Rings of Power as cultural appropriation
(Contains Spoilers)
Preface
I used to wait tables at a taqueria. The work put me in direct line of fire to a lot of customer criticism. Sometimes I’d get very good criticism, like, “my chicken isn’t cooked through.” Gross, sorry. Undercooked chicken was a mistake by the restaurant and we wanted to fix it (don’t tell the Japanese.) Other times I’d get weird criticism. For example, a customer might have a mostly uneaten fish taco on their plate, and I’d ask them if everything was alright, and they’d say something like ‘I don’t like cabbage.’ The problem for me was that cabbage was a feature. Main ingredients for fish tacos: fish, cabbage.
Movie and media critics have to be able to recognize and balance between these two types of critiques. Sometimes things in movies are bad like undercooked chicken: poor acting, continuity errors. Some things are bad like cabbage: jokes you don’t get, genres you don’t like. At times it can be difficult for us as individuals to tell the difference. But probably the reason I think The Adventures of Elmo in Grouchland is mediocre is not from mistakes by the production crew but rather features that are meant to make the movie enjoyable for its target audience but make it sanguine and predictable for me.
It follows that one of the functions of advertising and brand are to highlight features. This is especially clear with big brands like Nike. If I were to walk into a Nike shoe store I would expect to find comfortable shoes, generally with many colors, contours, logos, and bulk. These are all features. The price point of the shoes would be a feature as well. I don’t expect Nike’s to be made of the absolute finest materials because I don’t expect them to cost hundreds of dollars. At the same time, I expect reasonable durability and top-of-the-line sport function because their branding implies I’m paying for good materials and expert design.
If Nike were to make a shoe with the finest materials and that looked good with a suit that would be a mistake. This is a bit of a paradox, but the brand relies on the premise that quality is a function of sport function. Good sport function at price point seems to rely on the idea that bulky shoes with many patches of materials are attractive. The finest materials shoe with classic fashion sense is a betrayal; it’s emphasis on large pieces of unperforated and untainted leather suggests the remainder of Nike shoes make a sacrifice. This is incongruent with the brand and thus our finest materials shoe is a mistake, but only within the Nike brand.
Movies have brands too. My wife loves the Fast and Furious franchise. It promises Hollywood stars oozing charisma, exchanging hokey dialogue, and getting into very elaborately staged fights that defy physical law. The general detachment from reality created by these elements is a feature. And Fast and Furious is a successful franchise in part because it’s very difficult to critique: it promises a rather narrow framework, and often delivers in excess of what it promises.
A world is made
The Lord of the Rings, by which I really mean the entirely of the books Tolkien wrote about Middle Earth, are weird. Tolkien, as I understand it, had a rather unique creative process. He was a linguist by trade, and was quite engrossed in the work. The legend goes that as a hobby he created several new languages. Once he was satisfied with their phonology and syntax, he realized he needed someone to speak them. He created elves, dwarves, and orcs, or, more poetically, he found that the languages he made were most likely to be spoken by such strange creatures. The languages begat the cast.
His task was not yet finished. It was now obvious he needed a setting, and Middle Earth was born. Presumably he felt satisfied after that last step. As to why he wrote the short and meandering book called The Hobbit where strange and (dare I say) not very fleshed out characters adventure in his very fleshed out world, well I am certain it’s because his wife wouldn’t stop bothering him about what he was up to. See, it’s a literary endeavor.
I might have exaggerated that story for effect. But if you haven’t read The Hobbit recently, it is weird. For example, there’s two major antagonists that the plot might build around. The first option is the Necromancer. He is a character of utmost importance, such that the most powerful protagonist, Gandalf, considers his emergence an emergency and abandons his friends to peril in utmost haste. But if memory serves correctly we never once see Gandalf and the Necromancer on page together. Gandalf returns later to zero fanfare. Good thing we have our second antagonist, Smaug, a fearsome and talkative dragon. It makes sense to make him the main foil because his occupation of the Lonely Mountains is certainly the crux of the matter for The Hobbit and his companions. Their entire journey, the driving plot of the novel, is an attempt to return the Dwarves to their homeland which Smaug now occupies. How is one little hobbit and a ragtag crew of Dwarves going to remove such a creature of myth? I’m sure you’re on the edge of you seat, seeing as how this is one of the greatest adventure books of all time. Smaug is killed by a previously unnamed character well outside the presence of the Hobbit and his companions. This dragon slaying happens - if memory serves correct (doubtful) - a sentence or two. Huh. The book must be terrible then?
The Lord of the Rings, the universe, is at heart a dry history of Middle Earth. It covers in detail food, flora, creatures, languages, and important events (mostly begettings.) It is not character driven. Unlike many great works, it is not about the difficulties of marriage, the guilt of crime, or the toils of honesty. Why a somewhat dry history of a fantasy land, a set of books that certainly lack classic literary merit, are a beloved brand and household name is a bit of a mystery. But there is no mystery about the core fandom. There’s something about LOTR that especially appeals to nerds. The type of people, like Tolkien himself, interested in epic battles of good vs evil in a universe full of important men and great artifacts. Readers who respected that Tolkien wasn’t always losing hair stressing over a main protagonist, the complexities of maintaining interpersonal relationships, or the nitty-gritty of his character’s internal mental state. These are all features.
Another feature of LOTR is how sexless the world is. Women, I find, are strangest creatures of all, full of emotion, always ready to gossip, and their presence often precedes an eruption of inchoate felling clouding both mind and judgement. But seriously. Lord of the Rings is not focused on male characters because of misogyny. LOTR is focused on male characters because it was written by a nerd and, in general, it has vastly simplified social dynamics. Tolkien knew how to create a world that had verisimilitude for him. This is no small feat considering its vastness and novelty. Adding more front and center women would require one of two things. (1) Tolkien could have written women as simple, lifeless characters driven by singular goals. This would be an empty gesture: it is not progressive to add women to stories simply by writing them as men. (2) Tolkien could have written more genuine, important female characters with traits and goals reflective of their gender. But this is a feature change. Men and women are (spoiler alert) not identical. There’s probably something deeply true about the idea that better, more fleshed out female characters would make LOTR better. But doing so while still holding true to being a dry history of thousands of years of fictional conflict without interpersonal drama isn’t easy. For example, if I were to say ‘Saving Private Ryan would be a better movie if it taught one valuable lessons about the nature of marriage.’ This is kinda sorta technically true. But I think mostly the lack of marriage is a feature.
Another feature of LOTR was how characters are driven by a multitude of known forces. Middle Earth is a land of good and evil. Sauron and the orcs are evil. Hobbits are good. Humans and dwarves are vulnerable to greed and power. Great works of fiction, it is said, are character driven. Hamlet can give a monologue in an empty room. Frodo, on the other hand, is an archetype. He wants peace, quiet, a nice house, and to live happily ever after. His story is not his own: he is a victim of the great machinations of Middle Earth. He says so much himself. “I wish the ring had never come to me. I wish none of this had happened.” Gandalf replies with one of my all time favorite lines, “So do all who live to see such times, but that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us.”
Concrete elements of character of world building give individuals in LOTR a certain predictability. Bad people will do very bad things. Good people will try to stop them. Heroic characters from important blood lines will find weapons with names like Orcist or Dramborleg with pages of history behind them, and they’ll use those weapons for heroic deeds. The predictability is a feature. The lineages and history, believe it or not, are a feature.
Can a one billion dollar show do better?
The Rings of Power is probably a good show. The evidence for it being good is that it has an 85% rating on rottentomatoes and several of my friends seem to like it. The evidence against it is that I don’t like it (I weight this highly,) and I think it’s fair to say that it is not well liked amongst the nerds (no relation.)
I think what is happening here is that the feature list of The Rings of Power is vastly different than Lord of the Rings. Galadriel, the main protagonist, is a short tempered elf. She is restless, relentless, and bellicose. She is driven my revenge. She breaks the trope of elves - she is not staid nor stoic from a goodness greater than that of a human. Nor does she speak or act like a person who has lived thousands of years in a more civilized society. Lady Galadriel, from the Peter Jackson adaptation, she is not.
Young Galadriel is also not a classic archetype of femininity. Her personal failings are a lust for revenge mixed with a lack of sociability. These are not a female stereotypes. Whether this is empowering (women aren’t an archetype or narrow trope) or insulting (write male characters, cast them as female, wait for applause) is a ridgeline that many female characters before her have trekked in recent Hollywood history. It may be clear that I find writing violent, vengeful women in an attempt to shift Hollywood away from tropes is generally a mistake. However, bellicose women in movies as a whole are not a mistake. Movies create internal worlds with their own rules. Shout out to Uma Thurman in Kill Bill.
But let’s return to The Rings of Power. In episode 2 we find Galadriel washed up on a raft in the middle of the ocean with Halbrand. Is this circumstance the inevitable result of a fleshed out world? Is it Frodo and Sam trapped in a room with the spider Shelob, the fate of Middle Earth to be decided by the strangest of circumstances, thousands of years funneled into a single moment? I don’t think extremely lucky is the right way to describe Galadriel being swept up by Halbrand, so I will settle on extremely unlikely. In LOTR a particular set of circumstances often feels a function of the larger world. In Rings of Power the larger world often feels a function of needed circumstances.
Halbrand, the raft companion, is a down-on-his-luck smith from the South Lands. In his interactions with Galadriel he is often simple and self-centered, but we see glimpses of a complicated character, one with real literary merit. He is also Sauron. Why is Sauron on a raft in the middle of the ocean with companions? Why did he wait to kill his companions until Galadriel arrived? Does Sauron have absolute prescience? Is Sauron an embodiment of evil, or is he a complicated character with internal struggle?
I think Halbrand being Sauron is meant as subversion. This is a feature. (Shout out to every mystery/crime drama ever made.) Sauron being a complex character is a feature. People are complex, and we watch movies and tv shows about aliens and orcs not to learn about the aliens and the orcs, but ultimately to learn about ourselves. This is why dropping the simplified good vs evil paradigm is important in Ringland: to have fresh characters with interesting interpersonal conflict, we must create people (or orcs and elves) who are more than just archetypes. It’s a feature.
Speaking of complicated, Sauron, in some distant past, has rigged a contraption that will activate a dormant volcano. His old companion, now enemy (Adar) who presumes Sauron dead is building tunnels, an essential piece of the Rube Goldberg plot that will carry river water into the magma chamber and cause the volcano to erupt. Completing this task requires finding an old sword of Sauron’s, which serves as a key to an explosion that will empty the rivers into the newly dug canals that lead to the magma chambers.
This is confusing, but that’s a feature. If it made sense, you might be able to figure out what was happening before it happened. (Again, shout out to every mystery/heist movie ever made.) If you’re the type of person who likes media to wash over you like the rivers of the South Lands wash over magma chambers, then I think you’ll find watching Rings of Power quite pleasant. If you’re a nerd that likes using logic to make connections and build a coherent world then you may find the plot contrived.
If only we had known of arrogance
Imagine you are entrepreneurial multibillionaire and producer of Fine Wine. Would it be a good idea to purchase Coca-Cola Co (NYSE:KO) and use their massive brand to market Fine Wine? On the surface something about this makes sense: both Coca-Cola and Fine Wine are sweet, drug-filled liquids. They are both marketed as classy and staid versions of unhealthy habits. I can’t think of anything inherently contradictory about being a consumer of both products. Probably if you were to actually do this, and you did it really, really, well you could temporarily increase market share of your Fine Wine. And yet. They go together like clowns and a funeral. Inevitably that the brands would not hold each other up, like tension throughout a bridge, but dilute each other, like when I mix every vibrant color of paint and get brown sludge.
The mistake of Rings of Power is not principally of show making but of branding. It is surprising to me that a nerdy fantasy series with a simplistic good versus evil setup is worth a billion dollars. But I would think, if this is truly the case, it’s probably because people actually like nerdy fantasy series focused on world building within a paradigm of good and evil.
It seems like the show makers in Rings of Power hoped to take the good feelings people have towards the brand and update it with intrigue, subversion, and complexity, and were willing to hollow out some things (tunnels included) to reach that goal. What they wanted, I think, was modern sentiment, a show that didn’t leave anyone behind and had real social merit.
But I like Lord of the Rings, I think it has merit. I can believe this while simultaneously respecting that my wife would rather watch a romcom than the Peter Jackson interpretations, or read Pride and Prejudice (again) before the source material. (I know this is sexist of her and am happy to reprimand her for it.) I don’t think pouring some metaphorical Fine Wine into the metaphorical LOTRs Coca-Cola is going to win her over. Even small nudges in one direction aren’t particularly easy.
I’ll go even further. Real art, whether it has some great societal merit, or is just a pretty picture, is a function of someone making something they genuinely enjoy. They make it because they like it, and they share it because they hope you will find some of the same genuine joy or interest. Middle Earth was undoubtedly created as a labor of love. It is not perfect, but those who love it share it not for its flaws but its strengths.
I hope Amazon, or whoever dives into Lord of the Rings next, finds some of this love. I think sometimes it’s nice to have a villain and a hero, sometimes it’s nice, even for those who aren’t nerdy, to forgo some of the interpersonal drama. Sometimes it’s magical to get lost in the details of a fleshed out world: food, song, and creatures large and small. And maybe some begettings, one doesn’t want to forget where they came from.