Well, I can cancel my Amazon Prime subscription again. The last episode of The Rings of Power came out recently. Now that all the results are in, I can happily say that both the show and its reviewers have been … very much as expected.

An online feud has been raging for several years between the entertainment industry ‘Hollywood’ and a reasonably large portion of its customers. On one side, the industry has subscribed to a progressive agenda. In all things it clearly seeks the approval of the green-left Twitterati, who have a very specific notion of what ‘progress’ ought to look like in the industry – that is, a cast that is racially and sexually diverse, but not ideologically diverse, and a plot that subverts expectations and counteracts the narratives of traditional white society – and are willing to cancel and boycott anything that doesn’t meet their specifications.

Heretics like JK Rowling, whose moral compass does not point precisely to the current location of the Left’s wandering magnetic pole, and who is willing to say so out loud, are vilified and lambasted.

On the other hand, many viewers are not progressive and are frequently aggravated by what the industry is doing. Their complaints are many, and many of their complaints are valid. What annoys them more than anything else is when the industry takes an existing creative work and then ‘re-imagines’ it for the twenty-first century. Like Ghost-Busters, Mulan, Doctor Who, and most recently, Lord of the Rings.

There’s a pattern to the conflict. Hollywood blames the disgruntled viewers for being the problem (clearly the only reason they could object to this wonderful re-imagined artwork is that they are bigots). And the disgruntled viewers whine on Twitter that they just wanted to watch Star Wars, not attend a feminist re-education camp.

You see?

I get curiously gleeful watching this feud unfold, and occasionally even enjoy chiming in (as when I previously advised Spectator Australia subscribers not to waste any money watching the latest Matrix abomination). But I don’t think that the entertainment industry really understands the issue that is inciting vitriol from its alt-right nemeses.

Racial and sexual diversity is superficial at best. Do viewers really feel threatened by strong female characters? Do they really feel uncomfortable seeing racial diversity on the screen? Of course not. We may, for example, think racial anachronism is strange in a period drama that aims for historical accuracy in every other respect, but it doesn’t affect the viewing experience. Undoubtedly we’re annoyed at the reason for the diversity and the preachiness of it all, but on its own it can’t ruin a story. We certainly don’t begrudge any racially diverse actors from getting good acting gigs!

The real issues being contested are much more interesting than the superficial progressive punch-list for PC productions, and this stood out to me clearly with The Rings of Power.

Let me say up-front – the show was not a total write-off. I was able to watch it all through to the end, found it mildly entertaining, and am interested to see how they finish the story. But by no means would I call it ‘good’.

The main problem with this show is just amateur storytelling. It follows four different plot threads – Galadriel seeking military help from the Númenóreans, the Southlanders being besieged by orcs, Elrond seeking help from the Dwarves to mine Mithril, and the Harfoots (basically, Hobbits) encountering a powerful stranger as they migrate. The first three of these converge at the end with the Southlands being destroyed in a cataclysm that turns them into the land of Mordor, and the elves forging three rings of power.

It is obvious that the writers are very interested in what is happening on the audience’s side of the fourth wall. They deliberately create mysteries for anyone who knows the story of Lord of the Rings… Is the stranger Sauron? Or Gandalf? Who is Galadriel’s companion? Where is her future husband in all this? Unfortunately, they pay less-than-adequate attention to the coherence of the story itself.

Very few of the characters’ decisions hold up under interrogation, from the smallest events, like Isildur’s friends being punished for his actions, to major plot features – like how did Galadriel know to request military help from the Númenóreans since she left Middle Earth before the orcs attacked? Clearly these events were needed to drive the plot forward, but they weren’t given an internal logic. So many mysteries are created for the audience, that the fantasy turns into a kind of whodunit, but even less coherent, a who-will-do-it, as nothing has actually been done yet.

Apart from a general sloppiness to the storyline, the feature that I found most difficult was the character of the characters. They all argue. Continually. If you watch it, I challenge you to count how many scenes do not involve the characters arguing with each other. This leads to the conclusion that everyone is not on the same side. In fact, every single character seems to be on some sort of ego trip to prove that they have value, despite being small, young, poor, female, black, in their father’s shadow etc.

All of this is problematic baggage that comes with the progressive worldview. In the modern progressive view, moral status is conferred by what has been done to you. But in a traditional morality (such as in the original Lord of the Rings) moral status is only ever conferred by what you do to others. Based on everyone’s actions in this plot, everyone is selfish and entitled, no one is noble, and there is consequent confusion as to what actually makes the baddies bad and the goodies good.

It’s a crying shame because Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings was a magnificent bit of story-telling and later birthed an extremely rare phenomenon: three movies that were better than the book (in my opinion). In the Lord of the Rings, the main protagonist, Frodo, has a burden placed on him. He owns an extremely powerful ring, and the chief enemy of the world, Sauron, wants to find him and take the ring in order to have enough power to rule over everyone. Frodo embarks on an epic and dangerous journey to destroy the ring.

Quite uniquely, the enemy in this story is very remote. We don’t ever meet Sauron; instead, the ring itself is the character we come to know intimately. The ring constantly tempts anyone around it with the lure of wielding power. As a result, while the broad plot is a simple battle of good versus evil – and ‘evil’ is very unambiguous and unsophisticated (Sauron and all his servants are dark, ugly, murderous, and irredeemable) – the chief obstacle for the good forces is not that they would lose, but that they would give into temptation.

The Lord of the Rings was the creative effort of one man – Tolkien. He was a deep thinker – a scholar and a poet, who also fuelled the book’s aura of mystery by creating an immensely detailed deep-time backstory for it. Though the movie Lord of the Rings was the creative work of a different man, it did justice to the original in part by borrowing Tolkien’s exact wording as much as possible.

The Rings of Power by no means lives up to this legacy. Sometimes Tolkien-esque lines are given to the characters to make them seem wise (like this throw-away line from Galadriel, ‘What cannot be known hollows the mind, fill it not with guesswork…’), but instead they are totally jarring. You can’t make a character seem old and deep and wise by giving them occasional backwards worded clichés, but otherwise have them continually arguing about silly things and making immature, shallow decisions.

This is most notable among the Elven characters, who don’t seem like Tolkien’s elves at all – they don’t sing, they don’t talk to trees, they don’t glow, they aren’t steady or wise – they’re just people with pointy ears who don’t die.

Progressives may think that their influence on fiction is to challenge deep-seated social prejudices. In reality, however, post-modern fiction is self-effacing and self-destructive. ‘Shades-of-grey morality’ blurs the very lines that gave the fiction purpose. Subverting expectations destroys the plot features that give it closure. Pandering to viewer nostalgia turns the whole experience into a game played with the audience, rather than a mutual celebration of shared values.

There are good works of fiction being produced in our time. Some TV shows have magnificent storytelling. Art is not entirely dead.

The Rings of Power, however, sits very far from the top of the list.

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