Quoting
baby doll (view post)
When I said The Lord of the Rings trilogy was sexless, I didn't mean to suggest that this was a flaw per se or that adding sex would have automatically improved the quality of the films (although it couldn't have hurt!). To reiterate, my argument is that the sort of ideological tensions one finds in a film like Gone with the Wind--sexual or otherwise--are not present, as far as I can perceive, in Jackson's trilogy. The films could've embodied other ideological contradictions besides the sexual, which I was using merely as an example, but the starkness of the film's moral universe seems to preclude it, and this lack of tension is, in large part, what makes the trilogy so bland.
The problem with trying to read ideological contradictions into the trilogy's depiction of women is twofold: first, women are peripheral to the plot rather than central (as they are in The Cheat, Gone with the Wind, Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, Basic Instinct, and Jackson's earlier Heavenly Creatures, which had matricidal teen lesbians), and second, while individual characters in the narrative may be uncomfortable with assertive women, the film portrays those women and their actions in unambiguously positive terms. In other words, even if the women transgress the gender norms of Middle Earth, they don't transgress the gender norms of western societies in the early twenty-first century. The films weren't made in a historical vacuum, but they don't strike me as being what Eric Cazdyn would call "films of history"--i.e., films that work through the most fundamental ideological contradictions of their time on the level of their form before a common language exists to speak about these issues. (Significantly, many of Cazdyn's examples centre on the figure of a transgressive woman: A Page of Madness, Sisters of the Gion, In the Realm of the Senses.) Fritz Lang's Die Nibelungen clearly has a lot to tell us about Germany in the 1920s, despite being based on a thirteenth-century epic poem, but I'm not convinced that Jackson's film has all that much to tell us about New Zealand in the early 2000s (putting the aside the fact that Lang was a great filmmaker and Jackson isn't).