Why is it okay to like things?

The title is a little disingenuous—the topic requires a lot more attention, IMO—but I was thinking…

My family has made an annual tradition of watching the Lord of the Rings trilogy over the Christmas holiday break. This year I upgraded the tradition by buying the 4K restoration, which was well worth it—the movies have not looked this good since I saw them in the theater almost twenty years ago. These are comfort food movies at this point. We love them and, although I am personally over them as a film lover who craves novelty, to the point of finding them a bit tedious, the tradition is still a relaxing shared cultural experience with my wife and kids.

Having seen the films many times (and having loved the books as a teenager), the ideologies present in them become more and more apparent and more and more troubling with each rewatch. Not to belabor it, or be dully obvious, but the Lord of the Rings puts forward a breathtakingly conservative, “Rue Britannia” colonialist, classist and white supremacist worldview, which was Tolkien’s worldview to be sure, but which the movies, if anything, only extend and make more explicit. I can’t watch them anymore without seeing this, yet I can say without shame that I still love the movies (and the books) and will continue to watch them and show them to my kids.

I believe it’s inevitable that cultural objects such as works of art (whether high-, middle-, or low-brow, if that’s even a thing to be discussed without laughing) will contain troubling aspects—problematic aspects, to use a term I don’t love—and that our views on these will change over time. And, further, that artists will also often be jerks, or much worse, with the same kinds of prejudices and blind spots as anyone. I still love Tolkien for what his work has meant to me, even though his worldview is very old-fashioned, to put it nicely.

I’ve been thinking about this in the context of the War of J.K. Rowling, in which an utterly beloved popular artist has blown up her reputation and her own fandom by publishing some tiresomely stupid ideas about trans people in the past year. The worldview evident in Tolkien/Jackson’s work is far worse than Rowling’s ignorant transphobia, counted in terms of the larger impact of the ideas so contained, but for a generation of young people who grew up reading her books, her recent public statements have been an unforgivable betrayal of what they presumed were shared values.

On its own, the disappointment is a wholly reasonable reaction. What I don’t understand is why anyone would allow her wrong opinions to destroy their feelings about Harry Potter, as many have claimed they have. Further—and this is the rub for me—why isn’t the cultural response ever about Let’s help this person we love see the error in her views, rather than, Let’s banish this bigot forthwith from our sight and into the smoking depths of hell where she clearly belongs?

I am asserting without explaining, here. And I am simply reacting to Twitter and the various “think pieces,” so-called, that I have read about Rowling this year, without linking to them or attempting to put together a cohesive argument. Sorry about that. This is a much larger topic than I want to get into at this moment, but I hope to return to it at a later time.