Lord of the Rings: The Animated Musical

This essay is about flashbacks, one explanation for how humans perceive time and memory. Unlike some of my diatribes, the post is blessedly short for those of you without much spare time. Flashbacks have been used on stage and in film for over a century, but new techniques continue to appear. Medical professionals now use the term “flashback” to describe a symptom of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), although not all experts agree if this is a required symptom for diagnosis. As for its connection to The Lord of the Rings, characters use flashbacks when attempting to recall what has happened to them or to people in their communities. Despite the presence of an actual timeline in “Appendix B: The Tale of Years”, the timeline in the dialogue portion is shaky. Characters frequently misremember the past, receive glimpses of the future, and even become confused about the current date in the present. My goal in the animated musical is to preserve these flashbacks while drawing on the history of storytelling and modern understanding of psychology. Finally, a series of screenshots appearing in the final section of this essay will demonstrate how I intend to illustrate these flashbacks.

Literary Device and Film Appearances

The term “flashback” appeared around 1903 during the Second Industrial Revolution. It was originally spelled flash-back and served as a literal term indicating a flame coming from a furnace or engine. For people trying to be fancy, the term used in rhetoric is analepsis, a Greek word which appeared in English in 1849 and originally meaning when a person felt better after being sick. Meanwhile, the term in German film is rückblende, a combination of the German words for “back” and “diaphragm”, referencing a camera lens. According to the Dictionary of the Theatre by Patrice Pavis, flashbacks refer to an earlier event in the play that may not have been acted out. The author believed flashbacks must be indicated to prevent the audience from becoming confused. Indicators could include a narrator, different lighting techniques, or different music.

Despite the recency of the vocabulary, this literary device has been employed for thousands of years and is the default format in many cultures. In Indian epics such as Mahabharata, last referenced in “Framing Device” and “Rings in Literature”, a framing device and a series of flashbacks tell the story. In Ancient Greek epics such as The Odyssey, which appears frequently throughout the blog, the narrator begins in medias res or in the middle of the story and then flashes back to the beginning.

Some argument exists over who invented flashbacks in film. In the book Flashbacks in Film: Memory & History, cinema and literature professor Maureen Turim from the University of Florida argued that pioneering French film director Ferdinand Zecca created the earliest surviving example of flashbacks through his crime drama Histoire d’un crime (1901). The crimes of a man sitting on death row were projected onto the wall of his prison cell. While technologically innovative, the flashbacks do not appear in a separate scene, and the film is less than five minutes in length. Flashbacks as these are understood in modern film instead originated from movies directed by D.W. Griffith, a groundbreaking filmmaker who unfortunately decided to use his talent to make racist pseudo-histories like The Birth of a Nation (1915).

Symptom of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)

I last discussed PTSD in Case Study #2, when I outlined the history of the diagnosis and the likelihood that Frodo Baggins had the condition, as did many other characters in The Lord of the Rings. A prominent feature of the mental disorder as seen in Hollywood depictions was flashbacks or reliving traumatic events. The concept of the protagonist experiencing a condition that seemingly mimicked a storytelling device was too good to pass up for many directors. The Deer Hunter (1978) is widely cited as the film to pioneer using flashbacks to cut between scenes of everyday life to moments of war. Its innovation led the film to nine nominations and five wins for the Academy Awards or Oscars.

“Flashbacks and post-traumatic stress disorder: the genesis of a 20th-century diagnosis”, a controversial paper cited by many subsequent researchers covering the topic, stated that flashbacks were “culture-bound”, as these did not appear in the medical files of veterans in the United Kingdom who served in the Boer War, World War I, and World War II, but did appear in soldiers who had fought in the Persian Gulf War in 1991. The authors noted in a subsequent letter that they were only permitted to use files of soldiers who were deceased, which may have skewed results. The study considered that medical files were created by medical professionals rather than the patients, and a disconnect between the patient’s true symptoms and those recorded by the doctor was highly likely. Even so, the argument felt incomplete.

This issue in research method was acknowledged by the many researchers who wrote into the journal after the publication of the groundbreaking paper. In the “Correspondence” section of the August 2003 issue of The British Journal of Psychiatry, researchers responded to “Flashbacks and PTSD”. These researchers believed that “the media” was responsible for veterans over-reporting flashbacks, while doctors now encourage their patients to talk about these symptoms. Veterans who reported flashbacks may have received better compensation for their experiences. Additionally, the concept of flashbacks only covered sudden return of memories when awake, not its asleep equivalent also known as “somatic symptoms”, which had been widely documented throughout history and may be more common. As for the phenomenon being “culture-bound”, this could be the case geographically but not chronologically. People in the West created the diagnostic manuals used for the study. People who live in other regions of the world have their own diagnostic criteria and may not recognize the conditions from Western medicine.

Appearing in the Animated Musical

As previously discussed, the story uses the framing device of Elanor Gardner Fairbairn editing what would become the Red Book of Westmarch, meaning that all earlier events are flashbacks, which I will call Level 1 flashbacks. Woven throughout this level are Level 2 flashbacks, which will occur when characters describe previous events. While the narrating character was often present for these flashbacks, this was not always the case. For example, during “The Introduction Song”, Hamfast “The Gaffer” Gamgee referred to the drowning of Frodo’s parents and Frodo’s childhood at Brandy Hall in Buckland. He also falsely described Frodo’s grandfather Gorbadoc as being alive at that time, since the Gaffer was not present for any of these events. While the flashbacks might have been real, these could have been a fantasy conjured up by the Gaffer’s vibrant imagination since he had few outlets to use his mind.

A young hobbit with ragged blue clothes stands at the center of a dimly lit hobbit hall while an older, smiling hobbit with elegant clothes stands to the right and puts an arm around him.

Flashbacks can refer to events in the recent past or events long ago. When Bilbo talked to Gandalf before leaving Bag End, he experienced multiple flashbacks from different lengths of time. He described the feeling of an eye watching him, wanting to put on the Ring and disappear, and being unable to lock away the Ring. This apparently happened many times, perhaps even earlier on the day of the party.

A well-dressed hobbit sits at his desk in his messy office holding a ring to his eye. A wooden box sits on the desk near his hand.

Bilbo also mentioned a recent conversation with Frodo when his ‘nephew’ asked to join Bilbo on his journey. He seemed to skim over any emotional response that he or Frodo had to the situation, instead insisting that Frodo was “still in love with the Shire” (Fellowship, 34), implicitly preferring a relationship with nature than with another person. However, a few paragraphs or minutes earlier at the Long-Expected Party, Frodo had thought how he “loved the old hobbit dearly” (Fellowship, 33), meaning Bilbo. Similar to the flashback presented by the Gaffer, Bilbo had the incorrect interpretation of a flashback. Unlike the Gaffer, Bilbo had been present during the flashback and had plenty of opportunity for intellectual stimulation. He likely invented the interpretation to feel better about abandoning his ‘nephew’ who had just become an adult.

Point of view of Bilbo as Frodo looks away, and Bilbo has placed his right hand on Frodo's face.

Contrasting these flashbacks of recent events, Bilbo recalled his love of the mountains where he had adventured with his dwarf friends several decades before. During his speech at the Long-Expected Party, he referred to an event on the same day sixty years earlier. He had celebrated his fifty-first birthday at Esgaroth on Long Lake where the Men of Dale had held a banquet; unfortunately, Bilbo had a bad cold at the time and could only say “Thag you very buch” (Fellowship, 32).

A sickly hobbit sits in a black chair at a black table and tries to speak

Frodo also experienced a flashback when talking with Gandalf on the day after Bilbo left. He recalled Bilbo telling him secrets right after he had moved to Bag End about twelve years earlier. He correctly understood that these secrets had no need to be secrets, remarking that he “couldn’t see the point of altering it at all” (Fellowship, 43), but he did not comprehend that Bilbo should not have been keeping secrets with him. Of course, Frodo did not have anyone to alert except for Gandalf, who tended to be absent when Frodo needed him. Additionally, Frodo might have believed secret keeping was typical behavior between an ‘uncle’ and ‘nephew’, felt mature for being given the responsibility of keeping a secret, or had been told to keep secrets about whatever happened to him while he lived at Brandy Hall, which was never revealed in the text except for the beating by Farmer Maggot.

The older hobbit sits on the left with his arm around the younger hobbit while holding up the ring.

Level 2 flashbacks will continue to appear throughout the text, varying in length, use of dialogue, and perceived accuracy. Most will take place in third person to observe the actions of characters, although some will take place in first person much like Bilbo’s packing for his trip as described last week. A few nature-based flashbacks could even be described as second person, as the viewer will observe mountains, forests, rivers, and other natural wonders as if they were visiting Middle-earth. Some flashbacks will be incredibly short, which I previously described as “a series of ‘mini-flashes’, brief and consecutive visuals of the object in different times and cultural contexts”. This range of flashbacks will allow me to adapt the text faithfully to a visual format while preserving its layers of information.

Read past installments of Lord of the Rings: The Animated Musical