If there has always been a photograph of the King on the wall of a particular school, then only a very strong republican would want us to take it down. If there has never been a photograph of the King on the wall of a particular school, then only a very strong monarchist would suggest putting one up. It’s not about the picture.
When I came to Bristol I didn’t know who Edward Colston was. When I found out, I was quite neutral towards his statue: “That’s quite interesting” I said “That someone who would definitely be regarded as a monster in one era was regarded as a hero in another one. We might as well leave it where it is.” However, as time went by, it turned out that not everyone did think that Colston was a monster. Some of them paraded about town carrying giant golliwogs, some of them wrote to the papers saying slavery wasn’t so bad and that most of the slaves had a cushy time, and some said that Bristol was a white town and we should celebrate our white history. So of course the statue had to go. When it was still there, I am sure that there were sensible moderate leftists and sensible moderate conservatives who would have been okay with it staying on display, maybe with an explanatory plaque, but now it’s gone, only full on nutters would remotely think of putting it back.
Things that Tolkien “would have” objected to in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings:
—the change to Frodo’s age
—the juvenile characterisation of Merry and Pippin
—the comedification of Gimli
—dwarf-tossing
—Elf skateboarding
—the removal of Theoden and replacing of him with an entirely different character
—the removal of Faramir and replacing of him with an entirely different character
—the visualisation of the Balrog….
What Tolkien “would have” said about Rings of Power:
“It has nothing to do with the history of Middle-earth, so why are you even asking me about it?”
What Tolkien “would have” said about the War of the Rohirrim:
“Well, it’s not my middle-earth, but I respect the fact that “other hands” have taken my footnotes and appendices seriously enough to imagine them for themselves.”
Things that Tolkien probably wouldn't have cared about one way or the other.
Dark skinned Hobbits.
Yes, as a matter of fact, I can imagine a production of Romeo and Juliet in which the main characters are not played by Italians and a production of Hamlet in which the main character is not portrayed by a Dane. In fact the first time I ever saw Romeo and Juliet on the stage, at the Young Vic in the 80s, the Montagues were all played by black actors and Capulets were all played by white actors. Not what you would call subtle, but it made it terribly easy to keep track of who was on which side.
In the excellent National Theatre play about Nye Bevan, Winston Churchill was portrayed by a non-white member of the ensemble. They had the voice and the mannerisms and everyone understood what was going on. Most opera singers capable of singing the role of Cio-Cio-San don’t have the figure to pass for “fifteen exactly” but the audience uses their imaginations.
There are, in fact, several famous non-white historical figures other than Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King. I agree that you probably wouldn’t use “colour blind casting” in a story which is about racial difference. Unless you did: I could imagine it being a really interesting avant garde experiment. On the stage, anything goes. But you certainly wouldn’t do it in something like The Crown where part of the fun is that the actors look enough like the historical characters that we can pretend we are watching candid historical footage. Beatles fans have already decided that the projected tetralogy is or ought to be a deep-fake reconstruction of real events and that since Barry Keoghan probably wouldn’t pass for Starkey in a looky-likey contest, the film will be a travesty.
If you think that the whiteness of every white character in the Marvel texts and the Shakespeare extended universe is as important as the blackness of a black civil rights leader in a film about a black civil rights leader, then I think you need to take a long, hard look at yourself. Have I explained why the truly authentic way of adapting Spider-Man would be to make Peter Parker a Muslim)? [1]
There will always be someone who sees a person of colour playing Hamlet and says “I don’t understand — I just don’t see how a Danish prince could have African heritage.” That same same person will often see the same actor playing Othello and say “I suppose nowadays only actual wizards can play Prospero and only actual sea-monsters can play Caliban.”
As a matter of fact, I think that it is quite clear that Tolkien intended the Shire to be a slightly idealised and slightly comedic version of a small English town. I think that he is well aware that if you think about it too much, that it stops making sense. Hobbits are a brilliant dramatic device: by accidentally placing them in his Silmarillion universe, he created a viewpoint position and a way of making the mythological epic accessible to people who find mythological epics a bit heavy going, but at the expense of sacrificing the strict “realism” of his work.
There are hand waves about the freedom of the translator to use anachronisms. TH White talked about Arthurian knights sending their sons to Eton, and provided a footnote that Eton did not in fact exist at the time, but that if he had mentioned the actual school, no-one would have heard of it. So Hobbits get to have umbrellas, and post offices, and matches, and book-collections, and clocks, and pocket handkerchiefs, and generally act as if they are from the end of the eighteenth century even though the the Riders of Rohan are clearly living in the tenth.
I have no particular problem with saying that these almost cartoonishly more-English-than-the-English stereotypes all have white skin. It’s not an issue. Forty-eight hours ago I would not have given the matter the slightest thought.
However, it turns out that there are significant numbers of American Tolkien fans who see The Lord of the Rings as an irreducibly ethno-nationalist text. Tolkien, it seems, was creating a mythology for England, and “England” is synonymous with white people. Any colour-blind casting, let alone any suggestion that there actually were dark-skinned Hobbits, goes against the Professor's intentions, and is therefore to be perceived as a personal insult, resulting in the posthumous necromantic gyrations that dead authors always seem to suffer from.
Canonical questions about ethnicity in Middle-earth can be left for another day. Tolkien, we know, was engaged in re-writing his mythos from the ground up when he died, because he wanted to make it more consistent with plausible scientific reality. The Third Age ended about 4000 BC, so either he imagined that human ethnic and racial difference arose in the last six thousand years, or else he imagined that there were racial distinctions in the original creation. It is an open question as to whether he himself believed in Darwinism, and how he reconciled that with either his catholicism or his Middle-earth mythology.
If the toxic Tolkien fans are correct, and Tolkien’s mythos is irreducibly ethno-nationalist, can we continue to read it? I have argued, frequently, that it is possible to enjoy texts with toxic ideologies and certainly texts produced by toxic individuals. Economic considerations apart, the Harry Potter series itself is not primarily about the mystical essentialism of bathroom arrangements. Wagner’s proto-nazism is arguably more central to his operas, but seventy five years of productions makes it possible to hear Alberich the dwarf obsessing about his gold without automatically thinking “and that, of course, is what Wagner thought Jewish people were really like.”
I fully accept that if I was Jewish myself, I might not find the process of de-Nazifying Wagner very edifying: but at a purely artistic level, it is the case that once you ignore the poison, there is some non-poisonous stuff left.
I remain convinced that Cerebus the Aardvark is one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century: but I would never express that view without also saying in large block capitals double underlined in red that it is shockingly misogynistic.
In the case of Rowling and Wagner, we are either separating the art from the artist; or else deprioritising secondary themes in the work. “The person who wrote the book is horrible, but that doesn’t mean the book is horrible, necessarily.” “This book contains some horrible things: but it contains not-horrible things as well."
In Sim’s case, more problematically, we are privileging form over content: saying, in effect “This text says a horrible thing superlatively well”. It is certainly not the case that you have to agree with a work of fiction before you can read or enjoy it: indeed, if you can only enjoy books you wholly agree with you could probably never read any book at all. The Right very frequently say that The Left disapprove of (or, in fact, Cancel) anything which doesn’t meet their exacting standards of orthodoxy; although other aspects of The Right actively campaign for certain kinds of literature to be removed from school libraries, and indeed libraries in general.
I think that most of us in practice apply a sliding scale: the worse the ideology, the better the book needs to be to justify us reading it. We put up with Shylock in Shakespeare because Shakespeare is Shakespeare. We wouldn’t put up with him anywhere else. I tolerate the ideology of Cerebus because I rate the work so highly.
Some people might say that if something contains Bad Ideas, it cannot, by definition, be Good Art. And other people might say that if a work of art is Good, the ideas can’t, by definition, be bad. That’s why you get Bishops saying that Life of Brian was unfunny, fifth rate, undergraduate humour and Imams saying that the Satanic Verses is an unreadable novel. And also why some people are prepared to say that since Life of Brian is incredibly funny, it can’t possibly be offensive; and that since Satanic Verses is a work of brilliance, it can’t possibly be blasphemous. Some people even go so far as to say that those who take offence do not by definition have a sense of humour, and that the opinion of people who do not have senses of humour should be ruled out of the discussion of comedy movies.
What hardly anyone ever says is “You are a very funny man and that was a very clever joke, but it was completely wrong for you to have made a joke on that particular subject”.
I was distressed to learn that some Doctor Who fans are still arguing:
1: That Talons of Weng Chiang can’t be racist because it is such a good story.
2: That it doesn’t matter if Talons of Weng Chiang is racist because it is such a good story.
3: That it doesn’t matter if Talons of Weng Chiang is racist because racism wasn’t considered so bad in the 1970s.
4: That Talons of Weng Chiang can’t possibly be racist because some Chinese people really do work in laundries and talk like that.
5: That no-one really believes that Talons of Weng Chiang is racist, but some people pretend that they think it is for bad motives.
Spoiler alert: Talons of Weng Chiang is, in fact, racist.
My position has always been that two things can be true: “This is an excellent Doctor Who story” and “This Doctor Who story is incredibly racist”. But the existence of toxic fans who cannot see or do not care about the racism increasingly makes me inclined to revise my position.
If the Lord of the Rings is incidentally or secondarily or accidentally ethno-nationalist, then we don’t have a problem. It was written by a rich white guy in the 1930s and contains many of the attitudes of rich white guys from the 1930s: it may never have occurred to Tolkien to do it in any other way. And he provided us, very conveniently, with a Watsonian get-out clause. We are supposed to imagine that the Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit are very free translations of ancient texts. If the 1930s translator can give Orcs cockney accents or make Hobbits talk like posh English dons and school boys [2] then we can assume that a 2025 translator would have seen things that Tolkien did not see and overlook things which Tolkien saw.
If you can accept Frodo pushing Gollum into Mount Doom, or that Pippin clumsily knocked an armoured skeleton into the well in Moria (rather than foolishly dropping a pebble into it), you ought to be able to accept that some Hobbits have darker coloured skins than other Hobbits do. If you cannot, I respectfully submit that your problem is not about textual fidelity.
If the Lord of the Rings is centrally and irreducibly an ethno-nationalist text — if by “a mythology for England” Tolkien meant “a white mythology” then we have a very big problem indeed. If an adaptation cannot introduce of colour without violating the very heart of the text then I don’t think any decent director would touch it with a bargepole. The underrated movie version of John Carter of Mars eliminated the references to slavery from the character’s background, which had no discernible effect on the story. Conversely, there have been no serious modern attempts to adapt or revive Tarzan of the Apes because the colonial and patrician ideology is too central to the story.
The Lord of the Rings is not, in fact, an ethno-nationalist text. Tolkien didn’t strongly believe that all English people were white, though he may have tacitly assumed it. There was, in 1999, no obligation on Peter Jackson to introduce black or asian Hobbits into the Shire, and we should not retrospectively blame him for having made the artistic decision not to do so. However, the existence of toxic fans trying to appropriate the Lord of the Rings into their vile ethno-nationalist ideology does create such an obligation. Like it or not, he will be signalling which side he is on. I can’t discern any neutral position.
Plus: annoying these people is a good thing in itself. It is one of the few redeeming features of Rings of Power.
[1] Although now we have had Ms Marvel that would be redundant.
[2] There was a period of about forty years when the idea that the Hobbits who patrolled the boundaries of the Shire were called "bounders" would have been funny.
Hey! It's my birthday! Do you know what I would most like for my birthday? Well, since I can't have that, I'd like two more people to join my Patreon, so I had as many followers as my age! Come on. You don't want me to mope around all day thinking everyone has forgotten me, like a character in 1970s TV show, do you.....
Birthday Cake Clipart PNGs by Vecteezy
No comments:
Post a Comment