Tow slight nits to pick:
He left SA when he was three. To say he “grew up” here is a real stretch.
Tolkien was decidedly middle class, not upper class.
Except you have Hobbits, Dwarves, Elves and Men and they all look quite different. No reason they need to all look white. The only “races” that are shown to interbreed are Elves and Men, so we don’t even know if Hobbits and Men (for instance) could produce offspring even if they wanted to.
That is not to say that I’m advocating for a range of colors in the movies, but just that your premise and conclusion about a “normal society” doesn’t really even make sense wrt Middle Earth.
But what constitutes looking similar is subjective, not objective, and is strongly affected by society. A half-white, half-black person probably objectively looks a lot more like his/her white parent than to most other black people – but to many or most who grow up in Western society, they’ll just look “black” or “mixed”, and classified in a different group than their white relatives. We way-over-emphasize skin color, IMO, while under-emphasizing other features.
IMO, breaking down these sorts of perceptions is positive and good for society, and I think film and TV directors should be encouraged to do so when possible within a story.
Unless the same selective pressures towards light skin are in effect in other relatively hairless species in higher latitudes as are in effect in humans.
The casting was clearly a case where no one was thinking about diversity casting. And extras were probably cast in New Zealand, whose population is 60% white.
There is no reason why the cast couldn’t be more diverse. It is the exact same story if Gandalf were Japanese. It would be the exact same story if Legolas were black. It would be the exact same story if hobbits were native American.
It doesn’t matter what Tolkien intended. First of all, he lived at a time where characters always defaulted to white. In addition, there are dozens of things in LOTR that probably didn’t match Tolkien’s vision: he describes the Eye of Sauron as “The Eye was rimmed with fire, but was itself glazed, yellow as a cat’s, watchful and intent, and the black slit of its pupil opened on a pit, a window into nothing.” The Eye in the movie is red/orange.) I don’t see anyone arguing that the movie should have kept it yellow in the interests of “accuracy.” I do find it interesting that any potential changes to the race of a character is criticized in those terms.
If you had cast competent minority actors in roles of LOTR, the movie still would have worked. Arguing about how it fits Tolkien’s vision is just a straw man.
But if you cast Gandalf and his sort as all Japanese, the dwarves as, I don’t know, Native Americans, all the elves as black, the hobbits as something else then you’ll have people howling about racial stereotyping. If Legolas is the only black elf someone will object to that. If everyone else is still white men and Gandalf is Japanese there will be complaints of tokenism. Basically, someone is always going to complain. You can’t win.
An always relevant, always wonderful letter from Tolkien to a German publisher in 1938.
But there is a perfectly logical reason for why it wasn’t.
Arguing on the basis of “they changed this though” is always flawed. It’s a translation of a book into a movie so some things change. That doesn’t mean that everything has to change or that any change can be justified by “It’s a movie now”.
Yes, they could have potentially cast a bunch of different races and it may have worked. They’re not wrong for not having done so, though.
Says who? You weren’t the one translating the story to the cinema screen. It seems that the people who were had infinitely more say in how relevant Tolkien’s vision was to them and their work than you do.
I must admit, I always thought Strider in the Bakshi version looked Native American…
Yes, I’ve long noted that trying to capitulate to identity politics is like the two dudes and the donkey.
Alessan, people of different hair colors have lived together and interbred in European culture for a long time, and we still have a variety of hair colors. Skin color is a bit more complicated genetically, but the basic idea is still there: If you took a bunch of Europeans and a bunch of Africans and put them on the same continent together, and they all mixed freely without distinction for an arbitrarily-long time, then most of the people would end up being a medium brownish color, but you’d still get some who, by luck of the genetic dice, ended up as fair as a Swede or as dark as a Zulu. You wouldn’t have a bunch of people of different races, but that’d be just because people in such a society wouldn’t consider skin colors to be races.
Basically Brazil.
It would depend on where the continent is–assuming that there was selective pressure and not genetic drift that gave us light-skinned Northern Europeans and dark-skinned Africans, then this selective pressure would still be in effect in your proposed situation, and eventually you would end up with a mostly light-skinned population if it was a high latitude continent and a mostly dark-skinned population if it was a low latitude continent.
I should have qualified my “arbitrarily-long time” a little better. I meant a timescale long enough for thorough mixing (which only takes a few generations), but not so long that natural selection would be significant.
Fair enough.
I still think that a hypothetical objective outsider looking at a society similar to the United States in terms of variety of appearance would come to the correct conclusion that the country’s history involved a significant amount of recent immigration and cultural segregation, at least compared to other countries… but I accept that the matter isn’t as clear-cut as I thought.
So you think that because Tolkein “had in mind” a largely white, European vision for LOTR, it would be inappropriate to mess with that in the name of ethnic diversity. I’d be interested to know, as a general matter of principle, when the intentions of an author are, and are not, important to you in the casting process.
For example, about 18 months ago was had a thread about a Pennsylvania college that was forced to cancel the production of a play after the playwright objected to the fact that white actors were to be used in roles that the playwright had intended for people of color. In that thread, you were critical of the playwright’s decision, and you said:
If you believe that this is true, why would you be at all concerned if LOTR had, indeed, been populated by a multi-ethnic cast?
Why is it “not a bad thing” for us to have an almost-all-white LOTR because that’s what Tolkein envisioned, but a bad thing for an actual living playwright to enforce a condition of multi-ethnic casting in the licensing of his own intellectual property?
See post 18.
I won’t speak for ITR champion, but I do see a difference here. In the case you present, someone was trying to actively block an already cast member based on their race. The casting director and people running the production were presumably happy with their choices, but the playwright was trying to stop it. On the other hand, Peter Jackson cast his actors because he wanted to stay true to the material, not because he feared the disapproval of the wraithly form of dead Tolkien.
I see nothing wrong with someone casting a black Gandalf or a Hispanic Beowulf or or an Asian King Arthur if they want. Either as a statement or just because they don’t care. That’s fine. However, there’s also absolutely nothing wrong with them casting true to the original work either. Deciding that you want to cast a burly white guy to play Paul Bunyan in your movie because you feel thatt he lore is significant is no more or less moral a choice than opening the part to a a burly black guy or a 110 lb Pakistani.
Yes, but the playwright had made clear, BEFORE the college put on the production, that an ethnically diverse cast was a precondition of running the play. The college was not supposed to engage in the production unless they could meet this condition. The fact that the person was already cast is irrelevant, because the very act of casting a white person in that role defied the explicit contractual obligations that the college agreed to when it licensed the play.
Also, your point isn’t really relevant to the question i was asking. ITR Champion explicitly said that he was not interested in seeing a LOTR that featured an ethnically-diverse cast, and in the same post he connected this opinion to his understanding of Tolkein’s own vision; that is, to the vision of the author, and NOT the vision of the “casting director and people running the production.” He explicitly connected the idea of authenticity to the vision of the author, not the vision of the director or producer, so i believe that my question to him is quite apt in this case.
Sure, but that has nothing to do with LotR. Should a creator attempt to force people to use a particular race? No. Is it wrong for the casting director to choose a particular race in order to stay close to intent? No. The scenario you’re presenting is far different from LotR.