But a funny thing happens on your mission: despite making meticulous catalogues of all the media we intended to catch up on once home, by the end there, most of us found that our general attitudes towards film had coalesced into indifference. For those two years, we had lived life too directly, too purely, too deliberately, for us to be impressed by mere escapist fantasy anymore. What were the formulaic inventions of Hollywood hacks compared to the passions of real lives really lived, in all their grief, power, and intensity? What were the artifice of CGI or even live-sets compared to the hot sun on our skin, the glare in our eyes, the sweat on our face, the noise of the streets, the palms in the breeze, the broken-concrete under our feet? Well do I remember going to the theater a month after my mission and becoming hyper-aware, for the first time ever, that all I was watching were projections upon a screen, nothing more. When my old High School friends presented me with stacks of DVDs and CDs to catch-up on, I looked upon it as less a relief than a chore.
For me, that whole disorienting homecoming experience was doubly compounded by the fact that my Mom was literally on her deathbed when I came home, in the terminal stages of cancer, so those stacks of DVDs felt especially puerile. The Singles Ward, The RM, The Hometeachers, and other LDS schlock had just come out, which compared to my lived experience as an LDS missionary felt not only asinine but actively offensive in their banality--especially with my mother withering away on the couch behind me, unconscious and breathing heavily.
All of this is just long preamble to say that, when I finally saw Peter Jackson's The Two Towers for the first time, on DVD a week home from my mission, I was the least primed I could possibly have ever been to be impressed with it at all. In a sense, mine is the exact inverse trajectory of Ben and Erics': rather than being blown away by the spectacle initially only to eventually grow bored with the whole ordeal later, I instead was bored with it from the beginning, and it has only been in the years since that I have grown to appreciate certain of its virtues.
Because my mission is now officially awhile ago, and I have long since re-acclimated myself to movie watching, for better and for worse. So the question I faced as I rewatched The Two Towers last night, for the first time in many years, is how would I engage with the film now, so free of all the swirling hype that demanded I should love it back when I was least disposed to? Would I find myself nodding off, nodding along in solemn agreement with Ben and Eric that the whole thing is just an interminable slog?
That The Two Towers is slow and sure takes its sweet time is surely self-evident, perhaps even its defining characteristic. But I also found myself musing if that is necessarily a bad thing. One of my favorite, most thought-provoking films from my youth is 2001: A Space Odyssey, and that movie moves slow as molasses--and good thing, too, because the film needs all that room to breath. One cannot get a sense at all for the vastness, the loneliness, the breadth, depth, and expansiveness of the cosmos, without that glacial pace to expand your consciosness. Similarly, the Battle of Helm's Deep, I've come to the conclusion, really needs that extended running time--the battle really needs to feel so interminable, the hopelessness so profound, the darkness so complete, such that when the sun rises and the victory finally comes, you really feel it. It was a most curious sensation I experienced near the end of the Battle of Helm's Deep last night...I felt...moved...in a manner like I have felt in only fits and spurts throughout my entire adult film-watching existence.
Part of it too, I dare say, is I am now a little older, a little more mature, and am therefore more willing to take my time with experiences, to soak it all in. Also, between this *ahem* interminable election cycle, and the latest spate of senseless mass shootings, along with my extended memories of the Iraq War and the long legacy of the Bush administration we're still living through (including the rise of ISIS), I have a much keener sense of just how long these bloody conflicts can last, how much it can weary the mind and the soul to feel all your values besieged from all sides. "What can men do against such reckless hate?" wonders King Theoden aloud in the film, and the line resonates with me far more now than when I was 21, because it's a question I have caught myself asking more than once lately, as well. That just makes the victory feel all the sweeter by the end--it feels earned, not merely escapist or fantasy wish-fulfillment. I really felt like I needed to watch The Two Towers last night.
This is not to say I think the film is flawless. At all. I fully agree with Ben that Faramir (though the actor does the best he can with the material) is grossly mishandled by Jackson, and that his resolution with Frodo doesn't even make sense, neither internally nor in relation to the book. I also think that Grima Wormtongue (though again, I think the actor does the best he can with what he's given) was likewise mis-portrayed--if the whole point of his character is that he is seductive with his words, shouldn't he be a little more, well, seductive? As it stands in the film, he is just such a creep, it's strains credulity that anyone falls for his spell at all. By way of comparison, in the books, when Frodo first meets Strider, he says he believed him cause he thought the agents of Mordor would "seem fairer and feel fouler, if you understand." But Jackson's Wormtongue never seems fair at all--he is visibly, objectively foul from beginning to end. It feels like a missed opportunity to comment upon the seductiveness of evil, rather than falling into the easy, ridiculous ugly=evil/pretty=good binary that still makes us all so susceptible to salesmen.
But that is getting off topic; I would just like to conclude by saying that though The Two Towers really is slow, that is not intrinsically a bad thing--there is good slow and bad slow, like everything else. For evidence, consider Peter Jackson's The Hobbit films, also interminable slogs, and ask yourself: would you rather rewatch those, or The Two Towers? There is just something qualitatively different, definitively better, about the slow-pace of The Two Towers, a magic that Jackson completely lost by the time Warner Bro. twisted his arm into directing The Hobbits.
Until The Return of the King my friends.
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