Sauron has to be one of the most maligned bad guys in the history of modern story-telling. Tolkien wisely kept him off-stage for most of The Lord of the Rings because there is nothing more terrifying than our own greatest fears, and we cook these fears up in our imagination. If JRRT had brought Sauron directly into the story early in The Fellowship of the Ring, surrounded him with lightning bolts and clouds, had dark shadowy valkyries swooping out of the sky, dogs baying on the distant hills, armed men swooning from terror…people probably would have put the book down.
Seriously. Most of the story can be reduced to a simple act of buildup for the great nemesis who turns out to be an impotent shadow at the final confrontation. Stripped of his Ring, Sauron is still able to dominate whole countries. Armies march off to their dooms at his command. Tens of thousands of men willingly sacrifice themselves for no personal gain nor even to defend their homelands. Who is going to invade the Harad, the Riders of Tookland? I don’t think so.
The first glimpse of Sauron comes in the fact that he is able to send dark messengers to the Shire to hunt for Baggins. Sadly they can’t seem to catch a hobbit on foot even when they’ve been told explicitly where to find him. The Nazgul are scary upon first inspection, but when you stop and think about it, they really flubbed their mission.
Not to worry, the Lord of the Nazgul had a Plan B in mind just in case the boys in the Shire failed him. He traveled round the countryside between the Shire and Bree-land rousing all the evil creatures, many of which had served him (or Sauron) centuries before. Poor Tom Bombadil was off picking water-lilies instead of minding his proper business, so he missed the first clue that something was afoot. Maybe Goldberry saw the broom fall in the kitchen but Tom had to be warned by Gildor and the Elves to expect company. Then again, he admitted he wasn’t master of the Black Riders from the Black Land, so Tom can perhaps be forgiven for missing nine dark guys riding along the road which bounded his country on the south.
Well, in the event, Tom saved the day and foiled Plan B. Neither the Willow nor the Barrow-wight got the Ring, though the wight came close. Very close. If it had had any sense, it wouldn’t have wasted time forking up an ancient necromantic ritual but would instead have ripped the Ring from around Frodo’s neck and trotted off to the Lord of the Nazgul, who was waiting nearby. This is probably why the US Army Rangers and Seals are told the details of the mission before they stick their necks on the line.
It seems the bad guys just couldn’t find any decent help at the end of the Third Age. Look what they had to work with. Bill Ferny and the spy from Isengard (who had originally been serving Saruman but had been shown the error of his ways by the Nazgul) tried to kidnap Frodo in the dark of night but they ended up knifing pillows in the wrong room. Why didn’t the Nazgul just storm the inn, people ask. Because they had a problem with light, and Aragorn’s eyes were really shiny.
So, failing to catch the Hobbits in the Shire, the Old Forest, the Barrow Downs, and Bree, the Nazgul regrouped and headed across country for Weathertop. They figured any Ranger worth his salt would head straight for the hill to have a look around at the empty countryside he’d spent half his long life wandering through. So, score one for the bad guys.
But then, instead of grabbing Frodo and making off with him, the Lord of the Nazgul just tries to stab him with a Morgul blade as Aragorn is hopping about with two torches AND his bright eyes. So he barely nicks the little hobbit and pulls back into the darkness to wait for the magic to work on its victim. And he waits. And waits. And waits.
Something like two weeks later the Nazgul get one last shot at Frodo and the Ring, but they only barely overtake Frodo and company as they are about to reach Rivendell. Naturally since the Elves have mostly left Middle-earth the Nazgul have nothing to fear from them any more. Sadly, they didn’t bother to send any spies into Rivendell to see if Elrond still had some power. It turned out Gandalf was sitting with Elrond and he helped raise the river to wash away the Nazgul.
Imagine the tongue-lashing Sauron should have given to his nine bad boys when their uncloaked, shapeless, horseless wraiths came slithering back to Barad-Dur. “All right, that tears it! No more Morgul-blades until you bring me that Ring!” What was he going to do to frighten these guys, threaten to kill them? Rip off their heads? Subject them to endless torment? List their home telephone numbers on the Internet?
So, what’s my point?
Well, let’s stop and think about Sauron for a moment from the perspective of, say, a game master running a role-playing game. Or a game designer creating a Lord of the Rings computer game (such as a massively multi player online game, like the one Sierra On-Line, a division of Havas Interactive, is said to have lost the license for. Well, if they lost the license (or are about to), they are yesterday’s news. So what about the perspective of, say, the writers for a three-movie project based on J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings”?
Now, there’s a novel idea.
Everyone needs a good villain. But three movies need a really good villain. So far all we’ve heard about Sauron is that he’s been portrayed by a stunt actor in a funny blue suit…no, wait, that’s Superman. Sauron “was completely encased in shiny, jagged-steel armor and a ragged, dark blue cape.”
Now, that’s intriguing. “…The armor features a poison-ivy motif. Sauron’s helmet, which masks his face completely, is like a sheep’s skull with six jagged spikes. Think medieval knight meets kitchen appliance.”
Hm. RonCo designs Sauron’s armor. Infomercial at 11PM on every cable channel you can imagine. Oh, the merchandising deal that must have come from!
Seriously, Peter Jackson has his work cut out for him. It’s not like Tolkien made it easy to portray Sauron. The Big Bad Guy shows up in two accounts of the history of the One Ring (Gandalf’s in “The Shadow of the Past” and Elrond’s in “The Council of Elrond”), Gollum’s slightly haunted recollection of the fact that Sauron has only nine fingers, Pippin’s brief discussion with him through a Palantir, as a possible source for the bad weather on Caradhras, the mountain over Moria, as an impotent shadow just moments after he realizes where the Ring is, as a vaguely defined figure far to the south who detects Frodo on Amon Hen and eagerly searches for him, and as a partridge in a pear tree. Okay, maybe the partridge was just one of Sauron’s less infamous servants.
How do you dress up a villain so powerful he moves entire nations to war without having to sign a single loan guarantee or going on television to explain that there is more at stake than the price of oil? It’s hard to imagine Sauron having fireside chats with the Orcs of Mordor to get them all warmed up for the coming onslaught. More likely he’d roast a few hundred of them for breakfast just to remind the rest of the crew who was in charge.
And what is it about fantasy movies that they have to dress up their villains in skulls? Sauron is an angelic being. A fallen angelic being. Should he really be prancing around in a sheep’s skull? Didn’t he see what happened to the skull-helmed evil general in “Willow”? Maybe it’s a good thing Val Kilmer wasn’t picked to play Frodo. The final confrontation between hero and villain would have been overshadowed by the George Lucas/Ron Howard classic (okay, it was classic for “Willow” fans, and it shared a name with one of Tolkien’s evil trees, and there is sawdust in the remains of trees).
Well, the fanged skull imagery certainly implies the bad guy might have something to do with death. So maybe a good way to portray Sauron is as a death monger. Mordor might end up with lines of bodies impaled on stakes, like in “Bram Stoker’s Dracula” or that other classic movie, “The Beastmaster”. Now there’s a lesson in how to define your villains. Have them stare stupidly at the sky as an eagle takes away the sacrificial child.
Probably the best screen villain to come along in my lifetime was Ian McDiarmid’s Emperor from “Star Wars: The Return of the Jedi” (he’s the other Ian according to Sir Ian McKellen in a recent e-post, not to be confused with the other Sir Ian, Sir Ian Holm who plays Bilbo in the movies). Interestingly, Sir Ian (McKellen) played a wonderful Bad Guy in “The X-Men”, only Magneto isn’t really all bad. He’s just…drawn that way.
The difference between Magneto and Palpatine, however, is that Magneto didn’t ask for his war. It was thrust upon him and all mutants by a fearful and ignorant (and perhaps jealous) “normal” humanity. Magneto takes on the role of a fanatical terrorist, someone who is fighting for his country and people, and not merely out to make a buck (or a name for himself).
Palpatine just wants power. Or maybe he’s bored with power and he wants to use it. To control people, the universe, the stock markets. Palpatine is evil in ways that Magneto will never be, so Palpatine edges out Magneto despite a superb performance from The Man Who Would Be Gandalf.
Until we learn what Palpatine’s motives are (and, to be honest, I hope we never do), he will be perhaps the greatest, sneakiest, most evil film villain ever to rule the dark screen. Think about it. He never stands around and explains his schemes to the good guys while their second string pulls the plug on his nefarious device. You could hear a pin drop in the theater when ole Palp reached down, clicked on a switch in his Imperial chair, and said, “You may fire at will, Commander!”
Ian McDiarmid just oozes slime, too. He can be so disingenuous, so manipulative. In “The Phantom Menace” his character had to contend with the fact that Queen Amidala had slipped away from his evil minion, Darth Maul, as well as the inept and cowardly Trade Federation’s massive, overwhelming, superior force on their home planet of Naboo. She shows up on Coruscant and Palpatine now has to take a direct hand in matters as himself, not as Darth Sideous.
So, he gets Supreme Chancellor Valorum to call up a special session of the Senate and then lays the seeds of doubt in Amidala’s mind about whether Valorum can really pull their fat out of the fire. Valorum, it appears, has been mired in (baseless) accusations of corruption. I wonder who could have started those rumors? And right on schedule, just when it seems Valorum will keep the Trade Federation from derailing the special session of the Senate, the evil bureaucrats step in and point out to Valorum that at some point in time someone else had deferred a similar motion in order to set up a committee, and precedent shouldn’t be overset, blah, blah, blah.
You could see the anger creeping across Amidala’s face as she realized Palpatine had been right all along. Valorum had no way of helping to save her people. With Palpatine standing at her shouldering, reiterating his warning in the queen’s ear, there was only one choice for her: move for a vote of no-confidence.
That’s a well-told story. Sauron won’t have it so easy. He’s already the Big Bad Guy. He’s on top. The world is his, but for a handful of enclaves which have managed to hold out, and they are about to fall. He has the massive, overwhelming, superior force already in hand. It sounds like Sauron does have it pretty easy. But, in fact, he now has a reputation to live up to. Palpatine, because of the way the Star Wars story is being told, doesn’t have to live up to the reputation of the evil emperor who is betrayed by Darth Vader (sorry if I spoiled the ending for any of you). He has to build the reputation that later emperor lives up to.
Is the difference between the two characters obvious? Sauron is there, but he’s not there (in the literary story). Palpatine is not there but he is there (in the cinematic story). Palpatine has the advantage of being clever for the audience, of earning the respect of the people whose sympathy will never be granted to him. Sauron has to come on screen like he already commands that respect.
And he has to command it with so little in the way of a track record. He might as well not even be in the book, as far as Peter Jackson is concerned (or anyone who designs games based on The Lord of the Rings). There is no real Sauronic blueprint to follow (or disregard) in the literary story.
So how does Peter Jackson go about not destroying the character of Sauron the way so many previous attempts at bringing Dark Lords to the screen have? And there have indeed been attempts to create Dark Lords, even if they didn’t swell up over the ruins of their fallen fortresses the way Sauron does in the book.
Look at the Indiana Jones movies. There is always a Dark Lord in the background whom the hero never confronts: Hitler in the first and third movies, Kali in the second movie. Indy came close in the third movie. All he had to do was pull his gun and shoot and the world would have missed out on a terrible war. But he had more important matters to attend to, such as catching the next Zeppelin out of Germany. Ah well, such are the choices of mortal men.
Thulsa Doom was kind of a disappointment for me in “Conan the Barbarian”. That is not to say that James Earl Jones doesn’t do a great villain. Hey, I loved Darth Vader’s voice just like everyone else (and no disrespect intended to David Prowse — he postures better than any other bad guy). But Thulsa Doom looked like a middle-aged man trying to pass himself off as a hippie. What was with the hippie look anyway? The first scene with Doom, where he lopped off the head of Conan’s gorgeous mother, was well-played. I love that scene. Jones is pure evil there. But later on he’s just a debauched, corrupted, wasted villain. He comes across as someone who has lopped off one head too many. Thulsa Doom squanders his power by ordering beautiful girls to jump to their deaths and slithering off as a snake while his beast guards are slaughtered by a barbarian and a couple of thieves. He’s just not a Very Bad Guy.
Maybe the greatest obstacle for modern fantasy is that somewhere along the way someone defined the need for the story to give a face to the major villain. In the old pulp stories with Tarzan, John Carter of Mars, Conan and Kull, the swashbuckling hero always had to find the one big bad guy and kill him off. Never failed. Whatever the situation was, whoever kidnaped the princess (or slave girl, or whomever) was a really truly bad guy who had an army of nasty bad guys serving him. The hero would literally fight and slag his way to the main villain for a climactic encounter.
When Tolkien came along he didn’t write for the pulps. He wrote for a broader audience that was just emerging from the worst war in history, a war where people know who the Big Bad Guy was but who never had to confront his foes directly in battle. That is not to say there is analogy between history and The Lord of the Rings. Rather, there is what Tolkien would have called applicability. Hitler took his own life rather than face the consequences of his actions. As a villain, he never confronted his victims. The world was denied the full justice of its retribution for the horrors he inflicted on millions. (Emperor Hirohito, the other really bad guy of World War II, managed to come out of the war relatively intact, and people today refrain from villainizing him — except, perhaps, the families of the Asians who endured Japanese rule and occupation).
Sauron escapes the final retribution of Middle-earth in the end. He is remote, no matter how close the armies of the West come to him. In the Second Age Sauron died only when he became so desperate that he attacked Gil-galad, who had taken possession of Orodruin, the mountain (volcano) where Sauron had forged the One Ring. Gil-galad and his allies were denied the opportunity to humble Sauron, as Sauron had pretended to be humbled by Ar-Pharazon. No matter how complete their victory was militarily, it wasn’t empty just because Isildur refused to destroy the One Ring. It was empty because Sauron didn’t admit defeat.
At the end of the Third Age Sauron is defeated for good, but he is not humbled. Even as his power dissipates he rises up as a great and daunting shadow, reaching out over the battlefield miles away from the place of his destruction. He doesn’t wail out as the Lord of the Nazgul does when he is defeated and sent flying back to Sauron. Nor does the Dark Lord give up in despair when he realizes his folly, as Denethor gives up in despair when he sees all the forces Sauron has arrayed against Gondor.
Sauron is a fighter. He doesn’t give up. He keeps going to the last bitter moment, and in his spite he shakes makes an impotent gesture to try and convince the West he is still powerful, even though he no longer has any power.
Tolkien’s chief villain is cold and manipulative, like Palpatine. Sauron sacrifices whole tribes and kingdoms in his age-long quest to destroy the Dunedain and take his revenge against the Faithful who escaped the Downfall of Numenor and (with the aid of the Elves) brought about his own defeat. It’s nothing to Sauron to lose an army. When he’s reduced to a handful of troops, he pulls back, regroups, rebreeds, and tries again.
Slowly, bit by bit, kingdom by kingdom, Sauron topples his foes. He drives political wedges between them, or induces them to wander far apart. Elves no longer consort with Men, Dwarves no longer dominate the roadways, Men fight with Men. No one trusts anyone at the end of the age. The West is all but crushed because it no longer works together. The Council of Elrond tries to amend the 3,000 years of division among the Free Peoples, but it has no hope of rebuilding the great alliances. Even where there are still numerous people living and opposing Sauron, they are either too far distant from the greatest need or simply too weak to make a difference.
So it is left to the good guys to become sneaky and manipulative, even when they don’t agree on how to proceed. Gandalf has to rescue Rohan from the clutches of Saruman’s designs. The Rohirrim have been effectively neutralized by the threat of invasion from Isengard. It doesn’t matter that if Theoden were to gather all his Riders together he could probably defeat Saruman’s army in the field. Theoden has been demoralized and his people cannot agree upon a course of action. So Gandalf must devote vital time and energy to straightening out the mess in Rohan.
Denethor, proud and vigilant, stands aloof much as Sauron does. His mistake lies in viewing himself as a lord opposite to Sauron in the political game. “Denethor was tainted with politics,” Tolkien wrote in Letter 183. “Hence his failure, and his mistrust of Faramir. It had become for him a prime motive to preserve the polity of Gondor, as it was, against another potentate, who had made himself stronger and was to be feared and opposed for that reason rather than because he was ruthless and wicked. Denethor despised lesser men, and one may be sure did not distinguish between the orcs and the allies of Mordor. If he had survived as victor, even without use of the Ring, he would have taken a long stride towards becoming himself a tyrant, and the terms and treatment he accorded to the deluded peoples of east and south would have been cruel and vengeful. He had become a ‘political’ leader: sc. Gondor against the rest.”
Denethor was in no way Sauron’s equal. Like Sauron Denethor used “others as his weapons,” as he told Pippin when Gandalf announced the Lord of the Nazgul was come up against Faramir’s army at the Rammas forts. “So do all great lords, if they are wise, Master Halfling. Or why should I sit here in my tower and think, and watch, and wait, spending even my sons?”
But Denethor lacked Sauron’s power and resources. Denethor could in his small way master the wills of other men, but these men were more mastered by their loyalty to Gondor than by Denethor himself. They willingly served the rightful leader of their land for the national good. Sauron’s captains were dependent upon the sustenance of his evil will. He dominated their goals and actions, and directed them from afar. When he realized Frodo had the Ring in the Sammath Naur Sauron abandoned his captains and they were lost and confused. When Denethor took his own life, the captains of Gondor continued to fight the Battle of the Pelennor Fields, oblivious to his passing.
When Sauron sends out his cruel messengers they are only one cog in the great machine which is moving toward the destruction of all individual expression in Middle-earth. The Free Peoples can only assemble small forces to oppose Sauron’s machine. They are too small, too inadequate. They simply don’t have a prayer, even in Gondor, of defeating Mordor’s armies and allies. Hence, the West’s true defense is a little like Luke Skywalker’s boldly going to the emperor, only Luke didn’t think he had a chance of defeating the emperor directly. He was counting on someone blowing the Death Star to smithereens.
Star Wars and The Lord of the Rings both have final battles which accompany the dreadful confrontations with the bad guys, but the emperor is there with Luke, very real, very close, and he is ultimately defeated not by the rebel alliance or by Luke but by his own servant, Darth Vader. Sauron never gets close to Frodo, and he is seen only far away and with special perceptions normal people don’t possess.
Since Peter Jackson has apparently decided to clap some nameless stunt actor in iron ivy armor, it’s apparent that Sauron is going to be seen more than felt in the movies. Some people have criticized this decision, since you seldom see Hitler in movies about World War II (he never appears in “Saving Private Ryan”, for example). On the other hand, since no “name” actor has been assigned the role of Sauron, it would seem he probably doesn’t have a speaking role. Or perhaps, as some people guess, he’ll have a voice-over part. James Earl Jones does evil really well.
“Frodo, Gandalf and Bilbo never told you what became of your father.”
“They told me enough! They told me he drowned in a boating accident!”
“No. I am your father. I cloned you with my secret decoder ring. And if you give it back to me, I’ll clone a twin sister for you!”
Sauron can be portrayed in several ways. He could have a speaking part (with or without James Earl Jones’ help) and involve himself in various whining scenes where he rants and rails about the hobbits that no one can bring to him. He would probably strike most viewers as being rather impotent if shown this way. Evil guys who do nothing but complain about the ineffectiveness of their servants just don’t seem to be very smart and manipulative.
Or Sauron could be shown standing over a map, looking out windows, fading in and out of various scenes as an overlay image, doing absolutely nothing but wasting screen time. Some movies have used this effect to great detriment. I’d name a few but they were forgettable.
Or Sauron could be played by Jack Palance, doing one-armed pushups as he waits for the Ringwraiths to bring him the Ring (which they’ll never do). I think Palance did a great job in “Batman” where he says to Jack Nicholson, “Maybe we can cut a deal!” and Nicholson then blows him away. Unfortunately, Palance will probably never be able to live down his performance as Voltan in “Hawk the Slayer”, so he’s probably not in the running for Sauron.
Finally, Sauron could be portrayed as a cunning, conniving, manipulative schemer who has a LOT of stuff going on. He’s too busy issuing orders to his various lieutenants, or scanning the landscape trying to find Frodo, to take reports about failed missions. This kind of Sauron would not be impotently flinging underlings around the castle trying to pass himself off as a powerful being. Powerful beings, as trademark, don’t have to show their power. They use it. Big difference there.
The nature of Sauron may become one of the great questions as the first movie release date (December 14, 2001) comes along. Fans will want to know if the Bad Guy is really Bad or just a bad villain. It’s hard to find a good villain in the movies these days, and good villains don’t take reports of failed missions, fling their ineffectual minions against the wall, or scream in anguished frustration as the good guys elude their clever schemes and metal monsters once again.
Palpatine never flinches, no matter what goes wrong with his obviously hare-brained scheme to secure the position of Supreme Chancellor of the Galactic Republic. He nods, alters his plans, and moves on. Sauron has to be at least as deadly cold and calculating. Palpatine loses his fantastic apprentice, Darth Maul. Does he writhe in agony? Does he suddenly admit defeat and have to be talked into trying again by someone else? Nope. He never departs from The Plan.
Sauron has a Plan, too, and in the literary story he never departs from it until the very end. No matter what setbacks he suffers in the field (and he suffers a bunch of them), he keeps moving the pieces on the game board. His defeats are balanced by victories. His failures are countered by achievements.
A good movie Sauron has to do the same thing. Just because he fails to get the Ring before the end of the first movie shouldn’t give the audience the impression that any short guy with a really smart wizard friend could come out on top. In a way, the Ring itself is going to play the part of Sauron. The Ring is a part of Sauron, or possesses a part of him, of Sauron’s will. The Ring is subtly at work throughout the literary story, pulling, urging, compelling, tempting, testing anyone and everyone who comes near it. It wants to get back to Sauron, and on several occasions nearly betrays Frodo to Sauron.
Sauron is in rapport with the Ring. Maybe the movie Sauron will display some of this rapport, but hopefully without falling into the trap of emotionally sensing the near-misses that will plague the Ring. The Ring actually achieves its objective in the end: it prevents Frodo from tossing it into the Fire. A pity that Gollum just happened to be around the corner when Frodo finally claimed the Ring for himself.
In the end, if there is one factor which makes or breaks the movies, that factor may be Sauron. He has to seem credible, strong, and resourceful. And since the first two movies have to end on some sort of upbeat note, Sauron must suffer some form of setback in each of them. But the defeats cannot seem devastating. Sauron’s power has to be left largely intact for the final confrontation, where the situation is obviously hopeless and destroying the Ring is indeed the only option for success.
That’s a tough row to hoe, given how well-known the story is. People know how it is supposed to end. They won’t accept anything less than Sauron’s defeat at the hands of Gollum rather than Frodo. It cannot seem easy. It has to be shown that even Gandalf’s plan really fails. Sauron has to be unbeatable in every sense but his own folly. In the end, the only person who can defeat Sauron must be Sauron. This fact is foreshadowed when the Ring speaks to Gollum on Mount Doom, saying, “Begone, and trouble me no more! If you touch me ever again, you shall be cast yourself into the Fire of Doom.”
Some people insist this is really Frodo speaking (although the text argues against such a notion). Whatever one wishes to see in the literary story, the scene will only work if the voice is clearly shown to be the Ring’s, because if Frodo is directly responsible for Gollum’s tumbling into the fire, the whole premise of the movies will be shaken. If it’s simply a matter of using the Ring to order Gollum to destroy himself, then why shouldn’t Frodo do that before the end, before his life is at stake?
In fact, if Frodo is powerful enough to control the Ring at Orodruin, then he should be powerful enough to confront and defeat Sauron. And he is not. He cannot be. The third movie cannot end that way. Even Willow Ufgood’s disappearing pig trick shouldn’t work on Sauron. The only way to defeat a Dark Lord should be to let the Dark Lord defeat himself. His overconfidence in his power has to be his undoing.
And that’s what really destroys Palpatine in the end, isn’t it? No wonder he is such a good villain.
This article was originally published on August 18, 2000.
[…] “Looking Inside the Sauron Project” was added to the Tolkien and Middle-earth Essays archive on November 21. […]