We talked a lot yesterday about the absence of mothers in LOTR. The conversation started with one person asking, "Elrond is such a dick, clearly hates men, and has daughter issues...why are they trusting him? I kept waiting for him to betray them all."
So I explained about what happened to Elrond's wife (and brother), and how he's a little bitter and doesn't want to lose Arwen also, and that kicked off a "Yeah, all the mothers, including the Entwives, are missing." So gender issues, sure, in this story. But Tolkein was writing a skaldic lay, where the men are the ones who go out into the world and do things. And, more tellingly IMO, in the Appendices and Silmarillion and other writings, it's clear that he was fully aware of just how much pain and suffering the women bore, how much the strength of women like Aragorn's mother contributed to the eventual victory, how much Denethor and Elrond were affected by the loss of their wives. The Ents aren't functional without the Entwives.
And you also have the Lay of Luthien, where she's a complete hero.
Shelob being female is zoologically accurate.
In other words, I've always felt that criticizing LOTR for lack of strong female or good female characters is a bit like criticizing a war movie for same. No one criticized Saving Private Ryan for lacking female characters. LOTR is the war story of Middle-Earth.
In one of the History of Middle Earth books, there's a great quote from Gandalf about Frodo and Sam:
Oh, now THERE GO THE ALLERGIES AGAIN!
ihsk
I was out to dinner with my parents, brother, and his girlfriend last night. None of them have seen Rotk yet. It was well nigh impossible for me not to talk about the movie, so I tried to keep it to trivia and TTT EE stuff. I HAD to tell them there was no Scouring - I really think they needed to know that before going in (my mom used to reread the trilogy every fall).
There was much discussion of how I've taken over the sci-fi/fantasy geekship of the family from my brother.
Kathy, that repost from C-O-E was a help in explaining why that scene was soooo long and soooo slow. My first impression was to find it kind of pander-y, like it was wringing the tea towel for a few more drops of water, and thus it didn't work for me. As always, knowing the reasons behind a choice makes me much more willing to accept that choice. I think I'm one of very few who probably would like the films better on a first viewing if the first viewing had commentary.
(I do come around in the end, mostly.)
I finally realized what was subtly bugging me about
Minas Tirith, which may be completely blameable on the books but is more obviously wrong on a screen. The city has no suburbs! It's got no nearby farms, no shanty-towns set up outside the walls -- just the white citadel that looks a little too clean for regular humdrum people to actually live there. I was thinking back on it and it was the vast, flat expanse of the plain as Faramir led the Freudian Assault on Osgiliath that clued me: absolutely nobody lives outside the walls of Minas Tirith, except that they live hundreds of miles away.
It was just kind of odd. I imagine exacerbated by
the fact that Denethor never mustered Gondor, so there weren't any temporary tent camps peppered around the plain, or anything like that.
It was like someone had come in and tidied a bit too well!
Nutty, my wank for that is
Minas Tirith is too close to Mordor for people to live outside the walls.
BUT
one problem I had that was besides the tree being dead, I didn't get a sense that Gondor and MT had fallen into hard times under the stewards as opposed to the Kings as it is described in the books.
Minas Tirith not fallen into hard times? Come on! Remember the condition of the library? Clearly, they'd cut back severely on staff in the Archives!
That's the truth. Anybody who doesn't have a problem with
open flames
next to 3,000 year old manuscripts obviously didn't actually pass his archiving classes. Also, NSM with the indexing and organization.
There were a couple of posts upthread about Frodo's pity being an integral element of his success and I agree entirely. That pity importantly links back to Gandalf's speech about mercy and to Bilbo not killing Gollum when he had the chance, and how that affected Bilbo's ability to resist the ring. In a sense, Frodo understands that his pity/mercy for Gollum is crucial to his own resistance to the ring. Sam is in the right when he argues for getting rid of the old villain Gollum, in that he knows Gollum will betray them. Frodo may make the less tactically sound decision, but it is the merciful one, and he is rewarded for it, in the grander scheme. It is a good reminder that being right about something isn't always what is most important or even best. Even the very wise cannot see all things.
Then again, being right makes you less likely to be
stabbed by a giant spider and mummified, later stripped, beaten and tied up by orcs.
I firmly maintain that it takes both attitudes (mercy/distrust) to get to the goalposts, and privileging either one over the other is a mistake.
When I think about all the horrible things that COULD have happened, casting-wise, I can't really get too worked up about the pretty pretty elf princess.
This is how I feel as well. Just imagine Bay and Bruckheimer casting this movie, if you want to break out in a cold sweat.
shudder
