[Kalimac]

I preferred the book relationship, but can see why PJ & Co. did things the way they did. As Lord of Angmar pointed out, setting up Sam and Frodo as friends before the eavesdropping incident makes Sam's subsequent choosing more believable. In the books, Sam has been working at Bag End for years and years and doubtless he and Frodo knew each well in a master/servant way, but those scenes aren't shown, just implied. In a movie, it's a little harder to do that, so I thought that was a good move. <P>As for the nature of their relationship, the officer-and-the-batman relationship - I hate to see that being changed simply because it isn't the sort of thing which really exists in this society anymore. However, I can understand why they did it. To take an example of another relationship type which is pretty much moribund, consider courtly love, and imagine making a movie set in the Middle Ages where one of the subplots is how a man falls in love with a woman in the classic courtly love manner - she's above his station, perhaps already married, he never dreams of touching her and wouldn't want to if he could, but she has his heart. The man is a heroic figure, but a modern audience (including me) would be unable to see him the way he would have appeared, and been, *at that time.* There would always be the background noise - or foreground, in some cases - of "That's pathetic/repressed/just weird/unnatural," etc. We would be seeing the hero as having what we now think of as an abnormal and undesirable condition (probably repression - thanks, Dr. Freud). But the thing is, he didn't actually have one; our mentalities have just shifted so much that what once was white now appears rather off-white. <P>So what does the moviemaker do, if he wants to convey the real feeling of love for the lady which the hero had, and convey the fact that it was not unnatural or abnormal in the least? He can't make us think like medieval ballad-makers, but he can change the hero around slightly and give him a modern twist. He wouldn't change the plot - the hero and the lady would still be quite firmly separated - but he might have the hero dream of kissing her, and being unable to because of his respect for her state, or something similar. <P>Similarly with Sam and Frodo: if the relationship was preserved unaltered from the books, a modern audience couldn't help reading something into it that would never have entered the characters' heads originally because they had no concept of it; repression, stereotypes of the working class, and of course the ever-present sexualization of the whole thing. The master/servant aspects of the relationship would loom a lot larger for a modern audience than they ever would have in real life; they'd be blown out of proportion, and they'd look strange. So to keep the focus on the really important aspect of their relationship, this particularly distracting aspect would have to be toned down a lot.<P>I'm not saying that sort of approach is necessarily good, it's more a lesser-of-two-evils way of looking at things. I don't like sacrificing historical accuracy in the slightest. But I also don't like the idea that a relationship aspect which would have been probably-unnoticed and definitely *normal* at the time would acquire an unpleasant importance and possibly a nasty significance. Jackson altered Frodo and Sam's relationship a good bit, but can you imagine how much more skewed the perceptions of non-book-reading people would have been had it not been changed somewhat? Sam would probably come across as a toady, at best, and as for Frodo - well, let's not think about that.<P>Sorry to ramble on so long, I hope this made sense. (BTW I'm by no means a medieval history expert, so if someone wants to correct my courtly love example, I'd be happy to see it).