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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   33470 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 10, 2022

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Perhaps the most disturbing thing about the culture wars to me is that I repeatedly see attacks on principles so fundamental we don't even have explicit definitions for them, and then the battle lines that get drawn up are nowhere near that critical issue. Examples:

  • Censorship: in every HN thread people immediately start arguing about whether tech companies should be regulated to allow all speech, or whether private companies can do whatever they want and only the government is prevented from infringing on freedom of speech. Admittedly there is a "freedom of speech" principle at play here that does have a name, but everyone seems to have forgotten that it meant we were supposed to be tolerant of opinions that we don't agree with, which has almost nothing at all to do with terms of service on huge tech platforms. I think Scott is one of the few people I've ever seen address that directly (both in tolerating the outgroup and another article more directly about free speech). But there's a second issue even more central to censorship by big tech platforms: they all claimed to be huge proponents of free speech, gave soaring speeches during the Arab Spring about their high minded principles. Abandoning that is something that should cause us to withdraw a lot of trust and goodwill, even if we agree with their new policies. (Also, suspiciously, the two options people argue about both involve giving government and corporations more power: regulate big tech, or give up on free speech as a general principle. Don't get me started on astroturfing.)

  • Downthread there's a discussion about diversity casting in TV and movies. The most common argument I hear against it is that it's not appropriate for the setting, and the most common argument I see in favor is that people should be able to see characters that look like them. Those both sound fine to me, as far as they go. The deeper issue here only clicked for me when my facebook friend said to a Mermaid-traditionalist "if you're arguing that a Black little mermaid doesn't seem to fit the role, are you going to say the same thing when a Black woman applies to a job?" And I realized, right, the original claim was that Hollywood (mostly implicitly or systemically, less-so explicitly) racistly excluded people who weren't white and pretty. Which sure looks true - I was blown away when I started noticing how many things failed the Bechdel Test. But now we've replaced that with explicit, proudly-advertised activism, yet the battle lines are drawn such that we've just flip-flopped on who's wearing the fig-leaf of "[white/black/gay/trans] Ariel seemed like the appropriate artistic choice". Meanwhile we've damaged two deeper principles: keeping politics out of where it doesn't belong, and actually meaning it when we said that we wanted race not to matter.

  • Also downthread is a debate about whether it's okay to spell out racial slurs here. And I remember the wave of renamings that started with what seemed like a ridiculous objection to "master/slave" used in the context of IDE hard drives, and ended a few years later with those terms actually being renamed in a lot of technical contexts. In both cases the battle lines are drawn along "these words hurt people / replacing them causes more harm than gain". But the deeper issues to me are about injecting politics into places it shouldn't be (same with fast food joints becoming politically loaded), and the notion that we shouldn't taboo words at all. There was a brief period a few years ago when atheism was winning and we were all proud of the fact that we could say curse-words and anything else we wanted without the sky-fairy torturing us forever. Now we've flipped sides on that too.

Ultimately this boils down to two problems I worry a lot about. One is that the whole idea of having principles at all seems to have much less support than it should; people simply don't notice or care as much as they should about flip-flops or even expecting anyone to state or stand by a consistent set of principles at all. And while this isn't a place with obvious battle lines, I've noticed people quietly excusing it here and there. It's not immediately obvious why it matters to have principles! And I think this is why it's easy for people to discard. But it's really important! Principles are what let us be predictable agents, able to work with others who aren't part of our tribe and don't share all our values. That seems, like, utterly critical to any kind of functioning society, but I had to re-derive it for myself because nobody seems to talk about it.

The other is that the principles that people are discarding are so fundamental, so dyed in the wool for civilization, that we don't have explicit names for them or standard answers as to why they should be preserved. I noticed this when I saw JBP proclaim "tell the truth" as one of his 12 rules for life -- it was like, oh, right, that's really important, isn't it? How did I lose sight of that? Things like "words shouldn't be redefined by political fiat", "leaders should be held to high standards of personal integrity", "you should be prepared to explain yourself and lose status when you abandon a principle you endorsed", "don't inject politics into non-political contexts". All those seem to me like load-bearing walls for civilization, and we shouldn't dismantle them just to get an advantage in some other debate.

To end on a positive note, I do think this is an addressable problem. But we have to be quicker to look past the officially endorsed battle lines, find the valuable nameless things that are being sacrificed, contemplate them long enough to describe why they're important, and then defend them directly. That's actually been a silver lining for me: now there are a bunch of load-bearing pillars of civilization I've actually noticed and contemplated. I just wish it wasn't because someone was trying to burn them down.

What are under-appreciated values you see that routinely get sacrificed to Moloch in the culture war?

The deeper issue here only clicked for me when my facebook friend said to a Mermaid-traditionalist "if you're arguing that a Black little mermaid doesn't seem to fit the role, are you going to say the same thing when a Black woman applies to a job?"

Being black doesn't affect your ability to input data into spreadsheets or reticulate widgets. It does affect your ability to be Ariel because Ariel is not black.

I don't think her race was ever an important part of the character. Adaptions aren't always, indeed very rarely are, intended to be 1:1 directly translating every that was described in the source material onto the screen. They aren't real characters; they don't have any 'actual' race.

Indeed, in the excellent TV adaption of Jeeves and Wooster with Fry and Laurie, actors of some characters change between seasons, and obviously look different, but it hardly matters. The Roderick Glossop we encounter initially looks completely different to the one in series 3 and 4, and neither of them are necessarily that close to the description given by P.G. Wodehouse, but I somehow doubt anyone would feel it reasonable to shout Roderick Glossop is bald at their TV screen.

I don't think her race was ever an important part of the character.

It wasn't, until it suddenly was.

As ever, the stock response to "if race doesn't matter, why not make the character black?" is "if race doesn't matter, why make the character black?"

I don't think there's evidence that there was a decision that 'we must have a black Ariel', it's merely that the role was casted without reference to race and the best actor happened to be black.

I don't think we have any evidence for that. The best actor would be one that looks like the character, by definition.

The best actor would be one that looks like the character, by definition.

Not 'by definition' at all. As I said in the original comment, that would only be the case if you intended your film to be that way. Which would be fine, but there's nothing wrong with saying 'the race of Ariel is wholly irrelevant to the story, and therefore I will cast without reference to it'.

Look at it this way; to take one random example, they almost certainly could have found an actor to play Noodles in Once Upon a Time in America who looked more like Harry Grey than Robert De Niro. Does that mean De Niro was in some way the 'wrong' choice? Of course not, that would be a ridiculous thing to say, and it's ridiculous in this case as well. Insert other examples.

If you are intending to portray character X from book Y, the best actor is the one who most closely matches the physical traits of character X as described in book Y. Otherwise, you are not casting for character X, you are casting for an entirely different character that you've basically made up on the spot.

It used to be "doctors and college professors are not women". You're just asserting boundaries for a category without arguing why they should be there. But my argument is that this is the wrong level at which to have the debate in the first place.

  • -11

Ariel isn't a category, she's a concrete character with defined traits.

Let's have a look at the proposed cast:

Halle Bailey as Ariel, a mermaid princess and King Triton's youngest daughter who is fascinated with the human world: Black, the bone of contention here

Jonah Hauer-King as Eric, a human prince whom Ariel falls in love with after saving him from drowning, after which he becomes determined to find and marry Ariel: White (British with maternal Jewish ancestry)

Melissa McCarthy as Ursula, a treacherous sea witch whom Ariel makes a deal with to become a human, which is secretly part of Ursula's plan to conquer Atlantica: White (American of Irish descent)

Javier Bardem as King Triton, Ariel's overprotective father and the King of Atlantica, who is prejudiced against humans: White (Spanish) (No, not Hispanic, born in Spain)

Noma Dumezweni as Queen Selina, a new character for the film: Black (British-South African)

Art Malik as Grimsby, Eric's loyal butler and confidant, who sees to it that Eric finds the right girl to marry: Pakistani (British)

Lorena Andrea as Perla, a new character for the film: Hispanic (British of Spanish and Colombian parentage)

Kajsa Mohammar as Karina, a new character for the film: White (Swedish)

So if King Triton and Queen Selina are Ariel's parents, that means Spanish and Black African parents of Black African-American daughter who falls in love with a white prince, is tricked by a white witch, and interacts with Asian, white and Hispanic characters. Very diverse. The main objections, so far as I see, are that the original Ariel is white with red hair, and they've simply swapped actors for the same parts in the same story with the same plot, and crucially have changed nothing else about Ariel but her skin colour - they've kept her as red haired, in the blue costume, and everything else identifiable from the original movie and marketing ever since of the Disney princesses.

Disney are definitely trying to eat their cake and have it: if they had made a new mermaid with a new Black mermaid called Serafina or something and let her fall in love with an Indian or Hispanic or Black prince, changed names, changed the plot a bit, but most crucially changed costuming so that Serafina is a new character of her own, then people wouldn't be fighting over this. But then they would have run the risk of the new property not being as reliably profitable as the old one, which is already established and has a ton of marketing in place. So this is all about the bottom line, not about "hey let's give little Black girls Representation" (not if Representation eats into profitability).

I think we're in violent agreement here: we're both claiming that Disney is doing this for political reasons. I love that you researched the whole cast to make your point, but they're not being cagey about it at all. I think the place that we might disagree is that I claim "Ariel isn't black" and related arguments get too easily sidetracked into questions of artistic license. I think a better argument is "you're making political casting decisions, you're also doing exactly the same racist shit that was the reason people complained in the first place, just with different races, and we know this because you won't stop talking about it".

The pre-planned focus-group-tested battle lines are about artistic merit, and they'd love it if we argue about "who is Ariel, really?" forever. There's a better argument to have, and it's the one that advocates a world where lefty hippy screenwriters are expected to write good literature, black people are allowed to be mermaids, and Disney doesn't get to conscript half the populace to watch a stupid remake of a kid's movie because that's somehow owning the Nazis.

More the point, Ariel is fictitious.

EDIT: Unsure why the downvotes. My point was that comparing someone's opinion on the casting of fictitious characters to their hiring practices is farcical.

So are unicorns, but we would say that a unicorn with 5 legs and scales is not a unicorn. Vishnu isn't real, but a depiction with 12 snakes for arms and one large eye is probably not Vishnu no matter what you call it. Whether things are real or not has no bearing on anything when it comes to accuracy.

scales

The seaponies and mermares of Seaquestria would like a word.

https://mlp.fandom.com/wiki/Seaponies_and_mermares

But to the point, seaponies and mermares are not considered unicorns.

seaponies

Oh come on. 'Kelpie' was already a perfectly cromulent word.

I look forward to the Icelandic adaptation of Roots.

People often make these snarky comments such as 'what if a white actor played MLK' but it's blindingly obvious that these are not apposite comparisons. Race is obviously integral to Roots, whereas it has no relevance at all to the Little Mermaid. The appropriate comparison would be if you cast a white actor to play a part that was in previous iterations black, but with regard to which race was irrelevant.

Blacks are not uniquely good at getting whipped and following instructions poorly. I'd love to see some race-swapped Roots.

What fatuous remark. Roots is about African slavery; obviously you could make a show about another group of enslaved people set in Ancient Rome or Asia or whatever, but that would just be a different thing. While the characters aren't real, they are intended as a representation of the experience of a group of real people whose race is integral to the story at hand. By contrast, race plays precisely no role in the Little Mermaid.

"Race swapping your fairy tales is okay, but race swapping mine is double plus ungood."

Nah bro, my name is Chinkakinte, and I know kung-fu.

A total mischaracterisation of my position. In general I think 'race-swapping' is fine unless race played an important part in the story etc. So, I'd have absolutely no problem if they cast a white actor to play a role in an ancient African fairy tale or whatever. And conversely, I think it would be silly to cast a black actor to play Lyndon B. Johnson or Harold Macmillan.

I look forward to the Icelandic adaptation of Roots.

Story of Irish slave sold to Vikings 1000 years ago, and story of modern Icelander who found from his DNA test he is of Irish descent and went to search for his home village in Ireland?

Could be good.

Japan culturally appropriated it as Vinland Saga.

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