Betraying that they’ve never had a friend
/Everyone once in a while the benighted YouTube algorithm serves up a winner. Here’s an excellent short video essay that was recommended to me this afternoon. I watched it based on the thumbnail alone. The subject: the deep friendships of great literary characters being interpreted as sexual relationships, a terminal cultural cancer that never fails to annoy me.
The host, of the channel Geeky Stoics, a channel I’ve never previously come across, invokes several examples of this internet-fueled trend* but mostly focuses on two: Frog and Toad,** heroes of Arnold Lobel’s warm, gentle, very funny children’s stories, and Frodo Baggins and Sam Gamgee of Lord of the Rings. These are apposite choices, since both are great favorites in the Poss household and both have been subjected to this perverted eisegesis for some time now.
From there he advances to latter-day male loneliness and the generally sorry state of friendship in the modern West, topics I care deeply about and that he treats with extraordinary concision and care. It’s a solidly presented, thought-provoking little video, and I strongly recommend it.
But what made this video especially good was the use of CS Lewis’s book The Four Loves to frame the discussion. Just last week on Substack I made the case for The Four Loves as an underrated Lewis book, a late work brimming with his mature thought on the different aspects of love—its forms, objects, and enactments as affection, friendship, eros, and the theological virtue of charity. The video essay begins with a line from the chapter on friendship that I’ve thought about many, many, many times, especially when some smug terminally online type starts not so much insinuating as narrating the imaginary deviance of characters like Frodo and Sam:
“Those who cannot conceive Friendship as a substantive love but only as a disguise or elaboration of Eros betray the fact that they have never had a Friend.”
As I said, I have plenty of occasions to remember this line, but never as a gotcha—what it reveals is too sad for that.
The one point where I think the video misses a potentially fruitful nuance relates to class: while Frog and Toad are quite obviously peers, similarly situated in life, Frodo and Sam are a master and servant—Tolkien explicitly compared them to a British officer of the First World War and his batman. This does not preclude deep genuine friendship, something moderns struggle to understand and that the Peter Jackson movies mostly obscure. Just as we moderns have lost much with our condemnation of exclusivity or discrimination in relationships, so our suspicion of rank, hierarchy, or any other form of “inequality” has closed off whole dimensions of human experience to us.
But that’s a relatively minor point. There’s much more to the video, including more of Lewis’s discussion of the distinctions between friendship—a side-by-sideness oriented toward a common interest or mission—and other forms of love. Check out both Geeky Stoics’ video and The Four Loves, which is even available in a shorter, earlier version narrated by Lewis himself.
* Related: See this recent long video by Hilary Layne on the widespread deleterious effects of fanfic, not the least of which is the “shipping” of often inappropriate combinations of characters. Layne has a companion piece on Substack here.
** Often described by people on social media with the strangely specific phrase “canonically gay.” There is no mention of Frog and Toad being anything other than friends in the stories, the first collection of which is called Frog and Toad are Friends, making me wonder what these illiterates think the adverb canonically means.
