It’s challenging to find examples that adequately illustrate this “something else”. Yes, there is dialogue that lands like cold slop in every episode (“Why do you keep fighting?” “Because I cannot stop!”), yes the Harfeet are more noxious than the orcs (I found myself begging, at the beginning of each episode, that I might be spared their appearance. Just this once…), but none of this captures the – truly epic, in this case – failure of this enterprise.
And then I realized why: Because what is most wrong with this show is not anything that is in it. It is what’s missing.
Every once in a while, in “Rings”, a character will utter a phrase that sounds as if Tolkien himself might have written it. The experience is so jarring that it makes suddenly real the fact that, for the most part, the writing sounds nothing at all like Tolkien. It is like listening to a tinny replication of a grand orchestral production, hammered out on a mechanical toy.
“Rings” is a spectacle that includes all of the outward manifestations of Tolkien’s work: Elves, dwarves, Hobbits, wizards, and lots of battles and fighting. But nothing at all of what made that work so special and so compelling.
A necessary feature of great literature is that it comes from the hearts and souls of individuals. Each individual writer has his or her own perspective on the world, his or her own point of view. Great literature, almost by definition, is not “inclusive.” Indeed, it is just the opposite – it is the expression of the vision of a single individual, of what he or she sees with their unique heart and soul. The folks who put together “Rings of Power” have absolutely no appreciation of this simple fact.
What is so marvelous about Tolkien’s writing is this: He starts with something as brutal and soulless as war, and, working his own unique magic, he weaves a story about this darkest of subjects that touches our hearts – we resonate with parts of this story, and that is how we know there is truth in them.
He also shows us a new way of perceiving the subject – this abomination we call war. He shows us that brute force is not the only power in the world, and he gives us examples of ways that ordinary (and not-so-ordinary) humans can defeat the power of brute force. His message is the antithesis of what is spewed out by the vast majority of action movies – and was completely missed by the producers of “Rings of Power.”
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Later, she observes:
The creators of “Rings of Power” set out to colonize Tolkien’s world. This project was generated, not by an appreciation for Tolkien’s genius, for work that came directly from his heart and soul, but by a political and social agenda. And that is why it has failed.
Those who want to “even everything out”, who want to increase “representation” for women and minorities in literature, film and television, are not acting in service to great literature, or great art of any kind, but to its antithesis. Their characters are hollow “types”, not unique individuals. And while Tolkien created elaborate and believable cultures and ethnicities, his stories were emphatically about individuals.
It’s as if “Rings” was written by AI, or at the very least by people who wholeheartedly embrace the mechanistic view of humanity. It has all of the external trappings of the world that Tolkien created, but without any of the essence that animates it.
And:
An ideology that insists that what is important about people, what is at the heart of their “identity”, is their racial makeup, the color of their skin, their gender, or “gender identity” – the ideology that insists these are the things that make us who we are makes for bad television.
This is not because it replaces characters with “underrepresented” ethnic minorities, or turns male characters into female ones. It is because none of this was generated from a place in anyone’s soul. All of it is the product of political aims rather than artistic ones, and that is its ruin. Propaganda cannot replace what comes from the soul.
The human soul is the one thing Tolkien concerned himself with above all else. It was the subject and the source of his writing. It was precisely what made his writing resonate with us. It is what gave his work its power.
A belief system that says we are nothing but our chemical and biological makeup is no more sustainable than is a TV series filled with beautiful costumes and set decoration, but with hollow words and cookie-cutter types for characters. That worldview is doomed.
Read the whole thing here: https://www.lewrockwell.com/2023/11/bretigne-shaffer/why-rings-of-power-is-so-terrible-and-why-it-doesnt-matter/
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My comment:
A shallow man cannot copy what a profound man wrights (no pun intended). The work wrought by the shallow needs must be shallow.
The shallow sees only surface features: elves are pointy-eared; dwarves are short; hobbits are barefoot; wizards fly around on wires and shoot fireballs; goblins are negros. He cannot see Legolas, Gimli, or tell any difference between Merry and Pippin, Saruman and Gandalf, orc and Uruk-Hai.
Shallow characters have no inside parts, no motives, no spirit. They all think and talk like Southern Californian postmodern Gnostic. Anyone who is not of their camp is a reactionary and subhuman: rich uncle Pennybags from the Monopoly game, or Literally Hitler. Another worldview, alien but nonetheless worthy of respect, is impossible for the shallow man to imagine.
Nothing has a soul to the shallow, nothing has an interior.
He literally thinks that castrating a boy and donning a dress, lipstick and wig while surgically affixing false blobs of flesh to his chest make him female.
To the metaphysical materialist, words literally have no meaning, because they have no essence, no internal nature common across written ink-marks or spoken sound-vibrations. To him, men and women have no sexual nature; only an assumed social role of masculine and feminine signs.
To him, he himself has no soul, no self; he is only a collection or cloud of undirected and unintentional brain-atom motions. I speak no exaggeration here: I have literally spoken to an atheist firmly convinced of his own non-self-existence.
All things are dissolved into nothingness in his world view, even as all social relations, man-wife, parent-child, teacher-student, priest-laity, liege-vassal, magistrate-citizen, are dissolved into a meaningless Darwinian struggle for power: all things are master-slave, or, as Lenin phrased it, Who-Whom.
Nothing is real, nothing has a meaning, nothing is natural.
There is no such thing as artist and patron in their world, no gratitude from performer to audience, no love from author to reader. Artist, performer and author are instruments of power and social control.
Artist, performer and author are serfs of Big Brother meant only to program their patients into goodthink.
The muse serves beauty. Beauty makes men nostalgic for heaven. The social engineer serves power. The whole point of beauty is that it dwells in a realm where the power to compel holds no meaning, only the power to inspire the soul. The whole point of power is to trample beauty.
Small wonder their art is gibberish. The muse curses the propagandist.
