Kulturkampf

[HaughtyFrank]

https://variety.com/2024/tv/news/star-wars-lord-of-the-rings-bridgerton-toxic-fans-hollywood-response-1236166736/


There's a pretty simple solution and it doesn't involve coddling manchildren: hire better writers and make better shows/films. Or at least that would be the simple solution in a world where making good things was the goal, instead of making slop for specific demographics to consume. I remember when Fellowship Of The Ring came out and there were some LOTR message boards that were very critical of the changes. A lot of the Arwen stuff in that movie - making her a quasi warrior princess who out-rangers Aragorn and saves Frodo - would be viewed as "woke" or mary sue today. The manchildren will never admit that though, or they'll try to move the goal posts ("but it wasn't forced into my face nonstop back then!"). The fact is that most book readers didn't give a shit and loved the movie. And those who disliked the film still had their own space to argue and it never really felt that toxic.

To me the bigger problem is that so many writers do not read and don't appreciate art that doesn't coddle them or reinforce their worldview. This is how we produce allegedly literary people who don't read classic English literature because it's too white or too patriarchal. For television/film adaptions this is how you constantly get writers saying things like "I never read the books or saw the original film(s)." And these are the people who are constantly brought onto projects who tasked with providing a POC/LBGTQ/etc lens to something that is already struggling under the weight of its own emptiness. So you get half baked stories, half baked characters, no themes, etc but hey...we've got cool scenes with black people, which can be used in the advertising package for the streaming app! Shout outs to my parents who signed up for Disney+ to see Star Wars Acolyte only to then learn it has already been cancelled lol.

I love reading, I love films, and I enjoy some television shows. I've never read or watched anything that made me think "this character is white, I can't relate because I'm black." As a kid, I related to The Breakfast Club because I knew what it felt like to be mistreated, or to mistreat others, or to pretend to be brave, or to actually be brave. I saw myself on screen. In other cases, I saw or read about characters who were nothing like me, and that fascinated me as well. Villains who were nothing like me, themes I was unfamiliar with, settings I couldn't truly grasp...yet they still captured my attention and emotion. Because that's what art is supposed to fucking do lol. If your attention to art hinges entirely on whether it shows you what you want or who you are, you're just a rube. And sadly we have way too many rubes dictating where culture goes, what art does, etc.

I'm reminded of this Peter Jackson quote that got dug up when Rings of Power first aired

"There are certainly themes Tolkien felt were important."

"We made a promise to ourselves at the beginning of the process that we weren't going to put any of our own politics, our own messages or our own themes into these movies."

“What we were trying to do was to analyse what was important to Tolkien and to try to honour that. In a way, were trying to make these films for him, not for ourselves."

This kind of mindset just seems very rare now whenever something gets adapted or rebooted etc.
But also more importantly, whenever these new creators bring in their politics it's often just written like shit. Speaking of Rings of Power again, the first season had a bit where an elf arrived in a human city, and despite it being just a singular elf, they decided this was the perfect moment to have some commentary on migrant workers. So the human's were suddenly all like "these elfs are taking our jobs" (reminder, there's just one elf in town, one that isn't even working). The story beat than disappears as quickly as it came after a bad guy politician holds a speech that could be summed up with "We'll make Numenor great again".
Really great storytelling here. Real subtle and real inspired.

In comparison you got Star Wars Andor which is a very explicit examination of the rise of fascism and how ordinary people stand up against it, but instead of including some blatant Trump allegory or some contrived story point about "build the wall" they wrote it in a more universal way. One that feels true to Star Wars itself and true to the human condition. I have no doubt that the writers have a lot to say about Trump but they didn't forget that this shouldn't get in the way of a captivating narrative and characters. If you want to tell a story that actually means something it should have more longevity than just the election year 2024.

The Acolyte received a lot of hate, and some pretty blatant racist hate, but that's not why it failed. It failed because the writing was bad and even the people it was meant to pander to didn't really care for it resulting in a low viewership. To frame it as anything else just sounds like executives trying to shift the blame because god forbid anyone admits they gave a 200 million dollar show into the hands of someone who didn't know what they were doing.

It's also worth remembering the era the films came out in. War on terror, increased military enrollment, the Axis Of Evil, good guys and bad guys. Yet at no point did Jackson or anyone involved lean into that, or allow the films to be used as a cudgel by the majority (conservative) political consensus of the time. Just as Tolkien never leaned into it in his time or allowed allegory accusations despite the fact that his work was clearly influenced in some way by his involvement in WWI. And yet despite Jackson's dedication, Christopher Tolkien still hated the films and viewed them as an abomination haha.

I'm not even opposed to politics or social movement influencing art. You would expect contemporary events to find some representation in human expression. Nearly the entire decade of 1970s art was heavily influenced by Vietnam, political disillusionment, the decline in public trust of institutions, etc. Much of mid to late 1980s art deal with economic excess, capitalism, the arrival of women in the corporate work force, and more jaded depictions of suburban family life. I really have no idea how to summarize the 2010s or current 2020s from a film perspective thematically. Technically it's been a lot of bad writing and prioritizing identity and origin (prequels) over telling compelling stories. Some politics but compared to the 1970s they seem rather tepid to me. 

It's interesting you brought up Andor. I haven't seen it since I'm not a Star Wars person beyond the original three films. But it's very interesting to me that all the hate watch nerd/purist content focuses entirely on the other Star Wars shows and their alleged wokeness while having little to say about Andor. I see these people crying online about there being no more good Star Wars content and I'm like....hold on isn't Andor very well received and apparently good? Why do the nerd types act like it doesn't exist? It's probably more lucrative to hate watch things than to enjoy things. But I'd imagine that a show as thematic and politically charged as Andor is (from what I've read/heard) also kind of torpedoes the notion that this stuff should never be political. A lot of the shit we liked as kids had politics in it. There are political and feminist themes in Alien and Aliens lol. There are political themes in the original Star Wars. James Cameron has been very up front about the political leanings of Terminator 2. The Matrix was really blatant, right down to the "agents" thing. But all those movies are well written and well crafted. I just find it funny that people are being nostalgic about an era where everything was allegedly non-political, yet if you go back to that era Rush Limbaugh was calling all of it Marxist lmao.

It's funny, Andor seems to be generally ignored in these conversations, I guess because it doesn't really fit the narrative. It's highly political and yet still great. It also stars a Latino man, women, minorities etc. and yet doesn't get hate bombed by the fandom.