Bad Boys Make You Feel So Good

From the LOtR wiki.

"Too long have you watched my sister, too long have you haunted her steps." (Oooh! tee hee hee, delicious shiver.) 

From Fanpop

I'm going to write here about two interesting minor film characters who haunt the steps of the beautiful heroines: Eowyn, daughter of the Kings of Rohan, and Hermione, Harry Potter's intelligent bookish best friend.

Both Grima Wormtongue's romance with Eowyn and the Snatcher's obsession with Hermione are filmic moments which don't come from the books. In the film, the romance between Eowyn and Faramir is edited down to one moment when they stand next to each other at Aragorn's coronation, yet Wormtongue's adoration of Eowyn is expanded out to a whole scene. OK - a scene over the deathbed of her cousin, as opposed to a bedroom scene, but still heavy with sexual overtones. Hermione gets a good snog with Ron in the films, but this moment when the Snatcher sniffs at her perfume behind the magic barrier hiding her occurs long before that, just as Ron is about to rush off and leave Hermione alone with Harry. 

Engraved perfume bottle

Hermione stands one side of the barrier, while the Snatcher stands scenting her on the other side. She can see him, he can only sense her perfume. Later when he and his gang catch her, Harry and Ron, the Snatcher is wearing her scarf - which she had left hoping Ron would find it. "'Ullo beautiful," he says. It's clear that he recognises something most intimately physical yet delicately feminine: her smell. 

The bitter warrior maiden Eowyn sobs at Wormtongue: "Leave me alone, snake!" He replies: "Oh, but you are alone. Who knows what you have spoken to the darkness, alone, in the bitter watches of the night, when all your life seems to shrink, the walls of your bower closing in about you, a hutch to trammel some wild thing in? So fair, yet so cold like a morning of pale Spring still clinging to Winter's chill." When we look at the actual words, it's all the more strange that they are put into the mouth of Grima Wormtongue. Aragorn's words about Eowyn from the book are beautifully mixed here with Gandalf's understanding of her situation, in the book he says to Eomer her brother: "My friend, you had horses, and deed of arms, and the free fields; but she, being born in the body of a maid, had a spirit and courage at least the match of yours. Yet she was doomed to wait upon an old man, whom she loved as a father, and watch him falling into a mean dishonoured dotage; and her part seemed to her more ignoble than that of the staff he leaned on."

In a way I ought to put this post in my blog about writing: Erotica Writers' Bloc. What both of these characters do is act as a sort of lightning rod. They conduct away the woman character's sexuality. Eowyn and Hermione are gorgeous but we need to not think of them as primarily sexually attractive. When they are positioned opposite a slimy low life character who desires them, they get raised so high, they become so coldly clearly beautiful, that they rise above sexual desire. We know these men are not going to get to sexually possess them, they are reserved for higher things. 

In the films, this is done because the film-makers want us not to invest in Eowyn's attraction to Aragorn, nor the friendship between Hermione and Harry. The women's sexuality is conducted away so we can concentrate on them as warrior, as scholar, as women on quests. There is something that happens beyond this device, however, for us as viewers/readers.

Swan perfume bottle

I put these thoughts in here to reflect on what it means to us, enjoying watching/reading about these bad boys. What does it mean to imagine our beauty in the hands of someone like Grima Wormtongue? It can be exciting to stand next to someone beneath us, we feel so pure, so lovely, in sudden contrast: like a morning of pale Spring. That foul hand he puts about her long white neck, does she lean ever so slightly into it, even while she shrinks and then jerks herself away?

The French call this nostalgie de la boue, nostalgia for the mud, an attraction to something degrading. Social norms push us to think of sex and sexiness as degrading, perhaps it's a relief to turn to someone with whom we think we can enjoy the degradation on the side. We can remain pure and cold, while they experience all the filthy sex which we repudiate. It's interesting that the French call this feeling a nostalgia, a reminiscent wistful attraction, rather than outright desire. This is something we return to softly in fond memory, rather than turn to. 

Pheasant Eye Narcissus

Actually, the filthy muddy side is on the inside. We can't be fully human if we externalise it, project it off onto some slimy low life. The low life has a better side. Wormtongue was probably kind to his mother. (Possibly.) 

Mud is what flowers grow in, they cannot survive on a morning of pale Spring without it, however high up they lift their delicate petals. It's wholesome to be a person who is delightfully conscious of their sex appeal, and also a warrior, a scholar, on an interesting quest, striding out into the sunny day in Spring. 

People say: 
"Sex is dirty." 
"Yes! if you're doing it right." (Wink)