How "woke" are movies really?

Cafe Society
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Yes, I left out a word.

By the 1940s a number of black entertainers were famous enough to be considered for musicals. So singers and dancers got spectacular musical sequences equal to those of white performers. Since musicals in that era didn’t use the music to drive the plot, but used the plot as an excuse for a series of music videos (sometimes excerpted for soundies), the numbers that featured black performers could be cut without any effect on the picture. These numbers carefully excluded white performers so southerners wouldn’t miss any of their time on screen.

These pictures were essentially a genre of their own and had little to do with standard dramatic or comedic films, whose servant characters weren’t cut. (Of course, there were always some fuzzy boundaries.)

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I’ve read claims other places online that movies are “woke” if any cast member is a different race than what is first expected, if any woman is cast for any other reason than being a “10” who is universally f-able to a avg straight white man, if anyone is lgbtqia+ without it being explicitly stated in whatever source material, and similar. Every movie could star a straight white man and a white supermodel as his love interest, and the people looking for “wokeness” under their beds could find something objectionable.

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TV, not a movie, but you can see the same thought processes at work on this very board, never mind other places. Neither uses the word “woke” itself, but the thrust is the same.

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It hasn’t got one damn thing to do with “woke”, it is bad casting. I don’t care about the physical characteristics of casting if it isn’t important to the character. For instance, the recent, horrible Discworld Watch series. I didn’t care that Sybil was black. I didn’t care that Carcer was black. Neither of those mattered. But Cheery being more than 6 feet tall? I had a big problem with that. Even in comic adaptations where you have actual visual representations of characters I don’t care about unimportant race swaps. Tulip in Preacher being black? No problem. But yes, I do think that having Death in Sandman being anyone other than a very pale Goth is just shitty casting. And I don’t mean just a caucasian person, I mean someone painted up like a geisha. You can attempt to smear me as some right-wing racist as much you wish (you do that at the drop of a hat here anyway) but I know who I am outside of your simplistic jabs.

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Sure, whatever you say…

…and your opinion on appropriate casting matters more than Neil Gaiman’s because…?

How is being pale important to Death’s character?

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Because the paleness is a play on Death as the psychopomp of the skeletal Grim Reaper.

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I don’t have a horse in this football match, never having read a Sandman comic, but the association between death and a sun-bleached human skull is not a new concept.

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But Gaiman’s Death is already a deliberate subversion of most of the characteristics of the traditional Grim Reaper -young, female, warm and kind. Making her not pale is just a step further in that trend. It’s therefore a better casting than leaving her pale.

Also, I don’t think you’re using psychopomp correctly. Death is a psychopomp regardless.

Gaiman is a huge fan of reworking his earlier stuff. This is completely on-brand for him.

Death in The Sandman is in no way a sun-bleached human skull.

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This is what Death looks like in the comics. Beyond merely “a white person”.

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BTW, this is what Neil, Himself has to say about the casting:

“I give zero fucks about people who don’t understand/ haven’t read Sandman whining about a non-binary Desire or that Death isn’t white enough.”

and

"Someone who could speak the truth to Dream, on the one hand, but also be the person you’d want to meet when your life was done on the other. And then we saw Kirby Howell-Baptiste’s (she/her) audition and we knew we had our Death.”

He clearly cares more about character than colour. And it’s his damn character, so he is right (Death of the Author be damned)

emphasis mine

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So do you think that way about all decisions made by creators of characters? For instance, do you think that Greedo shot first and said “Maclunkey” as he died? Is the opinion/interpretation of the content creator the only one that matters and that of the content consumer doesn’t?

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Yes

Depends on which version I’m watching. But nowadays, yes, he did. That’s what the historical records show.

Although this is a terrible analogy, because Gaiman is NOT recalling all copies of the comic and issuing new ones with a PoC Death rendering the original hard to get. The comics are still in print, last I checked.

The TV show is a new thing. That’s a great thing.

It’s not the only thing that matters, but it is overwhelmingly the most important thing.

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You say that without having seen it. Maybe it will be horrible (irrespective of the casting). Good Omens was pretty good, but American Gods was godawful. So I’m not going to assume that a Gaiman adaptation is going to be good, even if Gaiman is attached to it.

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Pretty much. What maybe exacerbates it is that movie producers, in an effort to LOOK progressive, will sometimes jam “not a straight white male” or “look, a gay couple!” characters into the mix in a way that isn’t well integrated into the story and is often astoundingly, obviously a case of “look at us we’re ALLIES!!!1!” They are rarely actual glimpses of lives led by people who don’t look like Ryan Reynolds.

Well made movies that present such honest stories, like “Moonlight,” don’t get called “woke” because, well, they’re not. “Moonlight” was just about a gay black kid. A normal woke Hollywood movie would have told a story about a Ryan Reynolds type while shoehorning in a gay black kid as a supporting character Reynolds could save.

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I don’t have to see it to consider its mere existence a great thing. I’m not saying the thing itself is a work of art for the ages, that’s very much up in the air.

I’m saying the fact that multiple interpretations across various media exist, and that the work is evolving and updating, is a great thing in-and-of-itself.

My mileage varied.

ETA: I think I’m only going to continue discussion about The Sandman, specifically, in its own thread, I feel talking about a TV show that has its own thread here will get a bit hijack-y

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Well, as a start, there seems to be a lot more people of not conventional beauty in commercials than ever before. Like the lady who’s cursed to always wearing glasses. It’s like a Twilight Zone episode: she takes off her glasses, and another pair materializes.

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Haven’t seen it, but glasses have been a pretty standard fetish for a very long time, with the trope that the nerdy girl takes off her glasses and lets down her ponytail, and is now ready to be a runway model.

Was the girl in the commercial actually unattractive, or did she just wear glasses?

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You be the judge:

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She’s a bit older, so that’s a slight deviation from the perfect body, but she’s an attractive older woman. I know little about thyroid eye disease, but such conditions typically are more common in older folk, so she’s probably representative of a potential customer for this drug. Perfect teeth, no visible scars or birthmarks, good hair, and certainly wearing makeup. I don’t have sound, so I can’t comment on her voice, but I assume she had a presentable voice, and not a tinny or whiny voice. Everyone else in the commercial were also fairly attractive people.

And, like I said, I don’t tune into a show or watch a movie to see people that I see in real life, and as a white male, I can identify with Chris Hemsworth, Chris Evans, or Chris Pratt just fine. The lack of representation of ordinary people doesn’t offend me, and I find it much more meaningful to represent minority and marginalized people than I would in seeing someone that actually looks like me in a starring role.

OTOH, the part that I was a bit less facetious about is the fact that when less than perfect bodies are represented, there is something wrong with that person. Chris Hemsworth putting on the fat suit to show that he is now a loser I saw as a bit of fat shaming. I wasn’t offended, but it did take me out of it for a bit.

Recently, the Late Show with Stephen Colbert had an intro segment in response to some politician/pundit claiming that heterosexuality will be extinct soon, where they featured “The last straight man” in a wildlife documentary format. Now, that guy actually did look quite a bit like me (I even own that flannel), as he fumbled about his life and ate cold chicken wings from a plate balanced on his protruding abdomen(and it looks like he still had better teeth). Still not offended, but I didn’t find that segment very amusing.

Certainly not a hill I’m looking to die on here, and there is a long way that Hollywood and other entertainment venues need to go to adequately represent the people of our country and our world before it makes any sense for a white straight cis-male like me needs to start complaining about “representation”, but I am saying it’s a bit uncool to use unattractive people for laughs.

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Since it’s his character, it is Death of the Author!