Starlight, Wandering from the Path, and Failure in The Desolation of Smaug

Spoilers for The Desolation of Smaug, The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, The Empire Strikes Back, and The Wrath of Khan.

The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug is about mistakes and bad decisions.  Just as much of An Unexpected Journey was about trying to reclaim a glorious past, for those who see The Hobbit trilogy itself as a bad decision, this theme might seem very fitting.  But as someone who sees value in it, this theme unifies a movie that might seem to just be a formless series of events and creates some emotion unseen in any of the previous Tolkien films or in very many mainstream blockbuster films at all.

Smaug establishes early on that it will be about “wandering from the path”: Gandalf warns the company of dwarves not to leave the path in Mirkwood, saying that if they do, they “might never find it again.”  The first film was about setting out on the path (literally and figuratively), forming the company, and asking its central thematic question: why would Bilbo join this quest?  Having answered that at the end of the first film (the answer: empathy), the second film takes the united heroes it has established and shows them making mistakes, which lead them to splinter their company and ultimately to fail in their quest to slay the dragon. 

The dwarves leaving the literal path in Mirkwood constitutes the first bad decision made in the film (I’m not sure Gandalf’s decision to leave the company is a mistake, though his decision to enter Dol Guldur alone most certainly is).  The Mirkwood sequence also marks when the film begins asking what causes people to make bad decisions.  There is a motif of hallucination, delirium and intoxication in the film: the hallucinations in Mirkwood, the Elf guards getting drunk, Bofur getting hammered and missing the boat out of Laketown (it just had to be the Irish dwarf, I guess), Kili’s delirious conversation with Tauriel after she heals him.  It’s fair to say that these things fall under the category of intoxication: they are things that overwhelm the characters’ reason and decision-making, causing them to do things they wouldn’t normally do.  Intoxication means they can’t see clearly, which itself becomes a separate motif in the film with three characters with a cloudy eye: one of the menacing men in Bree, Bolg, and the brief of vision of Thranduil with half of his face burned off.  And isn’t there another character with One Eye?

But these are mostly minor examples of intoxicating things that overwhelm the characters’ decision-making.  The real focus of the film is on Thorin’s obsession with the treasure of Erebor and Bilbo’s growing obsession with and thrall to the One Ring.  The motif establishes these obsessions as essentially an extension of being drunk, which makes sense in the context of these films given the way the filmmakers often characterized the Ring in LOTR as being like a drug and Gollum and Frodo as being like drug addicts.

Bilbo’s and Thorin’s obsessions are what cause them to make mistakes or do things they would not normally do.  For Bilbo, the Ring gives him the ability to do things he probably would not have been able to do without it: fighting the spiders, sneaking through the Elven-King’s halls, and entering Erebor.  But the desire to keep it also drives him into a murderous rage when he sees it near a large insect.  And most importantly, even though he knows that he should tell Gandalf about it, Bilbo hides the Ring from the Wizard.  The Ring has started intoxicating the hobbit and influencing his decisions.

Despite the Ring’s importance in the larger story, and the title of this trilogy, Thorin’s obsessions and mistakes are the primary focus of Smaug.  They are the ones with the most consequence.  It is his obsession with the treasure that leads the company into the mountain to awaken the beast.  “He cannot see beyond his own desire,” Bard says (there’s the eye/seeing motif again).  And it is his obsession which causes Thorin to turn his own sword on Bilbo.

The film’s decision to focus on Thorin rather than Bilbo has been justifiably controversial.  Bilbo does have some important things to do in the film (scaling the tree in Mirkwood, rescuing the dwarves from the spiders, rescuing the dwarves from the Elves, entering Erebor on his own), but there are sections of the film where he really does seem to disappear.  When we see him in the boat leaving Laketown, I had a feeling that we hadn’t really seen him in a while.  Given the powers of the Ring, perhaps it is fitting that Bilbo disappears from his own movie.  And it’s also probably a consequence of having a film with 15 main characters, and that’s before you add in the Elves and the Laketown characters.  Many of the dwarves also fade into the background this time.  Has poor William Kircher had more than one line as Bifur in this entire series?  At least Bombur gets to be a bouncing barrel.

Yet the emphasis on Thorin is more appropriate for a specific thematic focus that makes the ending of the film an actual ending.  If we think about an ending as the point where the story is over, then a cliffhanger like Smaug’s doesn’t constitute an ending.  But for me, that definition doesn’t really work.  No story is ever really over, and certainly most movie stories don’t end when the credits role.  The happy couple finally saying, “I love you” and kissing isn’t an ending.  Their lives don’t stop there, unless they’re about to be hit by truck.

I haven’t thought about it long enough to come up with the best definition for an ending, and I don’t want to propose anything too restrictive since that is the opposite of what I’m trying to do, but I have taken to using this definition for an ending: a movie can end if it has answered a central dramatic or thematic question.  I think this can apply to most types of stories, but I think it is useful for making a part of a series into a complete thought rather than just an episode.  The central dramatic question of The Lord of the Rings is: will Frodo destroy the Ring?  But the central dramatic and thematic question of The Fellowship of the Ring is right there in the title: can Frodo make this journey alone?  By the end of the movie, there is an answer: Frodo has to leave his friends to keep them out of danger, but he can’t make the journey alone.  Or to put it another way: “I’m going to Mordor alone.”  “Of course you are, and I’m coming with you.”  The central thematic question of An Unexpected Journey is: why would Bilbo join this quest?  The answer is that he empathizes with dwarves’ need to find a home.

The central thematic question of The Desolation of Smaug is: can these characters avoid repeating the mistakes of the past?  At the end of the film, we have an answer: no.

This film is not just about any kinds of mistakes.  No, this wouldn’t be a Tolkien story without the Shadow of the Past.

Memory is everywhere in Tolkien.  I already wrote about how An Unexpected Journey has a very Tolkien-like focus on the past: the framing device of an older Bilbo writing his book, Thorin’s desire to reclaim his people’s glorious past, the return of an ancient evil, even Peter Jackson’s clear desire to reclaim the glory of his LOTR trilogy.  And memory is still present in Desolation of Smaug.  Every time the characters reach a new place or meet a new character, there is a history that needs to be told.  When they reach his house, Beorn tells the company about his ancient grudge against Orcs.  When the company reaches Mirkwood, they find the ruins of the Elven gate and statues overgrown with vines: this place’s glory days were many years ago (or as a resident of Mirkwood would say about another forest in Middle-Earth: “This forest is old, very old, full of memory and anger.”).  Stuff like this is part of what I love about Tolkien’s work: it takes place in a world filled with reminders of an older world.  The Balrog is not just another monster for the heroes to fight.  It is a living memory of ancient history.

The company’s captivity in the Woodland Realm reintroduces the theme of memory by having Tauriel explicitly state it when she describes her people’s love of starlight.  The idea of starlight as memory is both strangely scientifically accurate for a fantasy story and appropriate for the history of the Elves, since the last of the Silmarils (the famous Elven jewels of the First Age, the cause of much wonder and grief) was sent into the sky as a star.  (Side note: this is Earendil, the most beloved star of the Elves; Galadriel gave to Frodo a vial with the light of this star, essentially the light of a Silmaril, which contained the light of the Two Trees of Valinor; Frodo who used it to fight Shelob, spawn of Ungoliant who helped Morgoth to steal the Silmarils from Valinor and destroyed the Two Trees in the First Age.  Shelob’s Lair is a rematch of the most ancient conflict in Middle-Earth.  How cool is that?)

The reintroduction of this theme is important because the Quest for Erebor is the quest to reclaim a memory.  When Thorin convinces the people of Laketown to help him, he uses his memories of the glory of Esgaroth and convinces them that he can return them to that past glory.  And when the dwarves finally reenter Erebor, Thorin and Balin are overcome with memories of what the Mountain once was.

The past is starlight, but the past is also a room full of the decomposing corpses of dwarves who could not escape from the Mountain.  The past is a ruined city that was turned to ash.  The past is full of death and mistakes.  And just as the adoration of the past is very much in the spirit of Tolkien, this film’s skepticism of focusing on the past is also in the spirit of Tolkien.

We tend to think of Tolkien as THE conservative Luddite, opposed to industrialization, the internal combustion engine and progress, and instead obsessed with the idea of an agrarian English countryside that was long gone and may have never really existed.  But there is evidence that he too had some skepticism about dwelling on the past.  I already touched on this a little in my post about An Unexpected Journey: the negative ramifications of Thorin’s obsession with the past are not an invention of the films.  This doesn’t necessarily suggest that Tolkien believed Thorin’s quest was a bad idea, since the book tends to focus on his greed.  But evidence of Tolkien’s skepticism of dwelling on the past can be found in one of my favorite passages of his writing.

In the Extended Edition of The Return of the King, Gandalf tells Pippin about the decline of Gondor, a speech that is taken almost verbatim from one that Faramir (the character out of all he had created in whom Tolkien saw the most of himself) gives in the book of The Two Towers, when he tells Frodo and Sam about Gondor.  The speech in the movie (almost the same as the book; the only thing missing is a mention of elixirs, which doesn’t really add to the theme) is: “Kings made tombs more splendid than the houses of the living and counted the old names of their descent dearer than the names of their sons.  Childless lords sat in aged halls musing on heraldry or in high cold towers asking questions of the stars.”

First things first: if that passage doesn’t excite you, then there’s nothing I can say to convince you to like Tolkien.  Second: if that’s not skepticism about dwelling on the past, I don’t know what is.  Of course, the passage is about a decline from former glory, spoken by someone who wants Gondor to return to it.  The speech in the film is prefaced by Gandalf saying: “The old wisdom borne out of the West was forsaken.”  There is no denying that Tolkien valued the past and believed much of it was preferable to the present, but this speech also sees a great deal of evil in dwelling on the past.

And it is this skepticism that comes to the forefront in The Desolation of Smaug, not the sense of nostalgia that we commonly associate with Tolkien.  The question in this film is not whether or not the heroes will reclaim the glories of the past, but whether or not they can avoid repeating the mistakes of the past.  And past mistakes are everywhere in this film.  Thorin has the chance to repair the rift between his people and Thranduil, but instead he chooses to scorn the Elf-King again.  Bard is haunted (and publicly ridiculed) because of his ancestor’s failure to kill Smaug, and he still keeps a reminder of it in his house (significantly, the film ends before we find out if he repeats his ancestor’s mistake).  And Thorin is haunted by his grandfather’s greed, which summoned the dragon that destroyed Dale and Erebor. 

Two characters confront him about these past mistakes.  Bard tells him in Laketown that if they enter the mountain, they are sure to unleash the same fire that destroyed Dale.  And Balin reminds Thorin that the treasure of Erebor drove his grandfather mad, while Thorin’s face is framed by the head of an ancient Dwarf statue: the past is always present.  Bard’s warning comes with a prophecy that encapsulates the temptation of reclaiming the past, and the danger of repeating its mistakes: “And the bells shall ring in gladness at the Mountain King’s return, but all shall fail in sadness, and the lake will shine and burn.”

As the company returns to Thorin’s past home, with the memory of past mistakes, of a king that went mad and a town turned to ash, what happens?  They repeat it all.  Obsessed with the treasure, Thorin turns his sword on Bilbo, and Bilbo’s remark about the barrels sends Smaug back to kill the men of Dale.  In fact, Thorin’s plan to defeat Smaug is to complete Erebor’s last, unfinished construction project: creating a golden dwarf statue.  His plan is for it to fall apart, covering Smaug in molten gold, but it is interesting that Thorin fills in the outlines of a blueprint that was set more than a hundred years before to create a golden monument to past glory that falls apart after only a few seconds.  And it all still “fails in sadness,” Smaug flies out of the mountain, “and the lake will shine and burn.”  That last part is yet to happen at the end of this film, but there is nothing to stop it.  The central question of the film has been answered: the company of dwarves repeated the mistakes of the past.

It is this ending that I think makes The Desolation of Smaug special.  There is no denying that the film has problems.  I don’t mind the Kili-Tauriel romance, and I actually really like Tauriel as a character, but I don’t think a crude sexual innuendo is the best way to start off a fairy-tale love story.  The continued emphasis on digital rather than practical effects is also disappointing.  The CGI orcs are less interesting than the practical ones in LOTR, and while most of the effects look very good, holy moly does the molten gold look fake.  The CGI also tends to mean that the action scenes usually lack a real sense that the characters could get hurt.  The barrel chase scene is fun, but it relies primarily on a sense of kinetic energy rather than a sense of jeopardy.  I also don’t understand the decision to turn the dwarves into super heroes who can pretty much do anything.  The first movie introduced an idea that I really liked, that these dwarves aren’t really warriors and aren’t particularly suited for this quest, but the series hasn’t followed through on that.  They all seem pretty capable to me.  And while there are some great images (I love the wintry atmosphere in Laketown), sometimes I think the digital grading goes overboard, particularly in Mirkwood where a general washed-out brown look replaces what seemed from the production videos to be a darkly colorful and almost psychedelic-looking forest.  Of course, not all of the storylines get a satisfying ending with Legolas fighting Bolg and then riding off to… fight him again?  I like ending the movie with Gandalf captured, but I’m still not sure about the Dol Guldur stuff.  If he has faced Sauron and survived, will the Balrog in Fellowship be as formidable?

But there is so much in the film that I do think works, not least of which is the actual dragon Smaug.  He looks fantastic, and the whole scene with him and Bilbo is terrific.  Here is an actual villain in this series who is smart and cunning, and I love that he is actually able to challenge how Bilbo sees Thorin.  Most of the individual dialogue scenes work very well.  As much as I disapprove of the trousers line, I very much like the scene when Tauriel and Kili talk about starlight and moonlight.  I even think the borderline maudlin healing scene has a nice fairy-tale quality to it.  And despite the lack of jeopardy in the action scenes, most of the movie has a very exciting feeling of adventure.  And then there’s that ending.

How often do you see something like this?  A mainstream, blockbuster movie that ends with the heroes failing, with something bad about to happen that is the heroes’ fault.  The Empire Strikes Back ends with failure, but it also ends with optimism about rescuing Han Solo.  The Wrath of Khan ends with Spock dead, but Khan has been defeated, and there’s hope that Spock can come back (“life from lifelessness”).

Oddly enough, The Hunger Games: Catching Fire (released about a month before) has a similar ending, complete with a sense of failure and a town being hit with fire from the sky.  Even still, Katniss does strike a blow against the Capitol, and the ending reveals a revolution in progress.  Smaug ends with complete failure.  While it is a better movie than Smaug, I also think Catching Fire slightly botches its ending by cutting to what is essentially a Mockingjay screensaver, reinforcing the sense that the movie was really just a trailer for the next one.  I also don’t think the forgettable, mumbly credits song helps very much.  Whatever emotions we’re supposed to be feeling (anger, excitement, despair), the song just backs away from.

Formally, the ending of Smaug functions better.  Rather than backing away from the emotion of the ending, it confronts it with a confident directorial flourish.  Jackson’s other Tolkien films usually fade to black at the end (the exception being Unexpected Journey) and always wait until well into the credits to bring in the anachronistic credits song.  In Smaug, Jackson starts the song (loud, mournful, and surprising) right after a cut to black, even before the credits have started.  It’s a bold choice that could put people off, especially Tolkien purists, but it perfectly fits with the emotion of despair that the film ends on.  If the film doesn’t work for you, I can’t convince you to care about it or feel this particular emotion, but seeing it the first time, I found it very powerful.

And again, the sense of failure is something special in the ending of a blockbuster movie, and more specifically, it’s something that isn’t found elsewhere in the Tolkien films (the ending of the book of The Two Towers comes the closest).  For me, this ending provides a justification for the trilogy decision.  If the whole thing was done as one film or two films, the same story moment would happen, but it has much more impact as the ending of a film.  Making a blockbuster, fantasy movie about mistakes and failure, and ending that movie with the heroes being wrong, making mistakes, and failing, whatever other problems there are, that ending is worth it.