Rewatching the Lord of the Rings

Recently I rewatched the entire “Lord of the Rings” trilogy with my kids, in the extended editions.

That’s over 12 hours of movies, but my kids were not bored for a minute. After “Fellowship” my son was gushing about how clearly the story was told; and about how the music made him feel, particularly the chants and voices. He said the sounds in general were amazing, particularly the Nazgul screams.  And he said these movies were even better than “Star Wars”.

My daughter’s favorite character was Eowyn, though after the first two movies she had been ready to pick Sam or Gollum.  Her favorite scenes were Bilbo’s party, Galadriel’s transformation, and the argument between Merry and Pippin about who was taller.  She loved their friendship, as well as that between Legolas and Gimli.

I had never seen all three movies back to back.  In the past I sometimes found each of them (except Fellowship) a little too long, but watching them over three consecutive nights with my kids I was ready to see more.  I was riveted unexpectedly by certain scenes that I’d seen countless times, like Arwen at the Ford, and the breaking of the dam at Isengard.  Theoden emerging from Saruman’s diseased grip had me hiding tears. Denethor’s treatment of his younger son: devastating.  Eowyn backing away from Aragorn in heartbreak hit me, probably because she never backs away from anything else. The arrival of Rohan at Minas Tirith — just their arrival, not their fighting — quietly drew some tears out, rather than the excitement I typically feel when watching that scene by itself. Then Eowyn quietly broke me again by defending and mourning Theoden.  The Grey Havens was the final quiet blow, and for once, none of that – in fact none of the so-called false endings – seemed too slow.

I also reread “Lord of the Rings” earlier this year. That was an ever greater experience, and I have almost too much stuff about that to put into blog posts. (I’ve also had little time for blogging). This post is going to be strictly about the movies, about new things I noticed in them. I’ll also revisit old criticisms of Peter Jackson’s movies.

Callbacks and pairings

I realized during this rewatching how thoughtfully structured the movies are. I noticed countless visual and verbal callbacks to earlier scenes or themes. And because the movies do not separate, as the books do, the Frodo/Sam story storyline from that of their companions, you often have back-to-back scenes in the movies that call back from one of the main storylines to the other.

Let’s start with the purely visual callbacks.

• Saruman and Denethor are given similar deaths, except that Saruman may already be dead on the way down.
• Grima, atop Orthanc, looks a lot like the Smeagol we just saw in his intermediate stage of transformation into Gollum.  The resemblance is underlined when Theoden says to him, “You were not always as you are now.”
• Arwen’s hand closes around that of Aragorn who is holding the Evenstar jeweled pendant; Aragorn’s hand closes around that of Frodo who is holding the Ring.
• Pippin going underwater for the Palantir reminds you of Deagol grabbing the Ring.
• Pippin and Eowyn, within minutes, each awakes with a disturbing vision, he from a Palantir and she in a dream.
• In Gondor’s famous horse-charge lifting the siege of Minas Tirith, you finally see the Orc leader, Gothmog, showing some fear, which is satisfying because earlier he had arrogantly butchered Faramir’s similar but outnumbered horse charge at Osgiliath. 
• The Orcs hurl decapitated heads over the walls of Minas Tirith almost immediately after we’ve seen hundreds of skulls rolling within the Paths of Dead (though none seem to land on the skulls of Aragorn, Gimli and Legolas).
• Gollum tries to choke Frodo on Mount Doom just as he’d choked Deagol.
• Frodo and Bilbo cuddle with foreheads touching, on the way to the Grey Havens, just as Frodo and Sam had done while awaiting death on Mount Doom. 
• The entrance to Shelob’s lair, and Frodo’s hesitation to enter, recalls the entrance to the Paths of the Dead, and Gimli’s terror there; in both places our friends are stepping over dead bones.
• A horse nearly crushes Pippin with its hooves just outside Fangorn; a little later, Treebeard crushes an Orc with his foot.  And Gimli, in his best Treebeard voice, steps on Grima and says, “I would stay still if I were you.”
• The Watcher in the Water and the Balrog, at opposite ends of Moria, grab Frodo and Gandalf by the ankle (in the book the Balrog wraps a whip around Gandalf’s knees).
• Both the Moria Troll and the Balrog whip at their enemies (the Troll whips a chain).
• Gandalf tries to find the opening words at the Doors of Moria while everyone else sits around him waiting.  A little later you see the individual members of the Company waiting around Aragorn as we dimly listen to him trying to find the words that will persuade Haldir to allow them to pass into Lorien.
• Frodo’s hand grips Sam’s rescuing arm at the Cracks of Doom; it had been the reverse when Sam was drowning in the river at the end of “Fellowship”.
• Frodo and Sam crawl through Osgiliath’s sewer just as Merry and Pippin had done in newly flooded Isengard.
• Eowyn’s stew, we have to conclude, was missing only some good taters.

I thought that Sam resembled Shelob when he fought her.  Even when he’s not pinned by her, for example when he’s backing up and setting himself, he’s often down on the ground and sliding around like a crab or like a spider.  It gives the entire duel — one of the best in the Tolkien movies, and in the books, too — a disturbing and desperate quality. 

Frodo looks uneasily at the Ring and then at the sleeping Sam right after we’ve seen Smeagol turn on his friend Deagol. This is an obvious parallel, but it helps explain what was always unclear to me, namely why Jackson chose to open “Return of the King” with Smeagol’s backstory.  I had assumed it was merely dumped there, but it returns to the theme of friends turning on each other, as Frodo ends up doing.  That storyline has often been criticized and I’m sympathetic to the arguments against it, but after rewatching the trilogy almost my strongest impression is that the Ring will cause anyone to do anything, given enough time. 

That’s clear at the Cracks of Doom; Frodo’s mind is entirely overthrown. 

Didn’t Bilbo raise his fists at his dear friend Gandalf and later lash out monstrously at Frodo?

What the Ring does to anyone — what it does even to those who have lived uncorrupted for thousands of years — is surely the lesson that Galadriel imprints most deeply upon Frodo in that terrifying sight of her.

There are many purely verbal callbacks in the three movies, including:

• Frodo sends Sam back home saying “You can’t help me anymore”; he had said to Sam just before the fellowship broke up, “You can’t help me, Sam; not this time”.  Each time he was worse off without Sam and was betrayed by someone he had hoped, uneasily, to trust. 
• Sam urges Frodo at the Cracks of Doom, “Don’t you let you! Don’t let go,” moments after having urged Fordo to cast the Ring away and “Just let it go”.
• Theoden says “I know your face” to Eowyn as he is about to die, just as he had said it when he’d been brought back to life in “Two Towers.”
• Denethor muses as he goes off to die, “Why do the fools fly.” Gandalf had said “Fly, you fools,” just before letting go of the bridge and going to almost certain death in a fight against the Balrog. 
• Aragorn, urged by Elrond to seek the Dead, calls them “Murderers,” emphasizing the word in a way that reminded me of Gollum taunting his Smeagol-self as “Murderer!”  This in turn makes you think that Aragorn is calling on a whole population of Smeagols, all similarly treacherous – yet all redeemable. 
• Aragorn releases the Ghosts from their living death by telling them, “Be at peace,” which were the same words he’d spoken to Boromir after he passed. 
• Boromir says to Aragorn, “I would have followed you, my brother, my captain, my king”, soon after Aragorn has said to Frodo, “I would have gone with you to the end, into the very fires of Mordor”.
• “Return of the King” has these phrases in close succession: “I’m going to save you” (Eowyn), “You have to let me go” (Theoden), “Release us” (ghosts), “I’m going to look after you” (Pippin).
• Shagrat’s “this fellow ain’t dead” (about Frodo) is followed almost immediately by Pippin’s “he’s not dead” (about Faramir).
• Sam has to let go of Frodo at the Grey Havens and says to him, “You can’t leave.” He could well have repeated what he’d said when he thought Frodo had been killed by Shelob: “Don’t leave me here alone! Don’t go where I can’t follow.”
• Frodo says to Sam after the Ring is destroyed, “I’m glad to be with you, Samwise Gamgee, here at the end of all things”; he had said “Sam, I’m glad you’re with me,” when they had set out toward Mordor. 
• Aragorn says to Arwen in “Two Towers”, “I am a mortal. You are elf kind. It was a dream, Arwen, nothing more”, and he says to Eowyn in the next movie: “It is but a shadow and a thought that you love. I cannot give you what you seek.”
• Isildur writes “A secret now that only fire can tell.”  Gandalf later says, “I am a servant of the Secret Fire.”
• Saruman says to his new army, “You do not know pain. You do not know fear.”  Arwen says to Aragorn of the Nazgul, “I do not fear them.” Eowyn says later to Aragorn, “I fear neither death nor pain.”  Aragorn says before entering the Paths of the Dead:  “I do not fear death”.
• Aragorn is asked by Eowyn, “Where is she? The woman who gave you that jewel?”  Frodo had asked him, “Who is she? This woman you sing of.”
• Denethor declares, “against the power that has risen in the east, there is no victory”, recalling Saruman’s statement: “Against the power of Mordor there can be no victory.”

There are further parallels in content/themes, too many to begin to list them all, but here are some that I’ve written down.

• Treebeard explains about the Entwives — and how he has, and has not, forgotten them — just before Gimli explains to Eowyn about Dwarf women. All this fits into the theme, carried by Eowyn, about women being made invisible or forgotten (she fears not dying but rather “To stay behind bars, until use and old age accept them, and chance of doing great deeds is gone beyond recall or desire”). There is even a subtle foreshadowing of Eowyn disguising herself as a man, in Gimli’s observation that dwarf women go unrecognized because they look so much like dwarf men.
• Smeagol self-exorcises (“Leave now, and never come back”) shortly after Gandalf’s exorcism scene with Theoden.
• Sam is rejected by Frodo (“Go home”) right after Faramir is rejected by Denethor (“Yes, I wish that”).
• Frodo’s line defending Smeagol to Sam, “why do you do that, call him names, run him down all the time?”, is followed shortly by Boromir defending Faramir to their father with, “You give him no credit and yet he tries to do your will; he loves you, Father.”
• Sam finds Frodo in the tower right after Pippin finds Merry lying on the battlefield.
• Gandalf says to Gondor’s troops, “Send these foul beasts into the abyss!” soon after we’ve visited the place of damnation of the souls of the Dead; he’s condemning souls to damnation just as Aragorn is trying to rescue souls.
• Legolas says to Gimli, “side by side with a friend,” just before Sam picks up Frodo (“I can carry you”).
• Gandalf breaks Saruman’s staff and later has his own staff broken by the Witch-King.
• Bilbo gives Sting to Frodo right after Elrond offers to reforge Anduril for Aragorn (who refuses it).
• Bill the pony and Brego the horse are both released by Aragorn from service
• Frodo and Sam have a scary but short fall to “the bottom” right after we’ve seen Gandalf and the Balrog falling to the lowest depths of the Earth.

Revisiting criticisms of the movies

Back in 2003 I had soured a little bit on the LOTR movies when I realized how much conflict Jackson had invented, emphasized or amplified.  I don’t take those criticisms back, but over the years I’ve come to see how much heart there is in the movies.  Yes, some of the heart and soul is lost in the transition to film and in the creative decisions to opt for violence or to exaggerate confrontation.  But it doesn’t all go in that direction.  Jackson often amplifies and sometimes even improves on the heart that is already abundantly present in the book.  “I can carry you” is such an example, and maybe the best. Another is Boromir’s death (“my captain, my king”; “be at peace, son of Gondor”).  In this rewatching of the trilogy from start to finish, another stood out: “You bow to no one,” says Aragorn as he bows before the four hobbits, after they had attempted to bow to him. There, with a movie’s visual language, Jackson is completely true to Tolkien’s vision, in which the small and meek are to be honored more than the powerful.  That’s an especially welcome scene in these post-Trump days.

I had always regarded Aragorn’s “Men of the West” speech as a bit of war-movie speechifying; I thought such rhetoric really detracted from Tolkien’s great insistence that Sauron could not be defeated by force of arms.  But this time I liked the speech. Instead of martial tones, what stood out for me was his charge to his men to hold on to bonds of family and friendship. That is very much in the spirit of the book. When he charges forward he says, “For Frodo”, which he does not do in the book.  And above all he calls on his men not to give in — not today — to despair.  And that is assuredly a theme running throughout LOTR.  In the book it is Gandalf who most often counsels against despair, very memorably in a last debate before their march on the Black Gate.  Aragorn, standing in front of the Black Gate, takes up that theme. 

I had never understood how Aragorn could let Frodo go alone to Mordor, but Jackson clearly conceives of Aragorn’s susceptibility to the Ring as more than mere potential.  Now I view Aragorn’s decision as foreshadowed by what Arwen had said to him in Rivendell, when he told her how he was weighed down by the possibility that he shared “the same weakness” as Isildur:  “Why do you fear the past? You are Isildur’s heir, not Isildur himself. You are not bound to his fate…. Your time will come. You will face the same evil, and you will defeat it.”  Her words had always struck me as a general encouragement that he would not succumb to temptation and that he would eventually triumph; but really what she’s saying is that he will not succumb to temptation.  That is Aragorn’s worry.  He doesn’t doubt his martial skills.  He’s worried about his susceptibility to power.  In that context, his victory takes place when he lets Frodo go.

There will always be strictly logical arguments against Aragorn’s decision to let Frodo go alone.  But I have a better appreciation now for what the movie was trying to say.  Aragorn man knew his limitations, knew the dangers of temptation, and did not consider himself a superman above them.  This, too – this humility before the corruption of power – is something I deeply appreciate today.

I had always thought of “Two Towers” as the last interesting of the three films, partly because of its heavy emphasis on the Battle of Helm’s Deep.  But this time, perhaps because that battle doesn’t dominate the extended edition, I had a different impression.  There are many contemplative scenes in “Two Towers”, more than in “Fellowship.” There is poetic, unhasty speech not just from Treebeard but also Arwen, Elrond, Gandalf (full of riddles upon his return), Theoden (suiting up for battle), Sam (speech in Osgiliath), Aragorn (horse-whispering in Elvish), Eowyn (talking about cages and chanting in Old English), Faramir (musing over the body of a dead soldier), even Grima (to Eowyn). And of course Gollum’s long monologues steal the show.

The camera lingers on faces, particularly Arwen, Faramir, Gollum, and Frodo.

Jackson’s decision to make Rohan fight with little more than old men and teenage boys has been criticized, and there are good reasons for that. But Jackson’s decision enhances Eowyn’s story because it makes it seem all the more unjust and nonsensical for her to be forced into the caves, and not fight, when Rohan had hardly any able-bodied warriors on hand.

I leave you with one last criticism revisited.

The Eagles be like, “We won’t fly you to the Mountain, but we’ll give you a ride back if it blows up.”