#this isn't even getting into say all his time with denethor in minas tirith before he fucked back off to the north. let's unpack that!

[dying-suffering-french-stalkers]

now that i finished the silm i am back on my lotr the two towers grindset. aragorn son of arathorn i am studying you like a bug. every other sentence is all “he was tall and beautiful like the sea-kings of old” and then he does something like get down flat in the grass to listen for just how many horses gandalf summoned for them (as though that will not become apparent in minutes). he learned rohirric bc he spent part of his youth soldiering with them and he took the time to translate their song-lore into westron and to sing before their lords' graves. he tries to pull kingly rank in another king's hall, to the king's DOORMAN (crucial to note he also knows this king!), bc he doesn't want to give up his sick-ass sword. i love him your honor

[marta-bee]

i just saw your comment on the One Thing you don't like about the PJ movies, and I was wondering... what's wrong with Denethor?

(For context: I know the books inside and out, but I haven't watched the movies, so you can expect me to know everything in Tolkien but this is also an honest question. I'm scared. What did they do to Denethor??)

What an interesting vantage-point! Usually I see people only familiar with the movies asking how the book is different, but I don't think I've ever discussed him with someone only familiar with the books. Not that there's anything wrong with not knowing the book version, but this is new.

You may want to go to the bathroom, or pour yourself a drink, because we're going to be here for a while. Deep breath. :-)

Let's start with the family drama.

Denethor is a really bad father to Boromir and Faramir, Faramir especially. He flat-out tells Faramir he'd wished he had died instead of Boromir, which is a very twisted reading of the parallel book conversation (where Faramir asks if Denethor wishes Boromir's and Faramir's roles had been reversed). Denethor comes across as uncaring and even cruel.

But more than that, because they really did away with the lord's council other than Denethor and Faramir, the strategy debates leading up to the Battle of Pelennor Fields get reduced to a father-son squabble. When Denethor asks who will ride out to defend the Rammas Echor [though in the movies it's Osgiliath], he's not saying it to a group of commanders. Faramir's the only person there to hear him, so it comes out as very passive-aggressive. That means Faramir's decision to lead the charge isn't so much a commander doing his lord's doing as a son trying to prove his worth to his father. The revelation Faramir let Frodo and Sam go doesn't come across as a treasonous decision or an earnest disagreement on how best to handle it, but a son betraying his father. It all felt so pitifully small to me, and lacking the gravitas and thematic weight of the book exchanges. I don't doubt Jackson thought it was more relatable but for me it really hollowed out Denethor's character. It also made him manipulative, and that's even before you get into the whole Pyre sequence.

Second: as a ruler, he's really ineffectual.

There's no Beregond and Bergil, no well-organized evacuation, no him wearing armor under his clothes and working diligently to the point he barely sleeps, no rebuilding of the Wall or bringing in troops from Dol Amroth and all the rest to boost the city's defenses. Minas Tirith is much more ready to defend itself in the books than (say) the Rohirrim at Helm's Deep, and Denethor's great failure is he's so focused on Gondor's defenses it's committed him to too narrow a view of the war. But he's a remarkably good ruler on those narrow terms. In the movies he's just a doddering old fool and Gondor is not only unprepared, it's not actively preparing for war until Gandalf kicks people into action.

Part of that comes down to every movie having to limit its plot points and the details it gives. And I suspect PJ wanted to show why Gondor needed a king, why Aragorn was so important. But in the process he completely failed to show why Gondor was worthy of Aragorn; I remember thinking at the time that if it was me I'd rather have ruled over Rohan. And Denethor himself is just a humiliating shell of a man, let alone of a ruler. There's one famous scene set in the Court of the White Tree where he's raving about how Mordor has come upon them and they're all doomed and Gandalf just... conks him in the head with his staff. There are guards standing on duty, but they completely fail to react to his histrionics but also Gandalf's assault on him. And it's just pitiful.

That scene's actually a recasting of another book scene, the one where Denethor releases Pippin from his service and says they should all go find their death in whatever way seems best to them. But it happens much earlier in the movies, and without any explanation for why Denethor is SO given in to despair. Which leads me to my third reason why Jackson did our steward so wrong.

The movies also take away a really central explanation for Denethor's despair: the palantir. They do have palantiri, but really only the Isengard one recovered by Gandalf and Pippin. If Denethor had one it's never mentioned. Why Denethor used it is also never mentioned, so he doesn't come across as a man who'd fought valiantly but in the process exposed himself to "truth" too heavy to bear up under. It also doesn't explain why he's so sure they were all going to die, and why Faramir was as good as dead. He's just unraveling and comes across as weak and a poor ruler, never mind person.

That's frustrating enough in the scenes leading up to the siege, but you can only imagine what it does to the Pyre episode. More than a decade later, just thinking about that whole sequence just hurts. So I find I don't want to dwell on the details, but I do need to talk about one thing: shorn of any context for why he's so certain Gondor is about to fall, his move to immolate Faramir takes on a much more controlling --even abusive-- tone. There's an element of that in the books, but without any real grounding of why he thinks their destruction is so certain, it just seems like he doesn't want anyone taking control of Faramir away from him.

(He's also denied his stately end: instead of barring the doors and the tomb of the Stewards collapsing upon him, he turns into a fireball and runs all the way back to the Citadel and jumps off the stone outcropping. To say Jackson was showing his Harryhausen influences would be an understatement. :-) )

I try to remind myself that while Denethor may well be my Blorbo, he's actually a fairly minor character in the context of the larger story, and a lot of this may come down to where Jackson needed to center his storytelling. I can appreciate that. But a lot of it was just unnecessary, and robbed him of this high tragedy that made me so love the book character. I wept at the inevitability of book-Denethor's fall; with movie-Denethor, I just groaned.