[littlemanpoet]

Originally Posted by Sauron the White

JRRT sold the film rights with full knowledge of the process. This is not like some author in 1918 selling film rights to a fledgling film industry and then claiming that they had no idea of what they were getting into. To this day I wince when I read the comments of JRRT in is letters saying that he felt they could not make the film anyways. "Okay, I will sell you this swamp land to build a highrise building on since I know you cannot do it ." That certainly brings up some ethical questions.

My initial reaction to this was, "Surely he has got to be kidding! Is he actually going to try to drag Tolkien's good name through the mud? This is a new low."

Upon further consideration it occurred to me that something else might be happening here:

I admit I am pushing things to force the issue so a little anger now and then is partly my fault.

If this is the case, which I think may well be, I have no desire to be involved in such a (in my opinion) useless debate as Tolkien's personal character, which simply should not be in question; the facts are already well laid out in Carpenter's biography and Tolkien's Letters (despite the above attempt to create "a seeming" of what's not really there). Tolkien's character is not the issue of this thread.

Peter Jackson's character was not an issue in this thread either, until it was raised by the one person most bent on defending the movies, and I don't think it was intentional even if the logical implications of what was said were clear. I still don't think Jackson was intentionally misleading Tolkien fans; I think he really believed he could do what he said he could; he just didn't succeed.

There is an obvious relationship between willing suspension of disbelief and secondary belief. Many of us like to think that the things we love are so very different than anything else and their are special rules which only apply to that one thing. "Don't tell me about that other stuff because my love is unique and special." Almost everything is unique and special in its own way but still can have much in common with other things. I think these two concepts are certainly family members and not so different from one another.

I'm happy to discuss this, but you're beating around the bush. Please come to the point.

However, it's clear enough to me that one of the implications being raised in the above quote is that the distinction between suspension of disbelief and secondary belief are purely subjective. They are not. I will quote Tolkien at length from On Fairy Stories

Children are capable, of course, of literary belief, when the story-maker's art is good enough to produce it. That state of mind has been called "willing suspension of disbelief." But this does not seem to me a good description of what happens. What really happens is that the story-maker proves a successfuly "sub-creator." He makes a Secondary World which your mind can enter. Inside it, what he relates is "true": it accords with the laws of that world. You therefore believe it, while you are, as it were, inside. The moment disbelief arises, the spell is broken; {my underline} the magic, or rather art, has failed. You are then out in the Primary World again, looking at the little abortive Secondary World from outside. If you are obliged, by kindliness or circumstance, to stay, then disbelief must be suspended (or stifled), otherwise listening and looking would become intolerable. But this suspension of disbelief is a substitute for the genuine thing, a subterfuge we use when condescending to games or make-believe, or when trying (more or less willingly) to find what virtue we can in the work of an art that has for us failed.

This is precisely what many lovers (from the books) of Middle Earth experience when confronted with the failures in the movies. The spell is broken when Aragorn and Farmair lack in nobility; when Gollum is portrayed as a psychologically ill victim instead of as evil; when the Elves arrive at Helm's Deep where they cannot logically be (that is, within the logic of the Middle Earth created by the master). And so forth.

Again, let me stress that I do not consider Jackson to be a "shyster" who "faked us out"; rather, he believed he could do it and was wrong. Therefore we lovers of Middle Earth must, of necessity, willingly suspend our disbelief because too often the spell is broken. Mind you, there are many points in the movie at which Middle Earth is beautifully realized, and Secondary Belief happens, but it is a hit-and-miss game such that the spell is too often broken and we hang in there until and unless the experience becomes "intolerable", as Tolkien has described it.

One more point: there is a "for us" in the last sentence of the text I've quoted from Tolkien. This would be wrongly construed to render the entire quote "subjective". The distinction between "willing suspension of disbelief" and "secondary belief" remains an objective distinction which readers and viewers, as group of "subjects," experience. The distinction remains an objective reality.