Filming Faërie

Being the First Part of a Review of 'The Rings of Power' Season 1

I didn’t like Amazon’s The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power because it doesn’t look the way Middle-earth looks in my head.

…let me rephrase that.

I didn’t like The Rings of Power because it doesn’t feel the way that imagining Middle-earth in my head feels.

…closer, but I fear some explanation is still in order.

I want to clarify upfront that I am not whinging about the show “breaking lore.” Adaptation from one medium to another always involves changes because different media communicate in different languages. The chief question with an adaptation is not, “Does this change the source material?” but rather, “Do these changes serve the story being told?” And, I would add, “ Are they faithful in spirit to the original?” Nor am I talking about diverse casting. The racialization of Middle-earth is to my mind the most troubling aspect of ROP’s source material, one to which I hope any twenty-first adaptation would be lovingly unfaithful.

To get at what I am talking about, let’s go back to Episode 1, “A Shadow of the Past.” We open in Valinor, the Blessed Realm, with the Two Trees Laurelin and Telperion in full flower.  The Two Trees of Valinor, which were before the Sun and Moon, wellsprings of primordial Light! Their fate, and that of the Silmarils which alone preserved their Light after their destruction at the hands of Morgoth, is one of the foundational tragedies of Tolkien’s legendarium, a poignant myth of lost innocence and ineluctable decay refracted through Tolkien’s characteristic love of green and growing things. In a 1951 letter to the publisher Milton Waldman, Tolkien writes:

“The Light of Valinor (derived from light before any fall) is the light of art undivorced from reason, that sees things both scientifically (or philosophically) and imaginatively (or subcreatively) and says that they are good’ – as beautiful.” (Letters No. 131)

That raises a big adaptational question: how do you portray such prelapsarian bliss onscreen?

The Rings of Power goes about it by showing us a pair of big CGI trees on the horizon: one silver, the other gold. This is 100% canonical. It’s also dispiritingly literal-minded. In fairness to the production team, two continent-bestriding, world-illuminating trees might be the sort of thing which shimmer with mythic significance when half-glimpsed in imagination but seem mildly ridiculous when rendered in high definition.

That’s just the problem.

My response to the Two Trees (and I hasten to emphasize that it is mine – yours may well be different) has been my consistent response to the show’s other fantastic elements. ROP’s strikingly heteronormative Elves look and behave like conventional human protagonists, not Tolkien’s perilously fair Others. Seeing the Dwarf-realm of Khazad-dûm onscreen in the days of its glory, for all its big-budget scale, can’t compare with the breathless wonder evoked by its mere ruins in The Fellowship of the Ring. The human kingdom of Númenor is the most effective location we’ve visited so far, but the establishing shots nevertheless feel like a pre-rendered cinematic for the game God of War – an impression furthered by composer Bear McCreary’s serviceable but generic scores for both game and show.

I am left, time and time again, with an impression that I’ve visited a Middle-earth amusement park instead of Faërie.

ON (NOT) FILMING FAËRIE-STORIES

Faërie is a powerful but slippery word in Tolkien’s lexicon, more evocative than descriptive. “Faërie cannot be caught in a net of words,” he writes in his classic essay On Fairy-Stories, “for it is one of its qualities to be indescribable, though not imperceptible.” It gestures toward that peculiar quality of enchantment, that alluring strangeness, which you feel in a fantasy world that has “come alive” for you, one that has engendered what Tolkien calls secondary belief. It’s the way that Lothlórien or the Shire, for all their Otherness, can feel like places you know, even though they do not, in the strict sense, exist outside of your imagination.

For Tolkien, fantasy achieves much of its suggestive power precisely because, rather than offering a world-picture ready-made, it offers a word-picture that the reader must fully bring to life with their own imagination. The reader “co-creates” Middle-earth with Tolkien in the process of reading. In fact, Tolkien was skeptical that drama (by which he meant theatre, though some of his observations apply to film as well) could work the same spell, because it has to approximate, by technical means, what the imagination does organically. Here’s how he puts it in one of the endnotes to his essay On Fairy-Stories:

The radical distinction between all art (including drama) that offers a visible presentation and true literature is that it imposes one visible form. Literature works from mind to mind and is thus more progenitive. It is at once more universal and more poignantly particular. If it speaks of bread or wine or stone or tree, it appeals to the whole of these things, to their ideas; yet each hearer will give to them a peculiar personal embodiment in his imagination. Should the story say “he ate bread,” the dramatic producer or painter can only show “a piece of bread” according to his taste or fancy, but the hearer of the story will think of bread in general and picture it in some form of his own. If a story says “he climbed a hill and saw a river in the valley below,” the illustrator may catch, or nearly catch, his own vision of such a scene; but every hearer of the words will have his own picture, and it will be made out of all the hills and rivers and dales he has ever seen, but especially out of The Hill, The River, The Valley which were for him the first embodiment of the word.

By way of illustration: while watching The Rings of Power, I’ve also been reading The Lord of the Rings aloud to my seven-month-old son. By chance (if chance you call it) the first two episodes aired the same day we reached the chapter “Treebeard” in The Two Towers. There, the hobbit Pippin attempts to describe the eponymous Ent’s strange and wonderful eyes:

One felt as if there was an enormous well behind them, filled up with ages of memory and long, slow, steady thinking; but their surface was sparkling with the present; like sun shimmering on the outer leaves of a vast tree, or on the ripples of a very deep lake. I don’t know, but it felt as if something that grew in the ground – asleep, you might say, or just feeling itself as something between root-tip and leaf-tip, between deep earth and sky had suddenly waked up, and was considering you with the same slow care that it had given to its own inside affairs for endless years. (LOTR III.4)

This passage moves me to tears. I grew up in the middle of a national forest, in the sacred Black Hills of South Dakota. I could walk outside my front door and lose myself in the woods in a quarter-of-an-hour. Yet it wasn’t until rereading this passage in my early twenties that I fully grasped that the black locust tree growing outside my childhood home, the ponderosa pines with their vanilla-scented bark on the hillside above – these had inner life and an intrinsic value that had nothing to do with their utility or even their beauty. Reading this passage, I was—am—confronted by the staggering realization that every tree I have ever known is alive in the same way that I am. Because I bring my memory of every tree I have ever known to imagining Treebeard, the enchantment I find about him retroactively permeates the trees of memory – and, thus, the trees of experience.

This, I think, is part of what Tolkien means by Recovery, which he says is one of the great gifts of fantasy:

Recovery (which includes return and renewal of health) is a re-gaining – regaining of a clear view. I do not say ‘seeing this as they are’ and involve myself with the philosophers, though I might venture to say ‘seeing things as we are (or were) meant to see them’ – as things apart from ourselves. (On Fairy-Stories)

By entering into a world that does not exist and seeing a tree which the author has “spelled” into an Ent, we are able to see the “Entishness,” the sacred Otherness, of trees as they are when we turn back to the Primary World.

While I like the design of Peter Jackson’s Treebeard, I don’t get the same feeling of wide-eyed wonder watching his Two Towers that I get from reading and imagining Treebeard on my own. Indeed, Jackson doesn’t seem to have much time for the tree-ishness of Ents as such – he’s too busy getting them to the drowning of Isengard, a scene which is admittedly exhilarating but also easier to translate to the cinematic language of Hollywood blockbusters.

“Very little about trees as trees can be got into a play,” Tolkien says in On Fairy-Stories. More can be got into a film, or for that matter a television show. But if neither Peter Jackson nor showrunners Patrick McKay and J.D. Payne quite achieve arboreal enchantment, who does?

ANIMATED ENCHANTMENT: TOLKIEN AND MIYAZAKI

Watching the Studio Ghibli film My Neighbor Totoro with my toddler recently, I was caught short by an offhand line of dialogue about halfway through the film. The main human characters Mei and Satsuki and their father are considering the giant camphor tree which the forest-spirit Totoro calls home. The father breathes in wonder: “Magnificent tree! It's been around since long ago, back in the time when trees and people used to be friends.”

My kids will just have to get used to their dad bursting into tears over fictional trees.

Filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki famously doesn’t like LOTR, seeing it as part of an imperialist Western culture that painted people like him as the “evil Easterling” and aggressively Westernized Japan after World War II. And you know what, fair enough. But Miyazaki and Tolkien, for all the differences in their respective cultures and mediums, have a great deal in common. Both use fantasy to invoke an enchanted past “when there was less noise and more green” as The Hobbit puts it, a past swiftly being bulldozed in their times and ours by the forces of industrializing modernity. Both use their respective media to make the earthy, animistic beliefs on an older era credible to modern sensibilities, to re-present the natural world and the creatures who call it home as attractive, lovable, and worth defending. Totoro and Treebeard speak different languages, but they are made of the same stuff. Both Tolkien and Miyazaki re-enchant the world: one with words, the other with animation.

And animation, of all cinematic forms, may be best suited to achieve visually what Tolkien achieves verbally.

Every few months on Twitter I see a viral clip of some Studio Ghibli character cooking food: steaming rice, frying eggs, straining ramen noodles, chopping vegetables. It looks so lovely, so wholesome. We feel not only the care and attention of the character doing the cooking, but also the care and attention of the animator who rendered the boiling water and chopping knife with such exquisite detail. The very fact that animation isn’t real heightens our experience of this everyday action. It brings home to us the magic of what would appear merely quotidian if filmed in cinema verité. Here we see animation achieving an effect which a comparable live-action shot would fail to.

If this is true of frying an egg or boiling noodles, how much more so the drowning of a continent? In Episode 4 of The Rings of Power, “The Great Wave,” we get a clairvoyant glimpse of the Downfall of Númenor. It’s a good bit of special effects, but my brain knows full well that’s what it is. I’m paying attention to how the water is rendered, trying to guess which bits of the Númenorean capital of Armenelos are miniatures and which are CGI’d in, whether or not the wave overtopping the hills looks as if it can exist in the same plane of reality as the actor playing Tar-Miriel and the physical set. Animation bypasses this problem entirely. It doesn’t need to “trick” the viewer into believing that the special effects are on the same plane. The viewer already knows that what we’re seeing “isn’t real.” In that sense, it is very like how Tolkien describes fairy-stories.

All fiction is at some level fantasy, a product of the subcreative power to imagine what does not exist and call it into being with words. This is “narrative art, storymaking in its primary and most potent mode,” as Tolkien puts it in On Fairy-Stories. In a similar way, all film is at some level animation, a series of still images that conjures the illusion of motion. Especially as streaming giants shutter animation studios and scrub series out of digital existence, animation’s undeserved reputation as disposable “kids’ stuff” parallels in our time the relegation of fantasy to the nursery in Tolkien’s. But I would argue that, far from being subordinate to live-action, animation is in fact the natural cinematic form of fantasy. They are both liberated from the iron demands of strict realism, enchanting the everyday and rendering believable the incredible.

So am I arguing that The Rings of Power should have been an anime?

THE RINGS OF POWER SHOULD HAVE BEEN AN ANIME

Or, I should say, the medium of animation would effectively circumvent many of my issues with the show in terms of aesthetics and immersion. (The writing is another question for another essay.) For the irony is that, by attempting to capture the enchantment of Middle-earth with conventional live-action fantasy TV techniques, The Rings of Power gives us a world that is simultaneously more literal-minded and also less concrete and lived-in.

Part of how both Tolkien and Miyazaki re-enchant the natural world is through their pacing and attention to detail. Miyazaki’s long shots and deliberate pacing stand in stark contrast to the Technicolor hyperactivity of much Western animation. Minutes pass without a line of dialogue or plot movement, allowing the viewer to bask in the luminous splendor of Miyazaki’s landscapes and the painterly micro-actions and -expressions of his characters. Tolkien likewise spends pages describing a landscape, its flora and fauna, creating a real sense of distance and depth. Not for nothing has LOTR been accused of “too much walking.”

I found this sense of “placeness” largely lacking from ROP. Distances appear to expand and contract to meet the needs of the plot. How far is it from Númenor to the Southlands? Lindon to Khazad-dûm? Ithilien to Eregion? No matter. The show is too busy getting us from set-piece to set-piece. (In the interest of fairness: Tolkien could be guilty of this too, insofar as he gave Gandalf a magic horse that could ride the distance from Edoras to Hobbiton in a week.) To return to the image of an amusement park: the different locations almost feel as if they are themed attractions, abutting one another like Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge and Mickey’s Toontown at Disneyland. The viewer thus moves from one expansive, expensive set-piece to another as effortlessly as a parkgoer strolling between pavilions, surrounded by actors in mascot costumes and underpaid service workers. Impressive on a technical level, but ultimately superficial. A tourist attraction, not a Place to call Home.

Again, this is my experience; your mileage may well vary. But the cumulative effect is that I never felt immersed in the show’s world; it never commanded that secondary belief which is so crucial to effective fantasy, literary or otherwise. A successful fantasist, Tolkien writes,

makes a Secondary World which your mind can enter. Inside it, what he [sic] relates is ‘true’: it accords with the laws of that world. You therefore believe it, while you are, as it were, inside. The moment disbelief arises, the spell is broken; the magic, or rather art, has failed. You are then out in the Primary World again, looking at the little abortive Secondary World from outside.” (On Fairy-Stories)

That’s how I felt watching The Rings of Power.