First and foremost, it is important to resist reductive interpretations of the world. That’s why I wrote, some time ago, that the 74 million people who voted for trump are (mostly) complex individuals who cannot be summarily dismissed as irredeemable racists.
The people who stormed the Capitol? Ok, I grant you, that particular subset appears to be a genuinely deluded group. And, yes, a society always has to watch out for the legitimately dangerous radicals in its midst. But, at the same time, a given society, or a well-intentioned faction within that society, potentially harms itself by overreacting and lumping too many citizens into categories where they don’t belong.
And a recent example has reminded me how these problems sometimes play out. I know, this might initially sound like a bit of a stretch; but, yes, I’m talking about the new tv show on Amazon Prime: Rings of Power (RoP).
Now, here’s the thing: it’s a bad show. If you disagree, that’s fine. But what I’m asking from all of us is that we disagree largely on aesthetic grounds; that is, we should discuss the artistic merits and demerits of the show. And there may be light spoilers ahead, so, by all means don’t read if that bothers you.
One of the most obvious issues I have with the show is the dialog. Even if RoP were aimed solely at little children, this sort of dialog would still remain hopelessly silly and shallow:
“The sea is always right” (inexplicably chanted by a group of seeming adults staring at the ocean).
“Nobody goes off trail and nobody walks alone” (senselessly chanted by a tribe of nomads who proceed to break these rules and force any injured people to walk on their own).
Rocks will sink because they “look down” but ships will stay afloat because they “look up at the stars” (what? as some sort of metaphor this falls flat on its face since there are no particular qualities of stones which connect them with the action of “looking” down).
But the dialog is just one of many problems, and, for the sake of speeding up my blog post, I’ll summarize just some of the remaining issues: the timelines of the multiple plot threads do not even remotely match (in one plot line months or years have passed and in another only a few days have gone by), there is nothing but non-stop bickering between most of the characters on the show (leaving us with almost no sense of the camaraderie, friendship, loyalty, and trust that uplifts both Tolkien’s books and Peter Jackson’s films), and even the highly praised visuals and other world building aspects of the show leave me cold (the CGI is excessive and often unconvincing, the costumes are generic, and the lighting is bland).
How on earth did Amazon manage to spend a billion dollars on a train wreck? Was no one on hand to offer a course correction? Well, they apparently passed up the chance to get Peter Jackson involved and then fired a famous Tolkien scholar who tried to keep the focus of a Tolkien adaptation on, you know, Tolkien. But how did these missteps fail to raise red flags with the appropriate executives? Who knows!
The point is, RoP is a bad show, and there should be nothing, nothing at all, wrong with pointing that out. This observation is clearly obvious to the large number of reviewers who have not just given the show a terrible rating on Rotten Tomatoes but who have also written out their thoughts on why RoP deserves their scorn.
And yet. And yet. Here we are. Due largely to the fact that RoP incorporates a racially diverse cast, just about any criticism of the show has become reductively caught up in accusations of racism. And that fact reflects badly on us. Yes us: the Left.
This sort of problem follows from the warning I give in the first sentence of this blog post. We all need to avoid reductive interpretations of our world, our society, and our culture. This issue with RoP is one of the reasons why I warned not to view the 74 million people who voted for trump as little or nothing more than racists. That sort of simplistic take on the situation was sure to make us look foolish in the future. And now it has. An initial reductive interpretation of republican voters has now contributed to another reductive interpretation aimed at RoP critics.
But what, really, are we gaining by constantly spouting accusations of racism as an answer to or explanation for everything we either don’t understand or can’t explain? Arguably, we’re obscuring far more than we’re actually revealing.
And why is that such a problem? Because we need more voters to support us. The fate of the country and arguably the world depends on it. And we’re simply not helping our cause when we casually refer to millions of Tolkien fans, fantasy lovers, and just plain normal-people-with-good-taste as if they’re all racists because they dislike a show that is in fact bad. That sort of approach on our part is not exactly an effective recruitment tool. Far from it.
This situation is an opportunity for reflection on our part. We often call out, in an entirely justified manner, the excesses of the other side. But that in itself is not enough. We also need to develop an awareness of our own inevitable blind spots. And if our ideological restrictions have grown so severe that we can’t simply acknowledge when a bad tv show is in fact quite bad, we’re taking a big risk. We risk making ourselves look like a mob that is determined to keep wildly cheering for a billion dollar emperor with no clothes on.