I made a disturbing discovery the other night while watching the new extended DVD edition of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy: I’ve lost my taste for meaningless carnage. In the biggest battle in The Return of the King, as the vast pixelated armies of orcs came swarming toward Minas Tirith, only to be stabbed, hacked, pierced, beheaded, trampled, squashed, scattered like bowling pins, and heaped up like compost, I realized that I just didn’t care. I was staring at the screen in sour distaste and wondering what was supposed to be so fun about watching a massacre.
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My real problem with these scenes isn’t with Peter Jackson; it’s with J.R.R. Tolkien. One of the things that comes through most clearly from the extended version (along with its six extra discs of making-of hype and its, I swear, 46 full hours of audio commentary) is the fanatical reverence with which Jackson and his production team regarded their source. Whatever Tolkien wrote, they were absolutely determined to visualize. If he said Galadriel the elf queen was beautiful and terrifying, then they were going to cast Cate Blanchett and make her look like she was carved out of kryptonite. And if he called the orcs ugly, then the movie’s orcs were going to be so repulsive they’d give David Cronenberg nightmares. They look like devolved mutant gorillas who’ve been dunked in toxic waste. You can’t possibly feel anything for them but loathing–and that’s exactly what Tolkien would have wanted. He only invented the orcs in the first place so there’d be a race on Middle Earth to exterminate.
This purports to be a description of a cavalry troop hacking its way through a chaotic field of armed soldiers. A medieval knight would snort in contempt.
“Against the clear morning sky a cloud of dark smoke expands and drifts away. Slowly its dingy wrestling vapors take the form of a hooded giant with clumsy expostulating arms. Then, with a gradual gesture of acquiescence, it lolls sideways, falling over into the attitude of a swimmer on his side. And so it dissolves into nothingness.”
Jones is describing soldiers at night performing what he calls “the dreadful lifting-out of obstacles”–the obstacles being the bodies floating in the pools and flooded trenches. As the poet Ivor Gurney, who had also been on the front lines, wrote, “There are strange hells within the minds war made.” One of these hells is Mordor. The devastation and horror of the landscapes around the Dark Tower, the strip-mined hills and fuming slag heaps, the endless lines of marching soldiers–this is a pretty exact transcription of what Tolkien saw in France in 1916. The passages that most readers take as a prophecy of ecological ruin are in fact a memory of it:
It’s an adolescent view of war, which is one reason the book tends to take adolescent readers by storm. You can see it reflected in every frame of the movie’s battle scenes, which are teenage daydreams to the highest power, spiffy and dry-cleaned and sparklingly pretty, the best video games ever. The on-screen body count may be higher than Saving Private Ryan and Dawn of the Dead combined, but when the camera swoops and dives and soars over the swarming chaos of the virtual battlefield, somehow it never catches a glimpse of anybody writhing gracelessly in agony or sloppily bleeding to death. No wonder the movie copped only a PG-13 rating for its “epic battle scenes.” “Epic” evidently means “wholly unreal.” It’s not true violence; it’s barely even movie violence. It’s just a million orcs blowing up real good, the way orcs are supposed to.
