as pap that distracts us from the real multifaceted issues of the real-life prospects that we face.
All things considered, TTT (and LotR as a whole) speak to the rebel: the righteous warrior with a few staunch friends who stand against an impossibly huge, anonymous tide. Al Qaeda and Arafat might well watch TTT with glee, identifying themselves with Aragorn and Legolas and Gimli. It would certainly fit the model better than us in our comfortable theaters, using the movie as escapism not from mortars and car bombs, but from drudgerous work and onerous school and nagging spouses.
But we're the target audience anyway: the literate Western thinkers who love Teutonic and Greek and English mythology, who find joy in a pun or a linguistic joke, who find Thor and Odin more romantic than Jesus and the Pope. This is our mythology, the story that defines our world. Even if its ideals can't be made to fit our own worldview, it's still a beloved story.
It's fantasy. It's not allegory. Any attempt to make it so will ruin it. Or at least, that's what I think.
I can't wait.
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