So how does it alter your theory if you assume the ring is a vaginal hole and not an anal one?
Lots of holes out there to choose from.
J. R. R. Tokin’?
But the point many literary critics nowadays would make is that sexuality is always important in human relationships and you can’t ignore the way that the homosocial bleeds into the homoerotic. In serious discussion of the texts – say in a college class on JRRT – in 2004, that angle must be addressed.
Unfortunately.
Does it throw any holes in this theory that eventually almost every main character but Frodo, Gandalf, Bilbo, Legolas and Gimli gets married?
Oh, psh. Closeted gay men have been getting married forever. Or maybe the folks who married were bi and all happened to choose females in the end…
I know it could be any hole but it doesn’t seem to fit with Sauron’s Eye = vagina = bad.
I understand where you’re coming from Spectre, but I’m not talking about the book, which I understand was written in a time when hero’s were all men etc., but rather the film which has given its own artistic merit to the saga. Being a modern piece, even based on a traditional storyline, it has to be viewed from a modern POV.
Also Otto’s right. Just because you can’t believe that homosexuality was not “traditional” and therefore not fitting doesn’t mean that it would not have been present in society and in the book, perhaps.
I am glad that I am not the only one that immediately thought that Sauron’s eye looks like a vagina (a flaming one at that).
I don’t know about the OP’s original idea of the story being all about gays and drugs, but I did notice that there were a few times in the movie when the male characters eyes were locked together a little bit longer and a little more intensely than your average guys would look at each other. I believe one critic said that the movie was full of the main characters “exchanging moist looks” or something like that.
As the gay lounge lizard from The Kids in the Hall, Buddy Cole would say, “they were throwing looks at each other that heroes have been throwing heroes for thousands of years.”
Moving this to Cafe Society.
So, like in that scene at Rivendel when Boromir & Aragorn lock eyes for the first time and Boromir has to break eye contact…ya think maybe Boromir was a closet case with an overbearing father (who longed to be able to express his femininity in the way his brother did) who forced him into macho trials…and then Aragorn saw through and he was soooooo busted! Interesting angle.
Um, in case you hadn’t noticed, I was just kidding. I don’t ACTUALLY think the books are about homosexuality. I was under the impression that the OP didn’t really think that either. :rolleyes:
I don’t see how the question of sexuality one way or the other advances the story. That’s the issue. In what way would any of the characters’ sexual orientation affect the course of the tale? True, if Aragorn, for example, were gay, he wouldn’t be hooking up with Arwen, but even that might not have affected the primary outcome.
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Why does that “sadden” you? If it’s right, it’s right. If it’s wrong, it’s wrong. Why be sad about it?
It also happens to be a fact that prior to WW2 men in homosexual relationships would live in constructions like “master” and “valet” as a cover for their true lives. Is every such relationship in life or in literature gay? Of course not. Is it unreasonable to read Frodo and Sam as a couple? No.
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It’s not unreasonable, but again I don’t see how it would advance the story. As for rich Victorian single men, I’m sure you’re right that many were gay, and that the master servant relationship was a cover, but I doubt that was the case for most. I mean, think about it…here you are in Victorian London, living in a great flat, with more money than you can possibly spend…you might be gay, you might be straight, but either way you’re going to get someone in to do the ironing.
I righteously screwed up my coding in that last post, didn’t I? To avoid any confusion, I’d better repeat it:
Otto said:
I answered:
Otto said:
I answered:
Oh please, if everything included in Tolkien that didn’t serve specifically to advance the plot were excised we’d all be reading his epic pamphlet. Plot is only one aspect of storytelling. Characterization is another. If the relationship between Sam and Frodo can legitimately be read as “homosexual” and that enhances some readers’ enjoyment of the books (or viewers’ enjoyment of the movies), how does that harm you? I don’t have much of a dog in this hunt; I didn’t even see the second and third movies. The only reason I posted at all was because of your violent negative reaction to the idea (“grow the f* up”) at the mere suggestion of it. You’re the one, based on your posts, who seems to have some growing up to do.
And there I was thinking that the story was about some close guy-friends wanting to get rid of a ring. Now I know the truth!
Great OP by the way.
First of all, you cannot indiscriminately mix stuff from the book with stuff from the movie. Tolkien is not responsible for Jackson’s artistic choices.
Having said that, I have no doubt that (probably due to Mckellen’s influence) there probably is such a subtext in the movies, especially in FOTR. I was immediately struck, for example, by the enormous amount of hugging that went on. Hobbits in the film seemed likely to cuddle and hug at the drop of a hat. This was light-years away from the way they were portrayed in the book. It was an interesting choice, but Bilbo and Gandalf were, in Tolkien’s conception, no more likely to engage in promiscious hugging than two Oxford dons were – and if you’ve ever met an Oxford don, you’ll know what I’m talking about.
The analogy to gentleman/valet is correct. Even married men of a certain class had valets. Living in its epicenter, Tolkien was very much aware of this tradition.
To illustrate just how common this was in the UK, there are two styles of cufflinks. One type, the “American style” is the cufflink most people are familar with, finished on one side with a sort of rotatable clasp that is stuck through the cuff and then locked open to hold it in place. This design can be put on using one hand and was invented in America precisely because most men did not have valets and had to dress themselves. The other kind of cufflink is finished on both sides and is almost impossible to put on without someone to do it for you. This was the traditional cufflink used in the UK. It didn’t pose a problem because a gentleman wearing cufflinks would be extremely unlikely not to have a valet to dress him.
For what it’s worth:[ul][li]I read the triology, and I didn’t find a homoerotic subtext. And I’m a gay English major, so I can find a homoerotic subtext in anything. The really wierd thing is there seems to be no sex at all in this story. Aragorn’s marriage is thrown in as an afterthought. There are few women, and they are wives. But there’s no homosexuality to fill the void. It’s more like a pre-pubescent boy’s fantasy, with cool toys and fireworks, but no sex.[/li][li]I watched the movies, and yep, I definitely saw it there. This may Mackellan’s influence (as Truth Seeker suggests). Or it may be a sort of in-joke added by the screenwriters or director’s assistants. The film industry is practically one giant closet, and if you want to hear about a gay screenwriter talk about deliberately adding homoerotic subtext to Ben Hur, rent the documentary The Celluloid Closet. It may also be a marketing decision: Japanese animation directors have known for years that you can boost the female viewership by adding vague homoeroticism into a “guy’s movie.” The straight men miss it, and the women usually notice it.[/li][li]As for Spectre’s assertion that as “part of the epic tradition” the sexuality of the characters is “largely unimportant,” I’m wondering whose epic tradition he’s refering to. Certainly not Western Civilization’s. Homoeroticism in The Illiad, for instance, was widely acknowledged by the ancient Greeks, and in fact, in Plato’s Symposium, there is a brief discussion of whether Achilles or Patroclus was “on top.”[/li]Jackson’s Sauron does indeed look like a vagina, which probably says more about Jackson’s psyche than it does about Tolkien’s. And Gollum looks so much like a heroin addict that I kept expecting Mark Renton’s “Choose life…” speech from Trainspotting.[/ul]
shakes fist Damn you, Very Secret Diaries!
Now, then, in seriousness, just because two people (of whatever gender) are “close”, doesn’t mean they have the “hauts” for each other. Yeah. The world of fiction has these weird ideals about frienship and loyalty and stuff like that.
Stories of heroes tend to have a large imbalance in males to females because in most societies it’s the men who run away from home and go adventuring. It’s only in recent modern 'fics that the ladies join in on the action. (Er, pun not intended. 
)
So in a world largely without women (or without gender, really), the highest relationship is that of the fellowship, where the warriors swear brotherhood with each other and stick up for each other like family. This, from our more “enlightened” eyes, looks like they’re all severely closeted, but not all societies were as uptight about sex as the Victorians.
Personally, I see this sort of fiction as a sort of escape from the domestic scene, not some sort of homoerotic drug fantasy.
(Hey, wasn’t there a mock Freudian analysis in the LoTR parody thread that compared the Ring to the vagina in which all the men desired to “thrust their finger”? :D)
I have to disagree with you on that one. Plot, as in the sequence of events, may be only one aspect of storytelling, but I think in this case that it’s very foundation. Most of the characterization comes from the plot, from the deeds, words, and (in the book) the thoughts that JRRT wrote down. Often the characterization is done by means of third party descriptions, as when Gandalf describes Frodo to Butterbur (in the book, I don’t remember if that was in the movie too). I’d say that the extent to which JRRT simply “describes” a character using the omniscient third person voice is very limited. Moreover, I think that very few, if any plot elements in the novel were superfluous. PJ had to cut out a few threads, to keep the films under manageable length, but for me, that was not an improvement, but a necessity.
Rightly or wrongly, I tend to evaluate novels or movies on how well the plot fits together. Does a given element advance the plot or distract from it? Does it have bearing on future events in the story? Conversely, if something isn’t there, I don’t think it’s valid to read it into the story. I don’t thing there’s anything wrong with imagining that something to be there, if it improves your enjoyment of the story, but I don’t think it’s a valid method of critical analysis. One can look at Sam and Frodo and imagine that they’re gay, just as one could look at any two guys and do the same. But given the commonly accepted proportion of gay to straight, they’re probably not.
can’t resist an LOTR thread:
-I don’t think McKellan or Jackson deliberately put a homosexual subtext into the film. (Maybe I’m being naive here.) I think it just happened due to the attractiveness of the actors and the situations they were in - and the indiviual viewer’s imaginations. I saw all the hugging, esp. in the 1st movie, as perfectly natural to the characters. Hetero or homo, it was how I envisioned them acting when I first read the books, lo these many moons ago.
-Secondly - boy Andy Serkis should be proud. He has said many times he modeled his interpretation of Gollum on a drug addict. Seems this resonated with viewers.
-I don’t like the flaming eye as vagina. That interp really bothers me, for some reason.
I’ll address a couple of Hamish’s points:
As far as sexuality in the Western literary tradition is concerned, I didn’t mean to say that it didn’t exist. The Satyricon is homoerotic almost from cover to cover. I am not familiar with Plato’s Symposium, but if you say a debate was held as to whether which guy was on top, I’ll concede that that’s a likely homoerotic subtext. But, by your statement, there is a passage in the book that definitely suggests that. I don’t see any such passage in LOTR. Nor do I see anything that could be construed as sexual tension between the members of the Fellowship.
As far as the absence of sex is concerned, I don’t find that so odd at all. People do sublimate, either because they’re frustrated in their attempts to obtain sex, or because they are distracted by being involved in a tremendous struggle, as is the case in LOTR. One can live without sex, at least temporarily. Undergoing such a struggle as seen in LOTR would seem to be a situation in which getting some might not be your top priority.
The Vaginal Eye. It’s an interesting idea, but you’ll recall from the book that the Eye of Sauron was described as being like a cat’s, with a narrow slit for a pupil and ringed with fire. If anything I think it was a parallel to the Ring, which also became a Ring of Fire at certain points in the novel.