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Right now, you all are probably sick to the back teeth of the discussion about Amazon's "Rings of Power", but I have to talk about this or I'll explode.
I haven't seen episode four yet, it's upcoming over here but it has aired in the US. I looked up some reviews (to see what is safe to skip if I watch this, because there's a lot of filler and not much plot in the episodes as yet) and I couldn't believe what the first one said, so I looked for a second one and yep, it's true.
The scriptwriters for episode four (apparently it's Stephany Folsom and J. D. Payne & Patrick McKay, yes our boys again) are introducing the reasons the Númenoreans don't like Elves. And - wait for it - it's because "they're going to take our jobs!". No, I swear, this is actually it.
Yes, ladies, gentlemen, and those of you who aren't too sure, a direct immigration reference. So I suppose I should take it that Pharazon is Donald Trump surfing to power on a wave of Númenorean populism which is racist and fascists, and Tar-Míriel is Hillary Clinton who is the true Queen from whom he usurps her power.
This episode, by the bye, is called "The Great Wave" because of the nightmare Tar-Míriel has about the great wave coming in to destroy Númenor, and by now it can't come fast enough for me. Excuse me while I run around screaming as though my hair is on fire, because I feel like it.
These - look, I don't want to be insulting about Mormons, but good Lord is it very, very hard to resist dropping one of the "m"s there - blond denizens of the Mountain West have not got one scrap of imagination above the banal. They cannot grapple with the deeper themes of death and immortality that Tolkien wrote into his work. Everything has to be something snatched from American political slogans. The Númenoreans don't envy and hate the Elves for the immortality they cannot have for themselves, it's because dey took er jerbs.
Let's go back to the source, shall we? From a very long and detailed letter of 1951:
From a letter of 1956:
I don't know if swearing is allowed in our new realm of liberty and justice for all, but how the fuck do you, self-proclaimed huge Tolkien fans, read the above and come away with "Got it, the rebellion in Númenor was all about demagogues stoking fear of immigrant labour taking native jobs"????
I managed to make it to the troll fight the first time I tried watching it which made me cringe so hard I turned it off. I gave it another go and got a few episodes in, but sits firmly in the 'wavers from making me cringe to making me bored' territory.
I think part of the disappointment with Rings of Power is... well, take me. I read Lord of the Rings, which is a fantastic series of books. I actually read it when staying on a friend's property, so far out in the bush they only ran the generator for part of the day. I had a lantern in a bedroom I lit with a match and I read the Lord of the Rings by the light of that lantern, staying up later than I had before in my eight years of life to devour these novels. Absolutely enthralling stuff, and just a really good series of books. I reread them at twenty, and then at thirty-one. They're still great.
Then I watched the movies, which were by no means perfect adaptions but were just amazing movies. The sorts that you look back on and quote and talk about again and again. They hold up to the test of time well (crazy that Fellowship is now over twenty years old!), and even if you weren't a Lord of the Rings fan, the movies were just superb. At eleven I complained about them because they didn't seem to emphasise what the books did, but I think as a production designed to capture the magic of the books and make an entertaining spectacle to watch on-screen they hit the mark as well as was actually possible.
The Rings of Powers just aren't very good. Part of the problem with grand, sweeping declarations and weird philosophy and so on is that there's not a huge amount of middle ground. If these things aren't good, they're cringe. Mediocre fantasy is just cringe fantasy. You can have mediocre comedy where the occasional good joke saves the boring ones, mediocre action films where the gunfights save the awful dialogue, but mediocre fantasy is in the same unfortunately realm as mediocre sci-fi. You're not just trying to sell a story, you're trying to sell a world, and if you can't do that the story falls apart. If you fuck it up enough the whole world falls apart and you're done. It's weird and stupid and feels like someone's 16-year old fanfic. It's cringe.
Conversely, if my friends drag me out to see the latest Marvelman movie, the premise is I'm here to see some explosions, some witty one-liners, some scenes that just look amazing on the big screen, and if I happen to miss or just not care about what's actually happening I'm not going to be too disadvantaged. You can fuck those up some, deliver a mediocre product and it's still fine. It's not great, but eh. It's not particularly good, but I can chew on my popcorn, see the explosions and the punches, snooze through the exposition and still have a fine dinner afterwards where I mention how cool the fire god fighting the evil prison lady was at the end.
It's not great, but I don't feel the need to cringe away from it. Rings of Power (and Wheel of Time as a side note) is cringe. The 'rock or boat', the troll fight, the 'tek our jerbs' moments, it's just a bad TV show. Sure, it does the standard 'wheel out the five most racist trolls, imply these are representative of the entire criticism of the show and then suppress any thoughts that you might be making a hunk of crap with the sweet knowledge that only bigots hate you' move every sub-par show does nowadays, but this is just people who can't make a good show shoehorning their politics in clumsily which annoys people, but people always want to put their worldview in their creations. It's just these people are making bad television to begun with, so why would you expect them to be good at adding in politics subtly?
I don't doubt the showrunners/writers/etc are huge Tolkien fans. Nothing about the Rings of Powers says 'we hate Tolkien and want to make him spin in his grave', it just says 'we're not very good at making television and so we keep fucking it up and creating cringeworthy moment after cringeworthy moment'.
I mean, look at the difference between what is in original Tolkien is giving us and what the showrunners are doing:
Tolkien: There is no God, that is only a fiction by the greedy Lords of the West. We, the Men of Númenor, are so great, so powerful, and so daring that we deserve immortality. Come, let us set sail to seize by the might of our arms the lands of ambrosia and eternal bliss, and pull down those false godlings so that we may take our rightful place as the true gods of Man!
Showrunners: They're taking our jobs!
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