If a white person is superficial and can’t identify with a black protagonist because of the difference in their race, he can just pick any one of a dozen other movies that all have a white protagonist. If a black person is superficial and can’t identify with a white protagonist because of the difference in their race, he’s probably out of luck unless Will Smith made an action thriller this year.
Same thing with gender. Boys always have multiple choices among movies with male protagonists. Girls are lucky when they get one movie with a female protagonist.
This is yet another example of white male privilege.
BTW, I looked at Box Office Mojo’s list of the top 20 grossing movies of 2017. Of the live-action films on the list, I wanted to see how many didn’t have significant nonwhite representation, which I defined as when Googling the movie title, then clicking “CAST”, I only see white faces without scrolling—that’s the first six castmembers’ photos listed. I only found two live action movies that white in the Top 20.
One was #14 “Dunkirk”, which deserves a pass since unless there is an aspect to that historical event I’ve not learned all these years, there just wouldn’t have been nonwhites there. But the other, #19 “Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales”, seems more questionable. I’ve never seen any of that franchise, though, so maybe there’s a reason for it I’m not aware of.
In any case, I believe “Pirates” was considered a financial disappointment this time around, and the films up at the top of the list show that representation is pretty much crucial nowadays. But that still goes both ways, so it would be very risky—arguably crazy—to release a tentpole movie with no white representation at all.
As an example of a white guy identifying with Agent Ross, I present Howard Tayler’s review of the movie (near the bottom of the page; I can’t find a way to link to an individual review):
So you found “significant nonwhite representation”. Good for you. Have a cookie.
But as I recall, we were talking about the protagonist. How many of the movies had a black face in the top spot? Compared to how many had a black guy playing the character who was the white guy in the top spot’s sidekick?
I count one movie in the top twenty: Get Out. Maybe two if you count Dwayne Johnson as black.
And while I can’t connect them explicitly to Dunkirk, during the fall of France there were significant numbers of Indochinese troops (from French-colonized Viet Nam) who gave a very good account of themselves, fighting with such ferocity that the Germans made note of their valor.
A lesson absolutely everyone would quickly forget, at considerable cost, in the future.
There was some discussion of that in the thread here about Christopher Nolan’s movie Dunkirk. There were a lot of soldiers on that beach, and I was not terribly surprised that a movie wouldn’t show the relatively few there who were of color.
A valid complaint. If you are interested in the actual movie score I recommend the podcast Song Exploder episode 131 ‘Black Panther’ where they focus on the construction of one of the theme songs from the movie. I promise you will be impressed.
And of course, as it turned out, rap was actually a good choice, because one of the main characters really did come from a culture where that’s the dominant musical genre, and it’s very relevant that that’s the culture he came from.
Though I still think that combining dialog with lyrics in the trailer was a misstep.
It does indeed. But quoting an earlier instance of your stubbornly making the same error (losing the plot) multiple times does not a cite for your correctness make. (I also corrected you both times previously; this is now the third time.)
Let’s review, shall we?
[What Miller seemed to miss here is that a black kid born in 2010 also has “no end of representation in popular media”, also “including literally every other movie in the MCU” (I haven’t checked this, but I think it would hold up to the same test of the top six castmembers on Google—if not, it would have to be very early ones that failed to). That’s why I posted the list of last year’s top 20 grossing movies, to illustrate that point.]
[This was the first time I corrected you, and it’s weird that I had to, because you were the one—as I look back—who pointed out that Ross’s part wasn’t that big.]
[Second time I had to correct you on this point.]
There was also a cite and quote of a movie review that indicated how Ross was a surrogate for the reviewer, which for him illustrated the importance of representation.
Ross was there to tie the movie into the larger MCU. Remember he met T’challa in Civil War. I can’t read Ryan Coogler’s mind, but I don’t doubt that he had a little laugh at having a token white hero after so many token black heroes.
Not really sure what you guys are arguing about though.
We were having a discussion about the movie *Black Panther *and the characters in that movie. That somebody decided to introduce the topic of other movies:
So I explained to you that what non-white movie viewers are upset about is how rare it is to have a movie with a non-white protagonist. And that white viewers don’t have this complaint because movies with white protagonists are very common.
You chose not to address this point. I’m assuming you realized it was not something you could deny. Instead you choose to pretend that somebody was claiming that there were no non-white characters in movies and argue against that instead.
I, for one, have no problem with getting back on the topic of this thread, which is the movie Black Panther. If you want to continue to have a general discussion about the depiction of race and gender in Hollywood movie, you can start a new thread on that topic.
This is about the movie “Black Panther”, in which Ross is clearly there to provide a character for whites in the audience to identify with (and, yes, to tie into the broader MCU—also true of the South African baddie). And I’m continuing to maintain that there’s nothing “superficial” (as you put it) about their having that desire, just as there’s nothing superficial about POC having that desire in other movies with mostly white casts.
Stories, so it goes, are mirrors and windows. It’s good to have both kinds of stories: those that reflect your own life, and those that show you the lives of others.
White people going to the movies get a shit-ton of mirrors. Black people going to the movies get a shit-ton of windows.
Both kinds of stories are good. If you’re only getting one kind, it makes sense to say, hey, could I get some of the other? Maybe Lord of the Rings doesn’t need to have all the elves be black, maybe it’s okay if Spiderman is nearly an all-white cast, maybe if Bridget Jones’s Diary is all white that’s not a problem; but when movie after movie after movie is a mirror for white folk and a window for everyone else, that’s a problem.
That doesn’t mean that Aunt May needs to be Latina, or that Samwise should be black, or that Bridget herself should be Filipino. It’s okay for some movies to be windows. But it means that, across the field, across the medium, even across a studio, there should be a mix.
So, no, it’s not reasonable to demand a Token White Guy (yes, I’ve heard the pun, probably in this thread) in every movie. Doing that would be as superficial as demanding that at least one of the Fellowship of the Rings be clearly black. Just as black kids DIDN’T have hardly any superheroes to look up to in Marvel movies for a long damn time, white kids DID. A single movie that reverses the overwhelming trend doesn’t actually need to throw a token to white people for white people to have their mirror/window needs met.
Once again, we’re not talking about protagonists here, even if some people would prefer we did (even though this movie has black protagonists). In supporting roles, nearly every tentpole movie is diverse (including, BTW, the most recent—and excellent—Spider-Man movie). And that’s as it should be. It’s just basic, competent marketing, not to mention PR management.
For a movie like “Moonlight” to shoehorn in a white character would be quite another matter. But tentpole movies like BP have boxes to check. That’s just how it is.