The Capturing of Myth

[davem]

Fantasy, even of the simplest kind, hardly ever succeeds in Drama, when that is presented as it should be, visibly & audibly acted. Fantastic forms are not to be counterfeited. Men dressed up as talking animals may achieve buffoonery or mimicry, but they do not achieve fantasy....

Drama has, of its nature, already attempted a kind of bogus, or shall I say at least substitute, magic: the visible & audible presentation of imaginary men in a story. That is in itself an attempt to counterfeit the magician's wand. To introduce, even with mechanical success, , into this quasi-magical secondary world a further fantasy or magic is to demand, as it were, an inner or tertiary world. It is a world too much.

On Fairy Stories

I think this sums up why the movies fail. Also, i think we simply know too much about the actors, how the effects were done, how the locations were designed. I remember reading an interview with Anthony Perkins about one of the sequels he made in teh 80's to Psycho. He was asked about the effects in the movie & he refused point blank to discuss them, as he said that would ruin the magic.

My other problem is that on some level I was always aware that these were actors facing other actors or special effects. This, I feel, is Tolkien's point. Fantasy, myth, cannot survive dramatisation. It can be communicated by a storyteller, but not in the form of drama.

One review I read said that Jackson seemed to think LotR was an action movie in book form - as if Tolkien had really written a first draft screenplay. Effectively Jackson & the writers were doomed to fail because they failed to understand that fantasy cannot truly be dramatised:

(Speaking about a production of Wind in the Willows)..a [i]perceptive admirer (as distinct from a great admirer) of the book would never have attempted to dramatise it. Naturally, only the simpler ingredients, the pantomime, & the satyric beast fable elements, are capable of presentation in this form.

On Fairy Stories

I think Jackson made an heroic attempt, but it was ultimately, & inevitably an heroic failure, because it could never have succeeded. The more Jackson attempted to communicate the mythic aspect the more he inevitably failed:

In painting, for instance, the visible presentation of the fantastic image is technically too easy; the hand tends to outrun the mind, even to overthrow it. Silliness or morbifity are frequent results.(OFS)

It simply isn't possible to dramatise mythology effectively in 'realistic' drama - opera, perhaps, Greek drama in its original form, yes, but Jakson fell between two stools - he wanted to present a mythic world in a realistic way. Simply not possible.