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[Well, for several weeks now I’ve been thinking to myself that I needed to write out exactly why The Two Towers is my favorite film of the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Here it is. It is about 3,000 words long. Have fun!]
At this point, I’ve watched The Two Towers so many times that I can recite the dialogue to nearly any scene; I could provide an annoying kind of Rifftrax that would be less funny and more me telling you exactly which moments are the “most” significant, which shots are framed the best, which line readings are absolutely killer. I could comment on the way wind picks up some characters’ hair in certain shots, or how the light and the music come in at the right moments. In short, I am a fan, maybe even a crazy fan of this film. The Lord of the Rings film trilogy is a shaggy one by any measure. It’s bold, it’s beautiful, it’s epic—but it’s also messy. Peter Jackson plays with the idea of being a sweeping romance, a character drama, a family homily, an action movie, a buddy comedy, and God knows what else within the canvas of nine hours (more if you count the extended versions, which I am not for this essay). It kind of goes in every direction, and that’s both great and incredibly irritating and at times (ahem, Return of the King) really quite boring.
Two Towers is a departure from the other two films, in that it explores the themes that are the most Peter Jackson, and the least J.R.R. Tolkien. Jackson has to color pretty far outside the lines in order to make that happen, and as a result there’s more than one plot element that doesn’t quite work, more than one frustrating question that is never answered. And yet I find it by far the most enjoyable movie, the most interesting, the one that has stood the test of time (a decade, now). It’s also the most classically cinematic—the only film that feels like it ends properly. This alone puts it at the top, in my mind, followed by Fellowship of the Ring and then Return of the King.
It’s ridiculous that I even like this trilogy, you know. It’s largely white men (and elves and dwarves and hobbits who look just like white men). The few women have roles that are expanded or heavily altered to make them reasonable characters in the film. Everyone is so deathly pale and the bad guys are all so deadly dark. This starts and ends with fucked-up imagery.
But it’s a powerful, human, moving story—enough that the bullshit can be set aside (similar to Les Miserables, another work entirely without irony). This is a story of people working together to fight evil and do good, and that is everyone’s story (there are not many people who believe that they themselves are evil, after all). And in the context of finding the human themes that resonate with a modern audience—well, I think Two Towers is the obvious choice.
Because this has already come up numerous times—because the “critic’s choice” is usually Fellowship—I feel like I have to compare the two. But I think they are different enough that I can get away with saying that Fellowship is beautiful, and it totally converted me to the trilogy, but it doesn’t strike me in the heart the way that Two Towers does. In reality I think they’re two very different movies. Fellowship is about the Shire. And how cute hobbits are. And also about world-building, and the fantastical rules of the place Tolkien invented, a place that feels ancient and familiar. Two Towers starts moving past the setting, and the rules of the game, to the characters in this particular game, and who they are and what matters to them. And that’s not Tolkien’s forte. He loves the setting, he loves the place, he loves the lore, and that’s wonderful. Character is less important to him (though of course not unimportant. Just less important). Which is why the books are ultimately so frustrating for me. The characters do what they ought to, what people in epics do, but without the psychological realism I’m accustomed to—and need, in order to believe in or identify with my characters.
[I think the point is that Tolkien didn’t find it important that anyone identify with the characters—and certainly not me, a woman of color from a colonized land—but rather believe in them and find them glorious. He was writing an ancient epic, and I am imposing my modern values and identity politics on it. But ok, I own up to it. Carry on.]
The thing is, The Two Towers is cinematic. It is near-perfectly paced, with a muddly part in the middle where Aragorn has confusing Arwen flashbacks (more on that in a minute). it culminates in a half-hour long epic battle, the Battle of Helm’s Deep, which is one of the best on-screen battles ever, in the history of everything—a battle which ends up tying together the plot threads from across Middle-Earth, in defiance of Tolkien’s timeline, to create one of the most beautiful and satisfying conclusions to a movie I’ve ever seen. It’s also scored by two of the strongest pieces in the entirety of the trilogy—“Forth Eorlingas” and “Isengard Unleashed.” Dude, man, “Forth Eorlingas,” I don’t even want to hear it. That shit is epic. And if what you’re looking for from your epic fantasy is sweeping, romantic, inspiring, and powerful, well, The Two Towers has it, and in spades. Remember also that the main action of the film takes place over the course of a week, no more. (“On the morning of the fifth day, look to the east.”) As far as epics go, it does what it needs to—it provides the climactic battle, it provides the hero with a love triangle, it has funny jokes, it has good triumphing over an established evil. But it’s also more than that. What amazes me is how well this movie functions on even a shot-to-shot analysis—how carefully the writers were building these relationships between the characters, even when they must have known how little payoff Tolkien’s ending would provide these stories. It’s a whole bunch of red herrings, honestly—very pretty, beautifully done red herrings.
So, let’s be real: Without a doubt, the reason I love this movie is because it’s Aragorn’s movie. My classmates in school came back from seeing Fellowship saying to keep an eye out for the cute elf; I have never had eyes for anybody in that movie except the future king of Gondor. The brooding romantic hero is not anyone’s most original character—fine. I grant you that. But Aragorn isn’t even supposed to be a romantic hero in the books, yo. He’s not romantic, he’s not conflicted, he’s just a dude who wants to be king, and I think right from the start the trilogy’s writers were like hey, we need to retool this character, this character who is the hope of the race of men, entirely, because otherwise nobody is going to give a shit about men surviving the end of the third age or second age or whatever.
Aragorn (who is played beautifully by Viggo Mortensen, and before you leave here, let me just tell you that Viggo Mortensen really hated the idea of playing this totally cliché character but in fact does bond freakishly with horses and wears the same ring Aragorn wears in the movie so you know whatever) ends up carrying half the emotional weight in the trilogy right from the start.
And of course, Aragorn is the only character who seems to be aware of the existence of women. That helps—a lot. Of course, they had to invent most of Arwen’s character out of pure nothingness—what the hell is the Evenstar? What is that necklace? How does her fate get tied to the fate of the Ring, exactly? Did you know that Tolkien invented Arwen after realizing that some elf-maiden needed to sew the banner that Andúril was wrapped in when Elrond presented the newly forged sword to Aragorn in Return of the King?—but she provides a lot of badassery to Fellowship. Hence a lot of the choppy stuff in the middle of Two Towers, where she’s shoehorned into the script through the means of some very shady plot devices. Oh yes, dreams! And flashbacks! Or flash forwards? From when? To what? Whoooo cares?! No really, who cares? Because Arwen’s only present to serve as wispy, elvish contrast to the firecracking glory that is Eowyn, the (White) Lady of Rohan.
Look—I doubt anyone is going to disagree with me on the crucial fact that Eowyn is one of the best if not the best character in The Lord of the Rings. She’s the only female character with feelings, the only one. I don’t have a choice but to love her. Fortunately she doesn’t make it hard. She wants—so much, she wants to be important and valorous and bold and memorable. And of course she falls in love with Aragorn. She’s us, you see. If Aragorn is carrying half of the emotional weight of the movie (and certainly more, in my case)—then Eowyn is the wide-eyed audience member taking him in—all six feet and 78 years of him.
We don’t think of the camera lens as being a feminine gaze very often. I think Two Towers might be one of those rare exceptions. The camera tends to linger far more on the beauty of its male characters than on the sexuality of its female characters. We inhabit the position of Eowyn—starry-eyed innocent, vulnerable but defiant, watching as Aragorn and his friends move through the West. Because as wonderful as Eowyn is, she doesn’t really do anything in this film. She watches, mostly. And in nearly every scene, we watch her watch, as well. When Gandalf, Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli come to Edoras to free Theoden from Saruman’s curse, Aragorn holds her back from taking action. She is in fact forbidden from fighting in the battle, from taking part of any skirmishes. She is relegated to the role of spectator.
And specifically, she is an audience of one, watching Aragorn. For Rohan is the stage upon which Aragorn learns how to become a king. (This is, again, a cinematic choice—in the books, I believe we are supposed to interpret Aragorn as a willing heir, looking to do good in the position that is his birthright. It is a modern invention, the reluctant nobleman.) Aragorn comes into the kingdom a near-criminal—threatened by Eomer and his Rohirrim, infiltrating The Golden Hall, avoiding authority, scraping power off the earth as he goes. He leaves it a hero, the man who seized power at the crucial moment, when Theoden’s will faltered. Aragorn and Theoden have this fascinating, extended conversation about kingship in the subtext of the film—Aragorn’s defiance of Theoden’s caution, his concerns for the pride and morale of his people. In turn, Theoden snaps at him: “Last I checked, it was Theoden, not Aragorn, that was King of Rohan.” Theoden comes from an older time, but he knows what it means to rule; Aragorn knows everything of life except that, more or less.
But Rohan is the right place to wage such a struggle. It is a blank canvas, a country so barren there are more horses than people, and no cities at all to speak of. The only thing that exists there, honestly, is a fierce pride in their nation, and in each other.
And Theoden is the other shining star of this film, a surprising type of romantic hero, to be sure. But his position is unenviable—a king who only recently came to his senses, to find his kingdom under siege and his son dead. In one of the film’s most dramatically lit moments, Theoden’s manservant buckles on his armor before the battle. Theoden’s face as he stares into nothingness, as the last light of the day sets behind him, is absolutely grief-stricken; he has no hope of lasting the night, no hope of his kingdom surviving, either. There is this terrible sense that he must do his duty anyway. He says: Who am I? And his man responds: You are our king, sire. He asks: And you trust your king? The response: Your men, my lord, will follow you to whatever end. Theoden ruminates on this. “…To whatever end.” Then he says: “Where is the horse and the rider? Where is the horn that was blown? They have passed, like rain on the mountains, like wind in the meadow. The days have gone down in the West, behind the hills, into shadow. How did it come to this?”
Rarely up until this point have we seen what the horror of Mordor looks like. And here it is—the desolation writ plain on Theoden’s face. He has no choice but to wear his heavy mantle with grace. Aragorn has to struggle to come to terms with that mantle, and what it means. In another one of the film’s climactic moments, Legolas tries to tell Aragorn that the battle is hopeless, to which Aragorn responds angrily, “Then I shall die as one of them!”—the true duty of a king, you could argue. Half the point of the film is watching Aragorn change his mind about what it might mean to rule a kingdom—a journey that began, I grant you, with Boromir’s death, in the second/third/eighth climax of Fellowship. (The destruction that Mordor wreaks is the story of the Ents, too, which I admittedly love for entirely hippy-dippy reasons like “nature is great” or whatever—it’s badass, and it’s also about choice, and it’s both funny and poignant, so there.)
Strangely, the last time I watched Two Towers—even though I’d seen it maybe 30 times—I suddenly was struck with how much it speaks to my life, in various tiny little ways. Er, there is a lot about hobbits that doesn’t really mean much to me. But the overarching narrative of Two Towers is of the constant choice to do something against evil, for good, to defend what you believe in. Fellowship seems to me to be far more about the loss of innocence of the Shire—losing the magical and enchanted spaces of the elves, the sacred knowledge of the dwarves, etc. Generally speaking Tolkien is a lot more interested in the movement from that innocence to the corruption of the everyday human. So Fellowship is punctuated by the visual differences between “good” and “evil,” between the Shire and Mordor. Green and black. Soft and hard. Warm and cold. Beautiful and monstrous.
But dude—I don’t have a Shire. I am not from an idyllic village. I live in New York City. My place of residence looks more like Mordor on most days than it looks like the Shire, and sure, that’s not a good thing, but I’m not convinced it’s really all that bad, either. As beautiful as Fellowship is, it doesn’t feel significant to my life the way that Two Towers has managed to. The humans in both Rohan and Gondor are living in a world already tainted by evil. They are not, like the hobbits, fighting to preserve a perfect ideal. They are in the trenches, watching Nazgul take out their high towers, trying to hold on to the last scraps of their humanity.
Oh no—don’t worry—I have not forgotten about Osgiliath. I don’t like any scene with Frodo and Sam more than their private, tiny little showdown in the middle of a huge battle in an even bigger world, when Frodo pulls his sword on his best friend, after briefly succumbing to the siren song of the ring. To my mind, Frodo and Sam experience their worst tragedies in Two Towers, under the hand of Faramir. If Eowyn is our spectator for Rohan, Faramir is our spectator in Gondor. We watch him watching the hobbits—we watch him learn the story of his brother Boromir—we watch him use Gollum as a bargaining chip, dooming both Frodo and Gollum in the process (I can still barely watch this scene, because it makes me so upset). Eowyn is a passive spectator, but Faramir is active—he’s mucking things up just by existing, because he’s too far into the game to get out of it. (We’re probably all more like Faramir than we are like anyone else in the series—kind of inadequate, doing a sloppy job, but trying anyway, because we don’t know what else there is to do.) So of course in the final moments of the film, Faramir hears Frodo ask Sam, defeated: “What are we holding onto, Sam?”
The answer is: each other. Because the true story of Two Towers is the power of friendship. It is the tenuous bonds of fellowship that tie together the heroes of this story—not nations, not races, not even really agendas. It is just—I want what is good and right in life, and I want it for you as well, because we both share this burden of life together. When Aragorn presses Theoden to ask for aid, Theoden is fierce in his response: “Who would come? Elves? Dwarves? We are not so lucky in our friends as you.” The crucial word there is not “lucky”—it’s “friends.” It is no surprise, then, that Haldir should arrive, to rekindle the alliance (the friendship?) between elves and men; no surprise that Aragorn, Gimli, and Legolas should routinely save each others’ lives during the battle, limping through their adventures. So the hobbits form a friendship with the Ents. So Sam and Frodo choose to befriend a ruined wretch, gone mad with evil. So even Faramir extends some compassion to a couple of wanderers he comes across, and lets them go on their way.
Because when the crucial problem is—“I can’t do this anymore,” as Frodo confesses to Sam—the only response is—“Ride out with me,” as Aragorn offers to Theoden. Sam tells Frodo: “There’s some good in this world, and it’s worth fighting for.” And this exchange between Theoden and Aragorn, in the last moments of the Battle of Helm’s Deep, well, this is maybe the whole point of the film:
THEODEN: So much death… What can men do against such reckless hate?
ARAGORN: Ride out with me.
THEODEN: For death and glory?
ARAGORN: For Rohan. For your people.
THEODEN: Yes. Yes. The horn of Helm Hammerhand will sound in the Deep one last time.
Then Theoden walks up to Aragorn, and takes his arm. “Let this be the hour when we draw swords together.”
And Aragorn knows in that moment (look at his face) that he has earned the right of kingship, because this man has spoken to him as a peer. Indeed, as a friend.
Every time I watch, no matter how many times, I get chills every time the camera pans up from Frodo and Sam wending their way through the woods up to the desolate skyline of Mordor, where Nazgul wheel off the drafts of Mount Doom. Every time I watch, no matter how many times, I am unable to tear my eyes away from the last charge out of Helm’s Deep, the 10 men left after a night of fighting. Theoden calls out to his men: Fell deeds awake! Now for wrath! now for ruin! and the red dawn! Because perhaps having a friend, and keeping a friend, is the only thing that’s left when the world is a dark and terrifying place. Because perhaps keeping a friend is the only way to hold on to your own humanity. And when all hope is lost, perhaps it’s better to ride out with a friend than stay indoors, waiting for the world to collapse around you.
Forth Eorlingas!
LOVE ME ^^ (Now that I think about it I really just wrote a long valentine to Aragorn, son of Arathorn. Oh dear.)
Seriously. Go read this now.