Hello, Schlubs! For those of you not in the know, this March we held our second annual Schlub Madness, where readers voted on a trilogy for me to cover in the newsletter. The winner was The Lord of the Rings. You can expect essays on The Two Towers and Return of the King in the coming months, as well as some bonus features I’m super excited about.
Thanks to everyone who voted, and I hope you enjoy!
It shouldn’t work. An eight-minute intro shouldn’t work. When it comes to fantasy media, bringing the audience into the world is the trickiest bit of business. How many times have you watched lesser versions of Galadriel's (Cate Blanchett) opening monologue and felt your eyes gloss over? Some vaguely British voice speaking about “Light” and “Dark” as we see generic fantasy map number 10,001 pan across the screen. How often have you checked out after hearing the fifth character name with an apostrophe? Or other times, it’s an uncanny valley, where some unknown element just feels off. Frustratingly, it often boils down to either having the juice or not.
It’s no secret that Peter Jackson’s monumental film The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring has the juice (potion?)—but what alchemy did he use to achieve this? And why can’t anyone, even Jackson, recapture the magic?
Sticking with the intro for a moment—the world of Middle Earth is fairly accessible as fantasy worlds go. We got elves in the woods, dwarves in the mountains, and humans fucking things up in their little corners of the world. To be reductive, it’s a standard European fantasy setting. So for those who aren’t as fantasy-literate (re:normies), it’s a comfortable entry point. Due to this ease of entry, LOTR has been unfairly labeled as “vanilla” over the last few decades by modern authors and hobbyists—in reality, it was the first to do it well. Besides, to quote YouTuber PancreasNoWork: “Vanilla isn’t boring, it’s the standard to which all other flavors are held.” What the vanilla nature of the setting means from a filmmaking standpoint is that Jackson can take what is an easily-digestible baseline and highlight the delicious weird shit that makes Middle Earth (and his filmmaking of this era) so interesting.
To paraphrase future contributor and Tolkien-head Claire Rogers, “This isn’t the First Age where things are nice and clean. This is the Third Age. Things are dirty.”
Middle Earth is a schlubby place! The only human settlement we see in Fellowship is the town of Bree—a mud-spattered den of dirty, ferret-feeding travelers. Beyond that, only ruins of once-great Manish civilizations carpet the forests and riverways. Some characters are even old enough to remember their collapse. For most races, they live in a post-apocalyptic world. The elves have decided to Irish-goodbye the party, while the dwarves are holed up in doomsday bunkers mines. As dour as this sounds, Fellowship is masterful in its balance of tones. If the coming Age of Man is one of hungover sorrow and terror, then the Hobbits are a cheeky hair of the dog in the morning. The early tonal shift from Galadriel’s battle-laden introduction to the painterly hills of The Shire represents not only what separates this trilogy from the lesser imitators, but also what sets Fellowship above the rest of the trilogy: a balance of earnest goofiness and stylized horror.
For those who haven’t seen the films, Fellowship follows Frodo (Elijah Wood) and his friends Samwise, Merry, and Pippin (Sean Astin, Dominic Monaghan, and Billy Boyd respectively) as they are thrust from their idyllic home into the darkest reaches of the world in order to destroy the One Ring—an object of unimaginable evil. But before that, they attend a party. Similar to me and my nephew, Frodo lives with his wealthy adventuring uncle, Bilbo (Ian Holm)—who happens to be holding his 111th birthday at the beginning of the film. It’s a rousing affair of storytelling, keg-tapping, and dancing that may seem like an unremarkable start to a series most remembered for its grand battles. But Jackson’s intimate and goofy-ass camerawork gives the audience a humor to grab onto before things become too fantastical: handheld camera work, canted angles, even close-ups of bulbous feet.
Before he became a tech-obsessed Beatlemaniac, director Peter Jackson had a gonzo streak. From pornographic puppets in Meet the Feebles to oceans of zombified gore in Dead Alive, Jackson has a comedic eye similar to his contemporary Sam Raimi (Evil Dead, Spider-Man). Jackson is someone who’s unafraid to hit you with grotesque body horror (the “birthing sacs” of the orcs come to mind)1 or a dose of looney-tunes style physical comedy (Merry and Pippin getting covered in soot instead of getting blown to smithereens by a firework), all of which he uses to endear us to this world of drunk Hobbits and looming dread. Just a short while after the party, Jackson drills this marriage of horror and comedy home with the one-two punch of Farmer Maggot’s farm and the arrival of the Nazgûl. Jackson lets the audience fall in love with the carrot-juggling Hobbits, only to prey upon that audience love by throwing the Hobbits into the hands of a malevolent killer.2
In an interview with /Film, Bill Hader said, “So much of horror and comedy is also about pacing and timing and how you play it, how you lay the story out, surprise.” The magnitude of planning that went into this trilogy is staggering, especially from the crafts department. There’s a reason that the visual effects of Fellowship, a movie made twenty three years ago, hold up so well.
I don’t remember when I watched the trilogy for the first time, but I have a clear memory of sitting in my grandparents’ room and watching and rewatching the now-legendary “making of” supplements by Weta Workshop. I was enamored as Kiwi after Kiwi went into granular detail of how they built the scale models, the weapons and armor drenched in Middle Earth history, and the forced perspective sets. Far from the fantastical battlefields of Galadriel's introduction, Bilbo’s kitchen is an equally impressive work of visual effects—a forced perspective puzzle that allowed Ian McKellen to act in the same scene as Elijah Wood, but appear to be three times his size without the use of CGI. Beyond Bilbo’s kitchen, the scale models of cities like Minas Tirith or the sickening caverns of Isengard provide a tactility that stands the test of time. We remember the autumn leaves drifting across the pavilions of Rivendell because the actors have been there.3
I’ve spoken about the correlation of tactility to schlubby-ness before, but mostly from an audience perspective. Who would have thought that actors who are able to inhabit a real set, or wear handmade clothing, would give better performances than those covered in ping pong balls in front of a bluescreen (Gollum being the exception to the rule). Draped in rags and chewing on the well-worn lip of his pipe (and the scenery), Gandalf the Grey is peak schlub—a cheerful old bastard who communicates primarily through grunts and sniffles, rather than the elegant and stern white wizard of the latter movies. As I said earlier, Fellowship has a quaint sensibility that the later two movies lack. Many fans chalk that up to the coziness of the first act within the Shire, and while that’s partially true, I believe that brew of joy and terror I mentioned earlier gives Fellowship a focus on human fragility, rather than human triumph. Nowhere is this expressed more elegantly than in Sean Bean’s portrayal of Boromir. If Aragorn (Viggo Mortensen) represents the best of us, Boromir is the rest of us. The charming and arrogant son of a failing leader, Boromir is a tragic figure doomed to succumb to the allure of the ring—a representation of what will happen to Man if Frodo fails in his quest. And what a burden! To be the heir to humanity’s future and to watch as the hope of all Middle Earth lies in the hands of some helpless Hobbit. With Bean’s performance, Boromir isn’t the Judas of the Fellowship, but a conflicted soul living within the apocalyptic ruins of his people’s great past. One of my favorite scenes of the trilogy sees Boromir (correctly) chastising Aragorn for his aloofness to the plight of Man, and at the same time, speaking to the balancing act that makes this series so profound.
“Have you so little faith in your own people?” he pleads. “Yes, there is weakness. There is frailty. But there is courage also, and honor to be found in Men.”
The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring is streaming on HBO MAX and is available to rent on most streaming platforms.
Special thanks to Austin Smoldt-Sáenz, Elena Bruess, Joshua De Lanoit, and Max Seifert.
The little guy ass-deep in blood-mud who’s in charge of ripping open the Uruk-hai egg sacs might have the worst job in Middle Earth.
I’d recommend this fantastic Polygon piece for a deeper dive into the horror techniques used in Fellowship.
Eternal autumn leaves have got to be one of my favorite fantasy tropes.