Confronting the Questionable Legacy of ‘The Lord of the Rings’
On Saturday, Elijah Wood caused consternation with the announcement that he had commissioned an NFT – from a white supremacist cartoonist. After a swift and intense backlash, he has deleted the tweet of the announcement. In a welcome move, he has since sold the NFTs in question and donated the profits to the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. (LDF) and Black Lives Matter. It is still an unfortunate misstep from an actor propelled to fame by Lord of the Rings, an all-white film franchise steeped in racist imagery, whose cast and creative team have never reckoned with the racism they enabled in their fan base – while actors of colour in the new Lord of the Rings series on Amazon Prime pay the price.
Back in January 2020, the first cast announcements were made for the new Lord of the Rings series via headshots of 15 actors to the show’s official Instagram. The first update for months from a production that is both the most expensive in TV history and picking up the mantle of a much beloved film franchise, it naturally caused a stir – thousands of tweets and comments – analysing, criticising, praising, and speculating – flooded social media.
Taking a closer look at the engagement on the headshots, a disturbing picture emerges. Most of the photos have one or two hundred comments but there are two outliers: those of Ismael Cruz Córdova, who has over 700, and Sophia Nomvete, who has over 1.2 thousand – the only Black cast in the first announcement. While the comments have since been somewhat moderated, the day of the announcement saw them flooded with violent racism, degrading racist jokes, and assurances that the show would be a disaster due to going “woke” and – tellingly – featuring explicit sexual content. (That the presence of Black cast led fans to believe that the show would be hyper-sexual deserves its own article.) Due to the vast, global nature of the Tolkein fanbase, Cruz Córdova and Nomvete – who should have been enjoying one of the biggest announcements of their careers – were inundated with every international variation of racism and anti-Blackness.
Amongst the bile, many fans of colour and others fought back against the bigotry and rejected the idea that a faithful adaptation of Tolkein must be white. While their efforts were surely appreciated by the cast, the response to the racist backlash should have gone beyond a group already marginalised in the fandom. Crucially, the fans and cast of colour should have had the support of the cast and production team of the original film trilogy.
An intervention by the films’ cast and production team was sorely needed for three reasons. First, revered as they are by fans, their voices would have had a powerful impact on the conversation. By loudly rejecting an all-white Middle Earth – and any fans that craved one – they could have hugely influenced the nature of the Lord of the Rings fandom and reduced the sway of the racists. Second, it would have been an important show of solidarity with black actors in an industry where they are marginalised and mistreated. Third – and perhaps most importantly – they should have intervened because the films that made their name laid the ground for the racism in the fanbase.
Peter Jackson’s trilogy, while spectacular and ground-breaking in many ways, is glaringly white. Worse, the human villains are all coded as non-white; “bad men” from the East and the South, complete with either veils and kohl, or bearing tribal tattooing and scarification and riding mythical elephants. Worst of all, the inhuman Uruk Hai – muscled and merciless – have black skin and dreadlocks. While some of this British colonial racism and eugenicist thought are a reflection of the source material itself, Jackson made a – possibly thoughtless – choice to remain “faithful” to those parts of the text and even to exacerbate them. As a result, racist fans were not alienated by the films but accommodated, allowed to believe that their extremely racist interpretation of Tolkein’s work was the correct one. The film trilogy benefited from their racist support and everyone involved in it is therefore complicit in the abuse now raining down on series’ cast of colour (particularly the black cast, and more particularly the black women cast). The comments directed at Nomvete and Cruz Cordóva are not generic racism: they are rooted in the racist lore and imagery that Jackson’s films perpetuated. One of most frequent comments on Nomvete’s picture is “better be an Uruk Hai”.
This is not an attempt to “cancel” Jackson’s trilogy. It is simply a request that Jackson and the cast use their vast wealth, platform, and white privilege to reckon with the racism they enabled and to acknowledge and celebrate the fact that, were the trilogy made today, it would not look the same.
In the aftermath of the public allegations of abuse against Harvey Weinstein, as the first shockwaves of the #MeToo movement rippled through Hollywood, Jackson made one of the most important and valuable contributions by a man in the industry. He admitted to blacklisting victims Ashley Judd and Mira Sorvino on Weinstein’s orders, bringing some closure to a decade of being gaslit by the industry. It is past time that he – and his cast – spoke up again. The Lord of the Rings’ Black cast and fans need their support – and white fans and journalists should demand it. – Bessie Devlin