Choosing the Way of Pain: a dialog on Lord of the Rings

Steve Mohn & Peter Watts Choosing the Way of Pain: a dialog on Lord of the Rings

Much has been said of Peter Jackson’s take on J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings , and to say more may feel a day late. DVDs wold with the films are crammed with extras, and websites abound. It had made more money than anything else, ever, and everyone loves it. So when the relevant essay I had promised On Spec crumbled like stale cake in my clumsy hands, Jena Snyder, our production editor, suggested a dialoge with Peter Watts, author of the sf trilogy Starfish, Maletsrom, and Behemoth, and a guy who, Jena assured me, really knew his Tolkien*. I leapt at this since I don’t know anything and can always afford to learn something new.

New because this would not be two guys sitting at a table, nor even two e-mailers batting epistles back and forth in shuttlecock imitation of a transcripted dialogue. Days, not minutes, passed between replies. Each is a small essay, not so much worked as meditated on, with scarecely any cuts. We could go where we wished, yank the discussion in whatever direction. The only rule was that we had to have seen the films.

You may have to chew your way through parts of what we ended up with but, between my own solemn trench-digging and Peter under full sail, running before the wind, we have talked about Jackson’s Rings in a fashion unlike what you are liable to find elsewhere. And so then...