Classic CC2K: The Two Towers Strike Back

Inspired invention: Peter Jackson’s triumph at The Two Towers

Lance, great response. Let me start by clearing up some confusion that I fostered with my opening piece. You said these two things:

[Y]ou may have gone a little far calling the novel The Two Towers “bloated.”

You mentioned The Two Towers as the case study here in book-to-screen improvement.

I actually said neither of those things. I only said that the film The Two Towers was the best of the LOTR movies because of the deviations it made from the text, and I further said, “[K]eep in mind that narrative necessity forced Jackson and company to make many of the changes they made in Towers – including an extensive second act that they had to flat-out make up.”

But I’m really sorry for not going into my full argument immediately. What I thought was a clever intro turned out to just be a confusing one. Let me explain:

First, let me address the “straw man” you said I built, and the issue of bloat in Tolkien’s books.

When I called Tolkien’s books “bloated,” I was thinking of LOTR as one novel, which I think Tolkien eventually intended it to be. And yes, Towers is far and away the leanest of the three books. If we imagine LOTR as a great, but imperfect, cut of steak, the bloat is an annoying vein of fat that runs throughout the complete work, with the biggest deposit being found at the beginning (all the crap with Bilbo in the Shire), and then the vein thins out almost to nothing midway through (most of Towers) and then gets a little fatter again near the end. (At first glance, 100 pages of denoument seems reasonable for a 1,000-plus page novel, but thinking back to the books I’ve read over the years, I can’t think of a single one whose post-climax action takes up a full tenth of the total narrative.)

So even though I think Towers is the least-bloated of the three sections of Tolkien’s larger novel, I maintain that bloat still crops up in it. The charming but interminable middle section with the Ents springs to mind, a sequence whose crumpet-eating easy-goingness echoed the Tom Bombadil aria of Fellowship so much that Jackson and company moved some of Tom’s lines to the extended cut of Towers and assigned them to Treebeard. (I’ll talk more about how, once again, Jackson and company expertly handled this tricky part of Tolkien’s legend.)

As for my “straw man” — the niggling Tolkien detail squawker — all I can say is, I envy you for having not encountered the kind of blinders-wearing zealot I introduced you to over e-mail. What really bugs me about that breed of LOTR fan is how they mistake detail for artistry. Tolkien’s novels aren’t great because of all the maps he drew and languages he created; they’re great novels because they’re great novels, and detail squawkers miss out on the real artistry at work in the LOTR movies by clinging to the non-existent sanctity of the extensive mythology Tolkien and his son laid down.

But let’s get back to my thesis: That Towers is the best of the LOTR movies not just because of the deviations it made from the text, but because of the deviations it had no choice but to make from the text. It’s not that the Towers novel needed the most fixing (it didn’t), but rather that because of the goofy circumstances Jackson and company found themselves in, they wound up turning Towers into the best of the three films.

Pick up a copy of the novel The Two Towers and watch the three LOTR movies. If you follow the novel closely enough, you’ll notice that Jackson put the first chapter of Towers at the end of the movie Fellowship (a good call, as it let him tie up the Boromir storyline); and that fully half of the rest of the novel Towers is covered in the movie The Return of the King! That left Jackson with about 90 minutes of material to film for the Towers movie, but more important, because they had to adjust the pacing of the movies to more accurately represent the chronology of the events in the books — because they had to intercut concurrent scenes — they had no choice but to kill time for half of the movie of Towers to achieve these ends:

1. Make Helm’s Deep the climax of the movie.
2. Transform Frodo and Sam’s encounter with Faramir into a secondary climax.
3. Transform the Ent assault on Isengard into another secondary climax.
4. Looking ahead, they had to move the climax of the Towers novel — Sam’s battle with Shelob and Frodo’s capture — into the middle of the movie Return of the King so that it would happen at roughly the same time as the Pelennor Fields battle.

They did all these things, which caused two major problems:

1. They had to make Faramir more of a pain in the ass, so his decision to release Frodo and Sam would be a true climactic resolution of conflict.
2. Again: They had to flat-out make up about 90 minutes of stuff to fill in the middle of Towers.

OK, I am absolutely parroting a lot of what I heard in the appendices for the Towers DVDs, but Jackson and his crew spent most of their interviews defending the Faramir adjustment, which pissed off a lot of LOTR fans (me included). I’ll address the Faramir thing again here, but I want to focus my praise on all the stuff they made up, because it is those 90 minutes of pure, inspired invention that make Towers into the unique cinematic creation that I find so fascinating, and which I maintain is the best and most satisfying of the three films.

First: The Faramir Thing. Like I said before, Tolkien bungled Faramir. He fucked up, and Jackson and company would have been right to adjust his character the way they did even if they didn’t need to make his decision to release Frodo and Sam part of the larger climax of Towers. Tolkien spends the entire book building up the irresistible, seductive allure of the ring of power, yet Faramir (in the novel) takes one hard look at the ring, then dismisses it entirely — a huge misstep.

Don’t get me wrong — Tolkien was right to draw such a dramatic contrast between Faramir, who passes the ring of power test, and Boromir, who fails it. But he fucked up by having Faramir pass the test so easily. For the movie, Jackson and company focused on one line of dialogue from the book when Faramir looks at the ring:

“Now is the chance for Faramir, captain of Gondor, to prove his quality.”

Tolkien’s narrative voice further says that Faramir’s eyes glint (or something) before he laughs, refuses the ring, and releases the hobbits.

Jackson and his writing partners focused on two elements: the long, hard look that Faramir gives the ring, and on that key line: “Now is the time for Faramir, captain of Gondor, to prove his quality.” From those two elements, they built an extended flashback for Faramir. We drop back in time to right before the big meeting at Rivendell (seen in Fellowship) and see Boromir and Faramir celebrating the Gondorian recapture of the city of Osgiliath. In this largely extrapolated flashback, Jackson and company show us what good friends and close siblings Boromir and Faramir are. They introduce us to their asshole father, Denethor, who clearly loves Boromir, the supposedly greater warrior, more than Faramir. And they show us Denethor’s choice to send Boromir to the meeting in Rivendell, with the unspoken understanding that Boromir should try to claim the ring for Gondor.

Furthermore, that one line — “Now is the chance for Faramir, captain of Gondor, to prove his quality” — gets repeated three times in the extended cut of Towers, once by Faramir, once by Denethor (in the flashback), and once by Sam, after Faramir releases them.

Jackson and company took Faramir’s long, hard look at the ring and turned it into an entire journey — a journey that Tolkien should have taken us on. It’s crucial that Faramir pass the test of the ring because he’s introspective and philosophical where his older brother was bull-headed and brash. But the ring must nonetheless test Faramir’s character.

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