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rushthatspeaksThere are two important places I am Not Going.
Firstly, at the moment I am Not Going back to Philadelphia until tomorrow morning. I'm not dead, I'm not caught in transit, I'm right here at Ruth's. However, the GRE was really stressful, and I have monthly psychotic mood swings in full play, and I intend to be back before lunch tomorrow to do those two lovely exams I have left but right now I am Not Going.
Secondly, and probably more controversially, I am Not Going, now or ever, to see The Return of the King. I have various reasons for this. The simple one, which will be accepted readily by people everywhere and which therefore I am giving out when pressed for time, is that I really, really, really cannot deal in any way with the whole giant spider on film concept. It frightens me enough in the book. I feel really odd about hiding under the seat in front of me, because then I'm not actually seeing what the people who made the movie are trying to put across, and if I don't want to see that, what am I doing there? Also, I tried the hiding thing the second time I saw the second Harry Potter movie, after having managed to get through the spidery parts the first time somehow, and hiding did not work. It actually increased my nervousness and nausea. So that's a no.
The other no, the complicated no, is the one I haven't been going into as much detail on for fear of having the entire community of geekdom either attempt to lynch me en masse or write me off as a pretentious, pedantic, annoying type.
I discovered how much of Tolkien I had actually memorized when I went to see the first two movies. Now, I do not intentionally memorize books, but I have a good memory for a well-turned phrase, and for poetry, and the more often I am in contact with something the more of it I will remember, accurately, even years later. I had unintentionally memorized much of Gilbert and Sullivan by the time I was ten or so, even the plays for which I only had the libretti and not the scores or recordings (though the ones for which there were recordings... oh, I occasionally cursed my own memory in the unending effort to get my mental soundtrack to *vary just a little*...). I discovered while watching the first two movies that not only was I aware of absolutely anywhere the dialogue had changed, and aware of what should have been said, but I was mentally quoting huge chunks of description, poetry, whole actual chapters of the text in more or less complete verbatim. This didn't surprise me as I have been rereading the Lord of the Rings about once a year since I was twelve or so. Nor did it really affect my enjoyment of the movies as such; I was fully aware that changes needed to be made for filming and was intrigued by how they were done and only *really* annoyed about Faramir. I thought the movies were pretty good. Not great, but fun. And I became more aware of how thoroughly Tolkien had interpenetrated my awareness, how incredibly these books had woven themselves into my mind, and that was a wonderful thing to know.
The problem came when, about four months after seeing the film of The Two Towers, I attempted my annual rereading of the trilogy. And discovered that the memorization can be damn close to instantaneous when it comes to visual representations. I could not get the movies out of my head again. I could not return to the text without seeing the way the films had portrayed the world. My Middle-Earth, the space I have been living in mentally for over a decade, the space of some of my most glorious dreams and most horrible nightmares, was no longer visible to my mind's eye in my own images, the images I grew up with, the images brought out of me by Tolkien's prose. I cried. I tried again three months later. No change. Peter Jackson, unintentionally on his part and with the best of intentions, has stepped between me and the first two books, and I may never be able to get him away again. I am looking at the position of having lost the first two books for my own imagination forever. I will not lose the whole trilogy. I will not see the film of Return of the King. If there is a film of the Hobbit, I will not see that either. I cannot bear the thought of never being able to read so much of Tolkien again. Also, when and if I have children, I will not show them the movies until they have had the books read to them, or read the books for themselves, at least two or three times. So that the prose, which was first and will be deathless, will have a chance to work its magic first. Peter Jackson is brilliant, but he did not see what Tolkien saw, for what Tolkien made is in the rhythm of the words and in the manner of the telling as much as in the story and the characters. I hope to give my own children a chance to have the immediacy and brightness and reality of images meet the subtlety and darkness and conditional reality of words on a level playing field, and learn that good old-fashioned hoist which is the suspension of disbelief from the work of the master of world-making. I hope that in seven or ten or fifteen years when I read aloud to my own children the brightness and immediacy of those images will have lost its primacy in my own mind and I will be able to hear the author again, who created the books for us.
For now, I am truly and honestly in mourning, and I am absolutely not going to the movie.
Firstly, at the moment I am Not Going back to Philadelphia until tomorrow morning. I'm not dead, I'm not caught in transit, I'm right here at Ruth's. However, the GRE was really stressful, and I have monthly psychotic mood swings in full play, and I intend to be back before lunch tomorrow to do those two lovely exams I have left but right now I am Not Going.
Secondly, and probably more controversially, I am Not Going, now or ever, to see The Return of the King. I have various reasons for this. The simple one, which will be accepted readily by people everywhere and which therefore I am giving out when pressed for time, is that I really, really, really cannot deal in any way with the whole giant spider on film concept. It frightens me enough in the book. I feel really odd about hiding under the seat in front of me, because then I'm not actually seeing what the people who made the movie are trying to put across, and if I don't want to see that, what am I doing there? Also, I tried the hiding thing the second time I saw the second Harry Potter movie, after having managed to get through the spidery parts the first time somehow, and hiding did not work. It actually increased my nervousness and nausea. So that's a no.
The other no, the complicated no, is the one I haven't been going into as much detail on for fear of having the entire community of geekdom either attempt to lynch me en masse or write me off as a pretentious, pedantic, annoying type.
I discovered how much of Tolkien I had actually memorized when I went to see the first two movies. Now, I do not intentionally memorize books, but I have a good memory for a well-turned phrase, and for poetry, and the more often I am in contact with something the more of it I will remember, accurately, even years later. I had unintentionally memorized much of Gilbert and Sullivan by the time I was ten or so, even the plays for which I only had the libretti and not the scores or recordings (though the ones for which there were recordings... oh, I occasionally cursed my own memory in the unending effort to get my mental soundtrack to *vary just a little*...). I discovered while watching the first two movies that not only was I aware of absolutely anywhere the dialogue had changed, and aware of what should have been said, but I was mentally quoting huge chunks of description, poetry, whole actual chapters of the text in more or less complete verbatim. This didn't surprise me as I have been rereading the Lord of the Rings about once a year since I was twelve or so. Nor did it really affect my enjoyment of the movies as such; I was fully aware that changes needed to be made for filming and was intrigued by how they were done and only *really* annoyed about Faramir. I thought the movies were pretty good. Not great, but fun. And I became more aware of how thoroughly Tolkien had interpenetrated my awareness, how incredibly these books had woven themselves into my mind, and that was a wonderful thing to know.
The problem came when, about four months after seeing the film of The Two Towers, I attempted my annual rereading of the trilogy. And discovered that the memorization can be damn close to instantaneous when it comes to visual representations. I could not get the movies out of my head again. I could not return to the text without seeing the way the films had portrayed the world. My Middle-Earth, the space I have been living in mentally for over a decade, the space of some of my most glorious dreams and most horrible nightmares, was no longer visible to my mind's eye in my own images, the images I grew up with, the images brought out of me by Tolkien's prose. I cried. I tried again three months later. No change. Peter Jackson, unintentionally on his part and with the best of intentions, has stepped between me and the first two books, and I may never be able to get him away again. I am looking at the position of having lost the first two books for my own imagination forever. I will not lose the whole trilogy. I will not see the film of Return of the King. If there is a film of the Hobbit, I will not see that either. I cannot bear the thought of never being able to read so much of Tolkien again. Also, when and if I have children, I will not show them the movies until they have had the books read to them, or read the books for themselves, at least two or three times. So that the prose, which was first and will be deathless, will have a chance to work its magic first. Peter Jackson is brilliant, but he did not see what Tolkien saw, for what Tolkien made is in the rhythm of the words and in the manner of the telling as much as in the story and the characters. I hope to give my own children a chance to have the immediacy and brightness and reality of images meet the subtlety and darkness and conditional reality of words on a level playing field, and learn that good old-fashioned hoist which is the suspension of disbelief from the work of the master of world-making. I hope that in seven or ten or fifteen years when I read aloud to my own children the brightness and immediacy of those images will have lost its primacy in my own mind and I will be able to hear the author again, who created the books for us.
For now, I am truly and honestly in mourning, and I am absolutely not going to the movie.
