“And my bow!”

In the nine and more hours of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, as directed by Peter Jackson, Legolas speaks to Frodo exactly once. Their sole interaction consists of three words: “And my bow!” (I owe this information to Reddit, which also notes that in the original trilogy, Legolas doesn’t say much of anything. All of Orlando Bloom’s lines could fit comfortably within a page of ordinary text, which speaks to both his charisma and his limitations: he makes an extraordinary impact here with minimal dialogue, but does less well when asked to carry, say, a Cameron Crowe movie.) Granted, Legolas and Frodo are separated for most of the story, and it’s only in the second half of The Fellowship of the Ring—and the last few minutes of The Return of the King—that they share any screen time at all. And the role of Legolas, is anything, is considerably expanded from his part in the books. But it’s still a surprise to discover that two characters who occupy a fair amount of mental real estate in one of the most successful franchises of all time have so little to say to each other.

That said, when you have so many characters competing for space, there are bound to be hiatuses, both here and in other ensembles. Edmund, incredibly, never says a word directly to King Lear, and the two men only occupy the stage together in the closing scenes of the play. In the film version of L.A. Confidential, Jack Vincennes only speaks once to Bud White—”White, you better put a leash on your partner before he kills somebody”—and Bud doesn’t even respond. Yet we still tend to think of them all as pairs, or at least as counterbalancing forces in a narrative that propels itself forward through contrasts. Lear’s story runs in counterpoint to Edmund’s, and each gains enormous resonance from the other. Jack and Bud are opposing points in a triangle, with Ed Exley occupying the final corner, and the story is structured in such a way that we naturally draw comparisons. With Legolas and Frodo, the parallels are less pronounced, but there’s a sense in which the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy is a dialogue between the kind of physical bravery required to take down a mumakil singlehandedly and the plodding, unglamorous courage that carries us step by step into Mordor.

And what this all demonstrates is the subtle way in which juxtapositions, and not just interactions, allow characters to inform one another as they follow their separate destinies. I’ve written before about the power of ensembles, which, by Metcalfe’s Law, grow correspondingly more potent as the number of players increases. It’s easiest to understand this in terms of potential pairings, each one of which offers possibilities for interest or drama. (The legendary Samson Raphaelson, whose The Human Nature of Playwriting is one of the most useful—and hardest to obtain—books on storytelling around, suggests that authors turn to such pairings when trying to crack the plot: “I make a list of my principal characters and check to see if each character has had a major scene with every other character…I would say a good play, all other things being equal, should have thorough exploration of each other by all the major characters.”) But the pairings don’t necessarily need to take place within the action of the story itself. If the cast is vivid and rich enough, the pairings will naturally occur in the reader’s mind, even if the reader, or author, isn’t conscious of the process.

Which applies to more than character alone. We think of a novel or movie as a linear work of art that moves from one event to the next, but when we remember the books or films we love the most, even those that follow a strict line of action, we have a way of seeing everything simultaneously, with each piece commenting on every other. (In a way, it’s the opposite of how we think about dreams, which seem to appear in the brain in short, compressed bursts of imagery, only to fit themselves into a more conventional narrative when we recall them after the fact.) It’s also how an author often thinks of a work in progress—and one of the hardest parts of writing is balancing that impression of simultaneity with the linear experience of a reader encountering the story for the first time. When I think of Lawrence of Arabia, the memory takes the form of overlapping moments or images that are really separated by vast distances of celluloid: the famous cut from the match to the sunrise, Ali appearing like a dot on the horizon, Lawrence slumping on his camel with exhaustion or collapsing in despair at the Turkish hospital. Legolas and Frodo, or other narrative elements, may barely interact, but they’re part of a fellowship of the imagination.