The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Watch what the camera does right before the Rohirrim charge at Pelennor. It doesn't cut to swords. It scans the horizon. It pulls back along a telephoto line until the riders thin into a gold seam against the plain, and it lets you read the whole field — where the enemy is, where the city is, how far the run will be — before a single blow lands. Jackson learned this from Kurosawa's Ran: at a certain distance the individual soldier becomes illegible and the army becomes legible, one organism you can see thinking. Hold onto that shot. It tells you which kind of cinema you're in.

You're in the action-image, and at full throttle. Deleuze's name for the engine of classical film: a character perceives a situation and acts to change it, and the act produces a new situation — situation, action, situation again, the chain that drives nearly all of Hollywood. He also argued this engine broke after the Second World War, replaced by films of people who could only watch. So there's something almost defiant about The Return of the King reviving it, unembarrassed, in 2003 and being crowned eleven times for the achievement. Pelennor is the large form in its purest state: a global situation — Sauron's host, the siege of Minas Tirith — presses and presses until one decisive act transforms everything. Deleuze calls that pressing milieu the encompasser, the thing that calls the hero to act; here it is literally a darkening sky and a closing ring of orcs. The whole war is built as a binomial, force against force, and Jackson keeps the forces readable the way Kurosawa color-coded his armies in Kagemusha — gold Rohirrim, white Gondor, black Mordor — so that even in chaos you track the political situation as a field of color rather than a tangle of bodies.

Notice the breathing. Deleuze describes the action film's rhythm as a respiration-space: the lungs fill with vast milieu — Lesnie's anamorphic frame reducing Frodo and Sam to specks against volcanic rock, the same landscape-as-character grammar Freddie Young found in the desert of Lawrence of Arabia — and then contract to the taut single line of a duel. Out and in, the Open and the blade. And the crowds that fill those wide lungs are something new: MASSIVE gave each digital soldier a flicker of independent reaction, but the effect Jackson is after is the opposite of individuality. It's the dividual — a multitude rendered as one affective body, the charge felt as a single surge of dread or release. The mûmakil come on as weather, not as creatures.

Now look at the other strand, because the daring of this film is that it buries the action-image's own death at its center. Frodo perceives more and more — the Ring's weight, the geography pressing in — and can act less and less. He stops being an agent and becomes a seer, a watcher who endures. Sam acts; Frodo is carried. By Mount Doom he is reduced to a pure optical situation: he can only stare at the fire he came to use. And around him circles Gollum, who belongs to a different image entirely — the impulse-image, Deleuze's cinema of naked drive. Sméagol and Gollum are one body split by appetite; the Ring is a perfect fetish, the part-object that hollows everyone who touches it. Their whole road is a line of slope, an irreversible downhill toward exhaustion and death, and the closer they get to the crack of Doom the more the film stops resolving situations and starts simply degrading.

Then the deed fails. Frodo, at the threshold, claims the Ring — the will collapses exactly where the action-image needs it to fire. The most decorated action-spectacle ever assembled stakes its entire resolution on the hero's inability to act. What finishes the quest is not heroism but Gollum's compulsion, appetite biting the Ring free and falling with it. The impulse-image completes what the action-image cannot. That is a genuinely strange and moving thing for a blockbuster to admit: that the world is saved by the failure of action and the accident of a drive.

Around all this Howard Shore runs his web of leitmotifs — the Shire, the Ring, the Wraiths — each a mark, an object that means by its customary chain, so that the theme tells you what's coming before the image does. It's Wagner by way of John Williams's Star Wars, fantasy organized like music drama. And the famous multiplying endings, inherited from Lean's long disillusioned coda in Lawrence, are best understood as dead time — stretches that advance no action, the return to the Shire and the Grey Havens held simply so the cost can be felt as duration rather than plot.

So here is the better pair of eyes to take back into it. The film is two cinemas at war inside one runtime. The siege is the old dream — action that perceives, decides, resolves. Frodo's road is the modern one — perception with no adequate act, a body that can only endure and a drive that finishes the job by accident. The Return of the King doesn't choose. It lets the war be won and the hero fail in the same hour, and somehow earns both. Watch for the seam.