Advanced search Subscribe to our newsletter and you'll continuously be informed about our new books, series and journals. You can customize this e-mail newsletter to your particular needs and interests. Newsletters include special discount codes. To subscribe or change existing preferences press the subscribe button	Series and Journals From Hobbits to Hollywood. Essays on Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings. MATHIJS, Ernest and Murray Pomerance (Eds.) Amsterdam/New York, NY, 2006, XVIII, 403 pp. Hb: 978-90-420-1682-8 / 90-420-1682-5 € 85 / US$ 115 Pb: 978-90-420-2062-7 / 90-420-2062-8 € 40 / US$ 54 Series: Contemporary Cinema 3 Peter Jackson’s film version of The Lord of the Rings (2001-2003) is the grandest achievement of 21st century cinema so far. But it is also linked to topical and social concerns including war, terrorism, and cultural imperialism. Its style, symbols, narrative, and structure seem always already linked to politics, cultural definition, problems of cinematic style, and the elemenal mythologies that most profoundly capture our imaginations. From Hobbits to Hollywood: Essays on Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings treats Jackson’s trilogy as having two conditions of existence: an aesthetic and a political. Like other cultural artefacts, it leads a double life as objet d’art and public statement about the world, so that nothing in it is ever just cinematically beautiful or tasteful, and nothing is ever just a message or an opinion. Written by leading scholars in the study of cinema and culture From Hobbits to Hollywood gives Jackson’s trilogy the fullest scholarly interrogation to date. Ranging from interpretations of The Lord of the Rings’ ideological and philosophical implications, through discussions of its changing fandoms and its incorporation into the Hollywood industry of stars, technology, genre, and merchandising, to considerations of CGI effects, acting, architecture and style, the essays contained here open a new vista of criticism and light, for ardent fans of J.R.R. Tolkien, followers of Jackson, and all those who yearn for a deeper appreciation of cinema and its relation to culture. Murray Pomerance is Professor in Sociology, Ryerson University (Canada) Ernest Mathijs is Assistant Professor of Film and Theatre Studies, University of British Columbia (Canada) Contents List of Illustrations Dramatis Personae Acknowledgments Contributor Ernest MATHIJS and Murray POMERANCE: Introduction: There and Back Again: An Editors ’ Tale Douglas KELLNER: The Lord of the Rings as Allegory: A Multiperspectivist Reading Ernest MATHIJS: The Lord of the Rings and Family: A View on Text and Reception Sean CUBITT: The Fading of the Elves: Eco-Catastrophe, Technopoly, and Bio-Security Martin BARKER: On Being a 1960s Tolkien Reader Ken GELDER: Epic Fantasy and Global Terrorism Ian CONRICH: A Land of Make Believe: Merchandising and Consumption of The Lord of the Rings Jennifer BRAYTON: Fic Frodo Slash Frodo: Fandoms and The Lord of the Rings Sarah KOZLOFF: The Lord of the Rings as Melodrama Lianne MCLARTY: Masculinity,Whiteness, and Social Class in The Lord of the Rings Steven WOODWARD and Kostis KOURELIS: Urban Legend: Architecture in The Lord of the Rings Tom CONLEY: The Lord of the Rings and The Fellowship of the Map James BUHLER: Enchantments of The Lord of the Rings: Soundtrack, Myth, Language, and Modernity Cynthia FUCHS: “Wicked,tricksy, false”: Race,Myth, and Gollum Ruth GOLDBERG and Krin GABBARD: “What does the Eye Demand ”: Sexuality, Forbidden Vision and Embodiment in The Lord of the Rings Kirsten Moana THOMPSON: Scale, Spectacle and Movement: Massive Software and Digital Special Effects in The Lord of The Rings Jerry MOSHER: Morphing Sean Astin: “Playing Fat ” in the Age of Digital Animation Tom GUNNING: Gollum and Golem: Special Effects and the Technology of Artificial Bodies Murray POMERANCE: The Laddy Vanishes Works Cited and Consulted Index ABSTRACTS Martin Barker (University of Wales, Aberystwyth: On Being A 1960s Tolkien Reader of the Lord of the Rings Films This essay will look at certain issues raised by the transformations between books and films of the Lord of the Rings. Most traditional studies of adaptations examine the relations between book ‘text’ and film ‘text’. Insightful as these can be, they bear the problems associated with textualism: among other things, a tendency to confuse adaptation (the necessary processes of shifting a narrative into a new medium) and transformation (the processes of selection and accentuation which constitute a particular new version of the story). I want to tackle the problem differently, by exploring The Lord of the Rings as film from the point of view of an understanding of the books generated by a 1960s ‘interpretive community’. The fact that this understanding is only partly recoverable is not as much of a problem as it might seem, since such communities exist in good measure in memory (and a sub-theme in the essay will be some considerations on the current status of this concept). I will make an argument that among the interpretive frames which greeted the books in the early days was one which emphasised the processes of ratiocination and decision-making which enabled the fight against Sauron – and that these, interestingly, are much harder to generate and sustain in the Jackson trilogy. I will identify and explore the moments in books and films which most reveal this shift in emphasis, and consider its significance. --- Tom Conley (Harvard University): Lords, Rings, Dungeons and Dragons The map-game that has consumed the energies of millions of teen-agers might be said to inspire much of The Lord of the Rings. The hypothesis of this study is that maps and mapping inhere in the visual and narrative form of the film that has won the spoils of the Oscars. The cartographic impulse that guides the film is one in which the map becomes a "place in which we get lost." The formula belongs to Michel de Certeau's study (in The Mystic Fable) of Hieronymus Bosch's "Garden of Earthly Delights," in which the reader proposes that a mystical voyage is one, paradoxially, where a subjects find themselves where they manage to lose their bearings. A tradition of the roman fleuve (e.g., D'Urfé's L'Astrée, 1606-26) confirms how cartographic fictions are engineered so that divagation and return are essential to inquiry and to discovery; yet, when the latter are unmoored geography becomes as much "mental" (or "cognitive") as a science of the physical world. The Lord of the Rings is a filmic variant of an embedded tradition that it mobilizes through special effects: it produces oneiric maps that combine locational imaging with the art of travel that we know through the courtly novel. The mix of electronic technology and of a more rudimentary mapping impulse seems generate the imaginary cartographies of this film. The essay will attempt to situate them in a context of geography and the psychology of displacement. --- Ian Conrich (University of Surrey, Roehampton): A Land of Make Believe: the Manufacturing and Marketing of The Lord of the Rings The phenomenal global reception of Peter Jackson's screen adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings cycle, is partly the result of the new film market's determination to maximise lucrative concepts. As with the Harry Potter and Star Wars series of children's film fantasies, there is a dependency on an existing popular appeal, character familiarisation, and the opportunities offered by heavily financed, digital effects driven, extended narratives for the creation of a film franchise. But there are other issues that have been central to Jackson's screen epic succeeding where Ralph Bakshi's 1978 quasi-animated film adaptation failed. Through a consideration of the production and post-production of Jackson's The Lord of the Rings it will be argued that the spectacularity and sublimeness of the New Zealand landscape, this Edenic garden, is being exploited; the local myth of the resourceful pioneer and enterprising craftsman harnessed to manufacture a fantasy of a folk culture; a distant country which is on the edge of the world cleverly manoeuvred, adjusted, into a believable Middle Earth through detailed mise en scene and post-production effects; and fans' insatiability for all things Tolkien neatly controlled through a heightened protection of production images and the steady release of executive and toy related products. In this land of make believe, Jackson, New Zealand's foremost film magician, has demonstrated that New Zealand is not just a pastoral paradise but a producer's paradise offering a diversity of effective screen locations. A 1999 Production Guide, published by Film New Zealand to attract and assist locally based filmmaking projects from overseas, carried the title 'The World in One Country'; following the beginning of the production of The Lord of the Rings a new campaign was launched which widened the location possibilities and equated New Zealand with Middle Earth. Here, the response to Jackson's adaptation will be considered to be as significantly local as it is global. Undoubtedly, the international fan base for The Lord of the Rings is huge, and the audience's reception of the film will be examined through promotions, the available merchandise, and letters to the popular press. Local issues will be addressed through the ways in which the New Zealand government - a minister for The Lord of the Rings was appointed to manage the film's impact - media, and the national population have embraced the film as distinctly Kiwi. --- Sean Cubitt (University of Waikato): The Fading of the Elves: Eco-catastrophe, Technophobia and Bio-Security (excerpt of finished essay) This essay is an attempt to trace some of the emergent properties of an ecological aesthetic in the first movie of Peter Jackson's trilogy, The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001). This new aesthetic is especially important for all of us who live in Aotearoa New Zealand, site of all the locations and most of the miniature and computer generated image (CGI) material in the film. Not only was Jackson's trilogy (with an estimated turnover of $US1 billion well over one per cent of the nation's GDP) an extraordinary achievement for an industry with basically a single product. It has also become totemic of the country's self-understanding as an environmental paradise kept free by sundering seas of the industrial and genetic pollution of Asia and the North Atlantic nations. The double naming of the country juxtaposes the geographical specificity of the ancient Maori name, 'Land of the Long White Cloud', and the colonist's passion for combining the old country (the rich agricultural lands of the Dutch maritime provinces of Abel Tasman's birth) with the indefinite expansionism of the New. There could be no more fitting home for a film which addresses with passion and intelligence the dialectics of home and exile, harmony and expropriation, the clean and the destructive than these islands born of the guerrilla victory of the Maori over the greatest army the world had ever known, and the treachery that stole their victory from them in the dishonoured Treaty of Waitangi. As the Treaty regains its status as the founding constitutional document of the nation, the dialectics of secular and sacred understandings of identity and land have become the cores of politics, economics and biculturalism, from the economics of organic farming to the ethics of eco-tourism. --- Cynthia Fuchs (George Mason University): Wicked, Tricksy, False: Race, Myth, and Gollum Appropriately, the last film of Peter Jackson's history-making Lord of the Rings trilogy begins with recollection. Gollum (voiced and body-mapped by Andy Serkis) remembers how he turned from the hobbit Sméagol (fleshly Serkis) to the CGIed creature so relentlessly tormented by the Precious. Out fishing, Sméagol is so instantly smitten by the One Ring that he sets upon his cousin Deagol (Thomas Robins) with a murderous frenzy. From here, his subsequent addiction to Ringness leaves him alone in woodsy darkness, eventually transformed into the slithery, gaunt, and ferociously schizophrenic Gollum. Convulsive and frantic, Gollum's split self is also perversely and intelligently nuanced. So desperate to hold the Precious, so quick to despise Sam and deceive Frodo, this hobbit transformed is the most remarkably imagined "other," a newly raced being. Because he is unique (no other Gollums appear, at any rate), he is alone and frighteningly untethered, to community or history (despite and because of his personal backstory). Without a knowable identity or ambition, haunted by traumatic memories, Gollum has no place to be, except the fiery Cracks of Doom into which he throws himself at last. This paper examines Gollum's lack of definition in particular relation to race, as he evolves during the three films. While some critics have worried over the apparently raced depictions of the evil forces (Orientalist, black), Gollum's race is the only one deemed wholly other, wholly monstrous, victimized (by the evil Ring) and, most strangely, un-fixed. This has to do with his literal construction as hybrid human-CGI, and with his narrative and thematic uses, at once mythic and mundane, the repository for protagonists (and presumed viewers') fears and judgments. --- Ken Gelder (University of Melbourne): Epic Fantasy and Global Terrorism (excerpt of finished essay) There are many cues for an article like this, which looks at J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings - and in particular, the recent films of the trilogy, directed by Peter Jackson - alongside recent commentaries on, and anxieties about, the rise of global terrorism and the ‘war on terrorism’. There have already been links drawn between these events and literary texts, of course: for example, Jason Epstein has compared the United States, in its pursuit of terrorists, to Melville’s Ahab. But a more relevant cue comes from an article in the New Left Review by Mike Davis, which situates the aeroplane bombings of the World Trade Centre buildings in New York on September 11th 2001 in the context of fantastic images of the fire-storming of Lower Manhattan in a work by H.G. Wells, War in the Air, published eighty-four years earlier in 1907. Under zeppelin attack by Imperial Germany, ‘ragtime New York’, as Davis describes it, ‘becomes the first modern city destroyed from the air’. Davis is one of a number of commentators on S11 who reads the reality of the event through the logic of fantasy, as if it was a moment of terror, or terrorism, that made it impossible to distinguish between the two: ‘the attacks on New York and Washington DC were organised as epic horror cinema with meticulous attention to mise en scene. Indeed, the hijacked planes were aimed to impact precisely at the vulnerable border between fantasy and reality’ (p.37). That phrase - ‘the vulnerable border between fantasy and reality’ - also resonates with anxieties about terrorist activity itself, planned and executed (in this case) from within the borders of the US, and so speaking to America’s own sense of border vulnerability: of the possibility that the outside is already or always inside. --- Krin Gabbard (Columbia University) and Ruth Goldberg (SUNY/New York University): What does the Eye Demand? Sexuality, Forbidden Vision, and Embodiment in Jackson’s Lord of the Rings Trilogy What leapt out at me when I watched the first two films again was the use of the all-seeing eye and the ring of power as the two disembodied (and displaced) elements of ambivalence (attraction/repulsion, domination/surrender, etc) which are developed in the context of the hero's journey. As other writers have no doubt mentioned, the eye/ring imagery and its role in the "hero" narrative seems to strongly suggest a fear of female sexuality as forbidden and dangerous, and this is further borne out in the "monstrous birth" theme which runs throughout. (The fact that the all-seeing eye belongs to the dark lord makes it hard for me to understand the narrative outside of the structure of a classic family romance; and, since the hero of the narrative has no parents on the scene, the family romance angle becomes rather compelling as an interpretive structure.) So, I would want to look at eye imagery in mythology, the idea of forbidden vision within the family, and possible connections between classical depictions of female sexuality and the connotations of the eye/ring imagery in these three films. --- Tom Gunning (University of Chicago): Gollum and Golem J.R. Tolkien drew mainly on Norse and British myths and folklore for his epic Lord of the Rings, but the name of the character Gollum, mainly recalls the Jewish mystical tradition in which a Golem is an artificial man produced through magical formulae and rituals. In fact the first computer at Hebrew University was called Golem I. Now in an age of CGI and digital manipulation of the moving image, the character Gollum in Peter Jackson's film was a technologically generated image. This confluence of technology and magic, of the animated character interacting with "live" actors provokes us to confront a number of paradoxes about new cinema: the fascination of mythic representation in an age of super rationalization; the role of special effects in mythic narratives; and the questions about the borders between the human and the artifcial. --- Douglas Kellner (University of California, Los Angeles): Lord of the Rings as Allegory: A Multiperspectivist Reading Although Tolkien denied that his LOTR cycle was an allegory, I will argue that the novels and film cycle can be read as both a socio-political allegory and a moral-existential allegory that relates to the Bildungsroman theme of maturity and development. Like the figures in Joseph Campbell hero's myth, the young heros of LOTR have adventures, undergo challenges, and grow and mature into exemplary moral ideals. But in addition to the moral allegorical themes, LOTR can be seen as a political allegory as well. The initial LOTR was written during an epoch of world war and the rise of totalitarian systems that threatened democratic countries like England who were forced to enter into alliances to defend themselves against totalitarian forces. Yet the film cycle was produced in a different historical era with novel configurations such as the Terror War that has been raging since the September 11 terrorist attacks. In this context, the film cycle can be seen as articulating a force of crusading militarism that celebrates feudal values, social hierarchy, and military values. Interrogating the narrative, discourses, cinematic spectacle, and specific sequences and scenes, I will unfold the "political unconscious" of the film and its allegorical articulations of specific notions of gender, race, and class. Utilizing a multiperspectival approach, I will also be interested in articulating the ambiguities and contradictions of the film, the tensions with Tolkien's novel, and its reception and critical and audience response. --- Sarah Kozloff (Vassar College): Lord of the Rings as Melodrama As scholars such as Peter Brooks have taught us, melodrama is the form of narrative that seeks to establish a moral compass in a post-sacred time period. The Tolkien/Jackson epic certainly fulfills this function, and it also illustrate the hallmarks of melodrama clearly outlined by Linda Williams, such as: starting and ending in a place or innocence; featuring characters who represent extremes of good and evil; using suspense and delay for pathos; relying on spectacle and realism to heighten emotional effect. Uncovering the trilogy's debt to melodrama helps to illuminate the unifying principles behind many of the texts' formal elements, and explains its wide appeal. --- Ernest Mathijs (University of Wales, Aberystwyth): A Film without a Final Moment: Textual Reception Analysis of the Lord of the Rings Where is the final text of the Lord of the Rings films? With films, dvd’s, special event screenings, and extra-long dvd’s competing for the status of ‘definitive text’, the issue what constitutes the final version of LOTR is an important. It is a problem recognized by historical film researchers (who are often faced with different incomplete versions), and reception studies (acknowledging that audiences add meaning to texts), but usually not by textual analysis of contemporary films. However, with the differences between the LOTR versions receiving much debate, any textual analysis of LOTR needs to address the problem of the status of text as a secure entity. Thomas Austin (2001), too, has pointed this out in coining the so called ‘dispersible text’, a text fanning out in different directions in time and space, no longer allowing a ‘final moment’ for a film text. Why is there so much worry over this final text and how it prepares audiences for the screening experience? I want to discuss issues of inclusion and exclusion in the LOTR text (the deletion of Bombadil and Glorfindel, the beefing up of Arwen’s part, the cutting of Saruman in the third film, the exclusion of the ‘Scouring of the Shire’, the emphasis on details not visible in the film but celebrated in ‘special features’, and the LOTR exhibition), and make a comparison with Walter Benjamin’s concept of the ‘aura’ of the work of art. In film much of that aura is preserved in the ‘screening encounter’ with the film, with fans distinguishing themselves from others by rushing to the earliest screenings, or trying to sneak into avant-premieres. With LOTR, some of that aura may shift to the celebration of (or complaints over) prefigurative and post-release materials and discourses. --- Lianne McLarty (University of Victoria): Tolkien and Jackson, aside: Hobbits, History and Applicability This paper considers The Lord of the Rings films, not as ‘inferior’ commercial versions of J.R.R. Tokien’s writing, nor as the latest auteurist installments from Peter Jackson, but on their own terms, as movies. As social communication, these movies escape the grip of both Tolkien and Jackson, mingle with other stories in the ‘cultural landscape’, and enter into the arena of spectacle and ideological struggle. Taking a cue from Tolkien, I intend to ‘read’ the films, not as allegory, but in terms of their “applicability” to the political landscape of contemporary audiences. The landscape, and the movement of male heroes within it, is central to the basic story, whether told by Tolkien or Jackson. In popular movie culture, the landscape is translated into spectacle and the male heroes into signifiers of masculinity. Here, nature is sentient (and interestingly NOT feminized), masculinity is judged not according to size, and the will to power leads to “the crack doom.” Yet, it is through the progressive relationships among landscapes and masculinity that the problematic politics of race and gender are staged. Consistent with the indeterminacy of good and evil in Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings trilogy is contradictory. And, perhaps, suggestive of the limits of progressive cultural politics in the age of ‘terror’. Both books and movies need sponsors, after all. --- Jerry Mosher (California State University, Long Beach): What Were Once Vices Are Now Hobbits: Re-visioning Fat Bodies in The Lord of the Rings Films This essay will explore how body size--and especially body fat--is used to delineate character in The Lord of the Rings films. It will focus on three issues: 1) how Tolkien's vision of happy, healthy, fat Hobbits is compromised by the demands of the star system, which dictates that leading characters (Frodo) must be thin and fat characters must be in supporting roles; 2) how Sam's fat, feminized body contributes to the homoerotic tension in his friendship with Frodo--a hero/fat sidekick relationship similar to those found in juvenile fiction such as The Hardy Boys; and 3)why the producers of a film series featuring the most extensive special effects and costume prosthetics in the history of cinema would ask an actor (Sean Astin) to gain thirty pounds and maintain it during two years of shooting. The perceived legitimacy and humanity of De Niro-style method acting, I suggest, offers a way to anchor this fantasy in the corporeality of actors. Among so many digitally created bodies and sets, Astin's overdetermined and much-publicized weight gain carries the burden of bodily sacrifice that distinguishes these films and their live action from seemingly effortless (and heartless) computer animation. --- Murray Pomerance (Ryerson University): The Laddy Vanishes (excerpt of finished essay) Film studies has a tradition of investigating the acts of looking and being looked at in relation to power/gender/race issues. In Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, these acts become pressing issues because the status being visible and/or invisible, is introduced as a narrative element, influecing on how acts of looking/being looked at impact on viewers. In the cinematic universe luminosity, perspective and magnitude of vision are the foundations of the viewer’s engagement and yield mechanically to the those who pay for the privilege of renting it a position in the safe darkness from which to feel the power of the all-seeing eye, it is precisely this all-seeing eye the invisible boy seems to possess, and this haven of darkness he seems particularly to need, since vision comes to him only, or especially, when he is invisible, it being a curious feature of his experience that he cannot see so very well when others can see him seeing. One recalls John Berger’s observation in Ways of Seeing that western art and pornography have succeeded in representing female beauty as an object of exploitation by turning the line of the model’s eyesight away, so that the painter (and the admiring males he stands in for) cannot be seen by her seeing her. This is how the male viewer, notably in his invisibility, comes to possess what he sees. --- Kirsten Moana Thompson (Wayne State University): Scale, Spectacle and Vertiginous Movement: Massive Software and Digital Special Effects in The Lord of the Rings This paper will focus on the aesthetics of scale, spectacle, and vertiginous (simulated) camera movement in The Lord of the Rings trilogy, with particular focus on the computer-generated imagery and special effects that enabled some of the films’ striking visual set pieces. A milestone in computer-generated filmmaking, Steven Regelous’ Massive software program is an advanced 3-D crowd simulation program specially developed for Peter Jackson’s trilogy, and which received a 2004 Scientific and Technical Engineering Academy Award in recognition of its extraordinary implications for filmmaking. Massive software and other digital effects enabled the visualization of vast battles, with up to 200,000 Uruk-hai fighters in the Battle of Helms Deep and other scenes. This paper will analyze the program’s technical aspects and consider the philosophical and aesthetic implications of this new filmmaking tool in Jackson’s epic story. --- Steven Woodward and Kostis Kourelis (Clemson University): Urban Legend: Residential Architecture in Lord of the Rings From the cottage-comforts of hobbit holes through the Venetian elegance of elven cities and the unadorned medieval bulk of Helm's Deep to the panoptical threat of Sauron's tower, The Lord of the Rings trilogy has depended upon a range of spectacular architecture in its mapping of the conflicts of Middle Earth. This essay will consider the grammar of that architecture in relation to both characters and narrative, exploring how the races of Middle Earth are defined as much by where they live as what they do and how the battle for civilization is figured in the atmospherics of place.	Tijnmuiden 7 1046 AK Amsterdam The Netherlands T: +31-20-611 48 21 F: +31-20-447 29 79 248 East 44th Street - 2nd floor New York, NY 10017 USA T: 1-800-225-3998 F: 1-800-853-3881 Toll-free in the USA info@rodopi.nl