Lord of the Rings and the Effective Dramatic Technique of an Expository Scene

I don’t often understand multitasking while watching something. Although plenty of my friends swear by it. I grew up believing movies were to be paid close attention to, watched in absorption and careful attentiveness. Otherwise, meanings, subtleties, and lessons on humanity within the story and craft for the art of storytelling, would be missed. These were the entire reasons to watch anything.

Last night I experienced something different. I rewatched Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King. This is a movie I have not watched for a few years, but when I was a middle schooler in the early 2000s I watched this probably once or twice a week for long enough that I have the movie memorized to this day. Which I didn’t realize until the movie started and I was able to recite lines before the characters did. I remembered that back in my days of boy scouting, on long, seemingly endless hikes, I would sometimes shut my eyes and from memory let the entirety of The Fellowship of the Ring play out in my mind.

This over-familiarity with the movie changed the way I watched it. While it was on I began, first unconsciously, then very deliberately, to work on a script I am currently writing.

I once read (forgive me for forgetting the source) that there are two kinds of work while writing: hard work and soft work. Hard work is where you’re focused on writing the thing, whatever it is. That is, writing as if what you put down is meant to be the final product (whether or not it is, is beside the point). Whereas soft work is more exploratory. It’s where you brainstorm, throw out ideas, write notes, come up with lines but not scenes, etc. It’s the building blocks, or as I like to call it (and I got this from an improv teacher) “chum for the sharks”.

While Lord of the Rings was on in the background, I did soft work. The movie provided an excellent atmosphere for relaxing, with my mind able to wander and imagine and reflect, while still able to feel like I was doing nothing more than recreationally enjoying a movie. I could write a bit, while periodically checking in on the movie. My memory allowed me to fill in any story gaps and I studied the scenes I wished to, gaining insights I may not have had if I was watching for the first time, letting myself be carried along by the movie’s story.

For example, I watched a scene that as a young boy I didn’t care much about but which now seems an excellent example of an economical scene that accomplishes a lot with a little.

This is the scene where Gandalf and Pippin pay their first visit to Lord Denethor. If you are at all familiar with screenwriting craft, you have likely heard that scenes can be broken down into which characters win the scene and which characters lose the scene. Usually, the character who begins the scene with higher status, the character who is winning at the outset, must at the end of the scene be the losing party, and vice versa. The logic behind this is that the core of drama is change, and that ideally every scene in a movie features change that pushes the characters and the story towards the final change that is the resolution of the story.

As the scene begins, Gandalf and Pippin are winning. They have accomplished arriving in the city, after a long and dangerous journey, intent on delivering a warning to the leader of Minas Tirith, that his city is about to be attacked by the full strength of their mutual enemies. They have come expecting to find an ally in war. Instead, they meet a man who is not only torn by greif but who is intent on maintaing his own authority and counsel. He scorns their advice, declares Gandalf his adversary and asserts that he will hold the throne against its rightful ruler (it’s a fantasy, so kings with fabulous destinies have inherent rights). Where they expected to find friendship, Gandalf and Pippin have instead met an obstacle to their success. Again, anyone familiar with screenwriting terminology knows that obstacles to our protagonists are the things that make stories function dramatically. If you can master the push and pull between characters achieving some of their goals while suffering periodic setbacks, you can master dramatic storytelling.

The scene also does an excellent job of setting up Pippin’s entire character arc. He begins the movie making the fatal mistake of falling into temptation, gazing into the palantir and nearly losing his mind. He has to be watched over and sheparded around, babysat like the accidental troublemaker he is and encouraged not to speak at all when appearing before someone powerful less he say something ruinous to his allies’ objectives. In the scene with Denethor, he takes the first steps towards maturation, although clumsily. He kneels to Denethor and pledges his fealty and service to the cause of defending the city, as an act of atonement. (Two movies ago, Denethor’s son Boromir sacrificed himself to save Pippin’s life)

This arc’s ultimate payoff is something close to poetic. Pippin repays Borormir’s sacrifice by saving the life of his brother, Faramir. The hobbit who thoughtlessly quenched his own curiosity becomes someone capable of committing himself to saving a life. What may be seen as a tiny, almost inconsequential act of heroism given all the death and destruction in Pippin’s environment, is in fact heroic precisely because of its seeming futility. It isnt as recognizably noble as, say, stabbing the king ringwraith in the face or carrying Frodo up the mountain of fire, but it resonates as a key theme in these movies and books: small acts of courage in the face of overwhelming evil. Choosing bravery in spite of every reason not to. Pippin never wins a battle of might, which is why he isn’t a thirteen year old boy’s favorite character. But he does manage to stand up to the madness of his superior, when so many others stand by and let the raving father try to set fire to his living son.Iit’s not glamorous, it doesn’t turn the tide of the war, but it’s heroic all the same, which is why he’s more inspirational to me as an adult.

You might say I’m overanalyzing a scene but I would argue any effective movie scene manages to stuff and balance this many moving parts into as tight a space as it can. People only have so much of their attention span they are willing to give. Even in a more mediative movie, like those by Terrence Malick or Andrei Tarkovsky, the filmmakers are trying to fill every minute with as much of their ideas as they can.

The Denethor introduction scene, like so many in the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy, sucessfully achieves what I like to describe as invisible, entertaining, exciting exposition. Exposition is rightfully derided as an information dump when done obviously, crassly, and lacking drama. In other words when it’s boring, some talking heads just explaining things. There’s an art to finding the balance between giving the audience necessary information in the most economical way without making them aware they are being spoonfed some story setup. In fact, virtually all of Fellowship is setup but it’s active and crafted with such panache that it’s nevertheless engaging. These movies are worth studying if you want to be a writer of any kind of storytelling, cause let me tell you, finding ways to get a story going are truly difficult.

I once heard that Amy-Sherman Palladino (creator of Gilmore Girls, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel and a formative writing influence for me) wrote scripts for Gilmore while listening to episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. This always struck me as crazy. How could she concentrate, I wondered. Wasn’t she also missing out on whatever was really happening in that show? Although I have no idea if she did this after already watching the show once in full concentration, I now have experienced the benefit of paying half attention to something you have already watched thoroughly and critically: it becomes, like music, inspiration and a thing which you can study in pieces, to make sense of the whole and learn to better your own craft.