Being Cassandra

I was reading Mary Renault's chronicles of Alexander a few days ago, and she very specifically mentions the fact that kings should feel sorry for Hecabe.

This is all very well, and I feel Hecabe's grief as strongly as the next person, but what strikes me is that nobody ever wastes any sympathy on Cassandra. On Hector, yes, on Priam, plenty. And even though Paris generally comes in for a good number of "served him right" comments, at least he comes in for something.

Part of the problem is that Cassandra is such an insufferable know-it-all. If you had been the king who had his curtain drawn in the dead of night to be told half his Troy was burned, would you have been thrilled to have a daughter raising her hands and eyes to heaven as though to ask Apollo what he would have done if surrounded by such idiots? (Or, worse, turning back to shout, "I told you so!" as she was dragged in chains to the enemy ship?)

Cassandra's real tragic flaw is that she doesn't have one. She was the Seer fated to be disbelieved; had this been because of some girlish crime you could have winked slyly and said, "Ah, the girl's one of us!" But this was because she was so good and pure and virtuous that she refused even Apollo's advances, and commendable though this might be, it does give you the feeling that her shade is watching you from Hades with an air of pious disapproval. You can't really feel sorry for someone like that.

That, I think, is why so many people have a bit of sneaking sympathy for Clytemnestra. If your husband brought home a younger wife and she flaunted her nubile charms in the face of your mature but true affection (I'll do Clyemnestra a kindness and forget Aegisthus for the moment) you could at least have the satisfaction of calling her names. If she looked at you with large sorrowful eyes that saw every frivolity and transgression you had committed (here we bring Aegisthus back) while her city was being reduced to smoking ruins, and in all likelihood saw all the frivolities and transgressions you would commit in all the rest of your life, it would probably infuriate you even more than the bare fact of her existence.

The moral of the story? If you do know what's inside that nice big horse that the Greeks just happen to have left on the beach, don't tell people about it. They won't believe you, and when the warriors burst out of it and attack they'll only be annoyed with you for having been right.

Tolkien: Book to Screen

Not to be a Tolkien Nazi (I did spring for the Extended Edition DVDs!), but there are legitimate simplifications of the plot that are necessary to take an epic to the screen, and then there are baffling alterations that leave you thinking that either the director foresaw some insurmountable wrangle that you cannot imagine or he simply wanted to play in the sandbox. My top half-dozen from Fellowship:

1. Bilbo Baggins Whining: The Bilbo in the book is a cheerful Hobbit who doesn’t snivel and who seems remarkably capable for his age and valiant after his own fashion. The Bilbo in the movie switches from senility to fecklessness to, sometimes, a combination of both. He snivels in Bag End and he snivels in Rivendell and you see in him not the slightest vestige of the happy-go-lucky protagonist of The Hobbit.

2. Aragorn Whining: The role is reasonably well scripted on the whole, but there are times when you wonder – especially after watching Bilbo snuffling over the harm the Ring has caused – why it is necessary for everyone to whine. The man is eighty-seven. He’s just a little too old for teenage angst. He knows that he is going to be King of Gondor and Arnor, and if sixty-seven years haven’t been enough for him to get over moping about something that happened three millennia ago then it’s hard to see how he’s fit to lead even a village with a population of two.

3. “If you want him, come and claim him.”: I can accept Liv Tyler as Arwen – after all, casting Arwen and Galadriel is like casting Helen of Sparta; you’re never going to please everybody. But need she ride around on Asfaloth brandishing her sword at the Nazgûl like a female Horatio Hornblower? You could, just possibly, take Galadriel riding to the rescue. Not Arwen, especially when it means no Glorfindel.

4. No Quest for the Sun: This is undeniably a bit demanding of me, but I loved that scene in the book. You can just see a disgruntled Dwarf muttering imprecations under his breath when Legolas runs off, leaving him beard-deep in snow, “to find the Sun.” What do you get instead in the movie? Twelve seconds of Elven shoes on the white stuff and a completely redundant scene about how the Ring is starting to claim Boromir.

5. Seventeen Missing Years: We know that it is the One Ring to Rule Them All and so on. All the same, the effect it had on Frodo was because he had possessed it for seventeen years; in the movie you’re left thinking it was more like seventeen days. The point about its insidious evil is that it is insidious; it doesn’t ambush you like a panther on a jungle trail.

6. Rivendell and the Hall of Fire: Yes, it’s a movie. Yes, it has to be short because if people are expected to sit in the theatre through five intermissions, they’ll probably discover more interesting things to do. All the same, a few minutes to establish that the Last Homely House was in fact home to somebody other than Elrond and Arwen would have caused no crisis. Besides, it’s all very well to create a general-purpose characterization for all Elves involving being aloof and cryptic and staring enigmatically into the distance, but without some music or art or poetry they are not really Elves.