Books, Films, Adaptations, & Reader Responses 2/8
There are a few of my favorite things!
Part 1 of this series. published on May 17, Books, Films, Adaptations, & Reader Responses, ended with a promise to post the second part the next day. I missed that deadline in part because of some committees I’m on suddenly kicked into high gear and in part because thinking of the upcoming release of the expanded/remastered versions of Jackson’s films in the context of the two great posts about adaptations and reader responses I linked to in Part 1 resulted in one of my old fanfics suddenly leaping into view and demanding I start writing it again.
However, during the past nine days or so, while answering All the Emails, and working on my AU version of the Fourth Age, I was also making notes and collecting links about the films and adaptations in general. I realized today that this series will probably be at least six, maybe seven, parts long (in part to reduce the tidal wave effect of Really Long individual posts) (Ok, to *somewhat* reduce the effect, or at least break it up a bit . . .)! And no promises about when Part 3 will post (although I can say that it will involve Shakespeare!
When I finished this post, I was informed by Substack that it was “too long for email” which just means that you may not see all over it in the email version. But at least I can post it (one of the reasons I stick with Substack!).
The wild trip my professional life took after falling in love with The Fellowship of the Ring in 2001 involved re-reading The Lord of the Rings for the first time in two decades, reading (end to end and RE-reading) The Silmarillion for the first time (I bounced hard off it in 1977 but always kept the book), finally coming to appreciating The Hobbit (which I had disliked when I was eight), and delving deep into selected parts of The History of Middle-earth for the first time.
All that reading led to a variety of scholarly activities, most in collaboration with a medievalist in the History Department at our university; grant-writing,1 collaborating on scholarly essays on book and film, creating and presenting at on and off-campus events for students or the public on Tolkien (during the years of popularity as the trilogy was being released), and, of course, team-teaching Tolkien classes on the undergraduate and graduate level.
It was all great fun. It also surprised my department and the friends I had made while pursuing a scholarly agenda on feminist speculative fiction since I was was hired in 1993.2
A conference I attended soon after falling hard for Jackson (and re-falling hard for Tolkien) had a roundtable on The Film Adaptation. Most of the participants (save for Tom Shippey who worked as a consultant on the film, hated the film. Shippey, a linguist, and a Huge Name in Philology/medieval scholarship, had no problem disagreeing loudly with the literature cohort, but I was flabbergasted.
I mean, fine, don’t like the film, but to proclaim that film will somehow “destroy” Tolkien’s work? To ignore the fact that film is a visual medium and that adapting a lengthy novel with a complex narrative persona and interlaced plot and dozens of characters to a film must necessarily require changes? WTF?3 So I started thinking about the film, and my response to it, as a long-time Tolkien fan. I asked my department colleague in Film Studies for some recommendations on what to read on film and adaptation theory. He kindly invited me to sit in on a few of his classes and gave me some resources.
Almost a decade later, I felt completely vindicated when I read the first essay in the 2011 anthology, Picturing Tolkien: Essays on Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings Film Trilogy (eds. Janice M. Bogstad and Philip E. Kaveny_,4 Kristin Thompson’s “Gollum Talks to Himself: Problems and Solutions in Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings.”
By then, I’d also spent a lot of time talking to various literature scholars who had taught the book since the 1970s and came to understand the reasons why they responded the way they did (but that’s another essay! Thompson has published a number of books on film topics in addition to her work on the Jackson films.5
While Film Studies faculty and programs are sometimes in departments of literature at some universities (such as mine!), at others, they are part of Communication departments (where Thompson was), or in Media Departments.6 Film scholarship can thus show influences from the other humanities disciplines (and, at times, from social sciences methodologies, including statistical analysis).7
Thompson opens her essay with the following paragraphs:
By now numerous essays written by Tolkien scholars have decried the changes made in the adaptation of the novel into the film. It’s an interesting phenomenon, since numerous literary works get adapted as films without such essays being published, let alone published in such quantity as to become a genre unto itself. It’s also an odd topic, since, as I have pointed out elsewhere, there’s no apparent readership for such essays. Those who dislike the films presumably don’t want to read about them, and those who love the films won’t be convinced by a group of scholars to stop loving them.8
Scholars seem particularly irked by the films’ enormous popularity, not just among fans but also among reviewers. The latter could have dismissed Jackson’s trilogy as a mere fantasy film enlarged to blockbuster proportions, and yet many of them treated it with respect. Indeed the rough-and-ready measuring system on Rotten Tomatoes had “top critics’ giving The Fellowship of the Ring a 92 percent approval, The Two Towers a rare 100 percent, and The Return of the King 98 percent. Add the many Oscars and other awards heaped upon the film, and some long-time Tolkien experts might resent the trilogy as a work that undeservedly overshadows its source.
Moreover, the film seems all too eager to pander to the broad audience that it attracted, with prolonged battles, monsters, matinee-idol Elves, and comic relief that runs roughshod over the dignity of Gimli, Treebeard, Merry, and Pippin. Elsewhere I have argued that it is precisely these popular-genre elements, albeit, perhaps, at times taken a bit far, that prevent the film from becoming another staid, respectable adaptation of a classic.9 My view is that it’s better to have a film with energy and entertainment value that takes liberties than one that sticks to the original with bland respect (emphasis added).
Thompson makes her critical-theoretical perspective clear at the end of the third paragraph of her essay and, although she does not say so in so many words (I suspect because it’s such a foundational part of her disciplinary training), her perspective is informed by "adaptation theory" which was one of the first concepts that my Film Studies colleague introduced me to (and which he taught, regularly, in his classes!).
Jokien with Tolkien also draws on adaptation theory as this quote shows:
Though the very nature of adaptations from one medium to another means changes are inevitable, not all changes are equally necessary and/or successful. Some changes make more sense in the new medium, while others just don’t work for one reason or another.
Adaptation theory is more complex than either of the quotes above illustrate (nor do the two scholars need to explain in more detail since neither is writing on the topic of adaptation theory: they are applying it to Jackson’s film). Applied theory is my favorite kind of approach, but good applied theory requires knowing the theory in order to apply it.
So, I realized that before I leaped into my planned trilogy (that has now become a planned hexalogy) on book, films, and adaptation issues from my perspective as a reader informed of my love for both Tolkien and Jackson, I needed to talk a bit more about the theory. This is the first post on adaptation theory; the next one (involving Shakespeare!) will also touch on adaptation issues, and theory, although I hope to sneak the start of my thoughts on Jackson’s *two* films in along with Shakespeare.
So: the first essay my colleague recommended to me was:
Karen Kline. "The Accidental Tourist on Page and on Screen: Interrogating Normative Theories About Film Adaptation." Literature/Film Quarterly, vol. 24, iss. 1, 1996, pp. 70-84.
You can download a copy of this essay at JSTOR (if you have institutional access). If you don’t have institutional access (insert my rant against the capitalist capture of publicly-funded scholarship in commercial databases), you can set up a free account at JSTOR [that they instituted during the start of the pandemic] which will allow you to read 100 articles a month for free.
Or, you can just read my summary/notes which I prepared for my students when I assigned them Kline’s essay in one of the classes where I taught Jackson’s films!10
NOTES ON KLINE
When I use this article in my own work, I focus primarily on the half of the article where she identifies and defines the four paradigms of adaptation theory, explains how they are used, what each paradigm allows in an analysis, and what its limits are.
I do not know the film she applies them to although I think that’s a very good rhetorical strategy, to apply all four paradigms to the same film in turn, showing how each one leads to a different reading/evaluation of the same film. But I am not interested in won’t be talking about The Accidental Tourist!
Kline situates her argument in the context of different critics and academics present wildly differing evaluations of film adaptations (many of which are based on novels). 11She does not argue that any one of the four paradigms is the best one to use: she identifies one of the reasons for the problem is people making assumptions on the paradigm they are working from without being conscious that multiple paradigms exist.12
As a result, people are just talking past each other because (as I used to tell my students at every level from first-year composition to doctoral dissertation students), you cannot assume that your audience is working with the same assumptions, definitions, or knowledge that you are. In every communication situation (although as an English teachers, my classes were primarily writing ones), they needed to balance their purpose in writing with what their [assigned] audience knew about the topic in order to shape the most effective message.
In the classes I taught, I assigned Kline’s article, and we talked about using the paradigms as a way for them to evaluate fan and professional reviews online so they could, in turn, their turn, develop their essays on the films.
The four paradigms are: translation, pluralist, transformation, materialist.
I summarize Kline’s major points about each paradigm below and add a few of my own observations about how reviews and essays about the films by Tolkien fans or academics fit into one (or at times two!) of the paradigms.
First: translation (oldest, probably most popular, definitely most common)
Someone working from the translation paradigm evaluates the film based on how "faithful" it is to the novel (or source texts in other genres). The assumption underlying this paradigm is that the source text is the privileged text, the *original,* and that the goal of the filmmaker is to copy as faithfully as possible the source. There are film makers who strive for just that faithfulness, and reader-viewers who appreciate that approach. Terminology often used in essays in this category include: "betrayal," "faithful," and "loyal."
A large number of the essays on Jackson's films have been written by literature scholars who are not primarily trained in film studies, or knowledgeable about film terminology, and who are using this paradigm although they may not consider it the paradigm as opposed the only “natural” way to write about a film adaptation.
I think Thompson points to this pattern in the opening to her essay above, but I was interested to see her explain that, in her experience, the Tolkien scholars’ response was unique, not something she’d seen in the case of other adaptations based on popular or classical novels. It is a valid approach although I generally find it rather boring because in the case of Tolkien’s work, it’s hard to imagine how any film could faithfully re-create the full novel. They also, as did the scholar above who clearly thought creating the landscaping for the Shire, and Bilbo’s garden, was not that important also tend to ignore story-telling elements that are unique to film.13
Instead, the scholars and critics who privilege the source text give the formal elements of the novel the highest status. Some of the changes I’ve seen the most include
Cutting The Old Forest/Old Man Willow/Tom Bombadil/the barrow-wight scenes
Cutting “The Scouring of the Shire"
Changes in characterization and narrative arcs of Aragorn, Boromir, Faramir, Frodo, Arwen.
Long battle sequences (and more violent than the text).14
At the time the film was newly released, a number of scholars who had also taught Tolkien, sometime for decades, thought that its popularity would ruin the experience of reading the book (as Thompson notes, “overshadowing” Tolkien’s work), and that it would be impossible to teach the book in future.15
Second paradigm: pluralist
Kline cites another scholar’s definition for this paradigm: ass eeking to evaluate how "true to the spirit of the novel" the film is. This approach acknowledges the necessity of changes in some elements (especially literary/structural) that need to be made given that film is a different media (visual not textual). The assumption of this paradigm is that the film exists as an independent work (which means, in part, a filmmaker cannot assume that every audience member will be familiar with the source text)16) but should work to maintain a connection to the most important “theme,” or “spirit” of the novel.17 This assumption assumes a "balance" between the two texts (novel and film) rather than assuming one, or the other, is the most important.
I’m sure some scholarship on Jackson’s film takes this approach, but I cannot remember any. It would certainly mesh well with the text-based analytical approach in literary studies while allowing for the value of at least some changes for cinematic effect.
Third paradigm: transformation
This approach privileges the film above the novel (or other source text) in contrast to the translation paradigm and values transformative adaptation (one that may retain little or any of the original source material). The examples of scholarship using this paradigm build from a fairly moderate approach to the extreme. An assumption in this approach, compared to the other two, is that the differences in the film are often celebrated as examples of cinematic art (creating story or meaning in ways that a written text cannot achieve).
A few essays I've seen on Jackson's film (by film scholars) tend to this approach, especially those on the material culture of the film. One or two of my editor friends told me they were surprised to get a submission where the scholar felt no need at all to discuss Tolkien’s work and focused more on the influences of other films on Jackson’s!18
The fourth and last paradigm: materialist
This paradigm is the most recent in development and was not, at the time Kline wrote the essay (late 1990s) that often used. I’d also say that in a number of ways it’s the most difficult to do! This approach does not consider the texts in isolation from their cultural and socio-historical context; rather, a materialist approach analyzes both texts in the social/historical contexts in which they were created. She notes that there is a major difference between this paradigm and the three others which differ from each other, as she describes, but which, in contrast to a materialist approach, share a common essentialist assumption.
The assumption is that each individual text is singular, unified, ahistorical, and and “ideal” of sorts instead of being (messily!) grounded in complex historical realities and cultural contexts.19 Kline points out that the materialist approach also has some limitations: among others, since the approach focuses more on context than the texts themselves, the context is privileged rather than either film or novel.
Having been trained in literary theory and methods, I can attest that it’s difficult to do a materialist analysis: I would not have been able to do so on my own. Luckily, I was collaborating with an historian!
I’ll mention one of the essays we wrote that used a materialist approach: it was on the first Hobbit film. (It’s not available in any open-access format, but I’m willing to share a PDF of it by email for personal use.)
Ford, Judy Ann, and Robin Anne Reid. "Polytemporality and Epic Characterization in The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey: Reflecting The Lord of the Ring's Modernism and Medievalism," The Hobbit in Tolkien's Legendarium: Essays on the Novel's Influence on the Later Writings, ed. Bradford Lee Eden, McFarland, 2014, pp. 208-221.
The quotes below are the abstract for the essay
Abstract
Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey proves to be both more consistent with the canon of J. R. R. Tolkien’s fiction and more infused with the conventions of medieval epic than might have been expected from an adaptation of the novel The Hobbit. These two qualities are related, as the later Tolkienian texts on which the film draws are more resonant with medieval epic than is the novel that provides the film’s title as well as its main plot line and characters. This essay analyzes The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey from a materialist paradigm, situating both Tolkien's original and revised novel in the socio-historical context in which they were created (inter-war Britain), and arguing that Jackson's film draws primarily on Tolkien's later ideas for revising the original children's novel in order to make it a more congruent prequel. Thus, the film captures the echoes of European history, medieval and modern, that imbue Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion with the polytemporality that distinguishes those works from thinner, less embodied fantasies.
From the essay:
The influence of the medieval languages and literatures that were Tolkien's scholarly passion on his literary work is well known, as is the fact that the majority of scholars publishing on Tolkien's literary work during the past fifty years are medievalists. However in recent years, a growing body of scholarly articles have explored the influence of World War I and II on The Lord of the Rings (Chrism, Croft, Flieger, Garth, Jackson, Livingston, Long, Murnane, Simonson). Additionally, John Garth's 2003 monograph, Tolkien and the Great War: The Threshold of Middle-earth, is an extended biographical study drawing on archival materials from the British Army, Tolkien's own papers, and letters and other papers by his close friends to analyze the influence of World War I on The Silmarillion, parts of which Tolkien began writing during his time in the army. The majority of the scholarship on Tolkien's modernisms focuses on the influence of the world wars on Tolkien's later fictions which are embedded in the polytemporal history of Arda, a history which is increasingly coming to be understood as being influenced by both the medieval and the modern.
This paper argues that An Unexpected Journey serves as a more congruent prequel to The Lord of the Rings than does the book The Hobbit because it draws on Tolkien's later work to a great extent. This film foregrounds two elements that do not play important roles in the novel The Hobbit but are integral elements Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. First, the film focuses on political and military themes that echo the history of twentieth-century Europe, particularly the era of the two world wars. Second, the film employs the conventions of medieval epic, specifically those of epic masculinity, especially in respect to the construction of the characters Thorin and Bilbo who are changed from the comic fairy-tale (in the childish sense of the word) figures of the first half of Tolkien's novel. These two elements of the film are grounded in its incorporation of the material generated by J. R. R. Tolkien during his later revisions and his commentary about The Hobbit in what John Rateliff calls the post-publication phases of revision, including Tolkien’s consideration of a complete revision of the published text (208-209).
An Unexpected Journey uses this debate between Saruman, insisting that Middle-earth is at peace and will remain at peace, and Gandalf, arguing that there is mounting evidence that Sauron is preparing for war, to open a polytemporal space, allowing echoes of Britain between the wars to be heard. In the years after World War I there was a powerful anti-war sentiment. As historian K. W. Watkins writes, “. . . both politicians and people who had lived through the First World War were haunted by the ghosts of the earlier holocaust. It was not the theoretical pacifism of a minority, but a deep-rooted desire for peace, for peace at almost any price, that permeated nations” (Watkins, 1963, 71-72). Avoiding military conflict, no matter what the provocation, became a prime objective of the British government. A Foreign Office memorandum of 1926 summarized this attitude: “. . .Our sole object is to keep what we want and live in peace…whatever else may be the outcome of a disturbance of the peace, we shall be the losers” (Adams, 1993, 6-7). The rise of Fascist governments in the 1930s did not, at first, alter the general refusal to consider military action as a possibility. In February of 1933, two weeks after Adolf Hitler had become Chancellor of Germany, the Oxford Union Society, a renowned debating club, sustained the following motion by a vote of 275 to 153: “That this House will in no circumstances fight for its King and Country” (Adams, 1993, 9). Many working in the British government refused to see anything but peaceful intentions from Fascist leaders. For example, Deputy Secretary to the Cabinet Tom Jones wrote in 1936, and later published in his Diary with Letters (1954) “But Hitler does not want war with us. He seeks our friendship” (Watkins, 1963, 91). During Neville Chamberlain’s tenure as British Prime Minister (1937-1940), the policy of conciliation towards the National Socialists, often described as one of appeasement, had a broad base of supporters. There were also a smaller number of bitter critics, including the man who was to follow Chamberlain as Prime Minister, Winston Churchill. Those who opposed appeasement tried to offer evidence that continued peace was not possible. In April 1939, in response to the Italian invasion of Albania, Leo Amery, former M.P. and Secretary of State for the Colonies, wrote “Another blow has fallen. Another proof has been given that friendly and peaceful relations are as impossible with Signor Mussolini as they are with Herr Hitler” (Watkins, 1963, 90). The vocal minority forced debate and were often dismissed as trouble-makers. In October of 1938 The Anglo-German Review, an English publication, described Winston Churchill as “unquestionably the biggest war-monger in the world to-day” (Watkins, 1963, 89). Up until the moment that news broke, in March of 1939, that Hitler had invaded Czechoslovakia, the British people were bitterly divided over foreign policy (Rock, 1966, 202).
The debate at Rivendell in An Unexpected Journey resonates with the British experience between the wars. The film presents Saruman as eager to thwart Gandalf’s plans to remove the threat of Smaug. Saruman tries to label Gandalf as a meddler, a trouble-maker, an instigator, echoing both the charges made against the anti-appeasement politicians and the charges made against Gandalf when he entered the Golden Hall in The Two Towers, another situation in which Gandalf’s attempts to raise forces against Sauron are resisted by Saruman (Tolkien, 1954, 125-25). The resonances with both Britain between the wars and with The Lord of the Rings makes this sequence a superb example of the polytemporal effects achieved in this film. Throughout the meeting at Rivendell, Saruman attempts to persuade the others that Gandalf is creating trouble in an otherwise peaceful situation. Saruman insists that the Enemy was obliterated, saying "What enemy? The Enemy was destroyed. He will never be able to regain his full strength." Elrond reminds the Council that there has been peace—a "watchful peace"—for four hundred years. Viewers familiar with The Lord of the Rings will be aware that Saruman is being duplicitous because in Jackson’s The Fellowship of the Ring he attempted to persuade Gandalf that it would be wise to form an alliance with Sauron. In the context of the meeting at Rivendell, Saruman pretends to agree that an active Enemy should be opposed. The issue under debate is the validity of Gandalf’s evidence that the Enemy is actually active. (213-14)
I’m not sure that the two later films sustained this polytemporality (we did not do any work on the later two, for various reasons), but I remain fond of this essay, and fond of other work we did that emphasized the extent to which Tolkien’s work (and Jackson’s adaptations) embodied layers of medieval, modern, and even postmodern elements!
And I think adopting Kline’s approach can make for more interesting and informative commentary on adaptations (whether films, television series, games, or transformative works!). She concludes by saying:
A film adaptation cannot be all things to all people, especially when the people in question are film critics who bring different critical paradigms to bear in their evaluations of the film's effectiveness as an adaptation. In this essay, I have explored four paradigms that are prevalent in normative critical discourse about film adaptation, identifying the assumptions underlying each paradigm and illustrating how each paradigm makes certain critical commentary possible while simultaneously constraining other observations the critic might make. In the end, the critical paradigm might best be understood as a filter or lens which shapes the critic's perspective, facilitating his or her inevitable selectivity in isolating specific qualities in the novel and the film that the critic decides are most crucial to his or her judgment. Ironically, the very act of critical judgment thus involves a reductionist move, just as the adaptation of the novel to the screen necessarily requires parsimony. In this, the film critic duplicates the very movement he or she may criticize in the specific film adaptation—depending, of course on the particular paradigm the critic adopts (84, emphasis added).
I cannot express how much I love the bolded observations in the last half of the paragraph: we all have our filters, or lenses, which affect what specific qualities we consider most important. When it comes down it our evaluation, argument, or interpretation is limited (just as Peter Jackson’s was), so it would make sense to keep that in mind and value the other interpretations that people with other paradigms/lenses/filters/theories have developed.
Click here to read Part 3 of this series!
We received funding from the National Endowment of the Humanities (N. E. H.) for two Institutes for Public School Teachers on Tolkien: one, in 2004, J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings: The Real and Imagined Middle Ages and the other in 2009, J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings in the History and Literature Classroom. I should note that we did not write the text of the articles I’m linking to: wwe had a webpage on our campus about each Institute, but later on, the university decided to change its webpages/clear out old stuff, etc. etc. and shut them down).
Luckily for me, the small regional university where I worked did not have any requirements about what I published on (which some bigger name universities apparently have) as long as I published. The fact I was now publishing on Tolkien’s book and Jackson’s film was no more problematic than my earlier stuff on feminist sf to the administration: it was all “popular culture.” Most higher administrators (meaning those in the chain above my department head) probably didn’t even notice, except for a couple of Deans. One (Dean of the Graduate School) was a chemist who thought it would be easier to evaluate my work if I wrote on T. S. Eliot [I know, WTF???], and the other one (Dean of Arts and Sciences) was either a sociologist or a political scientist [we had to hire new Deans every few years because they all leap-frogged asap to bigger jobs at bigger universities with bigger budgets] whose advice to me was to stop writing books and only write peer-reviewed articles. I pointed out, politely, that the Department of Literature and Languages promotion and tenure requirements did, in fact, give monographs significant credit toward promotion and tenure (meaning they were a Good Thing To Publish) because disciplinary standards and outcomes in the humanities differed from the fucking social sciences). There are many reasons I did not pursue emerita status when I retired, decades of reasons, in fact, and some are, in retrospect, hilarious although they were not at the time.
One of the very Big Name Scholars of [Literary] fantasy who had organized it said that he read that they landscaped the Shire, especially the garden at Bag End, and let it grow for a year before filming there, but could not understand how they could do that (implication being that wasn’t terribly important) and yet cut the “Scouring of the Shire.” I volunteered to set up a roundtable the next year with some different perspectives (and I think he was relieved!) Now, there are some interesting arguments to be made about the reasons and impact of those cuts, but just assuming that the cuts made the film a failure seemed somewhat overstated.
The Tolkien Gateway has an entry that lists the chapters in the book and links to an interview with the editors by Kristin Thompson (on her blog, which has been inactive since 2011 but has a lot of great content). And, WOW, Googling around to see if she’s published the book on Tolkien’s novels she was talking about, I learned that the materials she collected for The Frodo Franchise are now at the Tolkien collection at Marquette!
Here are her publications on the film (I am not sure this list is comprehensive—it’s from a bibliography I did in 2021, so it probably isn’t):
Thompson, Kristin. "Fantasy, Franchises, and Frodo Baggins: The Lord of the Rings and Modern Hollywood." Velvet Light Trap 52 (2003): 45-63.
---. "Gollum Talks to Himself: Problems and Solutions in Peter Jackson's Film Adaptation of the Lord of the Rings." Picturing Tolkien: Essays on Peter Jackson's the Lord of the Rings Film Trilogy. Eds. Bogstad, Janice M. and Philip E. Kaveny. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2011. 25-45.
---. "Stepping out of Blockbuster Mode: The Lighting of Beacons in the Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King” (2003)." Film Moments: Criticism, History, Theory. Eds. Brown, Tom and James Walters. London, England: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. 144-48. [I must get this essay—I may have to break down and buy the book, sigh.]
---. The Frodo Franchise: The Lord of the Rings and Modern Hollywood. Berkeley, CA: U of California P, 2007.
Thompson, Kirsten Moana. "Scale, Spectacle and Movement: Massive Software and Digital Special Effects in the Lord of the Rings." From Hobbits to Hollywood: Essays on Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings. Eds. Mathijs, Ernest and Murray Pomerance. Contemporary Cinema (Contemporary Cinema): 3. Amsterdam, Netherlands: Rodopi, 2006. 283-99.
Although, ironically, when I was searching for film scholars to come to the conference to present on the film adaptation, I learned from graduate students in those programs that their tenured faculty tended to snoot Jackson’s “popular film” which did not meet the standards of “high [cinematic] art,” so, well, there’s that!
For an example of the media/statistical thread of film studies, see Martin Barker and Ernest Mathijs’s Watching The Lord of the Rings: Tolkien’s World Audiences which involves an international group of scholars doing the “largest film audience project ever undertaken, drawing from 25,000 questionnaire responses and a wide array of other materials.” That approach completely differs from the more traditional humanities approach which assumes a single expert engaging with a text, whether book or film, and also by nature focuses more on the reception of the film.
“Several such essays appear in Croft, ed., 2004. I reviewed this volume in Tolkien Studies III (2006), 222-28.” This quote is Thompson’s footnote which I reproduced here. You can find the full citation information for Croft’s 2004 anthology in my "Bibliography: Tolkien and Film" which covers the publications indexed in the Modern Languages Association (MLA) International Bibliography through 2021 — there are 214 citations.
“Thompson, 2007, Chapter 1.” [The Frodo Franchise: The Lord of the Rings and Modern Hollywood. Berkeley, CA: U of California P, 2007]
These classes were mostly during the winter or spring or summer “mini-mesters which were short (2.5 weeks, approximately) intense courses that earned a full 3 semester hour credit which assumed that pretty much all the class and I did for that time was work on the class!
It is worth remembering that even writers who share the same paradigm and its assumptions can make wildly different arguments about a film adaptation!
Disclaimer: Neither Kline nor I claim that people have to study film theory and learn these paradigms in order to talk about how they feel/think about a film, or determine whether they like it or not! We are talking about the professionals who write about film (whether reviewers or scholars).
Here’s an excellent explanatory handout about the formal elements of film that is similar to one that my colleague shared with me to use in my classes when we were doing close analysis of the film.
This is the one criticism I most agree with (and even more so with The Hobbit), but the other parts I of both films I love so much that I put up with them. I think the battle scenes in LOTR are better! However, if I’m feeling contrary, I point out that war is one of the major themes of Tolkien’s novel Legendarium (and he can get pretty violent/graphic in the SILM material!). I also tend to ask those who want every chapter re-created if they really want to sit through the entirety of “The Council of Elrond” as written (I thought how some of the most important information shared at the Very Long Committee Meeting was brilliantly woven into other parts of the film!).
My own experiences teaching Tolkien (which I could only do after Jackson’s films were so popular) are perhaps unique (in part because I often taught the film with the novel, or focused only on the films!). The differences I found were due in part to the location and dominant culture of the part of Texas in which I worked. Even at the height of the films’ popularity, a significant percentage of any of the classes I taught consisted of students who had not seen the films, or read the books, and that isn’t even counting the smaller group whose churches censored Tolkien’s work along with other fantasy fiction. The small group who were fans of the book, the film, or both were great (often thrilled to share their experiences and knowledge with their classmates). And by the time I retired (in 2020), Jackson’s films weren’t even in the traditional-age students’ consciousness other than, vaguely, as something their parents had watched. With the Tolkien Estate authorizing The Rings of Power, and the other films in production at Warner Brothers, these fears may come up again although many of us who were teaching then are retired, or close to retiring!
I saw Fellowship 45 times in before it left the theatres in the NE Texas/Dallas area. At every one of those showings, as the credits started to roll, someone in the audience would say (loudly enough for us all to hear): BUT they still have the Ring! How can it be the end??? I also estimate that at about half those showings I was seated behind or in front of a group in which one person was instructing one or more others (in loud whispers, sigh) about what was changed/missing/added/etc.
“Theme” is a specific concept associated with literary theory that means something different from “the moral of the story.” “Spirit” is not but seems to be a generic term that is probably closer to “theme” than to “moral.”
One personal example of this approach would be the lighting of the beacons: as far as I’m concerned, the power and beauty of Jackson’s version of that incident is so. much. better! than Tolkien’s description!
As I used to note for my students, adding to what Kline said, those contexts include the lack of access to systems of artistic production based on class, ethnicity, gender, etc.