"Lord of the Rings" is for boys .... A New York Times critic falls for lazy gender-typing. [Salon.com]
Randy just forwarded this link to me. Its author's well-taken point about not attempting to gender-type reactions to movies is one Randy and I have made to each other several times -- a conversation originally sparked by the movie Fight Club, not by Lord of the Rings, but the same point applies.
Just for the record, I also thought Master and Commander was a superb movie -- and I've read all 20 of the Patrick O'Brian books featuring the characters Aubrey and Maturin seen in that movie -- and thanks to Randy for the original recommedation to read those books. And, in response to a gender-typing comment I've heard over and over: I really do like the Three Stooges (if my mother were alive, she might signify her understanding, if not her agreement, by asking rhetorically where else I was to find my role models, after all).
'Ah, coises!' to all this gender-typing stuff. Heroes are where you find them. If Lord of the Rings taught us anything, it was not only that size and age aren't always the outcome's determining factors, but that neither is one's sex: the theater audience I was part of, seeing Return of the King, applauded loudest at Eowyn's heroic declaration, "I am no man!" This from a woman who has continually struggled against being pushed into what her society sees as a woman's passive, domestic, caretaking role, and against being left as a prize for Grima Wormtongue, when the men who deem themselves her protectors find themselves exiled, senile, or dead. She arms herself and rides with the Rohirrim anyway, in full battle gear, riding out to meet death rather than waiting at home for it. And a good thing, too: she turns out to be the only soldier on the Pelennor Fields equipped to slay the Witch-king of Angmar, leader of the enemy troops.
Galadriel is a ring-bearer herself, keeping Lothlorien against an encroaching enemy, and therefore the only one who can advise Frodo that he must find his own way somehow in his lonely task; she heroically refuses to accept the one ring with its evil consequences, even though she has longed for the ring; with her refusal she keeps her integrity and the ability to help her people and Middle Earth before she and the elves must leave it. Galadriel equips the fellowship with key gifts which will prove vital to their success. And she is the one who persuades Elrond to send the elvish troops to Helms Deep to honor the old alliance when their help is most needed.
Arwen, having saved Frodo's life in the first of the three films, fights here for Aragorn's survival and her future with him, challenging her powerful father to help Aragorn by giving him the reforged sword, the key to Aragorn's ability to get a powerful and dangerous army to follow him to the battle on the Pelennor Fields. Arwen does all this despite her knowledge that her life with him will result for her in years of loneliness after his death, and then in her own death, a fate she could have escaped simply by accepting her father's will.
We can talk all we like about how we wish the world was different. Meanwhile, here we are. And here are some women who have perceived and taken the steps they can take to live their lives as they see them, at fully understood consequences to themselves. Is that heroic?
You betcha.
5:02:55 PM 
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