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Originally Posted by The Saucepan Man
I shall merely limit myself to observing that surely anyone who saw the films in the cinema cannot deny that these moments generally elicited the intended reaction from large sections of the audience (myself included - albeit, admittedly, against my better judgment on occassion  ).
This takes us back, I think, to the question of whether it is "right" to tinker with well-loved characters in order to enhance audience appeal (at least among those to whom these moments are primarily targetted). |
Actually, from my experience, "generally elicited" is not a totally fair observation. When I saw the movies, not everyone in the audience did enjoy these 'audience moment',
Sauce. I heard titters of ridicule amongst the laughter and sometimes titters of ridicule when there wasn't laughter as well. Let us not deny the right of "Others" to voice their dissident opinions even if they might be in the minority. There might even be a 'subgroup' of the movie going audience who went in order to ridicule the cheesy aspects of the movies.
However...
Rather than simply swallow and regurgitate the defense of popularity, I think we ought to ask about the role and nature of the audience in the artist's conception and composition of the work.
Throughout history, there has always been a subtle tie between the artist's vision of and for his or her work and the need to have that work appeal to other minds. In the Western World, when artists and writers had private benefactors or patrons to support them, the works themselves were not so directly dependant upon audience approval in the sense of mass appeal. (They were dependent upon the approval of what amounted to censure boards, the king's opinion, and various other factors.) The commercialisation of art in the last century, particularly film but also literature, has I think changed the relationship between artist and audience because it has changed the nature of audience.
So,
Saucy, you are of course correct to repeat (ad nauseum
) that the movies were popular. But I would like to point out that such a method was not Tolkien's. He managed to write one of the most popular books of the last century without this kind of pandering to a mass audience. And I use the word pander deliberately.
Tolkien did have a sense of audience, but it was a very different kind of audience. (I will interject here that according to his biographer, Tolkien was socialable enough to enjoy the usual "noisy, brash, and boorish" acitivities of certain aspects of undergraduate life when he was first a student at Oxford. It wasn't that he was a snob about humour.) Tolkien, however, wrote, in the first instance, to satisfy his own conception of mythology, faery, and linquistics/philology. He then had an intimate group of 'readers', most of whom were 'listeners' as a sounding board. These men were, of course, the members of the Inklings. His own son, Christopher, also was crucial to Tolkien as a reader of the typescripts, as the Letters written while Christopher served during WWII, show.
So, Tolkien was able to create a work of art with huge, massive appeal but he did so without deliberately and consciously appealing to a mass audience. Like all writers, he did harbour a wish to be kindly regarded, to be popular, to be read and enjoyed. Yet this was not the overwhelming impetus of his writing. He hoped his work, once published, would be successful. But he did not compose that work in order to be successful or popular.
Is this kind of creative purpose possible only in literature and not in the movies?