ipsomaniac:
hmmm ok I started answering and went off the rails here so need to break this up.
My comment about Gollum as Boromir’s Shit Replacement was kind of a joke but. Now that you mention it, it’s interesting that Faramir is the only other main character aside from F&S to interact with Gollum over the course of LOTR (leaving aside Gandalf/Aragorn’s prior interrogation of him pre-FOTR). From everyone else’s perspective, they will only ever know of Gollum’s critical role in Sam & Frodo’s quest as hearsay - the invisible final piece in the puzzle, the phantom at the heart of the story, the ghost in the machine. Gollum’s a ghost, intrinsically: a walking manifestation of the story’s central trauma, a lost echo who can never reclaim his personhood; his function is to haunt, to linger, to repeat himself, to fail to move on.
TBC
As a ghost, he’s hard to see (even without the ring) and he doesn’t appear to that many people; it’s interesting that Faramir’s the only other guy in LOTR who talks to him. Kind of random on the surface; why would that be? Gollum is real to Frodo and Bilbo because ringbearers = he’s their shadow self, and Sam’s a package deal with Frodo (though there are some aspects of Gollum that remain invisible to him, or which he can bear witness to but not understand). But why Faramir? He doesn’t have any particularly resonant parallels with Gollum! No but unfortunately, Gollum does have some parallels with Boromir and has slotted into the story right when Boromir dies (and he dies immediately after succumbing to the ring - such that we know that if he had not died, he’d have been running around all ring-crazed like Gollum).
So in Gollum, Faramir is confronted with what Boromir would have been reduced to if he’d lived. On the one hand then, Gollum serves a very practical warning to Faramir not to make the same mistake (can’t be bothered to reread the scene but pretty sure Frodo frames it this way explicitly, they play this up even more in the film). But on the other hand it also provides Faramir with some much needed closure. By being shown the terrible counterfactual, Faramir is granted the definitive knowledge that Boromir’s heroic death was the best option left to him. But also the whole sequence functions as a ritual enactment of the grieving process, where Faramir gets to capture his brother’s ghost-fragment, punish him, forgive him, and let him go. All while setting himself apart from his brother’s legacy by consciously making different choices.
(What does Faramir have to punish Boromir for, and how does Gollum’s transgression in the forbidden pool represent this? Spitballing but 1. Boromir’s failure in succumbing to the ring, obviously. 2. Much more tenuous but… I think there’s a certain deeply buried rage that Faramir has wrt Boromir that goes something like, “why do YOU get to break the rules but I can’t??” And the spectacle of Gollum’s casual entitlement to the pool, his blithe disregard for certain laws or rules, might trigger something of the same feeling. Faramir is the overlooked conscientious younger brother who has always been stuck grinding away, dutiful and unpraised, at the thankless task of trying to maintain domestic law and order - that’s what he’s doing right now in this scene - while his charismatic favoured elder brother, who daddy will not shut up about, goes off galavanting on mysterious important quests, where he has one job which he fails at and then gets himself killed. Gollum is neither favoured nor charismatic nor galavanting but in this scene he IS acting with total disregard to the rules. And you could imagine Faramir having to deal with a lifetime of Boromir acting like the rules don’t quite apply to him because they both know daddy’s never going to punish him, he’ll always get away with it. So I think Faramir’s role as law-enforcer, how he deals with people breaking the rules/getting away with stuff, is a part of his identity that is deeply intertwined with Boromir and perhaps relevant to how he deals with Gollum here.)
This scene is also a ritual of closure in the other direction, for Frodo and Sam: the trauma of Boromir’s attempted attack on Frodo was never resolved for them, they never got to see Boromir’s final redemptive act of self-sacrifice. But now the scene is restaged with Faramir holding them in his power, and he rights that wrong on his brother’s behalf. By analogy it also functions as closure for the failures of men more generally - Aragorn has his whole epic arc of redeeming Isildur’s failure, but at a lesser level Faramir is atoning here for Boromir, Denethor, the whole line of the Stewards.
Moral of the story is Gollum has to stop whoring himself out as a shadow self for every tom dick and harry. or maybe that’s just me
