long with the rest of the world's moviegoers (at least, it seems, according to the reported box office gross), I went to a screening of Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King as one of my final cinematic outings of 2003. Though I wasn't up to watching all three installments in one sitting on Trilogy Tuesday the way many of you were (the spirit was willing, but the bladder, I'm afraid, was weak), I was careful to see it before it was time to make the rounds of holiday parties. After all, considering the sort of crowd I hang out with, the film was sure to be a major topic of conversation, and I didn't want to be exposed to any more spoilers than I'd already suffered thanks to my editing of reviews and interviews in advance of the film's release for both Science Fiction Weekly and SCI FI magazines.
Watching Return of the King turned out to be deeply affecting—but surprisingly, more than just in the way I'd expected. Going in, I anticipated that I would be moved by the act of bearing witness to the end of an epic, by experiencing Jackson's triumph as he put the capstone on his characters' quest ... and indeed, I was moved. But what I felt amounted to more than just reveling in a final chapter.
I also knew that seeing with my own eyes what I had up until then only imagined—the destruction of the One Ring and an exultant return to the Shire—made real on the screen in fulfillment of a childhood dream ... well, anyone who'd encountered the Lord of the Rings books at a young age could expect to be filled with a combination of awe and glee. For how often are one's personal formative experiences invested with such love and money for all the world to see? But the feelings that washed over me were also more than those as well, more than just those of validation and vindication.
Instead, the emotions that welled up as I sat in the theater in the dark were ones I never expected when I plunked down my $6.00. To my surprise, it was suddenly time to wake up and smell the popcorn.
Great art can equal great embarrassment
Return of the King was not just an intellectual experience for me—it was a visceral one as well. The film snuck inside of me to pull my strings and push my buttons. My reactions were intense. I got choked up at times and had to dry my eyes. I was so worked up by the action scenes that I almost cheered aloud, remarkable for me, as I am ordinarily a sedate moviegoer. (Laughter and applause, yes. Hooting and hollering, no.)
So Return of the King was as remarkable as was the first film in making a private dream real. And yet, as I watched, an undercurrent of emotion surrounding the real world was also always present. It swirled around two issues that were quite similar—questions of what to do with my own life. Both issues brought with them elements of embarrassment.
The first topic was a concern that crops up in writers' lives all the time (and as you can see by my biographical blurb below, I am a writer as well as an editor), and that is—Why am I not creating more? Why am I not putting more dreams on paper? Why am I not building worlds that can move people as much as this one does? Artists live as both consumers and creators, and no creative individual can consume a work of art without at some point thinking, "Shouldn't I be off creating as well?" And so, unexpectedly, my Return of the King experience had me feeling that I was being lazy and wasteful of my talents.
That first reaction was a personal one. But the second issue that was stirred up is more of a public one. Sitting in my comfortable stadium-style theater seat in a fresh, clean theater in the midst of a safe suburb, watching dirt-encrusted heroes stretched to the breaking point as they risked their lives to save their troubled world, I thought—Why aren't I doing something that is equally as important? There are great deeds that need doing in that treacherous world out there, and most of us in the audience do nothing that has those kinds of stakes.
Thoreau famously said that most men live lives of quiet desperation, and he was right, but the truth goes even further than that, because most of us live lives that are just, well, quiet, even as we watch or read about those who are living their lives at full volume. Face to face with Aragorn and Theoden and the others willing to head into battles that seemed like suicide in order to save Middle-earth—to be a writer or editor in that moment felt like being a clown. There are wrongs to be righted and evils to be toppled here on the real Earth—and I was settling for watching others do it for me vicariously. During that screening, it did not seem like enough. It seemed as if I should be doing more.
Well, now it's a new year, which is always a good time to point oneself in a new direction. Maybe this year I'll try to do a better job of letting the heroism of my fictional friends bleed over into the real world, and use them more as inspiration instead of just entertainment.
Maybe we all should try.
Scott Edelman started his trek to the editor-in-chief position at Science
Fiction Weekly decades ago, when he began working as an assistant editor at
Marvel Comics. Between these two positions, this four-time Hugo Award nominee in
the category of Best Editor was the founding editor of the
award-winning magazine Science Fiction Age, in addition to editing
Sci-Fi Universe, Sci-Fi Flix and Satellite Orbit. Currently, he also edits SCI
FI, the official magazine of the SCI FI Channel. His most recent short story appears in the new anthology Men Writing Science Fiction as Women, edited by Mike Resnick.
