Peak Guardian?

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Gob
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Peak Guardian?

Post by Gob »

Future Lord of the Rings films should acknowledge the book’s queer leanings

Nobody wants to see a horny Gollum or Orcs with raging hard-ons – but why shouldn’t some of Middle-earth’s denizens be gay?


The debate over just how gay Lord of the Rings really is will no doubt still be raging in another hundred years – there’s a fascinating essay written from a queer perspective here – given the gilded position JRR Tolkien’s high-fantasy novel holds in English literary history. What’s no longer in doubt is that Peter Jackson’s team for the Oscar-winning trilogy were perfectly well aware of their epic tale’s homoerotic undertones. Billy Boyd and Dominic Monaghan revealed this week that they almost shot a scene in which cheeky hobbits Merry and Pippin find themselves naked after falling from Treebeard the Ent’s branches and losing all their clothing. According to Philippa Boyens’ script, Merry then turns to Pippin and says: “It’s cold, isn’t it?” Pippin responds: “Hold me, Merry.”

That this scene was never filmed doesn’t matter. Viewed through a 21st-century prism (perhaps even a 1930s one) the entirely male-centric events of Lord of the Rings – the bonding, the emotional connections in time of peril, the torment of choosing between heterosexual romance and the company of men – have obvious queer connotations. That does not mean Tolkien wrote them in such a way: it is possible to argue that the author saw the hobbits as childlike innocents, mere sprites who lived long, long ago, in the mists of a sexless, Eden-like, ancient faerie. When the writer describes Tom Bombadil telling the halflings to “run naked on the grass” while he hunts, in a chapter that never made it into the movies, it’s hard to imagine that Tolkien had anything particularly carnal in mind. (The hobbits dutifully obey, by the way.)

Jackson also stopped short of anything sexy in the film trilogy, which was probably for the best. Nobody wants to see a horny Gollum or rapacious Orcs with raging hard-ons invading Gondor. But that doesn’t mean future adaptations have to remain sexless and ignorant of life’s rich rainbow of sexuality and gender. There is currently a petition on change.org calling for Amazon’s forthcoming small screen prequel to The Lord of the Rings to avoid nudity, following reports that the producers have hired an intimacy coordinator to oversee sex scenes. The worry, one assumes, is that Amazon are trying to filter this new Middle-earth through a Game of Thrones-style prism of blood, betrayal and body fluids.

This would undoubtedly be a mistake. George RR Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire saga is in many ways a reaction to Tolkien’s work, the equivalent of John Webster’s bloodthirsty Duchess of Malfi when compared with Shakespeare’s misty-eyed and fanciful A Midsummer Night’s Dream. But it would also be an error to present Tolkien’s world without reference to the realities of 21st-century society. Few batted an eyelid when Jackson invented a romance between an elf and a dwarf in his ill-fated Hobbit prequel, so why shouldn’t some of Middle-earth’s denizens be queer?

Tolkien’s world in Lord of the Rings is divided into white men, dwarves and hobbits from a European-style continent, and darker races of men from the east and south (along with their Orcish allies) who have fallen under the spell of the evil Sauron. Clearly recreating this vision for a 21st-century adaptation would be just as inadvisable as making everyone straight. Naysayers would rightly point out that Tolkien’s aim was to concoct a missing mythology for the Anglo-Saxon race; racists once used a very similar argument to suggest that Kenneth Branagh had committed sacrilege by casting a black actor, Idris Elba, as the Norse god Heimdall in the Marvel movies.

It’s all nonsense of course: these are fantasy concoctions, and producers are well within their rights to inject a little diversity should they fail to see anything but white, straight roles before them. In the case of Lord of the Rings, this clearly isn’t an issue, and in the light of Boyd and Monaghan’s revelations, it would be madness for future Lord of the Rings adaptors not to pick up on the queer leanings that have always been a part of the novel’s history. To do so would be to tie the story up in knots more twisted than the roots of the gnarliest tree in Mirkwood.


https://www.theguardian.com/film/2021/j ... r-leanings
To be fair, the comments section gives it a damn good kicking.
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MajGenl.Meade
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Re: Peak Guardian?

Post by MajGenl.Meade »

There's no end to this kind of shit, is there?

Well . . . .

that didn't sound right.
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Scooter
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Re: Peak Guardian?

Post by Scooter »

Someone speaks about the mere possibility of making adaptations to a work of fiction, as if that wasn't already an entirely commonplace occurrence, and the usual subjects go apeshit, because the nature of the proposed adaptations threatens their fragile masculinity.
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Re: Peak Guardian?

Post by Bicycle Bill »

Scooter wrote:
Fri Jul 02, 2021 7:52 pm
Someone speaks about the mere possibility of making adaptations to a work of fiction, as if that wasn't already an entirely commonplace occurrence, and the usual subjects go apeshit, because the nature of the proposed adaptations threatens their fragile masculinity.
Well, if we listen to some of the alphabet-soup brigade (you know, the ones that keep adding more and more letters to LGBTQ — I think we're up LGBTQQIP2SAA by now), I think we can figure out for ourselves who or what is feeling threatened.
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Scooter
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Re: Peak Guardian?

Post by Scooter »

And right on cue...
"If you don't have a seat at the table, you're on the menu."

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Gob
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Re: Peak Guardian?

Post by Gob »

Scooter wrote:
Fri Jul 02, 2021 7:52 pm
Someone speaks about the mere possibility of making adaptations to a work of fiction, as if that wasn't already an entirely commonplace occurrence, and the usual subjects go apeshit, because the nature of the proposed adaptations threatens their fragile masculinity.
Oh dear, you really don't see the irony there do you? Only person going "apeshit" is you. No one feels threatened buy this silliness, and exposing it for discussion is a fun thing to do., No one has denied that fictional works are regularly adapted, in fact there is an interspecies love affair in the LOTR movies.

Just calm down dear...
“If you trust in yourself, and believe in your dreams, and follow your star. . . you'll still get beaten by people who spent their time working hard and learning things and weren't so lazy.”

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Re: Peak Guardian?

Post by MajGenl.Meade »

Don't ever disturb a superior dance, Gob. The tiny fragile wokers don't like to be contradicted.
For Christianity, by identifying truth with faith, must teach-and, properly understood, does teach-that any interference with the truth is immoral. A Christian with faith has nothing to fear from the facts

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Scooter
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Re: Peak Guardian?

Post by Scooter »

Gob wrote:
Sat Jul 03, 2021 9:11 am
No one feels threatened buy this silliness, and exposing it for discussion is a fun thing to do., No one has denied that fictional works are regularly adapted, in fact there is an interspecies love affair in the LOTR movies.
And this particular call for adaptation is "silliness" because.....?

Riiight.
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Crackpot
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Re: Peak Guardian?

Post by Crackpot »

So it is your position that any male on male behavior that exhibits outside the “broish” norms must mean the characters are really homosexual?
Okay... There's all kinds of things wrong with what you just said.

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Gob
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Re: Peak Guardian?

Post by Gob »

Scooter wrote:
Sat Jul 03, 2021 11:42 am
And this particular call for adaptation is "silliness" because.....?

It's unnecessary, silly, and is just an obsession of the piece's author. Not every movie needs a prefect balance of sexualities in them, not every movie is a moral tale about how we should all love and respect and be nice to those who prefer bottoms to vaginas. The relationships in LOTR are based on friendship, not sex.
“If you trust in yourself, and believe in your dreams, and follow your star. . . you'll still get beaten by people who spent their time working hard and learning things and weren't so lazy.”

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Scooter
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Re: Peak Guardian?

Post by Scooter »

Crackpot wrote:
Sat Jul 03, 2021 11:51 am
So it is your position that any male on male behavior that exhibits outside the “broish” norms must mean the characters are really homosexual?
Of course not. I actually didn't speak at all to the alleged presence or absence of homosexual subtext in LOTR, but only to the concept of an adaptation making it explicit. Certainly the liberties taken with The Hobbit to turn it into the resultant film trilogy should make faithfulness to Tolkien's original a moot point.
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Crackpot
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Re: Peak Guardian?

Post by Crackpot »

What I find disturbing is the labeling of any “non-standard” male behavior as being “gay”. In fact I see it as a textbook definition of “toxic masculinity”. I find the very idea that we should be endorsing this viewpoint even in fictional characters to be problematic.
Okay... There's all kinds of things wrong with what you just said.

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Crackpot
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Re: Peak Guardian?

Post by Crackpot »

Should giving exposure to homosexual relationships come at the expense of enforcing outdated stereotypes that expressing a given behavior has a direct connection to ones sexuality?
Okay... There's all kinds of things wrong with what you just said.

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Re: Peak Guardian?

Post by Bicycle Bill »

Scooter wrote:
Sat Jul 03, 2021 12:37 pm
Crackpot wrote:
Sat Jul 03, 2021 11:51 am
So it is your position that any male on male behavior that exhibits outside the “broish” norms must mean the characters are really homosexual?
Of course not. I actually didn't speak at all to the alleged presence or absence of homosexual subtext in LOTR, but only to the concept of an adaptation making it explicit. Certainly the liberties taken with The Hobbit to turn it into the resultant film trilogy should make faithfulness to Tolkien's original a moot point.
Well, in that case, I'm looking forward to the day when George Lucas does another revamp and the Luke-Leia thing in "Star Wars" becomes "explicit", or someone gets their hands on the Harry Potter franchise and includes scenes that show just what actually goes on between adolescent witches and wizards spending eight or nine months out of the year in close proximity to one another at a boarding school ... you don't really think that 'Engorgio' was only used to enlarge bugs for a classroom experiment, do you?
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Re: Peak Guardian?

Post by Scooter »

No one's talking about doing full frontal naked fuck scenes, except that is apparently where your mind always goes. Something about those who never get it always talking about it.
"If you don't have a seat at the table, you're on the menu."

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Re: Peak Guardian?

Post by Bicycle Bill »

Just for the record —

Andrew Cuomo's Daughter Michaela Comes Out As Demisexual: 'We're Always Evolving'

PFLAG — the 'alphabet brigade', as I humorously call them (although there are some people here who apparently don't get the joke) – describes "demisexuals" as "individuals who only feel sexually attracted to someone when they have an emotional bond with the person."

Funny — I always thought was one of the hallmarks of being married.  You have an emotional bond with a person, you get married, and you fuck.
IN.  THAT.  ORDER.

How much longer before we have 'Pokesexuals' — individuals who only feel sexually attracted to other Pokemon players, or 'caffesexuals' — individuals who only feel sexually attracted to people with whom they've shared a cup of coffee?
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Re: Peak Guardian?

Post by Gob »

I'm "shagsexual", I only feel attracted to someone I've got a chance of shagging.
“If you trust in yourself, and believe in your dreams, and follow your star. . . you'll still get beaten by people who spent their time working hard and learning things and weren't so lazy.”

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Re: Peak Guardian?

Post by MajGenl.Meade »

Gob wrote:
Tue Jul 06, 2021 9:44 am
I'm "shagsexual", I only feel attracted to someone I've got a chance of shagging.
A select group of one, I trust.
For Christianity, by identifying truth with faith, must teach-and, properly understood, does teach-that any interference with the truth is immoral. A Christian with faith has nothing to fear from the facts

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Gob
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Re: Peak Guardian?

Post by Gob »

Yes, only you sweetheart ;-)
“If you trust in yourself, and believe in your dreams, and follow your star. . . you'll still get beaten by people who spent their time working hard and learning things and weren't so lazy.”

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Crackpot
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Re: Peak Guardian?

Post by Crackpot »

So even you wouldn’t do you?
Okay... There's all kinds of things wrong with what you just said.

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