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—a

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

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2021-06-15 05:30:04

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.