In the Flesh: The Return of the King

Gollum (Andy Serkis) wins no great victories. He has no coat of arms, no mighty steed, no blade with a fabled name. Nor does he have a home and its simple, honest comforts to which he longs to return. He has no companions and no liege lord, no country and no ethos. His naked malice and grasping, hateful desperation are the only things keeping him upright, and it all bends toward one grubby, pitiful little purpose: the Ring. In the film’s very first moments Jackson takes pains to show how complete the titular artifact’s hold over Sméagol is, flashing back to five hundred years before the events of the trilogy to the unfortunate hobbit’s murder of his cousin just moments after the two of them stumble across the Ring. As Howard Shore’s iconic score screeches with J-horror scare strings and a febrile, pulsating heartbeat, Sméagol chokes the life out of his own family and dons the Ring with something like religious ecstasy on his pinched features, the score reaching its crescendo in an unearthly shriek more akin to broken glass squealing against itself than anything identifiable as music.

Serkis plays Gollum as utterly abject but still in conflict with himself, even after he resolves to lead Frodo (Elijah Wood) and Sam (Sean Astin) to their deaths in the Pass of Cirith Ungol. He lacks any ability to conceal his emotions, with wonder, terror, greed, murderous rage, and awful grief frequently at war on his gaunt and sallow features. Realized by still unimpeachable motion capture and digital painting, Gollum feels as vibrant and alive as his flesh and blood co-stars, his cartoonish eyes and leering mouth possessed of an uncomfortable sense of reality. Again we see in him what will happen to Frodo if he remains the Ring’s bearer too long, and the distance between the two hobbits narrows in real time as the film progresses.

But Frodo isn’t the only character to whom Gollum serves as a dramatic mirror. Gollum is also a microcosm of Sauron’s worldview, perhaps an implicit critique of covetous modernity and post-industrial consumerism, the obsessive pursuit of ownership for its own sake. Sauron, like Gollum, has no vision beyond possessing and ruling things. Like Gollum he is obsessed with the Ring, and like Gollum he perverts and lessens everything he touches. In short, Gollum represents the world at its most vulnerable and the world at its most brutal and intractable. He is wretchedness instrumentalized, the state of desolation personified and sent out babbling and insensate into the world, and still, beneath the accrued detritus of five hundred years of torture and insanity, a little of that breakable, pitiful hobbit remains.