So, the deal with Tauriel and romance in The Desolation of Smaug (DOS) was not romance in general but specifically the reshooting that brought Legolas into the mix to form the love triangle of Tauriel-Kili-Legolas. Because of the many love triangles on Lost, Tauriel actress Evangeline Lilly (who played Kate Austen on Lost) did not want her character to be part of another love triangle, so there was an agreement with the Hobbit writers and producers to that condition.
And then, during refilming in 2012, up pops the Tauriel-Kili-Legolas love triangle.
Tauriel, played by Evangeline Lilly
According to this interview, the writers/producers found, upon reviewing what had already been filmed, that the opportunity to reshoot the Tauriel romance as a love triangle was too good to pass up. The explanation offered in the interview is that in The Fellowship, Legolas (Orlando Bloom) does not like dwarves, and the love triangle in DOS would give a “personal” reason for Legolas’s distaste for dwarves. Basically, according to this line of reasoning, Legolas feels threatened by Tauriel’s attachment to Kili (Aidan Turner), and he therefore dislikes ALL dwarves through to the time of Fellowship.
This scenario is problematic for several reasons, so let’s start at the top.
Regardless of the nature of the agreement between Lilly and the Hobbit writers/producers (was it an official part of her written contract? more informal?) – regardless of that, there was a breach of faith that doesn’t go over well with audiences when it comes to entrusting Hollywood creators with the production of culture. This falls into the same category as repeatedly killing off beloved characters for only vague reasons or for “dramatic/emotional effect,” drastically altering material in adaptations, and so on – breaking faith with an actor doesn’t give people warm, fuzzy feelings about being able to trust those in charge of making movies. This is how people lose faith in and get frustrated with those who have the power to determine what makes it into our popular culture.
Yes, it’s fantastic that Tauriel appears in the Hobbit films at all, given that the book has no such female characters. Tauriel is expertly grafted into the DOS storyline, so she doesn’t feel like a character slapped onto the script just to have female representation in the film. Tauriel is a delightful, strong female warrior, and she’s a Sylvan elf (or a “common” woodland elf), not one of the “High Elves” we see most of the time in Middle Earth (Elrond, Arwen, Galadriel, Celeborn…all elven royalty, basically). But, then Tauriel ends up in yet another Hollywood love triangle, breaking the agreed-upon condition with Lilly in the process. It just comes down to that Hollywood-sleaze feeling that so many pop culture critics (myself included) would rather not have to experience anymore when we go to the movies.
Moving on to another problematic point: the justification that the love triangle makes sense because it explains Legolas’s vendetta against dwarves. I just don’t buy it! First of all, Legolas clearly has issues with dwarves before the Tauriel-Kili thing becomes apparent. Remember, dear LOTR fans, that scene in Fellowship where Haldir (Craig Parker) and his patrol catch the Fellowship on the edges of Lothlorien? “The dwarf breathes so loud we could have shot him in the dark,” Haldir says – he, also, clearly does not like dwarves, but I doubt that’s because Gimli was throwing winky-eyes at Haldir’s secret girlfriend hiding just off-screen.
Here’s the thing: as fans of high fantasy surely know, Legolas (or any elven character) does not need a “personal” excuse for not liking dwarves. It’s a high fantasy trope that elves and dwarves do not get along well. The explanation for this that I’m most familiar with is that elves have a deep respect for nature and do their best to not harm or damage the environment. Their homes are built around trees and natural growth, rather than bulldozing entire ecosystems to make room for themselves; this is why the gorgeous elven architecture of Middle Earth seems to spring from the very land itself – it kind of does spring from nature. Dwarves, on the other hand, are always burrowing deeper into the earth in their quest for gold, gems, and other riches, a cultural agenda that elves find particularly distasteful because it is harmful to the earth and ignores the needs of “lesser” creatures.
This trope is definitely at work in both LOTR and the Hobbit films. (In fact, the trope itself may have originated in the popular consciousness due to Tolkien’s work.) Near the beginning of DOS itself, in fact, Beorn (Mikael Persbrandt), the last of the race known as skin-changers, comments that he doesn’t like dwarves because they are blind to life forms that they deem lesser than themselves. As he says this, Beorn gently picks up a tiny white mouse that one of the dwarves has thoughtlessly brushed away from the table where Thorin’s company is dining.
So, it’s no surprise that Legolas and most other elves in Middle Earth have issues with dwarves. We don’t need a manufactured love triangle as explanation because a) if we’re Tolkien/high fantasy fans, we already know the genre conventions and the precedent for elves not liking dwarves; and b) if we’re not Tolkien lovers but general moviegoers, DOS (and LOTR before it) already explain the issues some other races of Middle Earth take with dwarves.
Finally, isn’t it a little insulting to Legolas as a character to believe that, because one dwarf flirted with Tauriel (whom Legolas does clearly have great affection toward), Legolas is forever going to hate ALL of dwarvenkind? One, Legolas is an elven prince, so what is he really worried about status-wise? Two, can’t we all agree that Legolas is smart enough not to equate one dwarf’s actions with dwarves as a people? This is the elf, after all, who figured out in a matter of seconds how to take down an entire olyphant crew all by himself.
In summary, then, the “this is why Legolas hates dwarves” explanation really doesn’t satisfy my skepticism about the Tauriel-Kili-Legolas love triangle. I still do not get why it has to be in the film at all.
On that note, I’m not even fully on board with the Tauriel-Kili romance in the first place. (That’s probably why I goofed on Friday and mistakenly wrote that the issue Lilly had was with the romance subplot itself. I probably fused my own reservations with the romance onto the memory of reading that the producers had gone back on their word with Lilly.) This is one of those things that comes from studying gender representations in popular media, but I also like to think it comes from simply being a reasonably intelligent and socially aware person: Romance isn’t everything, and not every relationship – specifically, not every female-male relationship – has to be romantic. Dear Hollywood: Please stop insisting that, inevitably, any (every) female character and any (every) male character must somehow, deep down, be madly attracted to each other. That’s simply not realistic, and it doesn’t offer viewers a healthy model of how people should treat real people and real relationships.
Nevertheless, I’ve tried to find some redeeming qualities in the Tauriel-Kili romance. (Let’s just put dear Legolas aside for a moment.) What does this romantic relationship do that adds to the meaning we can find in DOS?
The problematic love triangle
The most satisfying answer I’ve come up with is that Tauriel and Kili’s romance speaks to the cultural interactions and frictions among the various races involved in the Hobbit story: elves, dwarves, hobbits (one of them, anyway), wizards, men (ahem, humans), orcs/goblins, and one giant, terrifying dragon. Specifically, Tauriel-Kili addresses the fantasy trope regarding elves and dwarves discussed above: The relationship offers a straightforward means of breaking down the stereotypical “elves hate dwarves, dwarves hate elves” trope. The scenes between Tauriel and Kili build the idea that elves and dwarves have so much more in common than they think, that each race has (for lack of a better word) an essential humanity which they must recognize and use as a foundation to unite against the encroaching evil in Middle Earth.
As many others have recognized, Tauriel and Kili’s relationship echoes that of Gimli (John Rhys-Davies) and Galadriel (Cate Blanchett) in LOTR, in which the normally lukewarm-(at best!)-toward-elves Gimli is enchanted by the elven Lady Galadriel, who is delightfully amused by the dwarf’s stammering reverence. The two have a sweet, chivalry-esque relationship that brings to mind the faithful knight and regal yet unattainable lady. Tauriel and Kili, however, don’t have the same kind of distance between them: Tauriel is a Sylvan elf, and Kili is Thorin’s (Richard Armitage) nephew, so he’s dwarven nobility. The dynamics are a little more equal, in that there isn’t going to be a furor over Tauriel returning Kili’s affections in the way that Arwen’s love for Aragorn upset Elrond in LOTR. Plus, by breaking down and challenging the conventional cultural barriers between elves and dwarves, Tauriel-Kili can address the need for intercultural understanding and mutual alliance in Middle Earth. This is a crucial theme, after all, in DOS, which begins to draw the lines between those trying to fight evil in its various forms and those who are trying to claim Middle Earth for their own by destroying the good.
But I don’t think Tauriel and Kili’s relationship had to be treated as a romance to get this point across. After all, Legolas and Gimli make the same point in LOTR without romance (although if my fellow queer readers/theorists out there want to do a queer reading of Legolas and Gimli’s relationship, go for it!). In the end, the only difference between the two relationships is that Legolas and Gimli are both identified as male, while Tauriel is identified as female and Kili as male. Guess which relationship gets the Hollywood romance treatment? (Although this blog post makes the interesting point that if dwarven women are indistinguishable from the men, couldn’t some of the members of Thorin’s company theoretically be women? Intriguing question…)
All right, Legolas, come back into the room now; you can stop killing orcs, or whatever it is you were doing for the past ten minutes. Where does Legolas fit in all this? What he adds to the Tauriel romance scenario is an intracultural conflict, namely that Thranduil (Lee Pace) doesn’t want his princely son, a High Elf, to be romantically involved with Tauriel, a “lowly” Sylvan elf. This is actually a great point, because it sheds light on the elven social structure, which is something we haven’t seen very much of up-close so far. There’s a lot of potential in this idea, but it ends up being displaced by the love triangle. Instead of making use of the tension between Thranduil and Tauriel because of Legolas’s affection for Tauriel – showing us more of the socio-political lines among the elves as a people – DOS focuses on Legolas as a rival with Kili for Tauriel’s affections and loyalty.
We’ve seen such a scenario time and again in Hollywood, and it simply doesn’t add anything new and interesting to the DOS story. (Forget the simple matter of practicality, that not all the characters involved in the triangle may survive the approaching Battle of Five Armies.) So what’s the point of the love triangle? In my view, there really isn’t one, at least not one that isn’t full of holes.
Ultimately, I get the impression that the writers/producers are aiming for another Aragorn-Arwen style romance. The problem with this in DOS is that there simply isn’t enough built-in textual support for Tauriel-Kili, because Tolkien didn’t include this element in the book. (Legolas isn’t there, either, of course.) And, as other fans have pointed out, The Hobbit isn’t a romance to begin with – it’s of the Great Quest persuasion, a category with traditionally little, if any, room for romance subplots and love triangles. What makes Aragorn-Arwen work in LOTR is that Tolkien built their romance subplot in the books, so that in the films it can successfully become part of the tension surrounding the departure of the elves from Middle Earth and the subsequent rise of the Age of Men (ahem, humans).
So, in the end, I have trouble accepting and feeling good about the Tauriel-Kili romance, even though I do love the idea of a strong, non-romantic relationship between them. I love Tauriel in general – she was such a delightful surprise (because I deliberately stayed away from spoilers before going to the theater). I definitely take issue with the love triangle – it just doesn’t make any sense to me, and the “official” explanation is too full of holes for me to be appeased by it. And, as a culture, we really, really don’t need yet another Hollywood love triangle.
On Friday: This week is the official start of the fall 2014 network TV season, so I’ll be checking out some of the shows starting up this week. What’s fun, frustrating, and fabulous out there this season? A friend alerted me to some trouble brewing in Gotham, so you can certainly expect to see that show making an appearance at TLSHBNW on Friday.
Time Lords, Superheroes, and Brave New Worlds 