Notes from the Road: Peter Jackson's Trilogy as Gothic Double

Jes Battis planted a seed in my head and now I'm going to plant it in yours.

Hello, good morning, good evening, and good night my lovely Hobbits. For those who celebrate Hannukah, Chag Sameach, for those celebrating Christmas, Merry Christmas, and for those like me celebrating nothing, happy Thursday!

Now that I’ve started PhD properly, I’ve decided I’m going to do is occasionally do these “Notes from the Road” blog posts. These are going to be thoughts from my readings that have nothing or little to do with my thesis, and aren’t quite substantial enough to turn into fully fledged papers, but are things I think are interesting enough to share.

Yesterday’s reading was “Gazing Upon Sauron: Hobbits, Elves, and the Queering of the Postcolonial Optic” by Jes Battis, which feels like it should have come out in the last five years, not in 2004. Frankly, this paper leaves the (generally) quite conservative and normative approaches to queering Tolkien Scholarship past somewhat in the dust, which might explain why I have constantly seen it mentioned but very rarely cited or developed on further; Tolkien scholarship has been very slow to evolve with the times (which is something I have had to struggle with when discussing with my History supervisors, for whom the field is about 20 years ahead in terms of queer approaches). Importantly, this is not a critique of those attempting to do the work in the field, but of the field as a whole. Until very recently (and arguably still), scholars attempting to do queer Tolkien scholarship had to play it safe and cautious or be raked across the coals. So, I understand why, I just find it frustrating at times. It helps, then, that Battis came to the topic from outside of Tolkien Studies and held their ground spectacularly well (as we all know, coming at Tolkien from outside of Tolkien studies can sometimes be a trap). Luckily, Battis has said very well a lot of what I was thinking myself, so expect me to be using Battis’s work as very important groundwork laid for my own work (insert PhD thesis in 5+ years time).

SO, I’m not going to linger too heavily on all the things in this paper that speak to my work, because there is a lot. That’s work for the future. I did want to draw attention to something fascinating that Battis says about the Jackson films, in a sort of throw-away bit of contextualizing. They refer to the Jackson films as the book’s “cinematic double”. I presume they meant this in relation to the gothic double, but they don’t go into this point any further. I think we should. This framing is a fascinating way to consider the Jackson films in relation to the book, and our relationship with both as fans and scholars.

What is the Gothic Double? The Gothic Double is when two characters in a story seem to mirror each other in significant ways, therefore throwing into question and/or collapsing the boundaries between the self in the other, especially when that Other is, on the surface, the self’s opposite. Gollum and Frodo (or Bilbo) are often considered to be Gothic Doubles of each other. For ease, and because the way they describe it is useful, here is a chunk of definition from Marquette University’s Glossary of the Gothic:

Doubling hence illustrates deep anxieties explored in the Gothic regarding the weakening of the distinctions drawn along lines of class, gender, race and nationality, posing threats to the interests of the self. It also raises a cautionary point that a thin line separates good and evil, and while it is easy for evil to infiltrate one’s protected sanctum, it is equally easy for one to fall into the latter’s trappings. As such, everything that seems good must also be held in suspicion of harboring a negative underside.

Doubling also foregrounds the motif of mirroring, in particular the projection of one’s fears, desires and anxieties onto the other, which becomes an uncomfortable reflection of ugly traits that the self refuses to acknowledge. The other thus reveals the social ills and moral decay that society tends to ignore. It also broaches the notion that there are always two sides to success; when someone wins, it is implied that someone else loses.

I’ve highlighted specific bits of this because I think they are most relevant in our case of looking at the Jackson films as the Gothic Double of the book. What does it mean that the Jackson Lord of the Rings films are the books’ Gothic Double? To me, this means that the films are simultaneously the same story and a diametrically opposed story, but that this diametrically opposed nature reveals the worst of both the text and ourselves, because they reflect the ugly truths which some book purists struggle to cope with, and so consider to be fundamentally Other.

Let’s start with the most obvious example: the question of Race and Racism in The Lord of the Rings. Now, I’m not going to cite the plethora of arguments for and against racism in The Lord of the Rings. This is a blog post, not a paper, and if you’re here you probably know the jist of the arguments. But if you don’t, a summary: People have been calling attention to the racialisation inherent in Tolkien’s world building for decades, which has been shut down by arguments that Tolkien was not, himself, a racist. It’s an apples and oranges argument, these are not actually counter arguments to the same question, but anyway. Whatever Tolkien intended or otherwise, there is an insidious undercurrent of racialized otherness in The Lord of the Rings, but it isn’t a main feature of the story, so it can be ignored by (mostly white) people who have the privilege to be able to ignore it in favor of more wholesome themes, and that is mostly how it was until the films came out. The Jackson films, which were required by a shift in medium to both make the textual visual and to simplify, are starkly clear in their divisions of good and evil along racialized lines, with very little of the book’s nuance. The racism is so clear that White Supremacists consider the Jackson films to be important to their movement.

Unsurprisingly, the response by book-first fans is often quite defensive, and for good reason; allowing White Supremacists to claim Tolkien would be a grievous mistake (both politically and in terms of being disrespectful to the author who, for all of his systemic flaws, did seem to be trying his best to be a thoughtful and considerate person). By thinking of the Jackson films as the Books’ Gothic Double, the reflection of the books that is both different but also the same, blurring the boundaries between the self and the other, then this response is a clear example of the Gothic Double (the Jackson Films) being an “uncomfortable reflection of ugly traits that the self refuses to acknowledge”. It’s a mirror, magnified.

The same thing can be said about themes of imperialism and nationalism, both aspects of the Jackson films that White Supremacists love. The exaggeration of these themes in the Jackson films holds a mirror up to our own refusal to acknowledge their present in the texts themselves, even if Tolkien never intended them to be there. Intention only goes so far, and Roland Barthes was right. At the end of the day, the intention matters very little and how readers interpret what is on the page matters more.

In other ways, too, we can see the Jackson films being a mirror through which we must look at the book more critically, and through which we must look at ourselves as readers more critically. The queerness of Sam and Frodo’s relationship is made painfully obvious when the films transcribed the text onto visual medium (even when the film dialed back on certain levels of intimacy present in the book), and yet book-only fans continue to protest. The emphasis on Aragorn’s Medievalist Quest in the films, making Aragorn in many ways the main character rather than Frodo, reflects not the book itself, but readership’s obsession with these medievalist elements (from the Rohirrim to the interlacing) at the expense of the modernist elements of the story (the sublimation of trauma through the written word made bare, complex discussions of identity and community, of war, of immigration, of relationships between people within the set-dressing of a meticulously crafted medieval-fantasy world). To this, book-only fans seem to protest less, but no wonder.

Let’s also consider the other quote I highlighted from Marquette’s summary: The Gothic Double “[weakens] the distinctions drawn along lines of class, gender, race and nationality, posing threats to the interests of the self.” We can ask certain questions here: When a large book that is often considered quite difficult to read is transcribed into a more accessible medium, is there an element of classism and elitism present in the haughty superiority often directed at fans who come to the films before the books? We’ve already considered race and nationality, but the same question then applies: when a (widely) white readership is now opened up to a more diverse audience, perhaps the bristling is racialized as well as class-based, as well as elitist, as well as purist. And what of gender?

This is not to say that the Jackson films are in any way better or worse than the book. They’re not perfect, but neither is Tolkien’s original work. If we use this idea of the Gothic Double to think about the Jackson films (and perhaps even the Rings of Power), we can think about what is being reflected back to us about the text, and about ourselves as readers in our negative (and positive) responses to what we are being shown. The purpose of the Gothic Double is to create a destabilizing sense of discomfort, where one is forced to look at themselves by looking at another, at their abject-self. We can look at the Jackson films not only as an adaptation, but as a means through which to reassess our own relationships with them, and the books, and the fandom. And perhaps this thought experiment is 20 years too late, but with the global rise of fascism trying to rally around the Jackson films as some kind of pure version of Tolkien’s works (see: backlash against Rings of Power that considers the Jackson films to be the Original, not the books themselves), I don’t think it is too late at all.

Because I think Battis put it best: “It is the conceit of the reader—a dangerous conceit—that s/he knows what story is being read, to whom it belongs, how it was set down, how it should be consumed.” (Battis, 913) A dangerous conceit indeed, and one worth looking in the mirror about.