The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Begin with the thing everyone argued about. In the theaters wired for it, An Unexpected Journey ran at forty-eight frames a second — twice the century-old standard — and the first thing many viewers noticed was that Rivendell looked like a place someone had built. The elven arches, the dwarves' prosthetic noses, the exact weave of Gandalf's robe: all of it arrived with a crispness that felt less like a movie than like standing on the set during a lunch break. Critics reached for "soap opera effect." Jackson had wanted lifelike. Audiences got constructed. That reaction is worth taking seriously, because it names something a viewer with Deleuze in their pocket can suddenly see clearly.

Start from what the film obviously is. This is about as pure a specimen of the movement-image as blockbuster cinema produces — Deleuze's name for the cinema where a character perceives a situation and acts to change it, where editing exists to carry that action forward and nothing lingers without a job to do. More precisely it runs on the action-image in its large form: a vast situation bears down until only a decisive deed can transform it. The dwarves have lost Erebor and its gold to the dragon Smaug; the exiled Thorin means to take the mountain back; every troll hollow, goblin tunnel, and stone-giant brawl is a rung on that ladder. Deleuze would call Middle-earth itself the synsign here — the encompassing milieu, the whole world staged so that it seems to call for the quest, to press the deed out of the reluctant hobbit. Bilbo runs out his door because the film's geography is built to make him run.

Now the strange part. The movement-image works by getting you to forget the image is an image. You live it forward; the shot is a window, not a surface. What the high frame rate did was break that spell. The picture stopped being transparent and became readable. Deleuze has a term for an image that has lost its self-evidence — that no longer flows straight into your nerves and muscles but sits there asking to be deciphered: the lectosign, the readable image. He found it in slow, difficult art cinema, where slackened action forces you to read a shot instead of ride it. The Hobbit arrived at the same place from the opposite direction. Not too little action — too much resolution. Forty-eight frames stripped away the soft motion blur that had always quietly done the work of illusion, and the eye, given more to see, began to see the seams. This is why a maximalist adventure picture provoked the kind of alienation usually reserved for Antonioni. The apparatus got so good it showed itself.

There is exactly one place in the film where reading the image is the whole point, and it is the best scene: Bilbo and Gollum in the dark. The dossier calls it the film's most disciplined passage, edited as a taut two-hander of close-ups and reaction — and the close-up is Deleuze's affection-image, a feeling registered on a face before it discharges into any act. Andy Serkis's performance-captured Gollum is finer than that, though. Watch how the creature's face keeps flickering between the wheedling Sméagol and the murderous Gollum, micro-tremor by micro-tremor, an intensity mounting toward a threshold it never quite crosses. That building-across-a-face is the potisign, the icon of power. And here, uniquely, the merciless clarity of the format helps: every twitch is legible, so the one scene that wants to be read is served by the very sharpness that betrays the rest.

Then Bilbo pockets a ring. He thinks it is a lucky trinket won in a game. You do not. Whatever the characters know, the audience holds the relation that gives the object its weight — this is Deleuze's relation-image, meaning assembled by the viewer as a knowing third party. The Ring is a mark: an object meaningful entirely by its customary chain, and our chain is The Fellowship of the Ring. Ring means doom; we learned it a decade earlier. The prequel form bakes dramatic irony straight into the picture, and lineage and concept fuse into a single fact: the movie could not mean what it means without the films that came after the story but before the release.

That lineage is the real discourse here. Fellowship bequeaths the entire apparatus — Lesnie's high-key New Zealand vistas, Shore's leitmotifs, the Weta forced-perspective rigs that shrink hobbits among wizards. Return of the King handed down the appendix-mining method that inflated a slim children's book toward epic length, which is precisely the padding critics charged. King Kong is where the Serkis facial-capture pipeline matured, so that Gollum's face could carry the riddle scene at all. And Avatar and The Polar Express are the ancestors of the scandal: Polar Express's uncanny hyperreal motion is the first tremor of the too-clear realism that 48fps amplified into a genuine crisis.

So what did the film do to film? It failed to make HFR a norm, and in failing it proved a point Deleuze would have relished. His whole system rests on the movement-image being an any-instant-whatever — a mechanical, neutral sampling of motion, twenty-four slices a second. The Hobbit changed the sampling rate and discovered that the number had never been neutral at all. The old blur was doing invisible labor, turning fabrication into flesh. Watch it again and watch what the frame rate hides. You will not be able to unsee the mountain being built.