Lord of the Rings – Bitch Flicks

Women as Love Objects in ‘The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug’ and ‘The Lord of the Rings’

I thought a lot about why Jackson created Tauriel. He’s already messing with the events, chronology, and mythology of the books, so why didn’t he just change the gender of a handful of major characters to make them into women? Why couldn’t we have a female dwarf or two? Why couldn’t the last remaining “skin-changer” the bear-man Beorn have been a woman? Or the Brown Wizard Radagast have been a lady forest foraging force of nature? Answer: Because none of those characters have the potential to be love interests. Instead, Jackson created a throw-away character that he could shape into a love object. I am so tired of seeing women have to give up their identity, their goals, their independence, and their power for love.

Spoiler Alert

My fellow Bitch Flicks writer Rachel Redfern recently posted a review of The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug that was insightful, and I agree with most of her points. She touches on the discomfort surrounding creating a whole new major character for the film in the form of Tauriel played by the athletic Evangeline Lilly. As a purist, I was certainly uncomfortable with the idea. I got over it. I had to admit that without Tauriel, a brilliantly capable captain of the guard for the Mirkwood elves, the film would be a dwarvish sausagefest. Redfern also highlights the ick-factor in the love triangle in which Tauriel gets enmeshed. The important thing that I’d like to add to our Bitch Flicks conversation about The Desolation of Smaug is that the representation of Tauriel brings into sharp focus the primary purpose of women within the world of Middle Earth: to be love objects for male characters.

For some context, let’s take a look at the only other two women who have a character arc in all of Middle Earth. First, there’s Éowyn, shieldmaiden of Rohan.

Éowyn is a fierce warrior who longs for the life men are allowed. — Éowyn is a fierce warrior who longs for the freedom men are afforded.

Éowyn had the biggest role of any of the women in J.R.R. Tolkien‘s beloved fantasy novel series The Lord of the Rings. The books themselves as well as the films actually chronicle her regret at not having the freedom to fight to defend her people and win honor and glory in battle as men are allowed to do. Éowyn (in both the books and films) single-handedly takes down one of the Nine, a Nazgûl, a Ringwraith. She faces off against the debilitating terror it exudes, and she wins. That is so hardcorely badass. She was hands-down my favorite character in the books.

Éowyn & Faramir gaze lovingly into each other's eyes. — Éowyn & Faramir gaze lovingly into each other’s eyes.

The twist is that Aragorn then has to save her life from the poison of the Ringwraith, and Faramir, the second son of the Steward of Gondor (and Boromir’s little brother), saves her life again by showing her how to love…i.e. how to be a woman. The fire goes out of Éowyn when she settles down and learns her place as the consort of Faramir. All her dreams of being considered an equal to men, of standing side-by-side men on a battlefield and commanding respect goes out the window because, apparently, all women really want and are good for is love and marriage.

Then we have Arwen, the daughter of Elrond and elvish princess of Rivendell. Director Peter Jackson takes a lot of liberties with this character in the film version of The Lord of the Rings. He generally made Arwen more visible (I think she’s only in two scenes in the books) and more active in that she saves Frodo from death at the hands of the Nine, which seemed cool at first, but with the introduction of the similar character of Tauriel in The Desolation of Smaug, this whole healing trope gave me pause. In The Fellowship of the Ring, Arwen uses herbs and elvish magic to heal Frodo from the poisonous wound he took from a Morgul-blade, offering up her immortality in prayer for his life.

"What Grace is given me, let it pass to him." — “What Grace is given me, let it pass to him.” – Arwen

Tauriel abandons her quest to destroy the orc infestation at their source, and she also abandons Legolas, her friend of 600 years, to perform a similar healing rite on a dwarf she’s known for a couple of days. What could be more important than friendship? More important than the personal quest that she defied her sovereign to follow? Hmm…

Jackson also plays up the tragic love story between Arwen and Aragorn to a nauseating level, making her life tied to the fate of the quest to destroy the ring. This renders her helpless and in need of saving after he’d already built her up as an elvish warrior with mad healing abilities. Arwen is divested of her prowess as well as her immortality for love. In the end, she’s simply a prize for Aragorn to claim at the end of his journey because her story is completely suspended until the dudes can rescue her…Sleeping Beauty style.

This brings us to Tauriel. I’m glad she was included in the storyline of The Desolation of Smaug. She’s an elegant, fierce, and brilliant warrior.

She’s strong, defiant, and makes her own choices.

Tauriel faces off against her elvish king.

I’m glad that Peter Jackson recognized that having a movie with no women in it is absolutely absurd.

BUT. There it is, the big but. But Jackson, like so many other male storytellers, can’t imagine a path for Tauriel that doesn’t include love. Tauriel is the love object of two male characters creating a noxious love triangle, and she, like Arwen and Éowyn, must sacrifice everything for that love.

I thought a lot about why Jackson created Tauriel. He’s already messing with the events, chronology, and mythology of the books, so why didn’t he just change the gender of a handful of major characters to make them into women? Why couldn’t we have a female dwarf or two? Why couldn’t the last remaining “skin-changer” the bear-man Beorn have been a woman? Or the Brown Wizard Radagast have been a lady forest foraging force of nature? Answer: Because none of those characters have the potential to be love interests. Instead, Jackson created a throw-away character that he could shape into a love object. I am so tired of seeing women have to give up their identity, their goals, their independence, and their power for love. And why is female love synonymous with sacrifice?

I can’t say how Jackson will tie it all up in his conclusion to the ridiculously drawn out trilogy of The Hobbit. Who knows? Maybe he’ll end the series with Tauriel having been instrumental, self-actualized, and above the pressures of our pitiful contemporary love culture that insists all a woman needs is love to be whole. Based on his current trajectory and track record, though, it’s not looking so hot. Sigh. It doesn’t look like a good day to be a woman on Middle Earth.

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Amanda Rodriguez is an environmental activist living in Asheville, North Carolina. She holds a BA from Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio and an MFA in fiction writing from Queens University in Charlotte, NC. She writes all about food and drinking games on her blog Booze and Baking. Fun fact: while living in Kyoto, Japan, her house was attacked by monkeys.

15 Men On A Mountain…and Evangeline Lilly in ‘The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug’

The addition of Evangeline Lilly (Lost) as Tauriel caused some concern among real LOTR fans, mostly because that character never existed in The Hobbit and no one wants to see a beloved a story messed with; but to be fair, if it wasn’t tinkered with and explored, then why go and see the film? You might as well just stay home and read the book then if you’re not interested on gaining a new perspective on the story.

Written by Rachel Redfern

Spoiler Alert

The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug premiered on Friday, just in case you didn’t know. And while the film has pulled in $73.7 million and topped the box office this weekend, there have been some mixed reviews–it’s too long, too boring, too overdone, too much action, or it’s fun, it’s brilliant, it’s beautiful. The divisiveness is understandable. Tolkien is a necessary staple to any library and Jackson’s Lord of The Rings, really is a visually-stunning, incredibly acted epic series; in my re-watching of the films last week, I was struck with just how impressive the films still were, perhaps even more so now.

It makes sense that any spinoff of such a beloved and hefty series, could either be a magical dream true (hello, Stephen Colbert), or too much of a good thing.

And here, in this installment especially, there was bound to be naysayers. The addition of Evangeline Lilly (Lost) as Tauriel caused some concern among real LOTR fans, mostly because that character never existed in The Hobbit and no one wants to see a beloved a story messed with; but to be fair, if it wasn’t tinkered with and explored, then why go and see the film? You might as well just stay home and read the book then if you’re not interested on gaining a new perspective on the story. But as was the case with Game of Thrones (at least according to me, don’t get too angry), I thought that the TV show was better with some of the changes and additions to the story, especially in the fleshing out of Margery Tyrell and Shae, both of whom are far more fascinating and interesting in the show than they are in the book. Why couldn’t the same be true in The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug?

Tauriel is a playful Captain of the Guard whose fighting skills rival that of the great CGI scenes for Legolas; except seriously though, Lilly actually used to teach archery at summer camp. Besides that, Lilly has a beautiful poise that really is perfect for a Tolkien Elf, and while I don’t speak it so I can’t be sure, her Elvish sounded fantastic. As Lilly is a staunch fan of Tolkien she was worried about adding in a new character, but in one of my favorite quotes from 2013, stated that, “I keep repeatedly telling people that in this day and age, to put nine hours of cinema entertainment in theaters for young girls to go and watch, and not have one female character for them to watch is subliminally telling them, ‘you don’t count.’ You’re not important, and you’re not pivotal to story.”

Which is exactly the attitude that is essential for progress to be made in the representations of women on film and television, and it’s amazing that Lilly was so invested in a larger goal that she was willing to tamper with one of her favorite stories. And she took even one step further; according to Lilly, she originally agreed to the part under one condition: “One condition, and they agreed to the condition, and that condition was in place for two years. The condition was I will not be involved in a love triangle. Right? Because any of you who are fans of Lost, I’ve had it up to here with love triangles.”

But then, that changed, and while Lilly, Jackson, and Phillipa Boyens (writer) all agreed that the love triangle just sort of arose naturally during filming, it was still a bit disappointing (despite Kili [Aiden Turner] being a remarkable rare mix of adorable sexiness). Twilight, Vampire Diaries, Hunger Games–all uber-famous features that are centered around a love triangle, and mostly, it’s just sort of getting old: there are others ways of portraying love than two fantastically handsome men drooling over an unreachable average woman.

I agree with Jackson and Lilly in their decisions to bring in a female character and wish more could have been incorporated, because at it’s core, The Hobbit is just a hairy version of Band of Brothers with a lot of mountains. And in reality, after watching The Desolation of Smaug, I tried to dream up a female version of this film, and I wondered, what would it look like? How would those interactions have changed? And it was really difficult to imagine anyone producing a film about 15 very short women of vary levels of attractiveness, traveling through a forest to kill a dragon with their queen and bossy/optimistic sorceress in tow.

Generally in film, large group female interactions, with or without world-saving levels of adventure, tend to be characterized by passive-aggressive bitchiness. And I’m at a loss for any TV show, miniseries, or film, that has ever been about an all-female group trying to save the world, much less three four-hour films about said adventure.

In all seriousness, would you go to see that movie?

2013 Oscar Week: ‘The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey’: The Addition of Feminine Presence During a Quest for the Ages

Guest post written by Elise Schwartz.

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey directed by Peter Jackson is the prequel story to The Lord of the Rings trilogy. It begins by introducing the protagonist, Bilbo Baggins, on the day of his 111th birthday, the same day that the Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Rings movie begins. It is the day that Baggins begins writing about the greatest adventure of his lifetime: an unexpected journey. The movie dialogues Baggins’ first encounter with Gandalf the Grey, a host of Dwarves, Elves, Orcs and Goblins, while assisting the Dwarves in their quest to reclaim the Lonely Mountain.

This Hobbit movie, which will eventually be the first part in a trilogy, is based on roughly the first half of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit. The book was published in the late 1930s and was intended to be a stand-alone children’s book. The LOTR trilogy only came to be as a request from Tolkien’s publisher. It was during this trilogy that Tolkien really developed Middle Earth and the characters that lived within its regions. It’s possible that due to the fictional world not being truly developed prior to The Hobbit being published, we only meet the 15 male characters that make up the traveling party and their enemies. Jackson took it upon himself to bring the two stories together as a whole movie series by introducing additional characters to the audience of The Hobbit that play a large roles in the LOTR. One main example of this is through the character Galadriel, the Elf Queen.

Galadriel appears in a scene that was created specifically for the movie adaptation. During this scene there is a meeting of the White Council, which consists of Gandalf the Grey, Saruman the White, Elrond the Lord of Rivendell and Galadriel. The council meets to discuss the mission of the traveling party to take back the Lonely Mountain and the role of Baggins as part of the company. Galadriel remains quiet and watchful during much of the meeting’s discussions. Though, she does interject during a heated debate between Gandalf and Saruman, and insists that Saruman let Gandalf speak. At the conclusion of the meeting, she offers Gandalf guidance and assistance if he were to ever need her help.

The members of the council treat Galadriel in an ethereal, yet mindful way. They show her respect in a manner that almost makes it seem like she should be placed on a pedestal. It is much how she and other female characters are regarded in the LOTR. Jackson was careful to show this in the style that it was intended – with dignity and admiration towards women of power.

Galadriel (Cate Blanchett) in The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey

Many other reviews such as this one have questioned why Galadriel was included in the film, when her character wasn’t introduced in the book. Was this just a way of adding females into the plot line? It’s possible. But we must remember that Jackson is tying the two series together and trying to create cohesion, which will turn into a much grander story overall. So why didn’t he include Arwen or Eowyn? Simply from a historical timeline, this is 60 years prior to the LOTR stories and Galadriel was the only female character Tolkien introduced that was alive at the time. As well, she is a character of authority that can add substance to the overall journey of the series.

So, even though The Hobbit was not meant to hold a well-rounded cast, Jackson’s film adaptation of the first half of the book does an exceptional job of introducing the audience to the world of Middle Earth and the characters within. He was careful to insert only the most necessary characters that needed introduction while sticking to the main themes and plot directions of the book. Though, I’m still curious to know if he will end up pushing the envelope enough with the Hobbit series to take home another Best Picture award in the future.

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Elise Schwartz writes at HalloweenCostumes.com and has been known to spend an entire weekend watching the extended versions of the Lord of the Rings films start to finish.