Feb 2, 2021 8:00 AM

The No-Good Very Nasty Remastering of The Lord of the Rings

In correcting every imperfection and sharpening every blur of his epic fantasy trilogy, Peter Jackson has violated a fundamental law of nature.

Look, I see why Peter Jackson did it. Why he rereleased, in December of last year, his Lord of the Rings trilogy, along with The Nasty Hobbitses—as I like to call them, channeling Gollum—in so-called “4K Ultra HD” (a redundancy). It’s a very 21st-century-filmmaker thing to do, this remastering business. Enrich the colors, sharpen the images, and your films hold up down through the ages. It’s practically a moral obligation, a question of clarity, of being clear, and if you can clarify Legolas by pumping an extra 10 million pixels into his perfect Elven pores, which comes out to something like 100 billion photons, all twinkling immortally through the cosmic sweep of spacetime, why then, shouldn’t you?

If there’s anything humans demand in this life, it’s that. Greater clarity. Just speak clearly, you scream—at politicians, at therapists, at spouses. Also at me, for writing such a muddy first paragraph. God, it really is a mess. Sinful, even, so wordy and wasteful. If clarity, like its cousin cleanliness, is indeed next to godliness—and it is; the word, in the original Middle English, meant “glory, divine splendor”—then to be unclear is to be unethical. Or un-optical, as it were, since optics are the new ethics, at least in corporate America, where all they do is seek clarity on this, visibility into that. I mean, could I be any more clear?

More than likely, so let me try again. Here’s how I should have started this essay: In 2020, everybody went a little bit blind.

Because that was Covid for you, in a sense: a great, glaring crisis of seeing. Stuck inside, people couldn’t see as they were used to seeing. They couldn’t see their friends and family, except on screens. They couldn’t see movies or shows or plays, except on screens. And they couldn’t see when the crisis would end, not even on screens. If this simulation called reality was crackling along in hi-def in the Before Times, it dropped to something like standard definition in 2020, went all glitchy and grainy. Sorry, this connection stinks.

As the outside world blurred, though, the inside world up-rezzed. Screens were all that remained, so they got sharper, prettier, denser, clearer. Everything you’d think had a record-breaking year in sales, did: big-screen TVs, with their UHDs and HDRs; iPhone 12s, with their OLED displays and 5G speeds; Oculus Quest 2s, now with 50 percent more pixels. Salvation would be achieved through clarity, and there was no resolution better suited to the times than something called 4K.

Not a new standard, of course; it began to show up in the mid-2010s. But “cocooning at home” during the pandemic, as one industry exec put it, “has accelerated interest in 4K.” Let’s recast the metaphor: HD was the caterpillar, and 4K the butterfly, bursting forth from its Covid chrysalis and crystallizing entertainment at quadruple the pixel density. The colors were dazzling, a truly heightened display. Classics like Lawrence of Arabia and the Hitchcock collection all the way down to every last Rambo and Resident Evil were 4K’d in 2020, not to mention video games, TV shows, and Top Gun to boot. Binge-watchers had been blind; now, they could see.

So look. I get why Peter Jackson capitalized on the accelerated interest. Why he remastered his trilogies in 4K, and just in time for the holiday season of a year in which an acute crisis of seeing collided with a chronic resolution fetish to produce a new market for the illusion of reality. But let me be clear. Crystal, if I can: What a no-good, anti-human, un-optical thing for this man to do.

Peter Jackson has never met a special effect he hasn’t tried to perfect. From the nontechnical and old-fashioned, like forcing perspectives so Frodo looks small, to the next-gen and physics-defying, like mo-capping a bipedal human actor into a four-legged fire-breathing dragon, he’s a master manipulator of bodies in space. In the case of Lord of the Rings, it worked. Magically. Little people convincingly and very emotionally saved an enormous world. Then he made The Nasty Hobbitses.

As a book, The Hobbit is everything LotR is not: short, silly, and stupid. Not that Jackson understood this. When he read it, he mainly saw that big scary dragon. In fact, he has suggested that he couldn’t make the films until the effects for such a beast were ready for him to exploit. Instead of thinking about how to make the story of an annoying middle-aged shut-in forced to venture outside actually, you know, compellingly tellable, he was thinking visually. And financially. It would be three movies, then—silly, stupid, and not at all short.

But that’s not the worst part. The worst part is that he seems to think he succeeded. That the look of these movies, pixels flashing in 48 hyperreal frames per second, is enough to justify their existence. So much so that he’d come to look back on Lord of the Rings with regret. Over the years, the “imperfections” in his original trilogy began, in his mind, to show.

Hence the 4K remaster. “We got the opportunity to go back and to remove and paint out any imperfections,” he says in a promotional video for the new Blu-rays, as animators retouch the scene with the Balrog. “It’s fun to have all the toys now. I sure didn’t have all this stuff to play with in the old days.” Now that he does, all six movies consist, Jackson says, of “pristine,” “sharp,” “ultra-crisp” images.

In her essay “In Defense of the Poor Image,” the filmmaker and media theorist Hito Steyerl defines an imperfect cinema as “resolutely compromised: blurred, amateurish, and full of artifacts.” She’s talking about underground, anti-elitist, anti-capitalist art, which Jackson’s cinema is, resolutely, far from. But the poor-ish, inconsistently color-graded, visually outdated images of his Lord of the Rings can be defended on similar grounds. The reason they work—in a very literal, but also cosmic, sort of way—is precisely because they look, by contemporary standards, imperfect. Because they look blurry and out of date: like relics from the past.

What humans perceive as the linear flow of time—first Jackson made The Lord of the Rings, and then he made The Nasty Hobbitses—is tied, very deeply if mostly unfathomably, to the direction of entropy. If you saw Christopher Nolan’s latest VFX showcase, Tenet, you might follow. Or not; that empty excuse for a film won’t make sense in any era, at any time. What’s known is this: The early universe had more order to it, and the universe today has less. The glass breaks, disorder increases, and time seems to move forward.

But who’s to say the broken glass, or the much-invoked deck of cards that was arranged numerically and by color but now is shuffled and therefore disordered, makes any less sense in its chaotic form? “The notion of certain configurations being more particular than others (26 red cards followed by 26 black cards, for example) makes sense only if I limit myself to noticing only certain aspects of the cards (in this case, the colors),” writes the theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli in The Order of Time (like A Brief History of, but beautifully written). “If I distinguish between all the cards, the configurations are all equivalent: None of them is more or less particular than others.” Of course, the human brain cannot make such fine-grained distinctions. As the cards are shuffled, the brain loses track of any meaningful relationship between them. The patterns and particularities, once so apparent, are now said to blur. “The difference between past and future,” Rovelli writes, “is deeply linked to this blurring.”

Confused? Let me try to be clearer: When things get unclear, you know time is passing. Blurring is the reason people can exist as physical beings in time. If your brain could somehow perceive a broken glass as a pattern identical to that of the unshattered glass—because, on a subatomic level, they basically are the same—you would transcend time. But you can’t. So you’re stuck here. Living, and inevitably dying, in a world where the imperfectly perfect Nasty Hobbitses are the standard by which Peter Jackson judges his perfectly imperfect Lord of the Rings. Where he remasters the latter in the style of the former, a violation of nature, of the order of time.

In a way, it’s God’s work. By fine-tuning his images, by increasing their resolution, Jackson is making the patterns easier to perceive. He’s de-blurring the meaning behind the shuffled deck, sculpting richer life from the mud of the past. But Jackson is not God, he’s a director of high fantasy, and that’s the wrong genre to unentropically reengineer. All stories should be allowed to get blurry in our memories of them, but fantasies most of all, because they’re so close to our dreams. We don’t dream in high resolution. We wake up, and the dragons fade.

Look, I can write a clear sentence: Peter Jackson should not have remastered The Lord of the Rings. Here’s another: Covid makes it hard to think about the future. Or I can write a blurred, amateurish essay instead, full of artifacts and stray thoughts, imperfections and improbabilities, that might suggest something more. Something about vision, about seeing a way forward. Something about heaven, and the unclarities that help get us there.

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