And that's the joy of applicability. It's both and neither at the same time.
Which people who like things to be either/or find utterly infuriating.
There's a cultural theory called [url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_death_of_the_author]The Death of The Author[/url], which I personally subscribe to. It argues that, essentially, the viewpoint of the artist isn't really all that important when it comes to their work. Summarised quickly, it works like this:
Creator ---->intentions>-----> Art <------<perceptions<------Audience
The creator designs a piece of art with certain intentions: Tolkein wants LoTR to simply be a mythic story about war between good and evil.
The art, however, exists separately from the creator's desires, because once created, that's it - it's out there and cannot be modified further.
The audience then interact with the art, and bring their own cultural perceptions to the piece, thereby experiencing it differently based on their own experiences, worldview, religion, politics, etc...
So, a heroin junkie reads LoTR and in Gollum, sees an equivalent of their own experiences. Is this an allegory, designed intentionally by Tolkein? No. There is simply the applicable idea originated by the audience member.
These multiplicities of experience, where there isn't one YES/NO answer are part of the joy of art. To quote Neil Gaiman, consider a gem. If you tilt it just right, you see only one facet, one side of the gem, and it's beautiful - so beautiful you could imagine it being the entirety of the gem. But then you look at it from another viewpoint, and there's even more beauty that you missed because you were only looking at one facet of the thing.
Applicability means that whatever you see is valid, so long as you can justify why you're right, and a lot of people hate that, because it means that they have to hold conflicting, sometimes contradictory ideas in their head, which produces cognitive dissonance - they want there to be only one facet to the gem, one 'right' answer. Basically, the gem's many facets sparkle too brightly for their eyes to cope with.
But the gem remains a gem, no matter how much they might close their eyes, squint at the one facet they like, and argue otherwise. The creator brings their experiences, the audience brings theirs, and when the two meet: art.