Making Fantasy Matter The Lord of the Rings and the Legitimization of Fantasy Cinema

Alexander Sergeant

In the past decade, the Hollywood fantasy film has established itself as arguably the twenty-first century's most popular form of film-making, a feat made all the more remarkable given the genre's somewhat troubled critical and commercial history. Exemplified in a number of high-profile examples scattered throughout hollywood's history, including Doctor Dolittle (Richard Fleischer, 1967), Willow (Ron howard, 1988) and Hook (Steven Spielberg, 1991), the fantasy film has traditionally been met with a mixture of apathy from mainstream audiences and derision from traditional newspaper and magazine critics.

This attitude showed no signs of changing at the dawn of a new millennium when Dungeons and Dragons (Courtney Solomon, 2000) was released internationally to both critical and commercial disappointment, described by A. O. Scott in the New York Times as a 'noisy, nerve-racking tedium of contemporary popular culture'. Yet, the release of New Line Cinema's adaptation of The Lord of the Rings would witness a fundamental change in the attitudes of both audiences and critics towards an oft-dismissed genre of film-making. Breaking box office records and opening to enthusiastic reviews worldwide, The Lord of the Rings not only ushered in a new era of the Hollywood fantasy franchise but was held up by journalists and critics such as Kenneth Turan as a model 'for how to bring substance, authenticity and insight to the biggest of adventure yarns'. Self-conscious in their desire to remove the films from the pejorative stigma long-associated with the fantasy genre, producers and screenwriters Boyes, Jackson and Walsh pioneered a number of formal and stylistic features that would not only prove hugely influential for future fantasy franchises, but would encourage audiences to look at the various trolls, wizards and hobbits presented in such stories in an entirely new way. The trilogy managed to showcase the merits of fantasy to a traditional intellectual establishment. By taking fantasy seriously, the trilogy's popularity seemed to come hand in hand with a new era of critical legitimacy.

Part of the reason the creative team behind The Lord of the Rings trilogy was able to legitimize the fantasy genre in this manner was due to the literary prestige of the source novel. Prior to the release of the trilogy, Hollywood adapted fantasy films from pulp fiction or comic book sources which, although popular amongst certain subsections of US culture, lacked the necessary prestige to register amongst mainstream audiences. Films such as Conan the Barbarian (John Milius, 1982) had managed to achieve a modest degree of financial success, but were primarily designed to appeal to a specialist audience of self-conscious fantasy fans rather than the broader audiences courted by Hollywood studios. In contrast, The Lord of the Rings was a film franchise targeted at the same audiences who, throughout the 1980s and 1990s, had been raised on a steady diet of action and science fiction cinema. Producers hoped that the phenomenal cultural impact Tolkien's novel had made not only within the United States but around the globe would allow it to transcend the specialist or niche appeal that fantasy film-making had enjoyed up until this point, and allow the film trilogy to succeed where countless others had failed.

Occupying a prominent position within the canon of twentieth-century English literature and frequently discussed by literary scholars for its remarkable depth of vision in the creation of Middle-earth, Tolkien's novel reflects the moral and ethical concerns of a practising Roman Catholic writing during a time of world war and the invention of the atomic bomb. In his own essay of literary criticism, 'On Fairy Stories' (1947), Tolkien advocated that writers should utilize the supernatural not as an 'end to itself' but instead as a device whose virtue lies 'in its operations' (11). Screenwriters Boyes, Jackson and Walsh sought to follow this example in adapting Tolkien's narrative to the big screen by emphasizing the angst-ridden plot embedded with the original story. The trilogy condenses Tolkien's epic tale to focus primarily on Frodo and Sam's journey to Mount Doom and the threat posed by Sauron due to the survival of the One Ring. Frodo is presented largely as a substance addict, and his fate is continually juxtaposed with the now-iconic character of Gollum whose status as a tragic antagonist is invested with a certain degree of psychological realism. Characters such as Boromir in The Fellowship of the Ring (2001) and Faramir in The Two Towers (2002) spend the majority of their time on-screen gripped in a self-destructive torment, whilst Aragon's decision whether or not to accept the throne of Gondor is given greater emphasis from the minor subplot it serves in the original novel. Whimsical episodes such as 'The House of Tom Bombadil' or the encounter with Old Man Willow are all but removed from the cinematic adaptation, and what is emphasized above all else is a feeling of dread and mortality. The narrative of The Lord of the Rings exemplifies a desire to be taken seriously, and to move the fantasy genre away from the pejorative connotations amassed by many of its previous forays on-screen.

Beyond these decisions taken at the level of character and narrative, the way in which Jackson depicts Middle-earth is also marked by a desire to dissociate The Lord of the Rings from a kind of visual spectacle offered in previous fantasy films. Whilst previous fantasy films had invited audiences to gaze at the otherworldliness of that which was on-screen – Dorothy's famous entrance into Munchkinland in The Wizard of Oz (Victor Fleming, 1939) being a prime example of this kind of aesthetic (Figure 1) – The Lord of the Rings is primarily invested in a very different kind of visual spectacle altogether. As David Butler argues...