Twisted and misshaped by centuries of attachment to the all-powerful One Ring, the creature Gollum finds his way on screen for the first time in Peter Jackson’s adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkein’s The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. Played as an eighty-year-old heroine addict by the critically lauded Andy Serkis, the computer-generated Gollum follows (and later leads) the hobbit Frodo and his servant Sam on their quest to carry the One Ring to its destruction inside the evil realm of Mordor.
Tolkein fans will no doubt remember Gollum as the previous bearer of the One Ring in the prequel The Hobbit. Frodo’s uncle Bilbo tricks Gollum out of “his precious,” a loss that Gollum seeks bitterly to redress decades later when he tracks Frodo and his accompanying Fellowship en route to Mordor. Finding the two hobbits asleep, alone, and lost after the splintering of the Fellowship, Gollum springs upon them in hopes of retrieving the One Ring.
Frodo and Sam—already alert to Gollum’s presence—instead spring upon him, binding him with an elf-made rope that Gollum claims burns him. Against Sam’s warnings, Frodo decides to release Gollum and employ him as their guide into Mordor. Frodo’s kindnesses and reminders to Gollum of his life before he was ensnared by the One Ring open up a space for Gollum to banish his murderous, Ring-addicted self and return to an earlier, empathetic self. Gollum—so named from his incessant coughing and throat clearing—transforms into Smeagol, his name before he murdered his brother for possession of the One Ring so many centuries before.
All is well until Frodo and Sam are captured while Smeagol is off gathering food. Under duress Frodo agrees to help his captors in turn capture Smeagol, whom Frodo fears they would otherwise kill. Stung by the betrayal, Smeagol allows his Gollum-self to return. Gollum persuades the now embittered Smeagol to return to him the moral reins of his life and lead the “nasty, tricksy hobbitses” into a trap where he can kill them and retake possession of the One Ring. (That trap, unfortunately, will wait until the third film in the trilogy is released later this year.)
In Tolkein’s mythological universe, Gollum stands as a sign of the corrupting power of the all-powerful One Ring. The One Ring uses Smeagol as a carrier virus, shaping him into a bent and twisted addict, devoted above all else to possessing and protecting the ring until it falls into more capable hands (and Smeagol can be discarded).
For the servant Sam there is no Smeagol, only Gollum. Sam passionately distrusts Gollum. It is Sam who originally binds him with the elven rope, and Sam constantly ridicules the contemptible Gollum.
Drug down more and more by the awful weight of the One Ring, Frodo sees in Gollum what he may become if he chooses to keep the ring instead of carrying it to its destruction. Desperate to avoid that fate, he needs to bring out the Smeagol-self; if Gollum can be redeemed, Frodo believes, then perhaps he is not doomed to himself become another Gollum in service to the power of the ring. Frodo needs Smeagol in order to carry on.
In time, Frodo betrays him, believing that he is saving his life by so doing. In Jackson’s portrayal of the scene, we have no way of knowing whether or not Frodo’s captors are bluffing in their threats to kills Smeagol. Caught in the midst of reverie at having caught a fish—his favorite raw snack—and unaware of the threat to his life, Smeagol only sees betrayal where Frodo sees a more ambiguous situation. The paid is laid for Gollum to return.
Can we blame Smeagol? Should he have seen the moral bind Frodo found himself in, empathized with him, and found gratitude for his saving his life? A morally developed person would indeed choose to exercise his ethical imagination in such a way.
But Smeagol is anything but morally developed. He finds in himself the compassion to echo Frodo’s kindnesses with gifts of food and path finding, but these are the first choices of a moral actor who has not (literally and figuratively) seen the light of day for centuries. Tyrannized by the One Ring and the Gollum-self it fashioned to protect itself, Smeagol long operated as a buried self, acting—if at all—via the sadism of victimhood. His capture at Frodo’s behest echoes to Smeagol his capture by the One Ring. Old moral habits recently discarded quickly return, whether for good or for ill. Gollum preys upon Smeagol’s returned sadism, using it to regain control and turn him against the hobbits. Sam’s constant ridicule contributes to Smeagol’s choice, making it “morally convenient” for him to lump a mistrustful Sam and a compassionate Frodo together into the depersonalized category of “nasty, tricksy hobbitses.”
When Frodo betrays Smeagol he is still in the midst of his moment of moral transition. Unlike the transactional moments that so characterize our contemporary understandings, a moment of moral transition are best understood as a kairos, koine Greek for a “right time” or “proper moment.” Kairotic moments are rarely instant, often lasting days, weeks, or even months. (Stories of the odd “instant kairos” often stand out in our minds precisely because their rare drama makes such compelling narrative.)
During a kairos, a person is uniquely vulnerable: Nietzsche likened those in the midst of moral transition to helpless infants left to fend for themselves in the desert. Without a supportive community and/or a safe haven, the person in moral kairos is likely to revert to the comfort of earlier vices at the first shock or tremor. The kairotic self remains responsible for its actions, but it shares that responsibility with those who have taken it upon themselves to be in that self’s care.
During the long moment of transition, they must be vigilant in protecting the kairotic self from such dangers as they can. If those scrapes and falls cannot be guarded against, they must do their utmost to guide their Smeagol through his moment of moral terror. Anything less is moral negligence. Smeagol must pick himself up, get back on the bike and tame his anxiety. But his companions must help him do so, lending him a supportive arm, checking his knees for bruises and straightening out his training wheels. Frodo and Sam choose silence and ridicule respectively, and Gollum makes easy work of their small cruelties.
This draft is slated to be published in Ethics News & Views later this month.
