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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   Edited 1yr ago   38202 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 12, 2022

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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.

Agree with this take. A few quick additional reflections -

(1) I have no issue with diverse casts where it's actually thematically appropriate. In a show like The Expanse, for example, where people from all over the world have gone to space and made babies, it's entirely appropriate to have a cast of diverse (and often racially ambiguous) actors. My favourite show of all time is The Wire, which has a predominantly black cast because it's actually trying to reflect the makeup of Baltimore. Same with Hamilton - there was a specific artistic purpose there in using non-white actors to play revolutionaries (namely, to emphasise the fact that these people were in some ways outsiders). But in a show like Rings of Power or House of the Dragon, giving seemingly random roles to black actors without any attempt to address their race in the actual story just feels like bad world building motivated by petty politics.

(2) Also, why is diversity casting so overwhelmingly focused on black actors rather than e.g., South Asians, East Asians, or indigenous peoples? This is true even for a lot of British productions, and our South Asian population is a lot bigger than our black population. The obvious answer it seems to me is that white American elites have a weird quasi-fetishistic relation with blackness, and as cultural imperialists, they end up importing their own psychodramas to the rest of the Western world. And that's something I strongly resent.

(3) As OP notes, the issue is definitely not that productions with racially diverse casts are now more common, it's that it's becoming increasingly difficult to justify shows that don't exemplify racial diversity. This forces a dilemma on anyone looking to tell historical stories situated in Europe's past. Do they risk the wrath of the media-activist complex ("yet another show about white people"), or do they find ways to include non-white actors even at the cost of verisimilitude (as in, e.g., Vikings or Bridgerton)? Verisimilitude isn't the be-all and end-all, but it's not nothing either.

(4) Finally - and this is a much broader rant - it frustrates me yet again how narrow the lens of contemporary "diversity" actually is, and how focused it is on the most visible forms of difference. Linguistic diversity, for example, remains the exception rather than the norm in most shows, with everyone talking in English. What about class diversity, or neurodiversity, or regional diversity, or faith diversity? My academic workplace is 'diverse' in terms of gender and race, but everyone is from a fairly elite background and there's not a single openly Christian person among the thirty or so academics I interact with on a monthly basis. That seems like a striking failure of diversity, at least if one were naive enough to think that the concept was genuinely about encouraging heterogeneous representation rather than political point-scoring.

My attention has been brought to this article by the Irish Times, about how "Rings of Power: The new hobbits are filthy, hungry simpletons with stage-Irish accents. That’s $1bn well spent".

It points out that the fake-Irish Harfoots align fairly well with the kind of 19th century British caricatures of the Irish:

The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power (Prime Video, streaming from Friday, September 2nd) takes place centuries before the original Lord of the Rings, and the harfoots are ancestors of the hobbits. If they don’t quite keep livestock in the livingroom, they are otherwise a laundry list of 19th-century Hibernophobic caricatures.

The accents embark on a wild journey from Donegal to Kerry and then stop off in inner-city Dublin. The harfoots themselves are twee and guileless and say things like: “Put yer backs into it, lads.” One is portrayed by Lenny Henry, a great comedian and actor who deserves better than having to deliver lines such as “De both of ye, dis does not bode will” (in an appalling Irish accent). Scouring the internet, there is no evidence of any Irish actors having been involved.

Why do these primitive itinerant hobbits sound like something from the dodgy-Irish-builders episode of Fawlty Towers? According to the show’s Australian dialect coach, the accents are intended to be “familiar but different” – and the harfoots are meant to have an “Irish base to their accent”, but they do not speak as though they’ve walked out of a “particular cross street in Dublin”.

The portrayal of “Irish” characters as pre-industrial and childlike – simpletons, really – threads neatly into the Anglosphere’s rich tapestry of disdain for Celtic peoples. It brings us all the way back to the 70s – the 1870s. There’s an early scene in which we see the harfoots, wearing filthy rags, scrabble in the ground for food. What is this, Famine cosplay?

The best sting in the tail is this conclusion:

Still, if you desperately want to return to Middle-earth, then, yes, the showrunners have done a fantastic job combining the grandeur of Tolkien with the grit of Game of Thrones. If anything, it feels more like vintage Thrones than the new Westeros prequel, House of the Dragon, as we cut between multiple characters across Middle-earth – each alerted, in varying ways, to the return of the villainous Sauron.

They also managed to score an interview with Payne and McKay, the showrunners, about "Why are the harfoots hungry simpletons with stage-Irish accents? We ask the showrunners" but it's behind a paywall, so I'll excerpt some plums where our heroes manage to offend a hefty chunk of the entire British Isles because yes, they are that dumb, no they didn't do it on purpose, which makes it even funnier.

First, they pull the classic 'plastic paddy' defence: sure and begorrah, didn't my own family come from the Ould Country?

“My gosh — I hope not,” says McKay. “My family is from Ireland. I’ve been there many times. My wife has family from Donegal. I feel such strong roots there. And love it there so much. Part of the joy of imagining this world was trying to come up with regional accents across the different worlds.

Next, why the walking, talking stereotypes of the Scottish Jock type are not really Scottish, even though we made them sound Scottish and gave them red hair and a love of drinking, fighting, and money:

“We adopted a version of the Scottish burr for the dwarfs. That’s certainly not intended to reference Scottish people. It is literally just trying to take a particular dialect and hopefully do our Middle-earth spin on it."

Having the not unreasonable question of "if you describe stereotypes, isn't that a problem?" put to them, they manage to keep digging that hole even deeper as they characterise what their version of Manchester is like:

But if you give the harfoots stage-Irish accents and portray them as filthy and dressed in rags — particularly if you then give officer-class English accents to the series’ noble elves — what else can it be but stereotyping?

“That’s really not where we’re coming from,” says Payne. “There is another world, the Southlands, where we’re doing a version of a northern-England accent, like Manchester. The way they live — in medieval huts in some cases, with mud and grime and chickens in the yard — is in no way meant to reference real people, certainly not the folks in Manchester. The same with the harfoots and a travelling community. We were inspired by Tolkien’s imagination and are not in any way attempting to capture the Irish people.”

Clearly they are unaware of the - shall we say - more problematic elements of talking about a travelling community in connection with barefoot, dirty, stage-Irish types. Maybe it's because I'm not on the same level of intellect as our two stars here, but I don't quite get what the subtle difference is between "So we're basing it on Manchester but it's not meant to be Manchester but our reference point was Manchester".

In conclusion, the reporter comes down on the side of "Watch House of the Dragon instead":

For an Irish person, particularly an Irish Tolkien fan, watching The Rings of Power can be like riding a very wonky roller coaster. You want to applaud the casting and luxuriate in the thrill of returning to Middle-earth. But then along come the harfoots, like escapees from Darby O’Gill and the Little People or that episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation featuring “Irish”-like aliens, and suddenly everything is flipped and we’re dangling upside down, the object of the joke. Are we to grin and bear it? Or perhaps just watch House of the Dragon instead? Forget about the whereabouts of the Dark Lord Sauron or the forging of the One Ring. This is the conundrum that Irish Tolkien devotees must wrestle with in the weeks ahead.

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