Gratuitous Love Triangles and The Desolation of Smaug

Source (Emilyeretica, Deviantart)

The first time I read The Hobbit, I was in fifth grade. I liked the plot; I liked the style of narration; I liked discovering the backstory to The Lord of the Rings. It didn’t occur to me to care about its utter lack of female characters. I didn’t even notice. It was one book out of the hundred others I read that year, and this one characteristic simply didn’t matter.

For those of you who haven’t read The Hobbit – and especially for those of you who have only seen the movies – there is no romance in the original story. The main character, Bilbo, is a hobbit who uses his wits and natural ability to walk lightly to survive the quest into which he is thrust. His companions on this quest are thirteen (male) dwarves and an old (male) wizard. There are no real romantic interests for any of them; their focus is completely on their mission.

I’m trying to imagine this story with an all-female cast, and it’s surprising how hard it is. Who writes a story completely inhabited by women? Who writes a story in which the armies, the saviors, the villains, the companions, the mentors, and the protagonists are all women? Who writes a story that is not only solely inhabited by post-adolescent women, but also completely free of these characters pining after one romantic interest or another?

When I try to think of other stories sans romance, I can only think of Herman Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” which is also a story of men. I’m hard-pressed to come up with another. I am especially hard-pressed to come up with one that features women. They must exist (if you’ve read one, let me know), but it’s telling nonetheless that I can’t think of one.

Why do The Hobbit and “Bartleby” feel so natural, so complete, but I can’t come up with a story featuring women that doesn’t at least peripherally involve love? Not that romantic love isn’t a worthy topic of novels, to be sure – but when was it decided that our stories had to include it?

Since Hollywood apparently decided no one would see a movie without romantic love, this all feels relevant. As a Tolkien fan, I would have seen the movie even without a single named female character. It’d fail the Bechdel test, but 1) The Hobbit: Desolation of Smaug already does and 2) The failure belongs to the text the script is supposedly attempting to follow.

All of which is to say I have the deepest sympathy for Evangeline Lilly, the actress who plays the elf warrior Tauriel in the second Hobbit film. Tauriel doesn’t exist in the book, and I don’t mind the general fact of her invention; I’m glad someone made the effort to include a female character in the movie. I don’t even mind the inclusion of Legolas, as his presence nicely sets up his position in The Lord of the Rings.

What I mind is that, against Lilly’s express interests, someone – probably a large group of someones, from Peter Jackson to the rest of the producers and screenwriters and studio executives – manufactured a love triangle.

Write in a sympathetic, female elf. Write in Legolas. But don’t put in gratuitous romance (especially not a gratuitous love triangle) just because you can. It’s simply not what the story is supposed to be about.

As a collective audience, I think we’re smarter than studios think we are. After film after film after film featuring romantic relationships of all kinds, it would be novel, refreshing even, to find one without. The studio even has a readymade excuse for this lapse: it’s called The Hobbit, by J.R.R Tolkien.

The film needed a female character; fine, I accept that. It’s the twenty-first century and goodness knows we need as many named female characters in movies as we can get. But they didn’t need to make her the center of a love triangle. Her character could have been interesting, multifaceted, and complete without it.

I truly do want to see films with multidimensional female roles. Tauriel should be so much more than her ability to be admired by both an elf and a dwarf. If the only way Hollywood can think to write in female characters is to add in love triangles, I’d almost rather they not try at all.