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Thomson and Thompson: What is their relationship, if any?

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Balthazar
Moderator
#41 · Posted: 19 Apr 2012 12:59
mct16:
Balthazar:
too young for a consensual sexual relationship with Haddock

mtc16:
But not too young to go around the world chasing gangsters and spies, getting appointed to a senior military position ("Broken Ear") and going to the moon.

No indeed! I think this is precisely the enigmatic magic of Tintin for child readers. He's completely unrestricted by any of the normal limitations of being a real child, ie: having to attend school, not being able/allowed to drive, fly, travel independently, use firearms, sign up for exciting professions, etc; yet because he's notionally a boy, he's simultaneously completely unencumbered by any of the aspects of normal adulthood that have little appeal to most child readers, such as worrying about money, having a love-life, having responsibilities to dependants, etc.

As has been discussed on other threads about Tintin's age, Hergé himself once said that he regarded Tintin as ageing between about 14 and 19 over the course of the books. Clearly some readers (particularly modern readers) view him as considerably older than that. Yet at the same time, his apparent lack of sexuality can make him seem pre-pubescent. He's just not a realistic child/teen or a realistic adult either.

I think the reason for this is that Hergé didn't create his characters as realistic, logical people with well-rounded back-stories. They tend to be archetypal characters more in line with clowning or silent movie characters than with literary novel characters - characters who stem from a visually pleasing idea, rather than necessarily adhering to the rules of literary naturalism. This style of character creation seems quite normal within the context of Hergé's early cartoony black-and-white books. As the books become more sophisticated and everything else in the books becomes more realistic, perhaps the lead characters' lack of sociological realism becomes more noticable by contrast and (for some readers) more odd.

In their first appearance in the b/w version of Cigars of the Pharaoh, the Thom(p)sons are simply caricatures of police agents, X-33 and X-33A, and a reader probably doesn't think about them having a life or a history outside the frames of the comic strip or wonder about their genetic or sexual relationship. By the time we get to the middle and later books, everything else about the Thom(p)sons' appearance and character has become so realistic and well-rounded, and everything about the world around them has become so realistic and well-rounded too, that we start to wonder about their relationship and identity the way we would if we met them in real life.

The fact that the books give us no answers and no back-stories is a good thing, of course!
mct16
Member
#42 · Posted: 19 Apr 2012 14:48
Playing psychiatrist, I believe that they are two non-related boys, who were brought up together (maybe in an orphanage), adopted each others' appearance and habits, and share a flat together, in order to fill the void of not having actual relatives - like Tintin has Snowy for companionship and he and Haddock live with each other at Marlinspike again for company.

As for the fact that even they address each other by their surnames, well maybe there is an element of Inspector Morse, who insisted on being addressed as "Morse" and not his full name of "Endeavour Morse". Imagine being called "Cutty Sark Thomson" or "Mayflower Thompson".
jock123
Moderator
#43 · Posted: 19 Apr 2012 15:39
mct16:
share a flat together

They share a flat – surely not?
Don't Thompson and Thomson live separately, at home with their wives, Sara and Sarah, in Ottegem and Ottergem...? ;-)
Balthazar
Moderator
#44 · Posted: 19 Apr 2012 17:25
Since I think you're right that we never see anything of their actual home-lives, I guess all possibilities are wide open.
They might live together and sleep together in a double bed; they might live together and sleep in the same room in twin beds; they might live together and sleep in separate rooms; they might live at completely separate addresses as bachelors; or, as Jock suggests, they might live at completely separate addresses as married men.

The first possibility I've listed would suggest they were a gay couple (though not absolutely proving it). And the last possibility would suggest that they're both heterosexual (though not absolutely proving it either). And none of the other possibilities in between would really tell anything conclusive about their sexuality or relationship at all.

To be honest, I think the most likely version of their relationship is that they're full biological twins, or at least brothers, simply because the fact that their physical features are almost identical seems to me to be a bigger factor than the difference in surname spelling. In other words, twins who for some reason have chosen to use different spellings for their surname and refer to each other by these surnames seems just a bit less odd and unlikely than two unrelated people who work together just happening by some massive coincidence to look almost identical.

But no explanation really provides a complete and conclusive explanation of all the known facts about them, which I guess is why the gay doppleganger couple interpretation doesn't seem that much more out of the question than other possibilities.
mct16
Member
#45 · Posted: 19 Apr 2012 18:33
Balthazar:
they might live together and sleep in separate rooms;

I'm for that possibility.

In "Crab with the Golden Claws", they do say to Tintin "venez chez nous" ("come to our place") in order to look at the file they have on the issue of the fake coinage. I think that they would have specified if it was just a common office that they shared rather than a flat.
jock123
Moderator
#46 · Posted: 19 Apr 2012 23:09
mct16:
I think that they would have specified if it was just a common office that they shared rather than a flat.

Why? If the place that was common to them was an office, rather than a flat, that would be “their place” – it would actually be specifying that it wasn’t the flat of one or other of them.
Balthazar
Moderator
#47 · Posted: 20 Apr 2012 01:00
jock123:
If the place that was common to them was an office, rather than a flat, that would be “their place”

I suppose the term "our place" could be an abbreviation for "our shared place of work within one of our flats", but surely it usually denotes "our home". And similarly, I think (with my wholly inadequate knowledge of French) that mct16 is correct in suggesting that the term chez nous suggests "our home" as in where they both live, and wouldn't be commonly used to refer to an office, even a home office.

If that is the case, I was incorrect to say earlier that we never see anything of their home life and it would seem that in 1940 at least they did share a home, rather than live separately. But that wouldn't rule out the possibility of them later moving into separate houses to live lives of wedded bliss with Sara and Sarah, as you suggest. (Or of course in partnered bliss with Stephen and Steven. The possibility that they are gay but aren't a couple, merely colleagues, is yet another permutation we haven't yet considered!)
mct16
Member
#48 · Posted: 20 Apr 2012 01:20
Balthazar:
But that wouldn't rule out the possibility of them later moving into separate houses to live lives of wedded bliss with Sara and Sarah, as you suggest. (Or of course in partnered bliss with Stephen and Steven.

I think our permutations are getting a little out-of-hand, aren't they? So much for moderation. LOL ;)
jock123
Moderator
#49 · Posted: 20 Apr 2012 07:43
Balthazar:
surely it usually denotes "our home".

Only if there is a shared home to designate as "our place"...

Imagine you have just run into Mr. Fortnum and Mr. Mason while strolling along Piccadilly, and in the course of conversation, they invite you to "their place". Would you a) assume that they had ditched their wives and set up home together, or b) think, "Oh, we're going to the shop at number 181?"

Actually, I think thinking of them as a couple of any sort, other than in terms of their vocation, loses too much of the original intent: Hergé made them virtual clones to play off the stereotype of the bourgeoise fonctionnaire, much as Magritte did.
They don't look alike because they are brothers, related or anything like that: they look alike because they are "the man", the Government, faceless cogs in the (inefficient) machine of state.
It would be revealing enough if Hergé had used the real-life often reproduced illustration of the two similar (but unrelated) detectives from the police magazine as his source; if, as Hergé claimed, he hadn't seen that picture, then the stereotrype gains an even greater sense of truth, by showing that Belgian detectives (like J. Edgar Hoover's crew-cut, straw-boater wearing FBI men) did, in fact, look alike...
mct16
Member
#50 · Posted: 20 Apr 2012 12:01
In the general sense of the word "chez nous" does mean "our place", as in a place where people live. If they were inviting Tintin to police HQ then they would have more likely have said "a notre bureau" ("to our office").

Having a flatmate in a platonic relationship is not unusual. Look at Holmes and Watson who live together until Watson gets married.

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