Is writing the only Artform that can produce Fantasy?

Tolkien and Lewis would disagree

Eric Falden

and

Clifford Stumme

have joined forces to write a four-part exploration of Tolkien’s seminal essay On Fairy-Stories, the first three parts of which are already out. So do yourself a favor, drop anything you’re doing, and go give it a read HERE.

They have done a great job breaking down On Fairy-Stories, not always the most straightfoward of texts. But for all the ground they cover, what made me think the most was this passage:

[Tolkien] also sheds quite a bit of ink explaining why stage dramas cannot accomplish sufficient Fantasy. It’s not realistic enough. The illusion is too thin. Stage-effects are inadequate. The story unfolding on stage is “not imagined, but actually beheld” (p.142).

The play, when read on the page, leaves room for loads of Imagination. We can mentally shore up the gaps and create for ourselves a world (Fantasy) in which we can have Secondary Belief. But once that story goes from the page to the stage, it pales against our Imagination. We are no longer Imagining, we are receiving. In the gap, Fantasy fails, because we are no longer present in the story; we are instead suspending disbelief.

To be dissolved, or to be degraded, is the likely fate of Fantasy when a dramatist tries to use it, even such a dramatist as Shakespeare. 

If you prefer Drama to Literature … you are apt to misunderstand pure story-making [...]. You are, for instance, likely to prefer characters, even the basest and dullest, to things. Very little about trees as trees can be got into a play. (pp. 141-142)

This seems to me like the personal preferences of one John Ronald Reuel Tolkien (the last sentence of that quote should be a dead giveaway to that fact). Tolkien even admits: “To make such a thing [as Fantasy Drama] may not be impossible. I have never seen it done with success” (p.141)

It’s odd to consider, but I believe that Tolkien likely would not have thought the Lord of the Rings movies of 2001-2003 would be capable of accomplishing any true Fantasy.

“The Heart of Fantasy According to Tolkien”, Fantasy & Imagination

When I first read On Fairy-Stories a couple of years ago, I found myself agreeing with Tolkien’s remarks. Theater is by excellence the artform of gesture and dialog. Inside these limits, it can do wonders; but its ventures outside it are limited. In a play it is hard to do even something as vulgar as a car chase; trying to reproduce, say, a character like Aslan or Treebeard is likely to end in farse. If we put an actor in a lion’s costume, the public may, while the play is going on, pretend that the man is an actual lion. But they will be pretending, suspending disbelief, rather than producing secondary belief.

As said, I agreed when with Tolkien when I read that passage. But I also (though I did not realize the contradiction until later) found myself agreeing with a different author, in a different essay, with quite different views.

I am referring to C. S. Lewis’s An Experiment in Criticism. Chapter five talks about Myth (which Tolkien would say are “higher fairy-stories”¹), and Lewis notices how some stories move us, and appear to convey some meaning or power, irrespective of their incorporation in a literary work:

The story of Orpheous touches us and touches us deeply; the fact that Virgil and other told it in good poetry is irrelevant. To think of it and to be moved by it is not the same as thinking of those poets and being moved by them. It is true that a a story like this would hardly reach us but in words. But this is an accidental relation. If some sofisticated art of mime, of silent movie or of sequential images could present it, it would affect us in the same way.

“An Experiment in Criticism”, On Myth

As Mr. Falden notes, Tolkien does concede that Fantasy Drama might be possible. But the sheer amount of qualification given shows he thinks it extremely unlikely. Lewis, on the other hand, does the opposite: he notes that narrative, written or spoken, is the most natural medium for myth, but he does not seem married in any extent to the idea that it is the only one.

The Limitations of Seeing

Lewis, I think, comes closer to the truth of the matter. There is an element of myth that preserves itself, irrespective of artistry and artform. But Tolkien, even if he went too far on the diagnostic, was correct on the symptoms: it is harder to produce Fantasy in drama than in literature (or oral narratives).

I am not a theater nerd, so I will abstain from commenting on whether true Fantasy was ever produced in front of a live audience. But let us take a look at what I would call some examples of Fantasy, even Myth, in cinema:

Binary Sunset — Star Wars: A New Hope (1977)

Breaking the Spell — Beauty and the Beast (1991)

Restoring the Heart of Te Fiti — Moana (2016)

Parting the Red Sea — The Prince of Egypt (1998)

The Story of the Ring — Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001)

This is, of course, a skewed sample. But let’s try to note the similarities: three of the scenes are from animated movies; and the remaining two make intense use of special effects and scenerey. We should expect that: fairy-stories, what we would today call the Fantasy Genre, deal with marvels and wonders, so it makes sense that movies that try to convey Faërie should rely heavily on special effects.

That is the first hurdle that Fantasy in the seventh art must overcome. If the visual and special effects are not good enough, the public will be reminded that they are, indeed, effects — and either the whole thing will be reduced to farse, or the public will have to “suspend disbelief” — which is what happens when Fantasy fails.

In this respect, animated movies might have an edge over live-action ones (not that this makes the process, from the artist's standpoint, any easier). For a movie to preserve immersion, let alone Subcreation, all the elements on screen must appear to be equally “real”; they must all exist on the same plane. And the scale by which this will be measure, in live action, are the actors: flesh and blood human beings.

Any time a live-action movie wants to showcase something not readily available in the real world, it must produce an image so convincing that the public believes that it and the actors are sharing the same space. The reason why, for example, it is hard for modern audiences to take 1933’s King Kong seriously. Ann Darrow is interpreted by a real woman, so everything onscreen should be something we could imagine a real woman interacting with — only for the movie to greet us with what is very clearly a stop-motion puppet.

Awesome movie. Also awesome workout for your disbelief-suspending muscles.

Animated movies sidestep this issue. Since everything shown onscreen is drawn, everything onscreen is equally (un)real.² So it is much easier to believe that both Beauty and the Beast inhabit the same universe.

But there is a more important issue. Even if we do our movie in animation, so that every element exists in the same plane; even if we do our live-action movie with effects so convincing the audience may have secondary belief — still, there are things which cannot be portrayed in a visual medium. To give a simple example:

[The Queen] had a magic looking-glass, and she used to stand before it, and look in it, and say,

"Looking-glass upon the wall,
Who is fairest of us all?"

And the looking-glass would answer,

"You are fairest of them all."

And she was contented, for she knew that the looking-glass spoke the truth. Now, Snow-white was growing prettier and prettier, and when she was seven years old she was as beautiful as day, far more so than the queen herself. So one day when the queen went to her mirror and said,

"Looking-glass upon the wall,
Who is fairest of us all?"

It answered,

"Queen, you are full fair, 'tis true,
But Snow-white fairer is than you."

Snow White, Brothers Grimm

Snow White is the fairest of them all³. This sentence alone brings a mythical quality to the tale: not merely the story of a fair woman, but of the fairest of all women who ever were and ever will. This puts Snow White among the likes of Helen and Lúthien Tinúviel.

And here is Disney’s interpretation of the same character:

“And away to his castle we’ll go… to be happy forever, I know…”

Now, Disney’s Snow White is a lovely character. Audiences have been falling in love with her for more than eighty years, and even Tolkien, who was not a fan of Disney, and especially disliked Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, had a bit of a soft spot for her.⁴

But look at the image again, and tell me if that is what comes to mind when you imagine the fairest woman to ever live.

There is no drawing so artful as to produce that. There is no living actress so beautiful as to reach it. Even though Snow White — and Helen, and Tinúviel — are concrete people with a defined face and likeness, still there is no human art capable of creating the fairest of them all in a visual medium. But our imaginations, guided by a text, can do it.

The problem is even more apparent when it comes to more abstract fantasy creations. How does one show visually “a Darkness that seemed not lack but a thing with being of its own; for it was indeed made by malice out of Light, and it had power to pierce the eye, and enter the heart and mind, and strangle the very will”?⁵ Which mortal hand is dexterous enough to create Cthulhu, that which “cannot be described—there is no language for such abysms of shrieking and immemorial lunacy, such eldritch contradictions of all matter, force, and cosmic order”?⁶ What does a voice “with no blood in it. Light is instead of blood for them”⁷ actually sounds like?

So, can movies produce Fantasy?

Because of all of this, I would agree with Professor Tolkien that fairy-stories and myth are most at home in literature. But, like Lewis, I would also say that it can travel to other mediums way better than Tolkien suggests.

Some things a movie may not do: to show superlatives, like the fairest or the greatest. But a lot can still be shown visually, and cinema has one big advantage over literature: it can call to its aid other artforms. Drama, music, image-making may not alone be sufficient to produce Fantasy; but when woven together by an artist, they can — as, ironically, the adaptation of Tolkien’s own works show.

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1. Or rather, to be precise, Tolkien says fairy-stories are “lower mythology”. From On Fairy-Stories:

This aspect of “mythology”—sub-creation, rather than either representation or symbolic interpretation of the beauties and terrors of the world—is, I think, too little considered. Is that because it is seen rather in Faerie than upon Olympus? Because it is thought to belong to the “lower mythology” rather than to the “higher”?

And later in the text:

There is no fundamental distinction between the higher and lower mythologies. Their peoples live, if they live at all, by the same life, just as in the mortal world do kings and peasants.

2. The exception, of course, is when different kinds of animation are mixed. See, for example, a somewhat early use of CGI in Disney’s Hunchback of Notre Dame, which does not always blend well with the hand-drawn elements.

3. Ignore the fact that she is seven is this version. WTF, Jacob and Wilhelm.

4

According to George Sayer, Lewis saw the film twice, the second time accompanied by Tolkien who ‘thought that Snow White was rather beautiful, but the dwarfs were dreadful’ (‘A Dialogue: Discussion by Humphrey Carpenter, Professor George Sayer and Dr. Clyde S. Kilby, Recorded Sept. 29, 1979, Wheaton, Illinois’, Minas Tirith Evening Star 9, no. 2 (January 1980), p. 18).

“The J. R. R. Tolkien Companion and Guide”, Christina Scull & Wayne G. Hammond

5. “The Silmarillion”, J. R. R. Tolkien

6. “The Call of Cthulhu”, H. P. Lovecraft

7. “Out of the Silent Planet”, C. S. Lewis