In the Flesh: The Two Towers

If The Fellowship of the Ring is about grounding us in Tolkien’s Middle Earth, The Two Towers is concerned with showing us what that world has already lost, and what it stands to lose still if Sauron should emerge victorious from the brewing war. This awareness of loss is nearly omnipresent in Jackson, Boyen, and Walsh’s screenplay. Gollum (Andy Serkis) trails Frodo (Elijah Wood) like a living Memento Mori, every garbled line he hisses carrying the unspoken postscript, “I am what happens if you fail.” In the Dead Marshes we catch a glimpse of what the natural world might look like in the wake of Sauron’s ascent to ultimate power, a stinking wasteland where the ghosts of those his forces slew linger endlessly in hateful silence, the horrors of long-ago wars soaked into the ground like cancer metastasizing through a body. In Arwen’s (Liv Tyler) vision of Aragorn’s (Viggo Mortensen) death we see the inextricability of loss from even the most joyful possible scenarios, just as Haldir’s (Craig Parker) death on the ramparts of Helm’s Deep shows us a future in which even the immortal elves have tasted of devastation.

Elsewhere, loss animates the story in more complex and abstracted ways. When Theoden (Bernard Hill) awakens from his enchanted state he must contend not only with the death of his son and heir but with his loss of time, his absence from the lives of his loved ones and his people during Saruman and Grima Wormtongue’s sorcerous possession of him. Treebeard (John Rhys-Davies) must reckon with his long years of inaction as his one-time friend Saruman laid waste to the forest of Fangorn under his very nose, Aragorn with his decision not to seek the throne of Gondor, Faramir (David Wenham) with his to let the Ring of Power slip through his fingers rather than seek his father Denethor’s (John Noble) approval by bearing it home. Faramir also delivers the series’ only real spoken commentary on the horrors of war, pushing viewers to think not just of the characters we’ve known and followed and the people who are most familiar to us in appearance and cultural milieu, but also those who serve under Sauron’s banner as full and complex human beings whose deaths are equally tragic.

Even if Jackson’s handling of Rohan’s ultimate victory at Helm’s Deep is perhaps a bit too clean, deflating the tension he builds over the course of the film, The Two Towers can’t be read as purely triumphal. From the little box of salt and herbs Sam (Sean Astin) clings to so desperately in his first scene as a reminder of home’s simple comforts to the desolate, selfish yearning of Grima Wormtongue as he covets Theoden’s niece Eowyn (Miranda Otto), we are reminded again and again that the things which structure our lives and give them meaning are both fragile and fleeting. There is no guarantee that what we love today will be with us tomorrow, or even that its memory will abide with us. Like Arwen, we know that loss is coming for us, that even our most joyous experiences and most beloved will eventually be taken; all we have left to us is how we live with that knowledge in the time we’re given.