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My facebook has been ablaze with the War of the Rings of Power, and by that I mean Amazon putting out tons of propaganda to indicate that everyone is racist for not liking the the Rings of Power, followed by half of the people saying no that doesn't make us racist, and the other half saying they just don't like it because it's a bad show. A similar thing is going on for the Little Mermaid, too. Alas, that these evil days should be mine.
The thing that strikes me is that no one is saying the obvious. To me, and I'll guess to many others, I really don't mind diversification of media. Or, that is to say, I wouldn't mind it, if it weren't for the fact that it's now the norm, it's practically mandatory for any show that doesn't want to be cancelled by internet SJWs, it's crammed down my throat everywhere, and it's turned into a major moral issue where half the audience browbeats the other. I feel like I'm being subjected to someone else's religion.
But that woke audience always comes back to "Why are you against black people playing roles? What are you, racist?" Well, no, I honestly don't think I'm racist. But in the position I'm put in, I get that I am taking actions that a racist would. The only difference is that a true racist would be against black people being cast no matter what, and I am only against it being mandatory and moralized. But since we live in this world, where it is mandatory and moralized, does that mean that there's nothing that would really satisfy me short of black people not being cast?
I don't quite think so. Another point that the woke audience comes to is "They clearly just thought that Halle Berry was the best person to play Ariel". And really, I think the answer to that is, no, they clearly prioritize diversity casting. She is black and they want to cast lots of black people because it scores them points with the woke crowd (and possibly also because it drums up controversy, which may be good for business). And then on top of that, they thought she'd be fine for the part. I don't know how I can prove that, but it just seems evident to me that diversity casting for its own sake is something that is being given high priority. In some limited cases, it's possible to prove it, such as with Ryan Condal, the showrunner for House of the Dragon who indicated that they cast black people to play Valerians explicitly for the purpose of diversity-washing. However, I'm guessing that Condal regrets saying that outright, because it's not a good look. It gives the other side ammo and also casts doubt as to whether the people hired really would have earned the spot on merit alone.
At this point. I don't really know what it would take to convince me that most castings of black people are not just to fill a quota. But this puts me in a tough spot, because I don't really want to be racist in action, even if I know I'm not in thought.
Why can't the production studio be looking at the demographics of the customer base and decide that hey some %age of our customers are black, and so they may relate to the story better and spend money on it if we include more/any black characters?
I've barely read LOTR but unless whiteness was a critical part of the story it seems fine to change skin color. It's a movie about, like, whole different species of humanoids right? Different skin colors should be well within bounds?
I agree a lot of productions feel like they're bending over backwards to include more races and it comes off as cheap and woke fearing (see: children's books), but the more basic business case seems valid too.
EDIT: I've not seen the show nor have I read the books and I mostly watched the original movies with 'drinking game' style interest, so pardon my ignorance. I see from the responses that the sprinkling of racial diversity is done in a clearly cheap and ham-fisted way. Thank you to everyone who took my question seriously.
The thing is, despite all the chat about "representation", they're not doing it for a black audience. Does anyone doubt that if they thought that dropping Arondir and Dísa made it more appealing to China, they'd do it in a heartbeat?
And if they are doing it for representation and a global audience, they better fit in some Indian, Chinese, Filipino, and as many South American actors in new roles as they can get for the next episodes and seasons. I mean, how can people watch a show if they can't see faces like their own in it, and right now if they're not white, they've got a couple of black actors and some ambiguously brown ones? If they're not black, who is representing them? There are trailers etc. in Hindi - do you mean that Indians can watch a show that doesn't have Indian actors in it in main parts to be Representative? I am shocked, shocked I tell you!
It's for easy publicity: we are making a Big Deal of Diversity, aren't we wonderful, please buy a subscription to our streaming service to watch our very expensive show.
Ah ha ha ha ha ha. Excuse me a moment while I wipe away tears of laughter, and no, I'm not laughing at you.
Is blackness a critical part of the story for Black Panther? Wouldn't it be just as good if we had our fictional magic science African kingdom with diverse actors, e.g. some Chinese, Hispanic, Pacific Islanders, etc. in supporting parts on-screen so people could have Representation and See Someone Who Looks Like Me?
After all, if we are supposed to accept magical meteors and special metal and mystic herbs and all the rest of it that made Wakanda super-advanced, why are we objecting to seeing Asian faces there? Wakanda isn't real, vibranium isn't real, the heart-shaped herb isn't real. It's all fantasy and made-up, not real history, right? So objecting to Asian and Latinx Wakandans is motivated solely by racism.
When Tolkien invented his universe, first it was for the languages to have a proper setting. Secondly, it was to make "a mythology for England". Everywhere else was having cultural renaissances, from the Celtic Revival to various European countries (see for example composers going back to and being influenced by native folk music of their respective lands). But what did England - not Britain, but England - have? Not the Arthurian legend, see here from a letter of 1951:
1937:
1938:
1943:
1944:
1954:
1956:
Another letter of 1956, where he was getting stuck into a Dutch translator who took it upon himself to put his own interpretations on everything (very pertinent for our Amazon showrunners):
1959, for a Polish translator:
Now, if Middle-earth was just Generic Invented Fantasy World, then it wouldn't matter. Cast black, white, red, yellow, brown, purple, green and indigo actors in the parts! But Tolkien was very clear that Middle-earth was not an invented world, it was meant to be our own world as we have it right now, just that the tales were set in a very distant, mythological past. So the English parts are meant to be English, and that does mean white. The peoples of the North-West are, by and large, white. The Elves are white (and, as an aside, the black-haired grey-eyed ideal of beauty for them is based on his wife Edith, there's your romance element).
"Hamilton" pulled it off by making all the cast (except King George and I think one or two of the Schuyler sisters?) non-white. If you're going to change up LOTR or the Rings of Power, then the least mendacious way to do it is cast everyone as non-white, that way you can claim with a straight face that you are casting the best actors not casting on skin tone alone. Not alone one black elf, all the Elves, including Galadriel and Elrond, are black/Hispanic/whatever.
Yes, the principle of having more socially-progressive versions of a work for Western audiences compared to versions with those cut out for other parts of the world has made me suspect, uncharitably, that the allocation of focus meant it was not so much about standing up for the oppressed but more about sticking it to the domestic outgroup. At the very least, the domestic focus didn't seem very EA ("Effective Activism?")-
-But fortunately for my sense of charity, I do not get the sense that this is happening as much as I once felt it was, with examples like Lightyear showing that Disney is willing to stick to its guns in the face of sanctions from countries that disapprove. I should not be quick to presume hypocrisy.
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Great post.
This is what I'd zero in on. I think I would inherently respect it more if they were to say "we decided to make an all-black cast for this adaptation to lend a completely new perspective to the story and give audiences an actually novel experience."
There's such slight of hand going on because oh, turns out they want everyone's money, so they can't take such a massive, ballsy risk in that has an obvious failure mode, so they half-ass it and try to get points for being unique but ultimately keep everything familiar enough to trigger nostalgia.
On that note, I looked up the other actors for the new Little Mermaid. King Triton is played by Spanish actor Javier Bardem, and Prince Eric is played by white Londoner Jonah Hauer-King. Ursula is also white. They cast a black woman to be Ariel's mother (presumably), to have some cover for this, but that shouldn't be necessary.
I am not really the target audience for this, and it's probably reflecting someone's preferences that the father and love interest of the protagonist are white, while her comic animal side kick is played by a black man. Maybe? Disney is usually good at reflecting what people want to see. I don't like it -- it accentuates the pandering in comparison to an entire underwater kingdom of black merpeople.
I'm keeping out of this, since I never saw the original animated movie and I know nothing about this new actress/singer or whatever she is. The only thing that struck me in the trailer was that they kept the red hair. So it doesn't matter that Ariel has switched from white to black, but the hair colour is the absolutely vital thing about her? Not that she's a mermaid? Why not simply let the character/actress have her normal black hair? That's the dumb part of it for me. "Ariel's skin colour doesn't matter, it has nothing to do with the character, but she must have red hair because how else are the kids going to recognise her as the mermaid princess?"
Now I am (unironically) waiting for the live-action Javanese remake of Brave. I want to see King Fergus dressed like this while still speaking in a broad Scots accent. Go on you cowards, I dare you!
Maybe to attempt to "address" a relatively common trope about Black actors/actresses in roles where the character was traditionally white?
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And it's not like Disney wasn't capable of such moves, they've put out a slew of culturally appropriate and unique(ish) films with fully ethnically matched casts!
Hell, The Princess and the Frog was made within living memory!
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That's (kinda) what they did with Ghostbusters, no? Those people have only ended up remembered because of their infamy.
I didn't mind the idea of a remake of Ghostbusters with an all-female cast, but I ended up not watching it for two reasons:
(1) All the guff about sexism - the same tired attack that if you dare criticise this idea, it is because you are an -ist or a -phobe
(2) It really wasn't necessary. The original movie is not perfect by any means, but it's fondly remembered and it works. Hollywood has an awful habit of doing remakes that add nothing to the original. 'What would the Ghostbusters be like if they were all women of a different era and with different characters?' is not a bad idea, but it would have been better if they made them a new branch or set up in a different city, not a straight remake of the original NY Ghostbusters.
The movie ended up being completely awful due to other reasons. They just let the women prattle on and improvise for hours like it was a Judd Apatow movie, and a significant amount of that made it into the final cut. That just does not work in this sort of movie.
That's part of why I didn't watch it. The Holtzmann character was played by some actress who I believe is a comedienne? And the clips I saw were about as funny as my last dental appointment, so it put me right off.
The idea itself wasn't bad, but "let's remake the original only gender-swapped" instead of a new original Ghostbusters movie was the usual Hollywood poverty of imagination, and the execution was awful (unfunny actress didn't help at all).
I really like this review, if you've got an hour to spare: https://youtube.com/watch?v=AHUV8QLpEAc
It really probes into what went so wrong with the movie.
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Doesn't that mean that, the interpretations today, absolutely should have black dwarves et al? Our world is very different from his, from a skin tone perspective. An American interpretation should cast more black people and so on. That from your explanation seems very much in keeping to his perspective. Todays stories told in the mythological past. Like it or not America's story is intertwined with it's relationship with slavery and the fall out thereof.
Hm? No, I don't think that's what's meant. Our world and his world have the same past, after all, and in the premise of Tolkien's Legendarium, that's taken as Middle-Earth. The present diversifying more wouldn't retroactively change the distant past, whether that's pre-Roman Britain or Middle-Earth.
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An interpretation today set in today's world should have. An interpretation today set in the distant mythological past should not, because those characters were not known then. Dwarves are not Americans, nor slaves, so having black Dwarves because slavery makes no sense. He wasn't telling "today's story", he was telling the story of that time.
If you want to depict modern-day Bree, then yes of course you can have black and brown actors, because of immigration and so forth meaning that black and brown people now live in modern day UK as ordinary citizens. In Frodo's time, due to people fleeing from Orc attacks, there were migrants moving into Bree from the South (probably Dunlendings). At least one of them was a spy, and maybe a Half-Orc. So you can have new influx of strange people moving in, but they are not native to the place as yet.
Well you said he was telling tales of our world now, just SET in the distant past no? If Tolkien was an author today he would be writing stories about the places, peoples and situations of today but mythologized into the past. If he were writing today, I suspect some of the issues around today would have been in his work, just set in his created mythology. That's what an adaption is, it takes a product, re-envisages it as if it were written today (with varying degrees of success). Alternate universe Tolkien writing today where Birmingham has significant Pakistani and Caribbean populations would plausibly have written a very different book.
Very possibly. But that isn't for an adaptation to do. An adaptation is not supposed to update the work for a modern era, it's supposed to stick to the original. If the writers on this show want to do their own thing, great! But then don't claim you're doing Tolkien. Either respect what the man actually wrote, or don't use his brand to prop up your original work.
Let me paste my reply above, because I didn't do a good job before:
"No that's fair, I didn't really explain myself properly there. What I mean is that, no matter what the adaptor's plan, it will be filtered through their own lense. Even if they set out to make an authentic adaption it will be filtered through their own viewpoint and biases.
It's impossible to adapt something as Tolkien would have done if he were a television writer now. And if Tolkien had been writing LoTR today it would have been a different book, because he would have been a different person with different upbringing and set of experiences.
Does that make more sense?"
My view is that whether you set out to update an adaption or not, by the very nature that the people adapting it will be from a very different society and viewpoint, that it will be filtered through their lense no matter what. Jackson's adaptions bumped up the importance of battles and romance because that is what his viewpoint of a big budget action movie was (mixed with what the financiers thought of course).
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This is such a bold misdefinition that I'm surprised you thought you could get away with it. ONE way of adapting a "product" (yeuch!) is to do that. For example, you can do Shakespeare in modern dress. To say that that's what an adaptation IS is like saying that carbohydrates are just what food IS.
No that's fair, I didn't really explain myself properly there. What I mean is that, no matter what the adaptor's plan, it will be filtered through their own lense. Even if they set out to make an authentic adaption it will be filtered through their own viewpoint and biases.
It's impossible to adapt something as Tolkien would have done if he were a television writer now. And if Tolkien had been writing LoTR today it would have been a different book, because he would have been a different person with different upbringing and set of experiences.
Does that make more sense?
It makes more sense, though I don't agree. For example, The Northman is very close to the movie I'd expect an actual Viking to make. Tolkien is far closer to modern viewpoints.
It's true that every adaptation is made through an adaptor's viewpoint, but they can be more or less faithful. And I'm not presupposing that more faithful is good. Stanley Kubrick adapted material in an unfaithful way in The Shining and it was better than a faithful adaptation, like the TV miniseries.
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