You may choose to take issue with me on Jackson, and that’s perfectly fine – but I don’t think that the Scouring is “dreadfully anticlimactic” at all, on any level. You may notice that I am not saying, and have NEVER said, a word on Jackson’s decision to drop Bombadil – even in a literary sense, in the books, I found him a distraction and a detour and that is when he wasn’t annoying me in other ways (I tend to think of him, post-StarWars ep 1, as the Jar Jar Binks of Tolkien;s universe). He was barely defensible in the books, despite Tolkien’s outspoken affection for him, and he was definitely not movie material. But the ending that Jackson DID choose for his movies – Frodo’s departing for the West – makes full sense only in the context of that Scouring (“The Shire has been saved, Sam, but not for me.”) If Jackson wanted to skip the Scouring then he should have ended the movies at the classic insipit “and they lived happily ever after” royal wedding in Gondor, and faded to black gracefully as the cheers for the King and Queen still echoed off the screen. But no, he chose to go down the deeper pjilosophical part of the story… leaving out the depth. All we got out of that tearful farewell was a grafted-on invitation to shed a few crocodile tears at the final parting of ways.

But I need a better reason to cry than that. Even healing tears.

I am not advocating that everything has to end in tragedy – not by a long shot. But LOTR was a deeply complex book (set of books?), and Jackson’s interpretation of the work made like a skipping stone thrown by a skillful hand across a still pond. It hit the water – hit the high points – bounced a respectable number of times, enough to command acknowledgment – but never EVER “got” the deeper story at all. The movies were very pretty… and they had lost all of Tolkien’s soul.

I did not demand a happy ending – but for THOSE movies I would have almost preferred to be left at the wedding feast. Because Jackson never quite managed to make me believe that I was doing more than watching pretty pictures.

peter jackson made a very controversial decision to cut out two entire books out of the trilogy: the one involving tom bombadil and the one involving the scouring of the shire. he did this because he believed, quite correctly, that audiences, especially ones who hadn’t read tolkien, would react with “wtf?” to this kind of long, protracted, anti-climactic ending.

as for happy endings, i suppose that’s a matter of opinion. i think most people read to be entertained: they’re not interested in the author’s pedestrian views on the meaning of life, or even a particular aspect of it. to me, the purposeful insertion of an author’s or a director’s personal views has only one purpose: to inflate the author’s ego by spouting their viewpoint in a soapbox they’ve constructed. and a big part of being entertained by fiction is indulging in something that doesn’t always exist in real life: the assurance of a happy ending emerging from the darkness. people know that real life isn’t like that, that’s part of why they are living a vicarious life through fiction to begin with. to have an unhappy ending in fiction is, as a general rule, not artistic or realistic, but obnoxious and ultimately unfulfilling.

so i guess the main question is whether or not you write for yourself or you write for your readers.

I’m just saying that people tend to interpret stories through the lens of what they believe about life overall. A Westerner raised in a heritage of happy-ending life theology is more likely to accept a happy ending story as true. As you point out, people of Eastern descent who have a different worldview might see the ending as cheesy. It’s not that the writer is writing about a comprehensive worldview, it’s that the reader’s worldview colors everything they read.

This has got to be the most thought-provoking discussion on the issue I’ve read in awhile.

Rachel

And I agree with everything you’re saying.

I see both sides of the coin/mask. I’m from TX. I’m obsessed with good vs bad and who gets to assign. So I’m conflicted and a little punchy about everything related. So of course (again) I’m frustrated with tack-ons of any sort. I loved the fact that Frank Herbert wasn’t ever going to give me a happy ending in any Dune novel. I loathe that the hacks, I mean, Mr Anderson and Mr Herbert, the younger, are determined to do nothing else.

My contention is that the punishment should fit the crime. A protagonist/antagonist should end the journey/story profoundly changed. There should be gains as well as loses proportionate to their journey if not their deeds. None of this should come at the expense of the story and NEVER at the expense of the reader who invests money, time, and (in my immature case) emotion in these characters.

For that matter, the worst of all offenses is the trailed off, ran out of gas, couldn’t miss another deadline ending a la KS Robinson’s Mars trilogy. I prefer a flawed but declarative (Hannibal and Clarice on the Beach) ending to an ‘eh, what the hell,’ (does anyone remember Blue Mars?) ending.

Rachel – I don’t possess sufficient hubris to even pretend to be writing about the “ultimate outcome of life”. I am writing about a specific little slice of that life, a period of days, weeks, months, possibly years – occasionally (in epic fantasies) writers will deal with a stretch of centuries – but then life goes on, before that slice of life of which we write, and after it. So there is nothing “ultimate” about it at all. And perhaps it IS just that I am Eastern-born – Eastern Europe, that is – and that’s enough to make me respond in different ways to a “happy end” mandate hammered out by, as you say, the West. Out where my own ancestors’ bones are buried, we don’t trust happily-ever-after. We’ve never known it.

Ideas of Western culture have been vastly shaped for the last two thousand years by the story of Christianity. Christianity asserts that in the end there will be a great battle (i.e. the “cost” or the “climax”) followed by good winning out over evil once and for all, and the new heaven and new earth reinstating an ideal existence. Thus, Western stories tend to favor a model in which the good guys fight a terrible battle but then, in the end, bad stuff really is gone for good.

Most people believe at least some version of this general idea about life, which is why we crave happy endings.

Rachel Heston Davis
Up and Writing
http://www.rachelhestondavis.wordpress.com