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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32898 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 10, 2022

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We are all, to some extent, entitled to draw upon the cultural richness of the entire world.

There are caveats, here. If you're drawing on something sacred, or something that has a specific meaning, then part of respecting the culture you're working with can be not diluting that sacredness or meaning by repurposing it for other, more frivolous ends. And in general, especially if you're drawing on people less well known than you, I think there is a moral duty to give credit to the people you are drawing from. Both of these caveats are based on my view of the morality of the situation and you are entitled to reject them if you choose.

There is also the caveat that if the thing you are using is more recent, then it may be subject to copyright or trademark law.

Beyond that, though, I think it's good to use each other's stories. In the specific case of Ariel, I think (a) pretty much everyone is entitled to Hans Christian Andersen's work at this point, and, (b) Disney get to do what they want with their own IP, although I'm unimpressed by the cash-grabbing aspects of their recent spate of live-action remakes.

Disney is, at the very least, legally entitled to the work that they pay people to produce. They may not be morally entitled to do whatever they want with it, however. I, for one, would certainly hope that they would feel some duty to respect their employees' creative work, and would be open to arguments that cash-grabbing remakes fail in this duty.

I do not think that changing a white character to a black one in the course of those remakes is in any way outrageous, however, and it is certainly not more outrageous than the existence of the remake in the first place.

If you're drawing on something sacred, or something that has a specific meaning, then part of respecting the culture you're working with can be not diluting that sacredness or meaning by repurposing it for other, more frivolous ends.

Who gets to decide what's sacred? There are Native Americans who approve of calling a sports team the Redskins or the Braves, and Japanese people who approve of Americans wearing kimonos, yet both those things were opposed because of "cultural appropriation".

I probably wouldn't apply "cultural appropriation" to either of those things. As I understand it, a kimono is not sacred and has no strong restrictions on when it can be worn, and people should go ahead and wear one if they want to. I'm less sanguine about "Redskins" but that's because the term is sometimes considered offensive, not because of appropriation. Different issue entirely.

As I understand it, a kimono is not sacred and has no strong restrictions on when it can be worn,

In Japan, probably yes. But some Asian Americans believe other norms apply in Boston, Massachusetts, the place of their protest.

I'm less sanguine about "Redskins"

I do not believe "Braves", the other example, is a slur.

So where does it stop? Will we get Chinese Ariel, Hispanic Ariel, Indigenous Person Ariel? All those are remakes which could be justified on the basis of Representation.

How about Snow White (isn't the very name problematic?) and Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty and Beauty and the Beast? No reason not to have remakes with race-swapped princesses who are already much too white!

"The Princess and the Frog" was already race-swapped, but at least there they swapped all the characters and moved the action to New Orleans and updated it to the 1920s. Do that with "The Little Mermaid" and you take away any reasonable grounds for objection.

I will watch all of those movies with my kid if they're not total flaming pieces of crap on a stick due to studios forgetting how to write good movies because they make more money stoking the culture war. And with how fast AI is moving, there may be a brief period where we can have all of those tailor made to our own ridiculous preferences on demand, just before we're all turned into paperclips. The real question is what the academy will think of Paperclip Ariel.

And if they made more films like "Moana", based on region-appropriate legends and native heroes and heroines, nobody would object. But if you must have black Ariel but you cannot have white Moana, then there is something more than merely 'making stories with the best actors' going on.

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