This week my wonderful wifey has been at a pretty horrible A.P. training. It's bad enough for a teacher to have to work during the summer, but to attend a frustrating and poorly run training for a week at the end of June is especially frustrating. To celebrate the end to this horrible experience we took the kiddos to one of their favorite places and then out to dinner.
For dinner we tried a new pizza place. It's a trendy new restaurant in a trendy part of town. It serves "traditional Neapolitan pizza". We already have a couple of places we usually go for pizza, but occasionally we like to branch out. Now, my taste in pizza is traditional American pizza. I like pepperoni, sausage, green peppers, onions and the like with lots of cheese and flavorful sauce. (Yeah, it's pretty much the opposite of traditional Neapolitan pizza.) The pizza was OK for what it was and I can see the appeal to people looking for a different kind of pizza experience, but it wasn't great pizza or what I look for in a pizza.
After dinner, we slipped across the street to a great local ice cream shop and shared some nice peppermint bon bon and strawberry cones with our kiddos.
During home, we were processing the dinner and comparing it to other pizza places we eat. The wifey said that tonight's pizza would never satisfy a craving for pizzeria pizza, in much the same way that homemade or frozen pizza don't satisfy that craving. I mentioned California Pizza Kitchen - a major chain that has fifty different pizzas on their menu but only about four that I would ever try. That's when she said, "you should treat it like the Two Towers thing".
The Two Towers thing:
Sometime in the 1980s I was introduced to J.R.R. Tolkien and The Lord of the Rings. I've read the LoTR so many times that I've worn out multiple copies of each book and there are at least six editions of The Hobbit on my bookshelf upstairs. When the decision was made to turn LoTR into a good live action movie I was excited. I watched Fellowship of the Ring with a mixture of fascination and apprehension. I enjoyed it, it was good. The changes they made to Tolkien's work were mostly cuts. They compressed time, cut out a couple of encounters and turned Glorfindel into Arwen so that the movie audience wouldn't be over burdened with a character they weren't going to see again.
The Two Towers was a whole different story. The changes they made to the second book were not contractions or judicious cuts to help the pacing of the movie. The movie makers decided to add several elements to the story that do not exist in the text. There is only one elf at Helm's Deep, Aragorn never falls of his horse and he never looks at Eoywen as anything more than a little sister. By the time of the War of the Rings, Elrond is happy with his daughter's choice of spouse and he doesn't leave Rivendell to bring Aragorn his sword. I spent half of the movie waving my bullshit flag. It was enjoyable, but it wasn't The Two Towers. This movie made me develop my theory about movies made from books. I'm ok if you cut and edit - even eliminate characters, but don't put stuff in the movie that's not in the book. Chances are that if the book is a great work, there's nothing your screen writing monkey can add that will be an improvement.
I enjoyed The Two Towers and all of the movies, but the more I watched them (and the extended versions of them) the more TTT would grate on my nerves. Eventually I reached what is know known as "the Two Towers thing." When I watch TTT I pretend that it's just a really well-made fantasy movie that has some plot similarities with and stole some names from The Two Towers. It makes me feel better. I can enjoy the movie, it fills a certain craving.
Much like how tonight's pizza filled a certain craving, but not the craving for pizzeria pizza, The Two Towers movie satisfies my craving for fantasy and action, but it doesn't satisfy my craving for Tolkien's in-depth rich world.
So, "the Two Towers thing", as the best baker in the world, termed it is now the generic term for adjusting expectations and framework. In the same way that I pretend TTT movie isn't The Two Towers if we were to go out to CPK again, I wouldn't think about it as going out for pizza. The Two Towers thing can be applied to any situation where you know your expectations aren't going to be met. My other most recent example was breakfast at a B&B the other day. The food was fantastic and fru fru...it wasn't breakfast. (As good as a pear poached in merlot can be it's not bacon.) Another case where re-framing expectations made the experience more enjoyable than it might otherwise have been. We're using the phrase "the Two Towers thing" from now on.
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