Corey Olsen and the Hobbit movies

With all due respect, I think there's a problem with the scope of the debate as you outline it in the main post above.  Without knowing what the formal question will be, you say that Dr. Olsen is arguing that the films are excellent adaptations and that you are arguing that they're bad movies.  Right off the bat, we have a disconnect, because "good adaptation" and "good movie" do not necessarily mean the same thing.  The diverging normative values that people ascribe to the words "adaptation" and "movie" have caused endless confusion and frustration in Tolkien fandom and they scuttle many debates before they really even begin.

Before I go any further, I should clarify: I am not an English major, I am not a professional academic, and I am not well-versed in literary theories of adaptation.  My own college education focused on political science (with significant detours through philosophy and history), so my grounding is more in the social sciences.  This may be why I tend to approach Tolkien movie debates (which I have participated in on some of the most active Tolkien forums, both as a member and as a moderator, for nearly six years) from the perspective of wanting evidence and hard comparisons.  But before you can do that, you need to define all of your terms.

I have long believed that it is entirely possible for an adapted movie to be "good" by any of the standards which we typically apply to films, even if it fails at capturing the spirit, tone, or anything else of the work it is based on.  (In fact, I would argue that this is precisely the category that the LOTR films fit into, but it's probably best not to get too distracted by those, particularly since they have a much larger defense force than The Hobbit films do.)  Actually, I try to avoid using the terms "good adaptation" or "bad adaptation" because most people don't consider adaptations good or bad unless they have some affinity for the source material, and you can't just assume that a majority of the audience will have this (though in the case of LOTR the percentage of the audience who knows the books is assuredly substantial, given its massive sales and influence in pop culture).  I certainly don't get bothered about deviations in movies when I've never read the source material, and sometimes I even think the movies represent an improvement.

I try to use the phrase "faithful adaptation" or "unfaithful adaptation" instead, to be descriptive without making a value judgement.  Don't get me wrong, in the case of PJ's Middle-earth movies, I think that he tends to be at his best when is being more faithful to the original text (and the writers come close to admitting this in the EE documentaries, by acknowledging that ideas such as Aragorn and Sauron fighting at the Black Gate were a mistake, and that they often revised the script to something closer to the book, at least with LOTR).  PJ's movies might be highly entertaining, well-made, and even emotionally moving at times -- but all of these things are (mostly) subjective experiences that will vary wildly from viewer to viewer, and have limited potential for debate.  However, regardless of your opinion about the entertainment or artistic value of PJ's movies on their own merits, the question of whether or not they were faithful adaptations of the book CAN be debated, because the book provides a fixed point of reference that all parties can acknowledge.

It's necessary at this point to address what can potentially be the most devastating pro-movie argument, which is that you (supposedly) really can't complain about changes, because books and movies are just different media, and why would you go to a cinema and expect to see the book projected on screen?  It's very important in these debates to call out the straw man of "purists want the movie to be exactly like the book!" as soon as it rears its head.  I have met a handful of people who made statements to this effect, but the position is self-evidently absurd, and movie defenders often try to get a lot of mileage out of it, so anyone arguing from purist standpoint needs to distance themselves from this argument right away.

It's also important to emphasize that the vast majority of movie fans actually share purists' distaste for excessive changes from the book, with the core disagreement only being: how much change is "excessive"?  It can be a good idea to point to early proposals for adapting LOTR (Janet Brennan Croft's "Three Rings for Hollywood" is an excellent resource for this; see the link below), or to Miramax Films attempts at getting PJ to cut out one or two of the Hobbits and to combine Gondor and Rohan into a single realm, with Eowyn as Boromir's sister.  Even Peter Jackson draws a line somewhere when it comes to changes to the source material, and the vast majority of fans feel the same way about at least some potential alterations.  For that matter, even many dedicated fans of the PJ movies can name various alterations in the films that didn't sit right with them, even if they enjoyed the films overall.  Frodo sending Sam away is a popular example of this sort.

http://faculty-staff.ou.edu/C/Janet.B.Croft-1/three_rings_for_hollywood.htm

So with this in mind, you should try to keep the debate focused on core issue of "did PJ go too far?"  There are of course various different ways of trying to answer this question, and the method you choose can affect the outcome you reach.  In years past, the "spirit of Tolkien" argument was very popular with defenders of the movies.  Basically, it held that PJ had successfully captured the spirit of what Tolkien was writing about, and that this meant that any number of specific changes that could be pointed to were superfluous and irrelevant.  The popularity of this argument stems from PJ and Philippa Boyens using it themselves in interviews and in the EE documentaries, but it cuts both ways.  David Bratman (co-editor of Tolkien Studies) gave an eloquent "spirit"-based argument AGAINST the movies in his essay "Summa Jacksonica", which was published in the anthology Picturing Tolkien.  However, I have found that the most effective counter-argument to this line of thought is to challenge the vagueness of it.  Demand to know what the "spirit of Tolkien" actually is, what makes it unique from other stories, and how PJ actually conveyed it given the changes to tone, character focus, and amount of action in the films.

http://books.google.com/books?id=jNjKrXRP0G8C

That said, the "spirit" argument is not as popular as it once was, so it might be best to jump straight into some specific criticisms of the film's changes.  With The Hobbit, it is pretty easy to point out major shifts in emphasis, particularly since the release of DOS.  The whole story begins with a flashback to the history of Durin's folk, and Thorin takes an increasingly prominent role in the story once he shows up.  Bilbo gets quite a bit of time at the beginning, but once we leave the Shire, the bulk of character moments, backstory, and decision-making falls to Thorin.  This issue is somewhat alleviated by the EE, which reinserts Bilbo into the Rivendell sequence, from which he was almost totally absent in the theatrical cut, but his relegation to the home video release still speaks volumes about which character PJ thinks is more important.  With DOS, the large number of scenes for invented characters like Tauriel and characters who are almost entirely PJ inventions in their roles here (like Legolas, Thranduil, Bard, and the Master) that draw attention away from the Company of Dwarves in general and from Bilbo especially can be used to illustrate that the point of these Hobbit films is vastly different from the point of the book.

The inevitable counter-argument that you will encounter here, one that has been very popular with Dr. Olsen over the past few years, is that Tolkien himself was unhappy with the limited scope and children's story-style of The Hobbit, and that he even tried to change it himself.  This is a dangerous argument, because it can sound very convincing to those who are not familiar with the textual history of The Hobbit.  PJ has been responsible for a lot of confusion due to his mangling of the timelines here, unfortunately.  Basically, the important points to make are that:

(1) When Tolkien re-visited The Hobbit in 1949, after LOTR was basically finished but still unpublished, he made a number of changes (which were published as the Second Edition) to make it more consistent with LOTR.  However, the ONLY substantial revisions were made in the chapter "Riddles in the Dark", concerning the nature of the Ring and the character of Gollum, two things that fade away very quickly once the story moves on from the Misty Mountains.  Sometimes people will try to make it sound like Tolkien re-wrote big chunks of the whole novel at this point; he didn't.

(2) In 1955, Tolkien wrote a letter to WH Auden expressing his dissatisfaction with The Hobbit and saying that he regretted having written it in the style of a children's book.  In 1960, he began to rewrite the whole thing in a tone more like LOTR, notably doing away with both of the instances of the narrator directly addressing the reader.  However, he abandoned this idea only a few chapters in after a reader whose identity is unknown to us told him that it was good, but not really The Hobbit anymore.  It is important to emphasize at this point just how little Tolkien cared about receiving negative feedback when he was determined to go in a certain direction with a story.  The multiple rejections of The Silmarillion, as well as the negativity surrounding LOTR during its writing process, even from some of the Inklings, are evidence of this.  So the fact that the testimony of one reader was enough to convince Tolkien to abandon the project strongly suggests that his heart was not really in it.

It's also worth pointing out that Tolkien's abortive "adult" 1960 revision did not remove such whimsical elements as the talking purse, the Dwarf songs, or the Cockney trolls.  Likewise, it did not introduce such Peter Jacksonisms as regular battle scenes or large amounts of Dwarvish backstory.

(3) Tolkien did eventually write a Third Edition of The Hobbit, in the mid-1960s, at the same time as he was working on the Second Edition of LOTR (in response to the Ace Books copyright fiasco).  He ended up making only minor adjustments, and did not do anything to undermine The Hobbit's identity as a children's book.

Finally, although they're not really related, but the Appendices to LOTR often get dragged into this, since the film-makers have claimed that much of what they're using to expand The Hobbit into three films (previously this argument was used to justify there being two films) comes from the Appendices.  Since mid-2012, an additional wrinkle was added by PJ claiming that the Appendices were Tolkien's "expanded Hobbit notes" from a failed re-writing, and that they were included in a later edition of LOTR.  (For the record, the Appendices were published with the First Edition of ROTK in 1955.)  If the Appendices come up in this context, it is worth pointing out that while the very basic facts of the White Council's confrontation with the Necromancer comes from Appendix A (with an even more basic summary repeated in Appendix B), and that the history of Durin's folk is also related there, the total amount of information relevant to The Hobbit in the Appendices comes out to less than 10 pages.  There's the section on Durin's Folk in Appendix A, a couple of entries in the Third Age section of Appendix B, and MAYBE a couple paragraphs from Appendix F that could be used for inspiration.  That's it, out of more than 100 pages of material at the end of ROTK.

Anyway, I apologize for the absurd length of this comment, but this is a debate that is near and dear to my heart (although I am not nearly as active in it as I once was), and I am excited about the prospect of a public debate on the topic during Mythgard's webathon, particularly since Dr. Olsen is a prominent figure and a vocal defender of the films.  If you are interested in reading more about this perspective on purism and the movies, I have written at greater length on these topics at my own blog, although most of the essays there are several years old and my views have evolved somewhat since then.  I'd also like to take the liberty of pointing you to a couple of essays that have been posted on the Tolkien forum that I run, which might come across as somewhat rant-ish (though I know the guy who wrote them personally, and beneath the facade he's a softy), but that I have found to be quite insightful despite the author's uncompromising stance on the issue of adaptation (one that I do not share fully).

http://eldorion.com/tolkienpurism/
http://www.hobbitmovieforum.com/t744-an-unexpected-journey-as-seen-by-petty-tyrant
http://www.hobbitmovieforum.com/t846p465-in-theatres-desolation-of-smaug-spoilers#118426

I hope that all of this rambling is of some use to you in your preparation for the debate, but if you prefer to take a different tactic or are simply weirded out by the intensity which this topic provokes in certain Tolkien forums, I do understand. Regardless, i wish you the best of luck in your debate!

It's also worth pointing out that Tolkien's abortive "adult" 1960 revision did not remove such whimsical elements as the talking purse, the Dwarf songs, or the Cockney trolls. Likewise, it did not introduce such Peter Jacksonisms as regular battle scenes or large amounts of Dwarvish backstory.

Pettytyrant101 wrote:You were Eldo, just not enough crabbit. Too generous with the other side. Too fair where no fairness is deserved. Stick the boot in!

Pettytyrant101 wrote: Instead of wending a way down the middle without touching the sides, it should storm down the middle punching both sides

Pettytyrant101 wrote:You were Eldo, just not enough crabbit. Too generous with the other side. Too fair where no fairness is deserved. Stick the boot in!

David H wrote: I love the grey area in between.

Elthir wrote:

He tasks me. He tasks me and I shall have him! I'll chase him 'round the white but not grey moons of Nibia and 'round the Antares Maelstrom and 'round perdition's white but not grey flames before I give up!