Wednesday, 30 October 2013

Switching Brain Function.

I splashed out this week on the extended version of Lord of the Rings. (A used copy, I might add: £10.84 including postage.) I did so because I was intrigued by all those clips you get in YouTube videos which aren’t in the theatrical version of the trilogy.

There was one which showed Frodo and Sam, early in the story, watching a procession of elves passing through a wood on their way to going somewhere out west (I’m hoping the extended version will also explain the ‘somewhere out west’ thing a bit better.) It’s a lovely scene with a mystical air, and I wondered why the studio had cut it for the standard version. I decided it was because they thought it expendable in terms of the plot, and that bothers me a bit.

Ever since the polarity of my brain started shifting from left to right at around age thirty, I’ve tended to favour style over content in cinema and theatre. It seems to me that plot is all about making factual connections between characters, events and circumstances, even when the plot is psychological in nature, and that means it’s fundamentally a left brain feature. Style, on the other hand, is about aesthetics, and that makes it right brained.

I suppose that’s why I can drool over form, colour and atmosphere these days, whilst finding complex plots insufferably tedious. Alternatively, it could just be that my IQ is plummeting.

No comments: