August 8, 2012

• Nasssssty Hobbitses!

  Well, not so nassssty. More like awesome, actually, even though I can hear the literary purists crying already, huddled over their well-worn 1970s paperbacks of The Hobbit, caressing them gently and calling them Preciousssss.

  As with far too many issues these days, I can see both sides. I need to get my eyes checked. On the one hand, literature should be respected. Even in adaptations, if you deviate too far from the soul of the thing, you commit an aesthetic crime. (I recently watched the Green Lantern movie. My wife asked "Was it as lame as you thought?" My reply was "It was lamer than a deaf, blind, quadruple amputee with Parkinson's." We do not have a politically correct household.)

  On the other hand, creative works are rarely pure. Tolkien built Middle Earth from multiple sources, "...endlessly combined, in living shapes that move from mind to mind...". All creation draws on prior creation, and while the cores of stories are eternal, the clothing they wear needs to be updated to reflect the times in which they are told, or they lose meaning and become dead, empty words repeated without meaning.

  Certainly, the lust for filthy lucre drove Peter Jackson to greatly extend Tolkien's story, but the lust for filthy lucre is, and was, behind the creation of most of the great works of art. Art created for art's sake rarely achieves greatness; it tends to be overly topical, self-indulgent, navel-gazing crap. Without actually seeing the films, I can't render full judgment, but I can have faith that while past performance is not a guarantee of future performance, it's one of the strongest indicators we've got.
  

  My mental images of the Hobbit are shaped by my initial reading, and by the Rankin-Bass animation. Re-imagining Thorin Oakenshield as pure estrogen bait is a gutsy move, but a well-calculated one. While judging a movie from trailers is very difficult, as trailers are deceptive and tricksy things, I'm guessing that Thorin's story arc is going to be more prominent. With three full movies, each likely pushing three hours, to play with, they will have a lot of time to add subplots and complexities. They have, oddly, one advantage over Tolkien: When he wrote the Hobbit, he had not yet read The Lord Of The Rings or completed the Silmarillion. There was ample material and backstory which is only evident in retrospect; indeed, the Hobbit had to be edited after publication to better fit the world that grew from it. (Much like Larry Niven, who linked his 22nd century stories and 28th century stories without having intended them to be aspects of the same universe, and then had to retcon things to make sure they all fit properly; when Ringworld was written, Pak did not exist, and the Slaver hyperdrive worked very differently from the Outsider hyperdrive.)
  

  So, we shall see. I know I am desperately looking forward to it, and looking forward to three years of having something to look forward to.
  

  • 9:33 am
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