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I forget what it is called, but what does this community think about when a movie takes a character that was white or a male and makes it a different gender or race for the sake of it?
To the point of advocates, I was cajoled into seeing the recent spiderman movie and I remember there was a cameo of some black superhero, and all of the black kids in the audience went nuts over it. And it was clear in that moment that there's a compelling need, to some extent, for more representation of x demographic, because, for instance, it can't be positive to grow up watching superhero movies and none of them look like you.
At the same time, I think it's often done in an absurd and borderline incompetent manner. I think there are three basic situations with respect to a character's race and gender. 1. Where there isn't really any implied gender or race, so the character's demographic profile can reasonably be whatever the producers want it to be 2. Where there may be an implied demographic profile, but it isn't unambiguously clear, there is a degree of ambiguity, and it isn't crucial to the structural integrity of the film (for instance, the bond films. The characters have historically been white, but 007 is really just Britain's top spy job and it's totally plausible that a black guy could land that job) and 3. Where there is clearly an implied demographic profile and absent the character fitting that demographic profile it's just confusing and nonsensical.
I don't mind the first 2 all that much, but the third is increasingly common. For instance, in House of Dragons, the princess is married to a black guy. However, he's gay and they have an arrangement where they can each sleep with whoever they want, and as a result all of her kids are white. There's a challenge to the succession claims of her kids, but all of the arguments against their succession are like 'I just have a sense for these things. I just know they aren't her kids' or there will be a quiet and vague reference to the fact that her kids don't look like her husband. But no one is ever just like 'she has 5 kids and they are all white. She has blonde hair and her kids all have curly black hair. Obviously they are not her kids'. Or in the recent lord of the rings show, in the hobbit community they are all white except for two people who are not married to each other, and one of those characters had a kid with a white hobbit, and their kid is white. And the producers/writers never thought to or saw the need to address that. I mean the hobbits are a genetically distinct and notoriously insular group and have been for thousands of years. Even ignoring that a white woman and a black man had a paper-white kid, how is it that in a community that has been self-enclosed for thousands of years only two people are black? Or you can even take Bridgerton (which I confess I have not watched), where one of the lords is a black guy. I mean this is in England several hundred years ago. One show might be a period piece for that same time period and cast characters that are black so they can write scenes that highlight how they were treated unfairly, and then another will go the opposite direction and cast a black character that would obviously have been white and you're supposed to ignore their skin color. Like it just doesn't make sense. Another example that really bugged me was in the Foundation show. I read all of those books. And one of the main characters was named Salvore Harden. His whole thing was that he was super masculine in a conventional sense. And they made his character a black woman. It's just not even the same character. I mean that's a character that they perhaps could have made black (so probably in the second category of characters), but making him a woman was just absurd and desperate.
They don't even try and explain this stuff. They just put it out there. I see the general need to increase diversity in film, but it's being done in such a stupid way and I think highlights the sometimes superficial and low quality thinking that comes with DEI lenses. Like if you google these instances I'm talking about the articles all have this tone of 'to all the racists out there:' like you didn't just make a king of england a black trans woman (not necessarily that I've seen that, but just as an extreme). By all means, write more demographically diverse characters into the first or second categories I mentioned earlier, but at some point there has to be some sort of recognition that there are parameters you have to work within in some cases, most prominently a historical drama.
I consistently feel like the current influence progressives have is little more than the dog that caught the car. I think they have been given a 'lets see what you've got' moment in culture and society, and once the current environment, which is more politicized and emotionally charged and thus does not apply a normal degree of critical thinking to ideas, passes, I think people are going to look back and observe that they really fucked it away and lacked serious recommendations when they were given the reigns. There is a way of doing this shit that makes sense, but that is not the way things are being done.
The responses to this are a little out there IMO. They tend to be 'not seeing diversity in film has no impact' or 'it's not weird for two white parents to give birth to a black child'
It's kind of funny to watch this conversation play out here as I'm taking a break to watch House of Dragons. The guy who would inherit the throne if the princess hadn't ostensibly had kids with his brother, meaning they are the true heir to the throne, is currently laying his case down in court and making the formal allegation that they are not his brother's true kids and when he talks about how he knows they aren't his kids he's just like "vibes are how I know! I just have an instinct for this sort of thing!" Like even within the premise of the show, that a black guy is married to a white woman, they are just so afraid of stating the basic fact.
"Look like you" as in has two arms, one head, and so on? Equating same shade of skin with "looks like you" needs more examination. By the way I had no problem identifying with animals like Simba in the Lion King, even though I never got to see his skin color under all the fur.
Acting is pretend play. Generally there's no problem with acting out the role of someone different from you. Obligatory reference to the ancient Greek men playing female roles all the way back at the inception of theater.
The demand for movies to be visually realistic is quite new too. Obviously theaters couldn't turn the stage into several realistic places within one show, nor could they use hyperrealostic props, so things were anyway much more symbolic and required suspension of disbelief. In such a context, race swapping is perhaps less of a sore thumb. Now that everything is supposed to look hyperrealistic, it's harder to argue for suspending disbelief specifically only regarding DEI attributes.
The problem isn't diverse people popping up in media but the ugly mindset behind it all, specifically that is seen as some revolutionary act, the dehumanizing bucketing of people based on a handful of attributes and patting each other on the back and huffing one's own farts over it.
Film is norm-setting. That's how norms are established and reinforced. I think people really underestimate how much of an impact that has on culture, and by extension how much of an impact it has on the way we perceive the world.
I think the goal of film has always been to be as realistic as possible. That just wasn't possible given the state of tech, and the ability of everything to visually look very realistic is going to have some self perpetuating properties in that if things can look realistic visually they should also be realistic in other ways. If film did not appear to resemble or have a basis in real life, people would have no interest in it. A joke, a plot, is only considered good if it can relate to some extent to the actual experience of existence, even in superhero movies.
Diversity in media is great. But in some cases the demographic profile of a character is relevant to the story. portraying, for instance, a black kid as being the natural offspring of two white parents just doesn't make sense, nor does the expectation that someone suspend disbelief for that to make sense. let's say that's portrayed in the beginning of the movie. If we are supposed to suspend belief we are going to say 'i guess that's just something we have to suspend belief and accept' but then later in the movie it's revealed that the kid is actually adopted and they are on a quest to find their birth parents. You have to see how that's confusing and nonsensical and how skin color actually does matter in some cases. Diversity can be added in ways that actually make sense. I mean, fuck, in the example I just provided, why don't you just make one of the parents black? I refuse to accept that the only way for diversity to added is for it to be forced in almost specifically in ways that objectively defy logic and require that we regard skin color or gender to be the same as someone having superpowers with respect to the expectation that we suspend disbelief.
This also ignores how we cognitively process film. In a given scene we are trying to make sense of the premise so we can then understand the nuances, words, and body language of the scene. We have to clearly know what we are expected to suspend disbelief for and what we are not expected to suspend disbelief for. So there are very clear and sensible places where we are supposed to suspend belief. Like if a character has the ability to fly, yeah we are going to suspend belief in that case, but even that always comes with an explanation of why they can fly. We can't just say 'you were cool with that guy who was able to fly, but for some reason the fact that we made the king of england a black trans woman requires an explanation??'.
It's not that the only form of belief suspension that's absurd is when it pertains to DEI. It's that that's the only area in which belief suspension is applied in such an absurd way. If you are portraying a historical event, or something that occured in that timeframe, it has to adhere to some extent to the realities of that timeframe.
It seems like a pretty far reach to claim that observing that an English noblemen, or a character that was literally a man in the book and whose character revolves around that, should probably be white is somehow dehumanizing. You can't simultaneously claim that we should interpret history with respect to the valid observation that x group of people were not treated as equals during a given time period, and then just seamlessly shift to conveying that group of people in an unrealistic position in a historical piece. You can't seamlessly go from the color of the character's skin being the entire point to belief concerning their skin color needing to be suspended.
In regards to the house of dragons example I mentioned, check out this video clip. Obviously, we are not supposed to entirely suspend disbelief. The race of the character undeniably matters in some cases. Even the guy playing the character was like 'we know they aren't her kids because they aren't white'.
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