Those two cases show that the public is OK with female action heroes in general. It doesn’t show that they’re OK with any random specific action hero being female.
So oblique accusations of racism are okay now? Awesome, this is fun.
BTW, casting Spawn as a white guy is just as absurd. But that doesn’t suit your SJW attack I suppose.
And where was that strawman erected?
Who says Ma and Pa Kent have to be white? Even in 1930’s Kansas, black people existed. Families even, who had friends and farms and jobs and stuff.
It’s not exactly fan wanking to say that the black skinned alien baby was found by a black human family, it’s just how you tell the story with a black actor in the role instead of a white actor. Write Smallville with a higher percentage of black population than would be historically accurate, OMG, inaccuracy in a superhero movie!
None of those changes are a big deal to the story or the character.
Sure.
And you can make a good story about a black Superman who overcomes racism, or a black Superman where nobody cares if he’s black or white, or a white Superman and the story doesn’t have anything to do with race because Earth has been invaded by four-dimensional space otters wearing Kryptonite tap shoes. But they are going to be different stories.
And if you don’t take that into account, the movie isn’t necessarily improved if you replace Meryl Streep with Whoopi Goldberg to do the voice over for the space otters.
Artistic creations need unity, says Aristotle. Thus everything in the movie has to work towards creating that unity. The more you slap stuff on because there isn’t enough work for the ethnic group of your choice, the less you are working for that unity.
As the TV executives apparently said to the writers of the My Favorite Martian series -
The secret of a good story is only to include the stuff that a Martian would say.
The Wild, Wild West bombed because, in part, a black Secret Service agent with his own train and magic gadgets in the 1870s wouldn’t say that - or at least, he wouldn’t survive if he tried.
Regards,
Shodan
Fighting a Never-Ending Battle for Truth, Justice, and the American Way, Against Multi-ethnic Space Otters
Society exists. That doesn’t mean stories are immutable.
A black Superman could 100% work. You’d have to make some decisions:
-Which is more important, a Superman that lives in an America with the same history as real-world America, or a Superman that doesn’t face racism?
-Which is more important, that Superman has a white adoptive family, or that Superman has an adoptive family that looks sort of like him?
Any of the answers you come up with could be really interesting. Black Spiderman 100% worked, and it worked by setting the character in a society that has some racism, but not making that racism the focal point of the story. They could equally have set the movie in an alt-New York where racism had never existed (or where it functioned in a way that didn’t impact multiracial kids), but that wasn’t the choice they made.
It’s great seeing authors make cool new choices, especially when they do so in a way that opens up the kinds of people that make it to the big screen as big heroes.
Humans expect fiction that makes sense? SHAME AND SCANDAL!
Humans want fiction which doesn’t white-wash the history of bigotry? UTTERLY INCOMPREHENSIBLE!
Humans know that Blacks were treated differently from Whites in 1939 New York City? BAN THIS SICK SHIT!
Wow. It’s almost… almost… as if certain changes might, in some obscure circumstances, become… what is it… what’s that term… plot relevant! Utterly amazing!
Of course changing race may be plot relevant. Characters can be written into many different plots and still be the same character.
There’s nothing about the Superman character that requires him to be white in order for him to be Superman. His origin story would adjust to be race appropriate. There’s nothing inherently nonsensical about that.
Of course. However the whole thing becomes a pretense when you say “This is a list of characters who could never be played by an actor who is X,Y, or Z category because of all these other decisions I’ve made about the piece that are really, seriously set in stone because I say so. It’s just an unavoidable reality that X, Y, and Z category actors are unsuited for a vast majority of roles, especially leading ones. Nothing can be done about it.”
The answers to the objections are generally of two types, and both might be applicable—(1) what you’re calling an impediment isn’t really an impediment and you can change the race or gender or sex of the actor and still have your story (2) what you’re calling an impediment results from a decision you made, one that can be changed, so don’t tell me that’s immutable.
Yup. As I said, it’s especially cool watching people make NEW choices, especially when it opens things up.
When someone decides to make the old, cliched choice–“ooh, ooh, I know, I’ll write a fantasy story starring all-white characters and set it in an analogue of medieval Europe!”–I don’t get that excited. When they make choice that close things off–“ooh, ooh, I know, I’ll tell a story about samurai, only instead of a Japanese protagonist I’ll have a white dude as the protagonist!”–I don’t get that excited.
Artists get to make choices, absolutely. But ferchrissakes, make those choices interesting; and if you work in a racist system like Hollywood, be aware of how your decisions affect the lives of actual workers in that system.
Well, ultimately, everything is a choice you made. You could choose to write stories only about four-dimensional space otters, and then race would never come up. But that doesn’t mean that when someone writes a story where race does come up, you can just say “It’s your own fault that race came up; you should have chosen to stick with the space otters”.
Sometimes someone will say that the race of a character is absolutely inherent to the story they’re trying to tell. And sometimes, when they say that, they’re wrong. But sometimes, they’re right.
If you’re trying to tell a story about an astronaut who gets left behind on Mars and has to figure out how to survive for the year or more it’ll take for rescue to get there, then sure, you can make Mark Watney black if you want: It won’t change anything. If you’re trying to tell a story about the astronauts on Apollo 13 who had to figure out how to survive getting back to Earth when their service module exploded, well, now race is at least somewhat relevant: The first black astronaut didn’t fly until over a decade after that, which says something about the culture of NASA at the time of Apollo 13, which is at least part of the story you’re trying to tell, though not necessarily the most critical part: It’d be a distraction to make Jim Lovell black, though maybe you could pull it off, if you were very, very good at it. If you’re trying to tell a story about the struggles faced by NASA’s first director of the IBM operating group in being accepted by NASA and society, you can’t make Dorothy Vaughn white, because that defeats the entire point of the story you’re trying to tell.
I totally agree.
Where we get problems is when people are like, “No, I don’t want race to be an issue for this character, so lemme make him white.” White Superman is definitely a choice, and his character’s interaction with the powers-that-be in Metropolis reflects that choice. Unless you’re writing about an alt-world without racism, writing a story set in, say, the last 400 years (at least) in the United States, race is an issue, whether your story deals with it explicitly or not.
We also run into problems where people keep deciding to tell the same damn story, and as a result, the same damn people keep getting shut out of paid work.
(Regarding the Apollo 13 example) See, there’s where your cultural assumptions are elevating race over dozens of other factors. There are a lot of ways in which Tom Hanks and Tom Hanks’s portrayal of Jim Lovell make him different from Jom Lovell and the portrayal deviate from real life. You’re choosing to draw a line around the perceived race of the actor and make that an uncrossable boundary. It’s “distracting,” not because it’s inherently distracting but because your assumptions about race and it’s importance are making it distracting.
Because that’s a difference that would have been relevant in the time and place where the movie is set.
Like, I don’t know what Jim Lovell’s real hair color was, off the top of my head. But it doesn’t matter. NASA, at the time, would have treated a brown-haired astronaut the same as they treated a blond-haired astronaut. So you can cast an actor with any hair color in the role, and not worry about it being authentic.
But NASA, at the time, would have treated a black astronaut very differently than they treated the white astronauts. So that is relevant, and so it’s much more difficult to work around casting an actor of a different skin color. And it’s not my assumption; it’s historical truth.
Nowadays, or in the near future when The Martian is set, NASA does treat black and white astronauts in the same way, and so for a film set now or in the near future, the skin color of an actor playing an astronaut is as irrelevant as their hair color.
“I got a great idea! Let’s remake Apollo 13, but this time we’ll cast Gabourey Sidibe as Jim Lovell!”
“I’m not sure that casting will work, Bill.”
“What are you, some kind of racist?”
See also: the mime version of Schindler’s List, and a remake of Old Yeller starring Fritz the Wonder Hamster.
Regards,
Shodan
You guys realize this is make believe, right? You can literally make the story to be anything you want it to be?
If you can’t envision a black superman without having to change the story at all then that is a failure of your imagination and a product of your personal hang ups.
You can sit there and say you want your superhero stories to make sense and not white wash history (think about that for second) but the only thing stopping it from making sense is your sense of what is right and wrong.
But…but the Major has PURPLE hair. Scarlett is a BLONDE…
So is Charlize, of course. I knew that.
This is an excellent post. Take a bow.
If you knew Jim Lovell personally, Tom Hanks’ portrayal may have pulled you out of the movie due to hair color, mannerisms, or accent. But 99.9% of the public doesn’t know the real astronauts so it isn’t a problem.
I would argue that some large percentage of the movie going public today has no real idea of how black astronauts would have been treated at NASA in the 1960’s (or don’t really care about a movie’s portrayal) and so a black actor portraying Lovell wouldn’t bother them. The story isn’t fundamentally changed by this one historically inaccurate element.
The Sgt Rock comic book had an African-American soldier introduced in 1961, 13 years after Truman fully integrated the military. While there were some black soldiers serving along side white soldiers in WWII at times (which is when the comic was set) it wasn’t as depicted in the comic. I’m sure it brought some people out of the moment, but to most young comic readers of the day I don’t think they cared that it was historically inaccurate. The writers didn’t ignore race, but neither did they let the past dictate how they told their story.
Wow. I never thought I’d have to be on this side of the debate, defending when it is appropriate not to change the race. But them’s the breaks.
Yes, obviously, you can choose to make a character be whatever you want. But that’s with new characters. This thread is clearly about preexisting characters. So it does boil down to “is their race important?” They already have some story already, and it matters whether or not that story is changed by a change in race. They already have a character, and it matters whether the character will change.
Sometimes, the change just doesn’t really matter. Other times, it matters, but that’s the point. But sometimes it matters in such a way that, if you’re not making a specific point, you might as well make a new character with a new story.
Superman being black? That definitely changes things. Even if we keep him being found by farmers in Kansas, one of two things will happen: he’ll be found by black parents, and then face the racism of a small town, or he’ll be found by white parents, and have the unique experience there. Either can happen, but it becomes the point of the story. It becomes “What if Superman were black?” If that’s not your point, then you’d probably keep him white, where his backstory can remain unchanged. (Sure, you could rewrite the world not to have that racism, but then it will feel like whitewashing racism, so that’s not a great idea.) I would be fine either way.
Now making Hermione Granger black? Meh. It was the 1990s, and she spent most of her formative years in a magical world where the racism is of a different kind. It would be easy for anything that would be different for her being black just to not show up in the stories. Especially assuming she remains middle class, the daughter of dentists.
Super Mario being Latino: changes nothing really. He’s only ever in this magical world, and it can just not have racism. No big deal. The only thing that changes is his stereotypical phrases and accent. Maybe he says “ay ay ay” when he gets killed instead of “Mama mia!”
Archie Bunker becomes Asian? That’s a completely different character, even more so that Superman. Even if you’re wanting to tell a story about an Asian with similar bigotries, you might as well make him a different person. I mean, he’s gonna have to have a different name, even. Why pretend he’s the same guy? The only reason I can see to do it is some stunt colorblind casting, probably for comedic purposes, and I wouldn’t trust that type of comedy to not actually be bigoted.
I’m sure there are other ideas. But surely at least that last one gets the point across, without needing to be about playing a real life person. Archie Bunker’s whiteness is essential to the role.