elizabeth’s grand theory of faramirs
(Note: I do not like Faramir in the movies, and this is mostly an exploration of their differences from that perspective. I tried to avoid bashing, but eh. It’s also really long, much longer than I originally expected. You can watch/listen to the whole thing here.)
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I think I’ve finally–after all these years–had an epiphany about movie Faramir vs. book Faramir. How the discussions generally seem to go is this:
Faramir = nice and mild, thus where movie Faramir = nice and mild, movie Faramir = book Faramir. Where movie Faramir comes across as morally unjust, movie Faramir not only isn’t book Faramir, but falls outside the acceptable range of Faramirness. These unacceptable breaks are regarded as lapses in his character, inconsistencies between mostly-like-Faramir and not-at-all-like-Faramir.
On the other hand, if we look at movie Faramir’s character as a whole, I think two critical traits emerge. One, he’s generally accommodating, good-natured, and conflict-averse (not willful or independent; also not scholarly or otherworldly). Two, he’s overpoweringly driven by the desire to earn the affection and approval of his father–it defines who he is in a very large part, and is his overriding motivation for everything.
It’s not that he’s ‘not exactly like book Faramir,’ but rather, exactly what his defenders always said: he’s a different person. He doesn’t have OOC lapses now and then; his personality is radically, and consistently, different.
This is super long (hah! that I could level that charge) but also super good. It goes to the heart of why so many film adaptations of richly plotted/characterized novels, even good adaptations, are hard for me to love. The shortcuts of logic you get when hundreds of pages of text are pared down to a few hours of visuals are probably necessary, on some level, but I mourn for what’s lost.
tl;dr: read the books.
Reposted from http://ift.tt/2x1NtVv.
Tags: granted, fun irony: this 3700-word text post, is adapted from a 23-minute video, so if we assume that is the correct ratio, to adequately adapt between text and video, then lotr's 480K words (appendices excluded), would have needed ~50 hours of movie, to have room for the real faramir, the extended editions back-to-back-to-back clock in around 11 hours, so that sounds about right, in terms of how much of the books' awesomeness, they had room to include, it's still a lot of awesomeness, but read the books.
