The Fellowship of the Ring: Philosophical Analysis
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- Опубліковано 27 чер 2024
- In today’s video, a brief reflection on the fellowship of the Ring, which is now back in theaters for a limited time only. Thanks for watching!
Julian
#cinema #movies #philosophy #lotr
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Great work! I haven’t heard these perspectives before and you’re great at rooting them in evidence and references. Thanks for sharing!!!
Omg thank you, for doing Lotr! These movies/books are wonderful, they are part of my soul. They have been with me since my earliest memories!
Thank you! I would be curious to hear about the other two movies, especially gollums neurotic, schizophrenic behaviour and his obedient-conspiratorial relationship with ‘the master’.
There's a quote in the book that i found to be absolutely the heart of the first book upon re-reading it. Hearing your identification of the Ring as a fetish object makes it clearer, but i think the quote indicates something additional, maybe even more apt for a psychoanalytic reading. For context, Frodo is sitting on the seat of the kings at Amon Hen when he slips on the Ring:
And suddenly he felt the Eye. There was an eye in the Dark Tower that did not sleep. He knew that it had become aware of his gaze. A fierce eager will was there. It leaped towards him; almost like a finger he felt it, searching for him. Very soon it would nail him down, know just exactly where he was. Amon Lhaw it touched. It glanced upon Tol Brandir he threw himself from the seat, crouching, covering his head with his gray hood.
He heard himself crying out: Never, never! Or was it: Verily I come, I come to you? He could not tell. Then as a flash from some other point of power there came to his mind another thought: Take it off! Take it off! Fool, take it off! Take off the Ring!
The two powers strove in him. For a moment, perfectly balanced between their piercing points, he writhed, tormented. Suddenly he was aware of himself again. Frodo, neither the Voice nor the Eye: free to choose, and with one remaining instant in which to do so. He took the Ring off his finger. He was kneeling in clear sunlight before the high seat. A black shadow seemed to pass like an arm above him; it missed Amon Hen and groped out west, and faded. Then all the sky was clean and blue and birds sang in every tree.
Frodo rose to his feet. A great weariness was on him, but his will was firm and his heart lighter. He spoke aloud to himself. `I will do now what I must,' he said. 'This at least is plain: the evil of the Ring is already at work even in the Company, and the Ring must leave them before it does more harm. I will go alone. Some I cannot trust, and those I can trust are too dear to me: poor old Sam, and Merry and Pippin. Strider, too: his heart yearns for Minas Tirith, and he will be needed there, now Boromir has fallen into evil. I will go alone. At once.'
So to me this smacks of the Kantian ethical imperative, where Frodo is struggling between the exterior ethical framework (The Voice) of what he knows he ought to do, and the appealing drive of succumbing to a temptation (The Eye). But Tolkien beautifully illustrates that neither force wins out or convinces him Rather it is that Frodo becomes aware of himself, and he realises what he must do because he feels he doesn't have a choice, much like Kant's theory of ethical imperatives. "Free to choose, and with one remaining instant in which to do so." By specifying the decision as instantaneous, it is clear that there is no weighing of pros/cons, but rather an essentially instinctive choice made when he is in touch with himself as a free being, unbound to any super-ego ideals. Yet it is precisely at that point that he enslaves himself to carrying out the task to completion.
I don't think the movie captured that moment at all well enough, but it was serviceable considering it could be one of the least filmable sequences in cinema.
I would be very interested to know anyone else's thoughts and interpretations of this scene in the book, and whether the movie conveys the same idea.
Like, The Eye as a symbol of desire is perfect. "Anxiety is the uncertainty that comes from not knowing the desire of the Other", and having Sauron be an Eye which you can feel watching you sums that up really well. Boromir watches Frodo with increasing intensity and frequency in both the book and the movie, showing again how the gaze provokes that response and leads to desperation.
That the Voice would be the counterpoint to the Eye also makes sense, although I don't know if I could put it into psychoanalytic terms. But I do love that it is painted as being qualitatively the same as The Eye - a disembodied power, its separateness no more reassuring than any other exterior authority. It's only when Frodo returns to himself, when he realises his own sovereignty that he is able to choose, and chooses based seemingly upon the concept of retaining the integrity of his Self.
There's also much less of an emphasis on Sam's contributions, which, if I'm correct, is something that Peter Jackson injected into the film, whereas in the books Sam is more gradually is revealed to be a heroic figure in his own right.
Yes!
The discord on Patreon doesn’t seem to be working. Is the link expired?
dm me on patreon or substack I’ll send you a fresh one
Man i would love for you to do an analysis of elden rings lore.
the dao of The Shire
@6:07 I thought you were going to start talking about how Frodo becomes Sam's "fetish object" at this point. After all, Sam's fixation on Frodo, epitomised in the scene where Sam walks into the water, forces Frodo to turn around and literally return his gaze.
Is art can have a message... Is there such things as art wothout a message? Such a stupid thing to say
A piece of art is just an inanimate thing. Its creator might make it with the intention to communicate a message, but the fact that so many works have famously been interpretted in ways opposed to their creator's intentions seems to be evidence that there is no way for a piece of art to have an inherent message of its own.
I could be wrong though. Why do you think art must have a message?
@@JB-fp3fb interpreted wrong .. Is that possible? But a wrongly interpreted message is still a message received.
Art signifies (a more appropriate Lacanian term) no? It's is a signifier. We can study it semiotically.
@@rama_lama_ding_dong I see. I think our disagreement is about the locus of the message, so to speak.
I was thinking that to "have" a message an artwork would need to own, or possess, its message. It would need to be a signifier directly tied to what it signifies in such a way that precludes, or at least invalidates, other signifieds that an audience member might try to apply to it. Which doesn't seem to be how art is.
But you are saying that simply being a signifier is inherent to a piece of art. That artworks have such powerful potential as signifiers that, when observed, one will inevitably signify something, regardless of what that particular message is to that particular observer.
Am I understanding that right?
@@JB-fp3fb here I vere into Deleuze & Guattari 's idea of line of flight-escape, points of eruption where a flow crosses the plane of consistency-immanence and becomes, so a becoming, but a locus nonetheless. Misinterpreted art is interpreted art, and often the mis-take leads to something new and wonderful. Re-interpretation also. Derrida would say "there is *nothing outside the text" meaning well possible interpretations are already there. Who knows. Right wing people read Orwell and cops listen to rage against the machine