Sightlines · a reading

A Deleuzian reading of The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies

2014 · Peter Jackson · The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies on Sightlines

Thorin stands still in a room full of gold.

Everything else in this film moves. Armies converge on a mountain. A dragon burns a town, a gate is stormed, bodies come off the side of a frozen tower. Then Jackson cuts back inside and there's a man doing nothing at all, looking at treasure, listening to something we can't hear. The film keeps returning to that room. It's the only place in the movie where nothing happens, and it's where the movie lives.

The film calls his condition dragon-sickness. Deleuze has a better name for it, with a whole theory attached. Across his two Cinema books he sorts images by what they do with the gap between perceiving and acting: you see a situation, you act, the situation changes. That circuit runs the rest of this film at full throttle. But between perception and action Deleuze wedges a third thing, the impulse-image, where the circuit jams. A drive takes hold, fastens on an object, and a person stops being an agent and becomes a symptom of an appetite. The object is what he calls the fetish, a scrap of the world torn loose and overcharged. In the films he had in mind it's food, or a relic, or a piece of a body. Here it's gold. Not gold as money or power, since Thorin already has more of it than anyone in this story could spend. Gold as a thing to stand near.

Naturalist films like this carry two worlds at once. There's the derived milieu, the designed and historical place: Weta's Erebor, runic and geometric and heavy, a civilisation you can read off the walls. Under it sits the originary world, which isn't a location but a condition, a savage zone where only appetites operate. The treasure chamber is where the kingdom becomes that. Every element of the design says throne. Everything in the staging says animal. Naturalism then runs downhill; Deleuze calls the descent the line of slope, the impulse eating its host. Jackson does something the tradition rarely allows. He lets Thorin climb back up it, and charges the full price anyway. Armitage carries that weight, and so does Lesnie's palette, which has told you the stakes before anyone speaks. Outside: blue, steel, wintry grey, the grey stone of ruined Dale. Inside: gold, one colour soaking a room and everything felt in it. That's the colour-image, colour that absorbs a scene instead of describing it.

Then there's the field, which is something else entirely.

Outside the mountain this is the most complete specimen of the large form of the action-image anyone has built this century. The shape is classical: an encompassing situation bears down until somebody's decisive act transforms it. The encompasser has its own name in Deleuze, the synsign, a milieu that isn't scenery but a pressure demanding a response. Jackson and Lesnie shoot it for legibility first, reading the armies from elevated wide masters as blocks of colour moving against other blocks, which is Kurosawa's solution to massed forces in Ran, borrowed openly and well. Then the cut down to sword-length, one body against one body: the binomial, force against force. The alternation between altitude and contact is regular enough to feel as a pulse. Deleuze found that pulse in the western and called it respiration-space, the vast milieu breathing in, the taut line of the duel breathing out. Sustaining it across five fronts (Dale, Mirkwood, Erebor and the Iron Hills, Thorin in the mountain, the duels on Ravenhill) is Jabez Olssen's achievement, and the grammar is Griffith's organic montage, convergent parallel action, inherited straight through the Pelennor Fields and through Braveheart's habit of cutting between the commander's vantage and the mud.

Here's what makes that worth arguing about. Deleuze's central historical claim is that the action-image broke after the Second World War: characters stopped being able to respond adequately to what they saw, and cinema's great modern films are made of people watching rather than acting. On that account a film like this shouldn't be possible in 2014. What Five Armies shows is where the machine went. It went into the blockbuster, where it is kept running at enormous expense, and the expense is literal. Once the world stopped handing filmmakers ten thousand bodies, somebody had to build them.

That somebody was Stephen Regelous, whose MASSIVE system gives every soldier in the frame a small brain: sensors, rules, a decision. Bergson's word for a living thing, which Deleuze takes over, is a centre of indetermination, a gap between what comes in and what goes out, a body that can hesitate. Weta's contribution to film history is a farm of them, thousands of tiny intervals released onto a plain and resolving into an army. Writing about Eisenstein's crowds, Deleuze called the mass a dividual: not one and not many, a collective that registers as a single feeling body. Alexander Nevsky made its dividual by montage, by collision at the cut, with Prokofiev welding a through-composed score to the Battle on the Ice. Shore's per-people themes descend from that, and so does a mix that gives the orc host massed percussion and the elves and men a cleaner metal. But Jackson's dividual is assembled the other way round, from underneath, out of hesitations nobody edited. Eisenstein's crowd was an argument. This one is a simulation. Whether those are the same thing is the best question the film raises.

The other question is the frame rate. Deleuze's account of cinema starts with the any-instant-whatever: the machine samples movement at equidistant ordinary moments, which is what separates it from the posed climactic instant of painting. Twenty-four frames a second still kept a residue of that old posed image, because motion blur smears an instant into a gesture. Forty-eight takes it away. Every instant equally present, equally sharp, nothing smeared into significance. Audiences said it looked like video. Bazin argued that cinema is driven by a myth of total cinema, an unreachable ambition toward complete reproduction of the world; HFR is that ambition arriving, and the reception suggests how much of what we love in a moving image is made of what the medium can't resolve. The Hobbit films remain the format's most prominent test and the reason it isn't the norm. Settling a question counts as doing something to film, even when the answer is no.

Six films, one country, largely one crew. Lesnie shot all of them and died the year after this one, which lends the cold light here a valedictory quality it never asked for. Smaug, who opens the picture, exists because Jackson and Weta worked out on King Kong how to capture a giant non-human performance and stage it against small bodies for scale. Freeman's Bilbo is the film's other still figure, the one the greed turns around: the same stillness as Thorin's, the opposite diagnosis. And Jackson's least-discussed invention is the hardest thing in the film, directing a scene in which one actor is on a set and the other is a pattern of markers, and making them share a dramatic space.

Watch it again for the edges of the frame. The extras aren't extras. Watch what gold does against steel, and count the cuts from ten thousand moving bodies to one man who won't move. That contrast is the design: a machine of pure action, built at the outer limit of what an industry could do, arranged around a room where action has stopped.

Concepts in play

impulse-image — Thorin alone in the treasure chamber, hallucinating in a sea of gold: the 'dragon-sickness' that the dossier names as 'the moral engine beneath the external war', a compulsion that suspends action rather than producing it.
fetish — The hoard itself — gold as a part-object charged with compulsive force, distinct from wealth or power; a 'compressed morality play about how gold poisons the will'.
derived-milieu — Weta's 'runic, geometric heaviness of dwarvish Erebor' — a fully designed historical civilisation, the concrete surface beneath which the drive operates.
originary-world — The treasure chamber, where Erebor stops reading as a kingdom and becomes a savage zone of pure appetite — the staging repeatedly juxtaposing that interior against the epic war outside.
entropy / degradation — Thorin's arc of 'hubris, corruption, and redemption', with Armitage carrying 'the film's tragic weight' — the naturalist downhill slope, arrested and then paid for.
affective colour — Lesnie's cold palette (wintry Erebor, grey stone of Dale, blues and steels of the battlefield) set against 'the golden dragon-hoard interiors' — gold absorbing the scene and its feeling.
action-image-large-form — A converging global situation — two orc armies, men, elves, dwarves drawn to Erebor — pressing until decisive acts transform it; the film is 'essentially a single sustained climax'.
the encompasser — The battlefield read from 'vast overhead views of clashing armies', the Lonely Mountain and Dale organising combat into legible zones — the milieu as a force calling forth action (the Ran debt: colour-coded armies from elevated wide masters).
respiration-space — The dossier's stated strategy: 'cutting between vast overhead views of clashing armies and tight, kinetic coverage of individual duels'.
binomial — 'The discrete single combats atop Ravenhill' — force against force, Thorin against Manu Bennett's motion-captured Azog, cut down from the mass.
montage-organic-american — Jabez Olssen's cross-cutting among five simultaneous fronts (Dale, Mirkwood, Erebor and the Iron Hills, Thorin inside the mountain, Ravenhill) — convergent parallel montage inherited from the Pelennor Fields and Braveheart's command/melee rhythm.
dividual — Massive-generated armies rendered as single affective bodies, reinforced in the mix by per-people timbres — 'massed percussion and guttural weight of the orc host against the cleaner metallic registers of elves and men' — with Shore's leitmotifs descending from Prokofiev's Battle on the Ice.
the interval — Stephen Regelous's Massive system 'deployed to populate an entire multi-army battle with autonomous digital agents' — each soldier a computed gap between perception and action.
any-instant-whatever — Shot and exhibited at 48 fps in native 3D on RED Epic — doubling the sampling of movement, removing the motion blur that preserved a residue of the posed instant; viewers reported a 'hyper-clear, video-like immediacy'.

How The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies was received →