Freckles & Doubt

I went back to work yesterday, after three weeks of holiday¹, and more or less as a last desperate splurge before going back to work I gave myself a slightly mad Tuesday during which I saw two movies in actual cinemas and everything. The first was by cunning plan, viz. braving the holiday crowds for a morning show at the mall to see The Hobbit: Desolation of Smaug, which I have unaccountably missed seeing earlier. The second was a random last-minute invitation from Pam & Lloyd to see Gravity with them, which was a splendid idea.



I have a sort of sneaking feeling that I shouldn't really have enjoyed Desolation of Smaug as much as I did. I didn't adore the film utterly, but it was fun, and full of hot dwarves and beautiful landscapes and Martin Freeman being endearing. Even so I'm faintly surprised that its adaptation choices didn't nark me off more than they did. There's some odd stuff going on there, a weird Jacksonesque abandonment of perfectly cinematic bits of the book (the staggered introduction to Beorn, for example. I was looking forward to that. They didn't do it. Phooey. And Beorn himself was simply lame.) in favour of brand new sequences which don't seem to serve any particular purpose (like Thorin and the lads scurrying frantically around dwarven forges for no other reason than because the director wanted an action bit right there.) And the spider battle was frankly pedestrian. I loved Smaug, visually and particularly his voice, although it's effects-ridden enough that it doesn't really sound like the actor (a pity because Benedict Cumberbatch's voice). The dwarven halls of the Lonely Mountain are spectacular. I really didn't have a problem with the introduction of Legolas, it gives a face to all the anonymous wood elves. Nor did I balk at the, hooray!, actual female character such as Tolkien didn't include at all in the novel. Tauriel was pleasingly kick-butt and it's just a pity that her potentially gender-corrective presence was utterly undercut by her immediately being slapped into a love triangle. Because clearly female characters can efficiently kill orcs all they like, they are nonetheless incomplete without a sexual function. Jackson and Stephen bloody Moffat are of the same casually sexist ilk. (Also, is it just me, or are Elven/dwarven relationships simply weird?)

Despite all the whinging above, it's weird that I probably enjoy the film because of its departures from the original, not in spite of them. As with the first film, I love the expansion of the story, the filling in of the blanks - the sense that Bilbo's journey fits into a broader tapestry of history and meaning and plot, with Galadriel and the Necromancer and all - not just the whole world, but Jackson's particular vision of it. Middle-Earth is so huge and rich, the kiddied-down version of it we see in The Hobbit is a glimpse in a tiny mirror, and it's lovely to feel the vistas opening up. I applaud Jackson's vision, even as I wish the result had been slightly less ham-fisted and self-indulgent and, even, thoughtless at times. The project deserves a better execution.



I am kicking myself that I left it too late to see Gravity in 3D, which I believe was spectacular. Even on the Labia's smaller screen and with their scratchy sound it's a phenomenal film, a virtuoso manipulation of tension, narrow focus and narrative control - such a simple, stripped-down plot to be so utterly engaging. It manages to be beautiful at the same time as it's gritty and real, with that minimalism of image and character despite the vastness of its backdrop. I loved the absolute absence of the kind of cuts to flashbacks on Earth which a more popular sort of film would infallibly have interspersed with the references made by characters to events in their past. Those actors had a hell of a task, to establish and maintain their characters with so little to play off. But they are amazing actors doing an amazing job of a highly skilled script, with jaw-dropping special effects that enhance rather than replacing the significance of the characters. The conveniently adjacent space stations all in the same orbit were a bit of a stretch, but the film-makers seem to have done their damnedest to actually replicate the physics of movement in space and the contemporary technology of the station and capsules. Science fiction at its best, if you accept the broadest definition of sf as fiction which is intrinsically about humanity's engagement with technological advancement, although of course strawberryfrog's point is valid, that from another angle Gravity isn't sf at all, but the purest contemporary realism. Bugger that. This is the sort of story sf should be telling, and I claim it with pride.

Subject line is from the dwarves' song in The Hobbit, of course - book version, not film. Film is the craft of light. I'm not sure Jackson is good at dwarves, actually: they're too bloody rude and slap-stick, even if the theme of greed and corruption is being nicely developed in Thorin. Dwarven dignity should not turn on and off like a tap.

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¹   In the exact opposite of celebration of my return to work, a random selection of my muscles have seized solid and my sleep patterns have been shot to hell for two nights. Last night I dreamed Moriarty turned me into a deer because of my refusal to assist in his nefarious criminal activities, resulting in my rude awakening at 5am this morning as I fled through the forests with his pack of werewolves at my heels. Hooves. Whatever. I need a new job.

Say what you will about Tolkien (I'm looking at you, China Miéville), his worlds do fill your headspace. Having re-watched the LotR films and re-read the books, and The Hobbit, and some random stuff from Unfinished Tales and things, over the last few weeks, I can certainly testify to that: I've pretty much been in Middle-Earth for the last month. It's a nice place to be, even if what you're mostly doing is mentally filling in the gaps and silences in the work. (Am I alone in darkly suspecting that Elven sex, such as Tolkien pretends doesn't actually exist, is probably inventively kinky? You live forever, you have to get horribly bored with missionary. Elven sex toys are probably works of extremely dodgy art. Also, both Denethor and Boromir were absolutely and definitely gay. One of the appendices refers to Boromir as being no lover of women, and talks about Denethor loving his wife as much as he was capable of. Hah. The family dynamics of that particularly fucked-up family suddenly become very clear. Poor Faramir.)

But I digress. What's really been hitting me forcefully, particularly after re-reading The Hobbit, is a funny sort of issue of world-building. Tolkien is supposed to be the ultimate world-builder, the man who's lovingly created the full histories and languages and mythology to support his fantasy realm. But he's really oddly unconcerned with a particular aspect of world-building which I can only think of as technological. His various civilisations exist cheek-by-jowl geographically, but actually represent separate stages over about five hundred year's worth of technological development, all mish-mashed together and apparently failing to affect each other at all.

We start out with the Shire, which is really the identification point for the reader. Hobbits live in a sort of idyllic middle-class pastoral haze, whose agricultural lifestyle is simultaneously primitive and comfortable. They have, for example, clocks and umbrellas and pocket-handkerchiefs. I bet you anything you like that they have indoor plumbing. Their gadget-level is approximately seventeenth century at the earliest, as are many of their rituals (tea-drinking, for example, or eggs and bacon for breakfast). This all makes perfect narrative sense, as they represent the quiet, normal, everyday existence against which all the high heroics are going to be contrasted. (They are also partially defined by the children's-story vibe of The Hobbit, and the tone of their doings shifts weirdly in and out of domestic fantasy and high epic across LotR).

But they make absolutely no technological sense at all. The next main civilisation encountered by Frodo et al (apart from Elves, who make even less sense) is Rohan. The Riders of Rohan are, in feel and language, Anglo-Saxonish; they're approximately eleventh century, I'd say, in civilisation and lifestyle. Their traditions seem to be oral and sung, and Meduseld is only a few steps up from a Viking hall. The Rohirrim drink mead and eat bread and chunks of meat; no afternoon tea here. They're a good five hundred years behind the Hobbits. But their nearest neighbours, and the civilisation they most interact with, is Gondor, which is the remnant of the noble Numenor, absolutely the last word in civilisation in Middle-Earth. Even in a fallen state Gondor has highly-developed architecture, more sophisticated armour, a tradition of written learning, and a complicated administrative system with codified laws. Denethor's guests are served wine and cakes, not mead and bread. Nonetheless, I'd define its level of functioning as an idealised high medieval, probably around fifteenth century at most.

So you have to ask what the hell happened here, historically. The hobbits have been sitting fatly in the Shire for umpteen generations, having very little in the way of wars or other contact with the outside world. (The Hobbit is interesting because it posits Dwarves moving freely through the Shire, but the commonplace of their presence has completely vanished by the time Tolkien writes LotR). Hobbits may have inherited something of Numenorean techology, but if Gondor has relapsed from that point, they should have relapsed even further; they've had nothing in the way of stress, war or challenge to kick-start any sort of technological advancement. They should not, in short, have umbrellas and clocks. You can argue that the Dwarves give them those sorts of gadgets, but that's not how Tolkien dwarves roll: they're about as high-medieval as Gondor, with a touch more Wagner.

And I'm not even getting into Elves. Elves lead that kind of mystic, elevated, idealistically pure existence which is all about beauty and miminalist requirements and Tolkien's need to reject metal and machinery other than Bilbo's clock. Elves make me think of Eloi: there has to be a huge, complicated mechanism churning away under that society to make it work at all. A few Elven smiths dicking around with forging rings really doesn't cut it. You're forced to do what Tolkien did, which is to mentally sub "magic" in as the unexamined, catch-all motivating force, and it's bloody unsatisfying.

But, of course, in many ways it's futile and pointless for me to try and apply this kind of world-building rigour to Middle-Earth at all. Tolkien's world-building is all in terms of language and mythology, not science and development; he recreates these particular historical periods not because they make any sense in a larger idea of Middle-Earthian history, but because those are the moods and tones and settings that his story demands. It's about narrative identification, not technological. In a lot of ways the middle-class comfort of the hobbits is completely out of place in a high-medieval heroic tale, included for contrast, not because a world could actually work like that. The story works brilliantly. The world doesn't. On average, he's still seriously ahead.

Curse you, Peter Jackson! You have ruined us, ruined us, for all post-LotR cinematic fantasy. Prince Caspian, like the earlier The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is not a bad little film¹, but it didn't blow the top off my head and fill it with trees, mountains, creatures, swords, epic battles and dishy men², and now I'm all spoiled and think it should. ( Further random analysis follows. )

¹ Although I don't actually think it qualifies as a good little film, either. Perhaps we should stick with "little film".

² It does fill it with dishy boys, but I'm getting a bit old for that.
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