Why Can't Movies Be Like Books?

[William Cloud Hicklin]

Assuming I've got the one you're talking about...it's a made for TV film that lasts an hour and fifteen minutes. Did it appeal to millions across the world, and win multiple Oscars?

One is tempted to respond, "who cares? The issue is whether it is good, not whether it appeals to the massed millions."
Instead I'll just observe that it would of course stop the narrative drive cold *if* the entire bloody Council were repeated verbatim (as well as using up way too much of the available screentime). Of course it had to be pared to essentials. But concedig that is in no way a justification for abandoning the essential dignity of Tolkien's scene for a boorish shouting match.

Tolkien was not writng for "Tolkienites," of course, since they didn't exist. He wrote a unique book owing in very large part to his stubborn refusal to compromise either with popular taste or with the fashions of twentieth-century Litteraturgedenken. He disdained stooping to irony: he wrote heroic characters like Faramir and Aragorn along the lines of ancient saga and didn't give a damn about "character arcs" or whether a contemporary audience could "identify" with them. And plainly it worked, given the books' overwhelming success: success *without* compromise.

There's a word for compromise of this sort, of altering the artistic vision and mode of expression to please a targeted audience: it's called pandering.