Moral architecture
Tolkein and . . . Jeff Bezos? A man and the head of an enterprise both of which Tolkien would have compared to his own fictional villains. Is it any wonder that Bezos’ acquisition of the name Lord of the Rings has unfolded into a grandiose and thankfully forgettable mediocrity. Would that someone else, who had that kind of money to throw around, have invested it in something that resembled the common good instead of his limitless greed and ego.
Every honest broker outside of say, Variety (Hollywood’s most masturbatory publication ) and IMdB (owned by Amazon) has called Amazon’s bungling LOTR fabrication what it is — pure shit. But never fear, Amazon has halted any commentary on its own sites, and the bot-army push-back to the push-back is here. In recent days, I’ve seen a marked uptick in defenses of Jeff Bezos’ extravagant attempt to rip off J.R.R. Tolkien’s antediluvian vision; the life’s work of an authentic genius — a man transplanted from South African to the UK, who hated Apartheid and was none too crazy about industrial capitalism — taken into the hands of an uber-rich American charlatan with a bottomless bank account.
Bezos’ defenders are like many well-and-truly-duped marks. Once they’ve bought the snake oil, they’ll pretend its curing their piles rather than confess they’ve been had. And as with many of today’s virtue-signaling scolds, they’ll smear those who point out that the snake oil is just bathtub booze, cocaine, and castor oil.
On my Google feed appeared an article that “pushed back” on the criticism’s of “actors of color” from Tolkien devotees. The problem is, “actors of color” (how “white”-centric is that phrase?) is not what the majority of the critics of the Amazon abortion are on about. But when you can’t answer the real criticisms, they best tactic is to slander Tolkien fans and scholars as racists.
The race-thang is an easy go-to among the Robin DiAngelo crowd, where affluent white liberal con artists can sell affluent white liberal guilt back to affluent white liberals; and we’ll talk more about that (leaving aside for now the ways in which permanence-of-racial-conflict narratives are the servants of a Morgoth also called Capital).
What’s the real problem among those of us who have actually read Tolkien, and even among those novitiates who sensed something of the real Tolkien from watching the Peter Jackson film trilogy? There are a few.
First, we have to get rid of some epistemological baggage, to wit, the “fantasy genre.” This is a category invented after the fact in an attempt to capture a story and submerge its distinctiveness within the invented category. Anyone who lists Game of Thrones alongside The Lord of the Rings or The Silmarillion has already made a category error. Game of Thrones has more in common with Breaking Bad and Ozark than it does with LOTR.
Because we’ve become such a superficial culture, drunk on a steady drip of simulacra, we attend to the most superficial characteristics of a work and completely miss its moral architecture — if it has any to start with.
The moral architecture of Game of Thrones, Breaking Bad, and Ozark is post-modern, that is to say, half-baked Nietzsche, with heaping helpings of gratuitous violence and sex taken from a menu of Hollywood’s tried and true titillation tropes. These three productions celebrate power, and the (a)moral architectural foundation is the “will to power.” As productions, it must be said, these three examples are well-executed. The same can’t be said for Rings of Power.
Tolkien’s moral architecture, on the other hand, is pre-modern. It’s more at home with Shakespeare — who still adhered to this pre-modern moral architecture even as he wrote at the dawn of modernity — or Chaucer . . . or Thomas Aquinas. Tolkien, a gifted linguist, researched Celtic and Northern European myths and legends, with the intent to produce a “mythology for England.” His moral architecture was late medieval Roman Catholic. Tolkien was obviously a modern man, a twentieth century man, his first big-world experience as a young adult was as a combatant in the sanguinary trenches of World War I; but his outlook was thoroughly pre-modern.
I guess there’s still an old English major in me. Amazon’s charade woke the ghost of Frank Reuter, the professor who taught me how to read literature back in the Triassic period, especially literature based on past epistemological frameworks. He hated anachronistic revisionist nonsense. Take Romeo and Juliet, as just one example, read and portrayed as as if it were a saccharine modern romance. When one studies the period, and Shakespeare, as well as the prevailing philosophy of that period — still drifting into the dawn of modernity from the High Middle Ages — it’s a tale of pride, sin, despair, and damnation.
One doesn’t have to share Shakespeare’s way of knowing to read him; but if one wants to grasp the actual sense of the author and the internal coherence of his plays, then one does have to study that older framework and suspend the temptation to retroactively impose a modern way of knowing on the author. It’s a matter of sound scholarship, a matter of learning what’s behind the text, and a matter of respect. I’m assuming, perhaps optimistically, that this humble, in-depth, and respectful approach to literature is still taught somewhere in the hustler age of Robin DiAngelo and Donald Trump.
Tolkien fans and scholars (who are not the sum total of RoP viewers) sense the violence that Amazon has done to Tolkien’s moral architecture. One article claimed that most Tolkien fans and scholars hated the Peter Jackson series, too.
Pure bullshit. They’ll say anything, these guys. Most of us enjoyed it. We enjoyed it because it was still clearly centered on honor, integrity, courage, virtue, and friendship—especially friendship—in the struggle between good and evil. The action and background served this moral framework, not the obverse.
Yes, Jackson took some liberties. He made Aragorn a reluctant king, when in the books Aragorn was gung-ho as hell about it (because Elrond, his foster-father, would only permit him to wed Arwen when Aragorn had defeated Sauron and re-united Gondor and Arnor). Jackson amplified Arwen’s early role. Jackson killed off Saruman and excised Saruman’s scouring of the Shire. He compressed time frames. He made Frodo look like a teenager (Frodo was fifty-one when he began his journey in the book). He threw in some annoying Hollywood battle tropes and action stunts, and he made some of his characters too dishy. Legolas never ran out of arrows. The films left the impression that pipeweed is pot (it’s Hobbit tobacco, y’all.) He took a lot of liberties. But most fans and scholars still liked the Peter Jackson LOTR trilogy; because Jackson managed to preserve Tolkien’s moral architecture.
Tolkien’s wide-ranging plots were metaphysically underwritten by the perennial struggle between good and evil—evil being not a force, but a lack and a loss—and the qualities of character necessary to navigate that struggle in the world. LOTR was about heroism — but not heroism constructed as mere physical courage. Heroism, in Tolkien, is a function of the virtues — of good character. Center stage are honor, courage, humility, selflessness, and loyal friendship. One could never imagine Frodo or Sam or Aragorn or Eowyn behaving like Marty and Wendy Byrde in Ozark, who once they’ve learned enough criminality decide to embrace it . . . or like Daenerys Targaryen. Never! That’s the difference between the “will to power” framework and the framework of honor — of virtue and character. And whether Tolkien fans who found themselves repelled by the shallow drivel of the Amazon production can articulate it thus, this abandonment of the moral architecture of honor is (in addition being terrible film-making) what put a lot of people off — not the straw men of racism, sexism, or purist fandom.
The Amazon abortion is pure Hollywood and a rip-off not only of Tolkien’s name to cash in on his popularity, but a quasi-rip-off of Game of Thrones as well (let’s produce a quasi-medieval fantasy with dark magic and lots of combat). Its cultural sensibility is post-modern metropolitan liberal. It’s long on visual tapestry, action, and the transformation of Tolkien’s characters and scenes into repurposed pop-culture Hollywood tropes. It’s utterly barren of Tolkien.
Let’s use Galadriel as an example, since she’s the character around which the weak plot, the bad acting, the pretentious and sophomoric dialogue, the inch-deep character development, the spastic pacing, the unintelligible backstories, and the unimaginative Hollywood tropes all revolve. In this production, they’ve portrayed Galadriel as the love child of Xena Warrior Princess and Kill Bill, in other words as a power feminist — a sly form of Hillary Clinton counterfeit-feminism which describes liberation as women learning and displaying the worst traits of men in power. (I have written two pro-feminist books, btw, here and here.) Tolkien’s Galadriel is nowhere to be found in this character. For starters — here’s that Tolkien moral sensibility —neither Tolkien’s Galadriel nor any of his other honorable characters are driven by revenge, though that’s exactly how Amazon’s Payne-McKay duo wrote their revenge-obsessed and perennially pissed-off Galadriel.
Modern readers are often taken aback by how the characters in Tolkien’s books let their enemies go once they’ve been defeated, because modern readers no longer recognize the metaphysical framework within which revenge is a motive that morally degrades us. We (and the Payne-Mckay writing duo) have been raised on a diet of revenge fantasy films our whole lives. Revenge is the cheapest, shallowest, and most simple-minded motive for lazy, unimaginative hack-writers to employ. And it has nothing to do with Tolkien’s Galadriel.
Galadriel, who appears in Tolkien first in the LOTR trilogy, is described as a six-foot-four-inch athlete (not a warrior), and she does fight in one (one!) defensive battle. She does not however identify as a warrior or seek battles. Her travels and actions are generally of a strategic and diplomatic nature, her greatest virtue being wisdom. When she brings down walls and other martial feats, she does not use a sword, like some “honorary man,” but employs her mastery of magic. She is a mage, bearing the power of the sacred trees in her hair, and she has the power of telepathy. She doesn’t spend her time pursuing Sauron. Sauron doesn’t even become the dark lord until the age after the Amazon abortion. This towering, mysterious, and wise Galadriel is unrecognizable in the embittered slay-queen of Payne-McKay origin.
The writers misinterpreted (and extrapolated from their misinterpretation) Jackson’s portrayal of Galadriel when Frodo offered her the ring. Remember when Galadriel turned purple and went all deep-voice? That was Jackson’s way of showing her latent power, not portraying her as unstable and angry. (In the book, her reaction was to laugh aloud at Frodo’s offer.)
Some trivia for those unfamiliar, Celeborn and Galadriel’s daughter marries Elrond — whose parents were both half-elf/half-men — making Galadriel Arwen’s grandmother. (Elrond is also Aragorn’s foster father, having taken him in and raised Aragorn from the age of two.) In other words, Galadriel is not Elrond’s girl-pal, but his mother-in-law. In the Amazon burlesque, Elrond — a lore master and healer in the books — is portrayed as another shopworn trope — the bad best friend to Kill-Bill-Galadriel, and worse yet, as a kind of creepy political manipulator.
I’ll stop with Galadriel there; we just needed to show what liberties Amazon has taken. But again, this is not — except for a tiny handful of uber-purists — the main problem with Amazon’s billion-dollar boondoggle. While most viewers who react badly to the production may not articulate their reaction in metaphysical and epistemological terms, they know that they do not get the “sense” of Tolkien’s imaginary world from this very Marvel-movie-like bastardization.
The devolution
The LOTR film trilogy was better by an order of magnitude than The Hobbit Trilogy which followed, even though Peter Jackson was hired back to make the latter. The reasons are various, but this critique can be made more on the artistic merits of the films, rather than their fealty to Tolkein’s originals. We’ll do it this way, because the main problem with the Amazon production is that, on its artistic merits, it is crap — not how it fits into culture wars and opportunists who use them for publicity.
It starts with Warner Brothers and its ilk and their apparently bottomless capacity to fuck up a film franchise with bad profit-milking sequels. But we can go further. By all accounts, the first trilogy had very little studio interference, while the sequel trilogy was plagued by it. Gotta get those money-makers out; time is money, dammit.
The LOTR trilogy is the film adaptation of a three part novel that contained 576,459 words. The film trilogy condensed that half-million-plus words into nine hours and eighteen minutes. The Hobbit film trilogy took seven hours and fifty-four minutes to tell a written story comprised of 95,022. The latter, then, tries to stre-e-e-e-etch the story substantially further than the former. They stretched with a far greater reliance on CGI and the insertions of dozens of bad Hollywood tropes. In other words, instead of trying to compress Tolkien’s sensibility into sharp, creative, and informative scenes, they relied on trope fillers.
Warner Brothers decided to make a knock-off of Lord of the Rings trilogy by reproducing the main plot elements as tropes — recycling successful and popular scenes and plot devices to milk a little more cash out of them and save the energy of lazy-ass writers. One example: where the romance between Aragorn and Arwen was taken from the book and played up in the films, in The Hobbit, Warner Brothers just invented a romance between a female elf — Tauriel (also a kind of Xena power-feminist) — and a dwarf. (Their romance begins with a dick-joke, yeah . . . that’s Tolkien.)
The overall result is something that’s unrecognizable as Tolkien. Critic Ryan Airy does an excellent comparative takedown of the prologues for each trilogy here.
The Hobbit exists on an aesthetic continuum somewhere between LOTR and The Rise of the Silver Surfer. The Rings of Power falls below the line.
Let’s do some backstory here. Jeff Bezos is an opportunist, but he’s also in the grip of some compulsion to Be Number One. As a pathological narcissist, a ruthless businessman, and a greedy jackass (but I repeat myself), his entry into this project was not Tolkien; it was HBO’s madly successful Game of Thrones adaptation. Bezos wanted his own GoT.
For the record, I hated GoT, but not for aesthetic reasons. All the things they got wrong with writing, directing, acting, and editing in Rings of Power, GoT got right. Bezos hired the wrong showrunners, writers, directors, actors, and editors.
Start with Bezos seeking the rights to Tolkien’s work. The Tolkien estate said aw hell no, so Bezos went to the Saul Zaentz Company, which held the rights to some Tolkien notes, and Bezos used a legal loophole to gain access to the name (IP), Lord of the Rings, which he hung on his abortion.
You see, Bezos doesn’t understand the difference between LOTR and GoT either, which is why he saw the “fantasy genre” and the profit receipts from both, and decided to make a LOTR competitor to GoT, whose sequel, House of the Dragon, is — how shall we put it? — kicking Bezos’ saggy white pampered ass in the ratings.
I guess when people know what they want, they go for the real thing, and not the knockoff. LOTR fans want the LOTR moral architecture — and, well, competent film-making. GoT fans want the GoT moral architecture — and competent film-making. Bezos found exactly the wrong path between all of these and took it.
The best-selling novel of all time was Don Quixote. The second best-selling novel of all time was Tale of Two Cities. The third was the Lord of the Rings trilogy. The critics rate it at around 58, still pretty high, and we’ll get to this disconnect between “critics” and readers momentarily. The point for now is that Amazon was playing with fire, and now Bezos is crying because people don’t like his little billion-dollar ripoff.
Going back a bit further, Amazon’s original notion for the new GoT was Conan (the Barbarian) — a bit played by Arnold Schwarzenegger back in Olden Tymes. Amazon’s Conan showrunner was to be Ryan Condal. Conan was prepared to begin production, when the Weinstein scandals broke over Hollywood. Amazon rightly feared that the conquest-masculinity of Conan, a rapey pagan warrior figure, would not be well received.
When Amazon did its trickery to acquire the LOTR IP, they were facing their own scandal with Amazon Studio chief Roy Price facing sexual harassment allegations. They had just replaced Price with Jennifer Salke, formerly of NBC Entertainment. She, in turn (bafflingly) fired Condal and hired J. D. Payne and Patrick McKay (the aforementioned “Payne-McKay duo”) as RoP’s new showrunners.
With Salke at the helm, Amazon had pivoted to someone they felt could navigate the scandals and still make a challenger to GoT (I found GoT to be full of normalized rape and misogyny, along with heaping helpings of gratuitous soft-core porn). Why she hired these two first-time showrunners, whose claims to fame were as un-credited writers for Flash Gordon, remains a mystery. Flash Gordon was . . . well, a film adaptation of a Marvel comic book character. Now we understand why the RoP series has all the earmarks of every other CGI-enhanced Marvel mediocrity.
Early on—before Weinstien, then Covid, interrupted Bezos’ project—they’d approached Peter Jackson. Jackson said, “Let me see the script,” and the conversation ended. The never called him back.
Ryan Condal went on to be hired by HBO to make House of the Dragon.
Oops.
Smear tactics and manufactured controversy
The Rotten Tomatoes entertainment review site compares “critical” professional-managerial (capitalist retainer) class reactions to general fan reactions, and for this production the PMC critics give it a score of 84 percent, whereas the general viewership rates it at an anemic 39 percent.
General viewership is not embroiled in the culture-war around the production or the skirmishes between Tolkien fans and the producers. They are responding by and large to the fact that the production was long on extravagant CGI and short on writing, acting, directing, pacing, dialogue, plotting, et al.
Hollywood (and Amazon-Hollywood) actually hold their own audiences in contempt, as evidenced by the way they and their surrogates have begun to bash the unwashed masses who’ve had the bad fortune of witnessing this trash, as a way to cover up the fact that it is trash.
It’s very difficult to generalize pros and cons, because — for example — the pros will range from culture warriors who are hyperventilating about Amazon’s “inclusion,” and for that adolescent boy whose aesthetic sensibilities encompass little more than comic-book action. On the other side — to which this writer belongs — those of us who are put off by it are likewise not some homogeneous mass.
Among the cons are over-identifiers.
The nature of today’s entertainment culture is such that some disembedded “fans” (in the Polanyian sense) are people who have come to develop an almost unhealthy identification with entertainment products, as well as actual literature and decent film-making. This powerful sense of identification leads them to buck against any changes to their iconic objects of identification, ergo the recent bad reaction to the reboot of The Little Mermaid (which was Disney diarrhea to begin with, imho). Some reacted against having a black actor in the lead.
I don’t for one minute believe that all the reboot detractors are racists; and I’m also quite sure that some were. The problem is not merely that there are racist reactions to such reboots — and take note, there have been good reactions to it, among black girls in particular (including our granddaughters).
The problem is how the studios are lumping every critic of the reboot in with the racists to smear all critics and pre-cancel (as racists) any critic who dares to say, “Your movie sucks because it’s bad film-making.”
Just to be clear, American film-making is a corporate vomitorium. Bad film-making is the norm.
Of course, there will be some who — already part of that stratum of people who think something called “wokeism” is a dire civilizational threat — will get wrapped around the axle about the “actors of color,” going back to RoP again now; but, with very few exceptions, these are not racists, but those who are themselves irritated (as I’ll admit I often am, though I’m far from obsessed) by the small but vocal bloc of SJW types who adhere to the nonsense of people like Robin DiAngelo. Amazon flopped itself right across the trenches of the culture war under the direction of Jennifer Salke — a white woman and fully paid-up member of the haute PMC.
Fake counterculture — or co-opted counterculture, which has become mainstreamed (so it’s not counter anything, but a new dogma) — has become a twofold matter of symbolically counter-privileging the margins — imagined more phenotypically than economically or historically — and directing performative antagonism at “privilege,” likewise imagined in ahistorical and aggressively non-economic demographic terms. I’m not a complex, unrepeatable human being anymore (and neither are you), but reduced to a “het-cis white man,” e.g. What-the-fuck-ever.
On this, the anti-SJW types have a point, I’m afraid.
Let’s explore a recent Twitter-enhanced theory called “fan-baiting,” because it is one of those phenomena wherein something is represented almost as a conspiracy, but which nonetheless puts its finger on certain actual dynamics. “Fan-baiting,” from what I can tell, is portrayed as an intentional, top-down media marketing strategy, which we’ll explain in a moment. My own take is that the Twitter persona (“Dr. Thala Siren”) who invented this term — a “cultural critic” whose actual identity I’ve been unable to ascertain (skeptical red light flashing) — has somewhat accurately described a media-marketing dynamic which emerged “organically,” but s/he described it as if it were mechanically engineered. Here’s the summary:
“Fan-baiting” is a form of marketing used by producers, film studios, and actors, with the intent of exciting artificial controversy, garnering publicity, and explaining away the negative reviews of a new and often highly anticipated production.
Fan-baiting emerged as a marketing strategy in 2016/17, after fans of beloved franchises such as Ghostbusters and Star Wars objected to what they saw as poor writing choices, sloppy scripts, and cheap alterations to plot lines and characters for the sake of shock value.
Along side these critics, there was a small group of bigoted but vociferous commentators who objected to the inclusion of black and female actors in roles traditionally held by white male actors. Some of these individuals began publicly harassing actors.
Bigots have always attacked diversity on screen, but in a highly polarized political climate, instances of harassment on garnered disproportionately massive media coverage, which provided production studios with both free publicity and a new defense against actual critics.
Studios seized the opportunity to discredit criticism of poor writing & acting, insinuating that these, too, were motivated by bigotry. What used to be accepted as standard critiques were increasingly dismissed as part of the ignorant commentary of a “toxic fandom.”
Soon, it became standard practice before release to issue announcements specifying diverse casting choices, coupled with pre-emptive declarations of solidarity with the cast whom they now counted on to receive disparaging and harassing comments.
Actors who are women and/or BIPOC became props & shields for craven corporate laziness and opportunism. The studios save money both by avoiding expensive veteran writers as well as by offloading publicity to news outlets and social media covering the artificial controversy.
“Fan-baiting” works. It brings in a new sympathetic audience whose endorsement is more about taking a public stance against prejudice than any real interest in the art. “Fan-baiting” also permits studios to cultivate public skepticism over the legitimacy of poor reviews.
“Fan-baiting” also compels reviewers to temper their criticism, for fear of becoming associated with the “toxic fandom” and losing their professional credibly, resulting in telling discrepancies between critic and audience review scores.
The true nature of “fan-baiting” is never so clear as when a script is well-crafted and audience reviews are accordingly positive, exposing the announcements, declarations of solidarity, & grooming of skepticism for what they really are: cynical corporate marketing tactics.
Put another way, media corporations have found a way to monetize the racism that they set their actors up to receive.
Amazon knows exactly what it’s doing. One of the first images released was of Disa. On cue, a couple bigots said the predictable, allowing a giddy Amazon to release its pre-prepared scripted statement denouncing the “pushback”. It’s the new business model.
Fan-baiting isn’t “black people getting cast”. Rather, it’s corporations banking on black people getting harassed to inflate publicity. Hence, diversity casting is in part motivated by the hope that the corporation can maximize harassment and, consequently, $$$.
Racism and sexism are the main issues. A secondary issue — one that is being overlooked — is corporate monetization of bigotry. Even while a studio purports to be “challenging bigotry” it is also counting on bigots being bigoted, and doing its best to direct them to the actors.
As I said, this could as easily have been described as a series of parries and thrusts rather than a “strategy.” This may be a temperamental thing. As I grow into my seventies, my temperament has edged toward contingent self-organizational rather than conspiratorial accounts. Not to sound misanthropic (I’m not), but my experience has accumulated in such a way as to make me doubt (1) the ability of even the smartest people to plan and execute grand strategies and (2) the ability of anyone to predict the future further than about an hour and a half.
Could it end up working as a marketing strategy? Hell, yes! Lots of market strategies develop out of trial and error. Watch the numbers, throw shit at the wall, and see which shit makes the numbers go up. (Sorry for mixing metaphors.)
The very reason this has become “a thing” is because it’s been cast into the public arena as a pre-fabricated racial issue. I say that as a long standing anti-racist (not the performative, pop-post-structuralist kind), as a member of a multi-racial family, and as the author of articles and books about actual racism, white supremacy, and various patriarchies over the last twenty-eight years (before that was a military career). Once this stuff is constructed as a public controversy, the pressure (and propaganda) is on for members of the public to weigh in — which we do, because the media who generate this shit are our near-exclusive windows on the world now. Intentionally drawing the public into controversy is a well-established tactic; controversy can be monetized (ask fucking Zuckerberg).
Substitutionsim
Yes, as the research for Brown v. The Board of Education showed, all the way back in 1954, that representation matters. But there are different ways to achieve representation. Simple substitutionism not only fails to achieve what accurate representation might, it validates the pre-substitution status quo. I covered this at length in my own book, Tough Gynes — Violent Women in Film as Honorary Men (which applies quite well to Amazon’s butchery of Galadriel’s character).
In Tough Gynes, I focused on women’s newfound “inclusion,” in liberal feminist terms, in films which featured violent female protagonists.
The many feminisms that were and are not liberal/capitalist have found no voice in Hollywood, and the same critique could apply to a good deal of the representation of black characters (using just one “racial” example).
Substitutionism is to simply substitute a female (or black) character for a traditionally white/male character or social role. In other words, roles, archetypes, professions, manners, values, and practices that were developed over the course of centuries in the context of white, male (and capitalist) hegemony — practices of power which morally degraded white people and males through the exercise of power — are redeemed and re-normalized by the substitution/inclusion of women and blacks (in our racially restricted example), who now perform precisely like those white males with power. In other words, according to liberal dogma, the problem was not the exercise of power, but exclusions from the exercise of that power.
In my book, I noted how GI Jane (played by Demi Moore) became an honorary violent man, whose substitution was complete when she could humiliate her opponent by saying, “Suck my dick!,” and when she went on to kill some Arabs. Denzel Washington, in Man on Fire, played the formerly white archetype of the uber-violent “special operator,” and redeemed himself using torture (this was concurrent with the torture scandals plaguing US Armed Forces in Iraq and Afghanistan). Torture can be good, and even a black man can be a good torturer. In the original Alien script, Ripley was a man, but when they hired Sigorney Weaver for the part, they just changed the pronouns — and it became “a feminist masterpiece.”
The professional-managerial class has been very well integrated in many respects, so it has a lot of phenotypic diversity; but because this class is so insular, it not only has little to do with the vast majority of everyday people, it holds regular everyday people in contempt. In many cases, this is that old combination of fear and the desire for control.
Women and/or racial minorities within this stratum are every bit as much the captives of their own unacknowledged class-episteme as their white male peers. And they are likewise devotees of equity (versus equality).
What?
Equity versus equality signifies two different world views — the inadequate but convenient shorthand is capitalist versus socialist. Remember when I said earlier that the narrative of the permanence-of-racial-conflict serves capital? We’ll unpack that now.
Equality, as problematic as that idea is, means (in a socialist sense) that everyone is more or less of the same class in terms of the social goods to which they have meaningful access. The big social problem for equality-advocates — looking at the world today — is “wealth inequality.” There’s something fundamentally wrong, equality advocates say, when three men (Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, and Warren Buffett) have as much wealth as the bottom half of the American population. (Agreed)
The goal of equity (in the capitalist sense) is for proportional racial and gender representation in each class. It’s fine for the 0.1 percent to own 32.1 times as much as the bottom 90 percent, as long as the 0.1 percent are 51 percent women, 19 percent Latino, 12 percent black, and four percent Asian, Native, Pacific Islander, South Asian, or Middle Eastern. (Here is an in-depth exploration of this race and class confusion.)
Producers, directors, studio execs, advertisers, well-known actors, et al, are not part of the bottom 90 percent.
Another problem with substitutionism is that it excludes more honest, authentic, and meaningful representations of the actual lives of actual women and minorities who are not members of the haute bourgeoisie or the PMC. Watch a series like The Wire or a film like Places in the Heart, and compare them to the substitutionary drivel that now dominates entertainment art.
Returning now to critics and audiences.
Class analysis of the discrepancy between professional critics and actual audiences might lead one to believe that fashion-trapped petit bourgeois “influencers” are not so much a part of some elite plot, as the are a bunch of dupes, convinced of their own perceived infallibility, and isolated from “the masses” who miraculously manage to exist outside of PMC echo chambers.
That doesn’t change the fact, in fact it reinforces my own account, that these “critics” really are afraid to stray from the party line, which has been captured by the superficiality of “inclusion” as an actual aesthetic standard to the detriment of actual aesthetic coherence and standards of production. They really are afraid to say the Rings of Power is shit, because it really has been successfully associated with the inflammation of a few bigots. They live in fear of online guilt by association. If Rings of Power hadn’t “race-swapped” (as I’ll explain, this too is bullshit), they’d have panned it (well, not IMdB, because Amazon owns it).
This narrative that those who dislike Rings of Power are racist or sexist ignores the most frequent complaint of actual online reviewers, who seldom mention the ethnicity or gender of the actors: boredom. They find the production boring.
One last and unfortunate example of fan-baiting, race-gender deflection of criticism, and substitutionism: the newly released The Woman King, starring Viola Davis — an actor I’ve admired in the past for skill in the craft. The claim that it is “inspired” by a true story is very shaky, given that they’ve misrepresented the Dahomey Kingdom in Africa (roughly, modern Benin), the “Dahomey Amazons,” and the Franco-Dahomian war in multiple and significant respects. Promotional material says things like:
“Inspired by true events that took place in the Kingdom of Dahomey, one of the most powerful states of Africa in the 18th and 19th centuries. It’s story follows Nanisca, General of the all-female military unit, and Nawi, an ambitious recruit, who together fought enemies who violated their honor, enslaved their people, and threatened to destroy everything they’ve lived for.”
. . . or . . .
“Together they fight the French and neighboring towns who have disrespected their honor, and enslaved the Dahomey people.”
. . . or . . .
“The Woman King will tell one of history’s greatest forgotten stories from the real world in which we live, where an army of African warrior women staved off slavery, colonialism, and inter-tribal warfare to unify a nation.”
The problem is . . . well, its all bullshit. For starters, the history is well-recorded and well-known among historians of Africa, but these promoters can get away with calling it “lost history” because Americans, with precious few exceptions, don’t know a damn thing about African histories (George W. Bush referred to Africa as a “big country”), or history more generally for that matter. The king (King Ghézo, d. 1858) in the movie was dead decades before these fictionally-modified protagonists were even born, but that’s a quibble (like my photos above).
Ghézo, by the way, in the 1850s, attacked the city of Abeokuta, trying to break the British blockade (established in support of slavery abolition) so he could revive the slave trade. That attack failed.
The reality was, during both Franco-Dahomian wars (1890–1894), the wars were started by the Dahomey who were raiding semi-independent French protectorates for the purpose of procuring slaves. The weren’t “uniting” shit. The Kingdom of Dahomey rose to power as slave raiders and sellers for the Europeans during the trans-Atlantic slave trade; and they practiced slavery enthusiastically after Euro-American slavery was abolished, for which they plundered neighbors and committed serial massacres — in which the Minon (the woman warrior “army”) took part. The Minon were recruited, by the way, largely from the King’s vast army . . . of wives.
By saying this, am I a hater? A racist? Viola Davis thinks so, because failing to co-sign this historical cover up and Hollywood/Marvelesque (black substitutionary) slay-queen fantasy means I’m not supporting “black excellence” and I “don’t support woman leaders.”
The black people, including black women, who were the victims of the Dahomey are inconvenient to the ahistorical Hollywood/PMC narrative checklist.
If they’d made another Black Panther, which never claimed to be “history hidden by the colonizers,” then I’d say, “Fine. I’ve no problems, even though I’m not a super-hero fan of any kind. To each his or her own.” But The Woman Queen is being promoted by bald-faced lies that are being passed off on the public as “history,” because it is a great substitution narrative. Liberal equity rocks.
How the hell did we get here? Capitalism, yes. That’s a big part of the story. But there’s more, and it will return us to Tolkien.
Old race, new race
To explain “race,” in the context of this reaction to RoP — even though we’ve established that race and gender aren’t the public’s big issues with the series — we need to divide metaphysical worlds into pre-modern and modern, the latter of which also encompasses post-modern (which isn’t really “post” anything). Let’s call it old-world and new-world. The old-world, then, is in many respects completely different from our new-world; and here I’m not speaking chronologically, but philosophically — think “pre-Descartes, post-Descartes.”
Tolkien is old-world. Race, as understood by our present-day culture-war combatants, on both sides, is a thoroughly modern, new-world construct. We need to back up and get a running start here to jump over this fence.
Tolkien was in many respects a neo-Platonist, which we needn’t (and shouldn’t) explicate now since it would require volumes as well as people far more familiar with neo-Platonism than me. We can, however, describe some points of reference within the metaphysical framework of Tolkien’s Middle Earth.
First of all, the spiritual precedes the material. We see this in Tolkien’s world-birth mythology, where spiritual beings sing the material world into existence. Forms — born in the celestial mind — precede their own incarnations. Second of all, these forms exist in complementary relation to one another. Thirdly, in Tolkien’s metaphysics, evil is blindly parasitic upon the good. (It’s no incidental conceit that Sauron and the ring-wraiths are blind in the books — the wraiths literally blind, and Sauron “blind” to “the good” that approaches his fortress with the intention of destroying the ring of power.) For Tolkien, there can be no pure evil; that would be like a parasite with no host. In the books, when Saruman loses Isengard and many of his powers, he becomes the secret force behind the scouring (the industrialization) of the Shire. He needed the good to suck out its blood. Fourthly, Tolkien’s narratives are driven forward by a pervasive, if subtle, divine providence. Think here of Gandalf’s counsel to Frodo in the Mines of Moria — a quote in the Jackson film taken verbatim from the book: “There are other forces at work in this world, Frodo, besides that of evil. Bilbo was meant to find the Ring, in which case you were also meant to have it. And that is an encouraging thought.”
Tolkien’s Middle Earth “races” are understood within this old-world framework. Put a pin in that.
Unpacking the campaign to smear all Amazon critics as racists (and sexists), using black and female actors as a shield against criticisms that haven’t a damn thing to do with race, we might use Whoopi Goldberg as an entry point.
Goldberg recently race-smeared RoP critics and blundered forward in the same breath by saying, “They haven’t studied the source material.” Well, yeah, many have; and this “story,” if you can call it that, was patched together by bad writers, and jammed into a fictional chronological loophole. That’s not source material.
Goldberg got herself into trouble some time back by saying the Shoah (Holocaust) was not racially motivated, because the Jews were “white” like other Germans. This provides us an entry point, because Goldberg — Caryn Elaine Johnson, who took a Jewish stage surname — has inadvertently exposed everything that is incoherent about contemporary ideas regarding race . . . as well as all the ways people don’t understand the construction of “the races” in Tolkien.
Some will say that race was invented by capitalism. That’s partly true and partly false. Modern conceptions of race emerged within the capitalist epoch, but there were former conceptions of something that translates into “race.” What capitalism gave birth to was “scientific racism,” which has now undergone serial transformations within modern/”postmodern” epistemic frameworks. Ancient Greeks wrote about “race” with some frequency, and in a very “essentialist” fashion, though not universalizingly so as modern social darwinists did (and do). They had an account of these essences that’s totally alien to capitalism’s “social darwinism” and late capitalism’s subsequent reactions against social darwinism.
Race meant something over, under, around, and through . . . lineage, language, land, foods, customs, and deity/ies. In many cases, especially in and around the Mediterranean and North Africa, any one group (race) might contain a pretty diverse set of phenotypes (which we now identify with race). Whoopi Goldberg saw pictures of European Jews and European Gentiles, and based on their “white” phenotypical similarities and our own cultural categories [check if you are (a) white (b) black ( c) Latino/a (d) Asian (e) Native American (f) Pacific Islander (g) Middle Eastern (h) Other], and she saw European Jews as “white.” Is “Jewish” a race? An ethnicity? A religion? What of secular Jews? What if she were to encounter black Jews (yes, there are)?
Ancient Greek writers saw race (a word derived from “roots”) as a group consolidated around lineage, language, land, foods, customs, and deity/ies, and when they wrote about various races and their essences, they attributed these essences to internal and external forces working together.
An example (ht to John Heers, FTF) from the Hippocratic Corpus, around 350 BC, on the Scythian “race”: Scythians are fat and disinclined to work, says our writer, with red hair and red faces (from too much cold exposure), and their women have great difficulty getting pregnant. Pretty racist, eh? Scythians, btw, were sort of Slavic by today’s lights, roaming around between Mongolia, Russia, and Turkey. In the same breath, our Greek race theorist notes that Scythian women taken as Greek slaves are trimmer, more vigorous, and more easily impregnated than their “free” counterparts to the North. Wait, what? Weren’t they essentially fat and lazy and nearly infertile? Well, Scythian men are averse to sexual intercourse because they have “cold bellies” and they spend to much time on horseback (watch out, all you horsemen). (Okay, it’s weird, but a reminder of why we can’t retroactively project our own ways of knowing onto people in the past.) Scythians are messed up, by Greek standards, because their essence is determined not merely by genos, but by land, climate, food, and even animals.
In the Torah, or Old Testament, Moses — an Israelite, working for an Egyptian (North African) monarch, takes the Cushite (More Southern, “black African”) Tzipporah as a wife (Numbers 12). The Cushites were neither Egyptian nor Israelite, but once (black, by today’s account) Tzipporah marries Moses, she becomes, in the “racial” scheme of Hebrew writers circa 1400 BC, no longer a Cushite, but an Israelite. She retains a recognized history as a Cushite and a recognizable phenotype, which makes her somewhat unique among her new people, but she is re-racially determined by a new land, new foods, new customs, a new language, her incorporation into a new patrilineage, and a new deity. Race, in the old-world sense, also meant a common understanding of the good (similar to the way we think of “religion”).
Earlier modern and social darwininst conceptions of race reduced “race” to lineage and phenotype. So in a sense, Whoopi Goldberg’s racial blunder about Jews was (kind of) understandable. Even many anti-racists, especially of the permanence-of-racial-conflict variety, are also stuck with this conception of race — maybe a superficial touch of “culture” thrown in.
The truth is, Whoopi Goldberg, referring here to her show The View, where she also got into hot water on immigration issues (another story about phenotypes), has far more in common with interlocutors like Meghan McCain, Nicole Wallace, and Barbara Walters than she does with a black woman living in Stadium Heights in Durham, NC. Goldberg has assets totaling $60 million, she lives in a West Orange mansion in New Jersey, and she speaks the language of the film/infotainment industry. She eats the same foods as others of her class, shares their values, and like them has no real connection to land or or any day-to-day connection to climate (like a farmer, e.g.). In old-world terms, her race would be . . . oh, maybe . . . Infotainmentite.
Look at this stock “diversity” photo:
Members of the PMC would likely see themselves here, and “celebrate diversity” (where’s our Asian? our Arapaho? our Azerbaijani?). What I see are designer clothes, about a million dollars worth of dental work, a thousand dollars worth of coif, hundreds in cosmetics, and a lot of transient fashion sense. In other words, I see class (and youth). Not one of these people is “representative” of me or my neighbors or the vast majority of people in our town or our families. And not because of race.
Race, seen in the social darwinian sense as lineage (mis-understood as “genes”) and phenotype (when did melanin come into the pop vocabulary?), is not only the obsession of social darwinist bigots, it’s become a cognitive default for professional anti-racists, who seldom challenge the reduction of race to lineage and phenotype, but instead (rightfully) denounce anyone who puts the categories into a value-hierarchy and (wrongly) suggest that “white people” are inevitably racist (a kind of perverse cultural essentialism, which can be monetized and politically exploited).
Yes, there are historical forces that are manifest today in sub-cultures as economic, cultural, sub-cultural, and “racial” differences. Life in Stadium Heights is far different than it is in West Orange or Anaheim. These differences were forged in economic and political strife, by the pursuit of “progress” and profit, by human frailty, by climate and soil . . . on and on. How far do you want to go back?
Jacques Maritain said,
The temporal good in which the state’s justice fructifies, the temporal evil in which its iniquity bears its fruit, may be and are in fact quite different from the immediate results which the human mind might have expected and which the human eyes contemplate. It is as easy to disentangle these remote causations as to tell at a river’s mouth which waters come from which glaciers and which tributaries.
Today, in the new-world, and even with these “cultural” and economic differences, the old-world understanding of race would have already merged us across phenotypes, based on our distanced relation to land and climate, our shared understandings under the aegis of corporate media, our acceptance of thoroughgoing dependence upon money to survive, our homogenized industrial food system, etc. etc. More so in recent years, as we’ve all been incorporated into the digital race.
The old-world said we have souls. We were more than the gears in a great machine, in a system, more than a race of “users” for a menu of software and apps. In this, I am like Tolkien — old-world.
The producers who thought they could “improve” Tolkien by making up their own story and plugging in some “diversity,” as well as those who have dismissed Tolkien as a racist because he refers to middle Earth’s “races,” really have no clue. They are all still themselves the captives, even if derivatively, of social darwinism’s race-reductions.
Though Tolkien was not reproducing biblical, classical, medieval, early modern, or late modern races in Middle Earth, this old-world poly-causal understanding of race informed his world-building project. Hobbits weren’t white; they weren’t even “men.” They had personhood, but they were not “human” in the sense we’d think. Elves were not (white) humans either. Tom Bombadil and Goldberry, who were erased from the film productions, were angelic beings. Gandalf, as well as Sauron, were Maiar — beings with one foot in the spiritual realm and another incarnated. Hobbits were of three kinds — based in large part on how they made livings and in what kind of terrain — Harfoots, Fallohides, and Stoor. The were different in appearance, the Harfoots being shorter with brown skin, a love of cultivation, and an aversion to deep water. They had some cultural contact with dwarves. Fallohides were taller and slimmer, hunters, with a reputation for mischievousness and physical courage. The Stoor were fishermen, and the only hobbits who wore boots. Pippin was Fallohide, and Frodo was mixed Fallohide and Harfoot. Sam was Harfoot. Smeagol was Stoor. Elrond was half-elven, as was his twin brother, Elros. So elves and men could have children. Elrond and Elros were given the choice at the age of majority to choose between which culture they wanted. Elrond chose the elves, and was granted immortality. Elros chose to become “man,” and with it received “the gift of death.” Dwarves, likewise had some diversity, with darker dwarves, called Blacklocks, living in Rhûn.
Is anyone seeing social darwinism here? Or Whoopi Goldberg’s skin-deep account of race? Is anyone noticing how far afield from Tolkien are any of the controversies and manipulations around Amazon’s dreary production?
What comes to mind — for this old, Southern, retired Army, multi-ethnic family man — is a term that I picked up from black Southerners: the okey-doke. It’s not assent, as in, “Okey-dokey,” but a noun meaning trickery-and-bullshit. When you “fall for the okey-doke,” that means you’ve been misdirected or hustled. In today’s exceedingly manipulative world of sales pitches, tribal politics, scams, and hustles, not falling for the okey-doke is a full-time job.
Amazon is a big fucking hustle. The biggest.
Back to the beginning
I may be wearing readers out with what seem like trail runs off the beaten path of Amazon, Tolkien, and culture wars. Sorry, but I had to go there, if for nothing else than to organize my own thinking.
As this is nearing completion, the fourth episode of Rings of Power has just been released. Miriel is having an elaborate CGI flood-dream, so Numenor must be falling. (It’s symbolic, dude.) Kemen and Pharazon are trying to recreate (rip off) the Denethor-Faramir father-son conflict, but the context is confusing, because the increasing list of characters whose backgrounds and motivations are increasingly opaque are engaged in actions that seem more designed to support pre-arranged action scenes (cool, dude), than vice-versa. Tamar — about whom we know nothing — is stirring up anti-immigrant hatred, only toward elves (huh?). Another clumsy retrojection of current events into an anachronistic context. “They’re going to take your jobs.” I shit you not. The crowd starts abusing people as “elf-lovers.” (Fuck me with a Twinkie!) A responder (Armenelos, write it down, because the names just keep accumulating) reminds the crowd that Elros (Elrond’s brother) defeated the Morgoth. No, he didn’t, that battle was when he was like twelve-years-old, but the point was to give Armenelos a platform for a good speech (the tail wags the dog yet again). Enter Galadriel (ugh!), who has about three facial expressions throughout the whole series so far (really a terrible casting choice, even for this revised, revenge-motivated version of Galadriel), who now reproduces yet another trope-rendered scene from LOTR, by cribbing Gandalf and Elrond speaking of Aragorn’s claim to the throne of Gondor (only with substituted characters). Then another scene is ripped off from LOTR — Gandalf telling Denethor he is no king, but a steward — but this time between Galadriel (who makes her mean face, which looks like a squirrel about to sneeze) and Miriel. In this one, Miriel jails Galadriel, because Miriel hates pissed-off squirrels, I guess. Okay . . . enough. You get the picture.
And again, the pacing and writing is so atrocious, that it’s a fourth consecutive colossal bore. And so viewership continues to fall for Rings of Power and rise for House of the Dragon.
Don’t blame the viewers, Jeff. They can find spectacular CGI-generated scenery, combat action, and superficial characters in their gamer libraries.
That is all.
While I have never known much about LOTR, or much of that genre itself, I really enjoyed the read and learned some things, particularly towards the end. I am not a racist...but I do feel like some big unravelling is occurring and much of what we praise as progress may well bite us in the ass, and not just the people who we assume to be gaining the most from it. Most of us on the left would say, "But it IS progress, it's a great start", or worse "better than nothing". I've read some of your material on this subject before and enjoy it. As one of my favorite songwriters penned as the opening to a great song, "There's a lot of bad wood underneath the veneer". I think you wrote about the "progress" of having women and minorities flying weapons systems that slaughter innocents, but the majority of liberals still call it a step in the right direction.