I wrote a column a few weeks ago suggesting we had reached
peak craziness. Alas, I was wrong.
Exhibit A: One morning last week I heard the actress Robyn
Malcolm assert on Morning Report that
the role of Gandalf in the proposed Amazon TV production of The Lord of the Rings should be played
by a woman. And not just any type of woman, but specifically by a kuia (or as
she put it tautologically, “an old Maori kuia”).
Ian McKellen did a great job playing Gandalf in the movie
adaptations, Malcolm conceded, “but we don’t need another old guy with a long
white beard”.
Was it a joke? You’d like to think so, but I fear not.
Assuming, then, that Malcolm was serious, we can anticipate
a few obvious problems with her idea. First, J R R Tolkien very specifically
envisaged an old guy with a long white beard when he created the character of
Gandalf. And while the author may be long dead, he’s entitled to respect for
the integrity of his story and characters. He certainly deserves better than to
have them hijacked to satisfy a passing ideological fashion.
You’d think that of all people, someone like Malcolm – who,
after all, depends for her livelihood on the ability of writers to create
compelling characters for actors to play – would grasp that.
Evidently not.
There’s also the tricky matter of explaining how
an old Maori woman would come to be living in Middle Earth – a fantasy realm,
admittedly, but one very clearly rooted in European lore and culture.
That leads us to the most obvious difficulty of all –
namely, that no company is going to spend hundreds of millions employing
Malcolm’s acting mates on a TV series that no one will want to watch, which
would surely be the fate of a Lord of the
Rings that lacked one of its defining characters.
If someone wants to create a TV series with a kuia as its
central figure, well and good. But fans of Lord
of the Rings (I’m not one, incidentally, but that’s neither here nor there)
love it as it is, not as some virtue-signalling thespian imagines it should be.
In any case, why stop at Gandalf? Literature is riddled with
figures who perpetuate repressive patriarchal models. Why not cast a black
woman – better still, a lesbian refugee from somewhere like Sudan – in the role
of Sherlock Holmes? And given that Daniel Craig has apparently tired of the
role, what’s to stop the producers of the next James Bond movie from casting a trans
woman – perhaps in a wheelchair, just to reinforce the sense of inclusiveness –
as agent 007?
Once you adopt the idea that the purpose of films and other
forms of entertainment is to advance an ideological agenda, the possibilities
are limitless. But we know from history what happens when literature and the
arts are co-opted to enforce someone’s idea of correct thinking. I mean, how
many great works came out of Stalin’s Soviet Union? I remember a Peter Sellers skit
that made a joke about a mythical Soviet film called The Seven Brave Tractor Drivers, which more or less sums up what
happens when art becomes a vehicle for ideological propaganda.
I now turn to Exhibit B in Peak Craziness Reconsidered. For this we need look
no further than Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau, who has fallen victim
to the pernicious concept of presentism – the insistence that past actions and
statements be interpreted and judged according to contemporary values.
In 2001, Trudeau – then aged 29, and employed as a
schoolteacher – attended an Arabian Nights-themed fancy dress party. He wore
robes and a turban and had his face, neck and hands darkened. Someone
mischievously (or more likely maliciously) supplied Time magazine with a photo showing Trudeau with other attendees, thereby
triggering an explosion of moral outrage which almost matches the one that
erupted when Austrian president Kurt Waldheim was exposed as a former
intelligence officer in the German army during the Second World War.
The comparison with Waldheim is not inappropriate. Amid the vindictive fervour generated by neo-Marxist
witch-hunters, wearing brownface – a term most of us had never heard until the
Trudeau affair, but which is presumably only a degree less offensive than
blackface – is on a par with war crimes. And no one is safe, not even a
politician who has gone to great lengths to demonstrate his sympathy for
fashionable causes.
It’s impossible to ignore the irony that the very people
Trudeau has tried to ingratiate himself with are the ones who have turned on
him. So it’s true: the revolution really does devour its own children. The
furore should serve as a lesson that even the most impeccably woke politicians
aren’t immune from malevolent trolls.
Obviously wanting to get in ahead of any other
career-destroying disclosures about his reprehensible past, Trudeau then
confessed that while at high school, he had worn blackface while singing the
Jamaican folk song Day-O. A closet
racist, then, beyond all doubt; just one step removed from the Ku Klux Klan. And to think this was the prime minister who
had pretended to welcome Syrian refugees. Gasp! Was there any limit to his
deceit and hypocrisy?
Trudeau completed his own humiliation with an apology that
took grovelling to a new level. But in the feverish orgy of judgmentalism that followed
Time’s story, a few important points
have been overlooked.
The first is that people’s actions should surely be judged
by their intent and their consequences – and I mean real consequences, not the ones that exist only in febrile, highly politicised
minds. Did Trudeau intend to hurt, mock, exploit or demean dark-skinned people?
It was a fancy-dress party, for heaven’s sake. Was any harm done by colouring his face and wearing Arab robes? Only to the
overheated sensibilities of those who go through life looking for opportunities
to take offence. Dressing as Aladdin hardly ranks as a crime against humanity.
Second, who in their past life hasn’t done something they
now wish they hadn’t? Who wants to be held accountable for things they did decades
ago, before their judgment had fully matured? I certainly wouldn’t. But Trudeau's self-righteous tormentors make no allowance for human frailties.
Moral perspectives change. Demanding that people’s past behaviour
conform to contemporary codes laid down by a shrill, Pharisaical minority of
activists raises the bar impossibly high. I doubt that many public figures
could pass that test, and I imagine many lie awake at night fretting that their
past will catch up with them.
Who knows? That Christmas pageant in your first year at
school, when you were assigned to play Balthazar – you know, the one of the
Three Wise Men who was traditionally depicted as black; somewhere there might still
be an incriminating photo. Better track it down fast and put it through the
shredder.
Finally, what is it about wearing blackface that makes it so
offensive that anyone guilty of it in their past is condemned as a white supremacist? It’s only four decades since New Zealanders without a racist fibre in
their bodies sat down in front of the television on Sunday nights to enjoy The Black and White Minstrel Show.
Sure, it wouldn't happen now. But did it occur to anyone then
that it was racist? Was the show intended to be degrading or insulting to
people of colour? That should be the yardstick by which we now judge it. Again,
intent is crucial.
Granted, in hindsight the use of blackface resulted in a
grotesque caricature of black people that is now seen as offensive. Woolly wigs
were worn and mouths and eyes were exaggeratedly big and white. It also evoked
memories of the Jim Crow era, a time when black Americans suffered appalling institutionalised
discrimination.
For those reasons it not surprisingly fell out of favour in
the latter part of the 20th century. But somewhere along the line,
it seems to have been forgotten that performing in blackface was often an
acknowledgment that its white exponents owed a debt to genuine African-American
minstrels of an earlier time. It was one manifestation of the racial and
cultural cross-fertilisation – whites borrowing from blacks and vice-versa –
that left a permanent imprint on American music.
The fact that blackface, however innocently used, has since come to
be regarded as a vile assertion of white supremacy and a potential destroyer of
political careers, even for someone with Trudeau’s liberal credentials, shows how
devastatingly effective the march of identity politics has been – and how
brittle the political fabric of western democracy has become.
