![]() ![]() The men watching these things are at once uncomfortable with them and drawn to them. There are heroes who demonstrate tenderness, gentleness, and compassion, traits that do not fit the standard male hero archetype. When men watch a story like Lord of the Rings together, certain male characteristics are called into question. By doing this, they are able to hide physically homo-intimate behaviors that are a corollary of spiritual closeness in plain sight. So men play jokes like "tea-bagging" one another. Men need to be close in the Corps, but the closeness required is itself suspect-or at least uncomfortable for most men. But that closeness, when it starts to take on a deep and spiritual dimension, threatens hetero-normative standards. Possibly both." The Marine Corps requires that men within it become closer than most men become in normal life. In my short story about male identity in the Marine Corps, "Brokedick," the main character notes that "most of the jokes they'd played (in the Marine Corps) had been either homo-erotic or homophobic. The jokes today have lost their mean-spirited edge of fag-bashing, of guarding hetero-normative standards by threatening harm to those outside the standards. In my personal experience, this is as true today as it was three decades ago, even though now you would be hard-pressed to find a man even in a group of hetero-normative males who thinks there is anything essentially wrong with homosexual behavior. Jokes and comments about homo-eroticism are a constant when a group of largely heterosexual males gathers. If you watch the movie in the company of a lot of men, as I have many times, one topic of conversation that infallibly arises is the level of homo-eroticism in the films. And even the films' flaws can be a good point of discussion. It'd be awfully hard to read through all three books in a day with a group of people. I can only go so long without it.Įven though I've said before I'm not crazy about everything in Jackson's movie trilogy, it's still easily the best way to enjoy the story in a communal fashion. Much like Carlos Fuentes needed to read Don Quixote once a year, I occasionally have a mystical need to re-visit Frodo's quest to Mount Doom. I will be hosting a Lord of the Rings (LOTR) movie marathon in the near future, which explains this being my second LOTR-related post in two weeks. ![]()
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