I am beyond excited for the upcoming Lord of the Rings series from Amazon.
The version of Middle-Earth that Peter Jackson created has been, for nearly 20 years, one of my favorite places to escape to in my mind and heart. The Lord of the Rings trilogy is my favorite singular movie experience, I adore with my whole heart The Hobbit movie trilogy (faulty though it is, that'll be another post) and I'm so very looking forward to returning once again to Middle-Earth, thousands of years before we ever meet Frodo or Sam or Aragorn (the show is set in the Second Age).
Except.....butts.
Okay, let me explain. Recently, some entertainment news sites picked up on reports that casting calls for the show wanted actors/actresses who are comfortable with nudity. In the days since, there's been enough other information coming out to dispute whether nakey time in Rivendell is for sure going to happen. It might, it might not.
For the little-to-no worth of my two cents, here they are: I sincerely hope it doesn't happen.
Yes, part of that is because of my faith. As a Latter-day Saint, I am against unnecessary depictions of sex and nudity in entertainment, be it TV, movie, comics, music, etc. And for my part, I believe showing sex and nudity is basically NEVER necessary. I'm in a place where the occasional tuchus is no bother to me, but more than that and I get uncomfortable. I can't think of a single sex scene in a movie or TV show that showed nudity where simply implying the encounter wouldn't have had the same effect.
It's why I haven't watched Game of Thrones or any number of other popular TV shows. I started Brave New World on Peacock, and two episodes in, it was clear nudity was going to be a recurring theme, so I ditched.
That's me. The world is different, and I get that. I don't expect Amazon, which hasn't shied away from sex and nudity in its shows, to cater to people like me who like the screen clothes on. So let's look at the other side of it.
By far the most common analogy I've seen with the news of nakers Middle-Earth is that Amazon is trying to Game of Thrones-ify its Lord of the Rings show. Here's the problem: George R.R. Martin, who wrote the Thrones books, is graphic and stark and raw in his novels. So while I don't like it, there's a certain logic in showing on screen what Martin told in his books.
Martin's way is not Tolkien's way. Tolkien doesn't really do romance in much of his writing, except to describe who got married to whom and who loved whom in a rather historic and textbook kind of way. So to take what he wrote and create sexual scenes out of nothing, in my mind, simply brings his world down to the same level of so many other shows, relying in part on sex to sell.
Tolkien deserves better than that. I know I'm not going to win any arguments about putting stuff in where it wasn't before. After all, Peter Jackson created scenes and situations and drama that weren't in the books (like Denethor being a complete jackass; he was a jackass in the books, but that was played up for the movies). Heck, Jackson made three movies out of The Hobbit when two would have sufficed (if not just one movie).
But it just doesn't fit. It doesn't fit the mood and tone and style of the books, of the movies, of anything from Tolkien we have so far.
My favorite Star Wars podcasters had a discussion like this about Star Wars once. For some reason people had been calling for a "grittier" Star Wars, wanting things like graphic violence and raw sex and swearing and all that. And the podcasters addressed that idea, and said they didn't want that in Star Wars. One of them - mind, he's a big fan of Game of Thrones and even hosted his own podcast for the show, so he isn't against sex and violence - made the point that all that stuff isn't Star Wars. At its heart, even though people of all ages and backgrounds enjoy it to a great degree, Star Wars is for young minds and hearts, and sex and swearing and bloody violence just wouldn't fit.
That's what I say about Tolkien. Graphic sex doesn't fit. It just doesn't. To put it in, to me, would smack of prurient motives to make money and attract people on the basis of tawdry entertainment. That's how I feel and it's entirely attributable to my upbringing and religious faith and personal feelings.
Do people in Middle-Earth *wink wink nudge nudge?* Of course. Or else Tolkien had in mind some other method of making babies. But he chose not to include any of that, and his son Christopher (who released a lot of his father's work and did some of his own tinkering in Middle-Earth) chose not to include any of that.
One blog wrote about this very thing regarding Tolkien and sexualized content:
"Tolkien was super-duper Catholic. In his own words to his publisher he expressed the desire for his overall Legendarium to be presented as “‘high’, purged of the gross.” That’s from his famous Letter 131. I’ll get back to it in a bit. He did not write stories in the manner of George R.R. Martin, although the inverse is often true. The word ‘rape’ does not appear in The Hobbit, and only once in LOTR: The Return of the King (even then not referencing a person but a geographical place, Gondor: as in ‘sack’ or ‘pillage’).
There are a few notable instances of non-sexual nudity mentioned in The Lord of the Rings itself: (a) the hobbits’ bath in Crickhollow, (b) the running naked through the grass to clear their hearts and minds after imprisonment by the Barrow Wights, (c) Frodo’s rescue by Sam at the Tower of Cirith Ungol. Perhaps there’s one I missed.
A few stories from The Silmarillion include incredibly dark things like incest; as with Túrin and Niënor. But that wasn’t their fault (poor things) and Amazon Studios does not have the licensing for those particular stories." (TheOneRing.net - the whole post is worth a read)
So I'd like to see Amazon do the right thing and not include any of that.
So that's my take: I'll take all the Minas Tirith I can get, minus the "Morgul" if you get my drift.
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