Tolkien fans are awaiting the much-hyped Amazon Lord of the Rings tv series not with bated breath, but trepidation. Please, Amazon, don’t fuck it up, is the most frequent comment in fan groups. “A fool’s hope,” as Gandalf would say.
Fans are already wincing as a domino-effect of wokeness claims a series of beloved decades-old franchises: Star Wars, Star Trek, James Bond, Ghostbusters… Early announcements regarding what is now officially called The Rings of Power did little to allay fears. Talk of “diversity”, nudity, hiring “intimacy coaches”. Given also that the series is based on the thinnest stretch of material in Tolkien’s legendarium, fans live in dread that the showrunners (both of them near-complete parvenus with only a single — uncredited! — writing job between) will use that as an excuse to impose every fashionable identity politics “diversity” pandering imaginable.
Right on schedule come the casting announcements. Oh, boy.
But none of this should surprise anyone. From the black Regency aristocracy of Bridgerton to the black Anne Boleyn and Joan of Arc, Hollywood is drowning in a tide of “blackwashing”. Aside from an apparent visceral disdain for gingers, Hollywood is erasing white women first.
This isn’t some “alt-right conspiracy theory”, either. It’s an open and unapologetic wave of racial preferment and skin-colour quotas.
In September 2020, the [Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences] launched its Representation and Inclusion Standards Entry platform (or RAISE). For a movie to qualify for Best Picture, producers not only had to register detailed personal information about everyone involved in the making of that movie, but the movie had to meet two of the Academy’s four diversity standards—touching on everything from on-screen representation to creative leadership […]
Meanwhile, CBS mandated that writers’ rooms be at least 40 percent black, indigenous and people of color (or BIPOC) for the 2021-2022 broadcast season and 50 percent for the 2022-2023 season. ABC Entertainment issued a detailed series of “inclusion standards.”
We’ve seen regimes that were similarly obsessive about making people submit detailed registers of personal details. Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, Maoist China… such company Hollywood keeps, these days.
Like all such regimes, this one rules by fear. No-one dares criticise the new racial paradigm openly. “I’m not crazy,” one screenwriter said. Others are afraid to even send an email lest it fall into the hands of the racial Inquisition.
We spoke to more than 25 writers, directors, and producers—all of whom identify as liberal, and all of whom described a pervasive fear of running afoul of the new dogma. This was the case not just among the high command at companies like Netflix, Amazon, and Hulu, but at every level of production.
As one survivor of Maoist purges recalls, the only way to survive is to pretend to be even more fanatical than the rest.
“Best way to defend yourself against the woke is to out-woke everyone, including the woke,” one writer said […]
“Everyone has gone so underground with their true feelings about things,” said Mike White […]
Another writer, who, like most of the writers we interviewed, was afraid to speak openly for fear of never working again […]
It is, said Sam Wasson, the author of “The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood,” not so different from the McCarthy era.
In the end, though, it’s all going to blow back on Hollywood. “Get woke, go broke” is more than a catchy slogan. Consumers can still vote with their wallets. From televised sports, to video games, to the Academy’s own showcase, the Oscars, viewers are deserting wokeness in droves. No Time to Die drew the worst box office (against the second-highest production budget) of all the Daniel Craig Bond films. Each of the Star Wars sequels did worse than its predecessor.
The politicization of content production, creatives said, was going to be the industry’s death knell. “Especially this past year, ideology has become more important than art,” Quentin Tarantino said in June on Bill Maher’s show. “It’s like ideology trumps art. Ideology trumps individual effort. Ideology trumps good.”
Common Sense
The last word on Hollywood’s trade of quality for quota points must, though, go to Lord of the Rings creator J. R. R. Tolkien: The Shadow that bred them can only mock, it cannot make: not real new things of its own.
Evil, as Tolkien knew, can only ruin and twist the creations of greater minds than its own.