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I find this perspective a bit baffling. Have people forgotten how the artifice of fiction works? The idea that what we see on-screen has to represent the literal truth of the fictional universe, hidden-cameras style, in every detail, is a very modern idea and a pretty dumb one. It's how you get people making convoluted theories about code-names and plastic surgery to explain how James Bond turns into a different guy in-between movies. It's just a recast, bro. The 'real' James Bond looks neither exactly like Sean Connery nor exactly like George Lazenby. They're actors. Stand-ins. Race-blind casting in historical dramas works in the same way. A black actor is playing a character who, "in-universe", the audience is expected to understand wasn't actually black.
If you find this sort of thing immersion-breaking, fair enough. I certainly understand the appeal of television which leans really hard into hyper-researched realism; Rings of Power must particularly rankle because the Jackson films were built on this sort of thing. But complaining that black RAF pilots are "historically inaccurate" makes about as much sense as complaining that if Kermit is supposed to be a frog, he shouldn't look like he's made out of felt.
I think it's a combination of a few things
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So there is no distinction between fantasy and a straightforward historical drama for which factual depictions are expected? You don't think an East Asian Cleopatra would be massively distracting and rightly so? Or that a morbidly obese Marilyn Monroe would be a non-starter?
James Bond and LOTR. Both are fantasy.
Perhaps there historically has been
(although people sure didn't use to shy away from casting John Wayne as Genghis Khan). I am simply saying that the pro-race-blind-casting position is to reject the expectation of realistic depiction; not to surrender historical accuracy itself. The smart pro-race-blind-casting argument isn't "you should be allowed to make a movie where Cleopatra is canonically Chinese" but "you should be allowed to make a movie where Cleopatra, a Greek woman in-universe, is played by a Chinese woman". i.e. you should look past the fact the actress in Chinese in the same way you look past the fact that she's speaking modern English instead of subtitled Ancient Greek.I sympathize with saying that this is a distracting burden to place on the audience. But people keep complaining "but Cleopatra wasn't Chinese. casting a Chinese Cleopatra would be inaccurate", and that is the position I am trying to defeat. "Cleopatra is canonically speaking Ancient Greek, but the audience doesn't understand it and the actress can't pronounce it properly anyway, so we'll depict the dialogue in (non-diegetic) modern English" -> "Cleopatra is canonically Greek, but Chinese actors need jobs and Hollywood doesn't make that many meaty historical dramas about Chinese history, so we'll cast a (non-diegetically) Chinese actress as Cleopatra".
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I look forward to seeing an Asian Cassius Clay and a white Idi Amin.
The conventions of movies and TV are that your actor should look like your character as best as you can; unlike in live theatre, race-blind casting isn't typically a thing. Of course there's a lot of latitude -- Naveen Andrews isn't Iraqi but they can get away with casting him as a member of the Iraqi Republican Guard because the audience doesn't know an Indian from an Iraqi anyway. It doesn't extend to filling WWII-era London with black people or making a remake of Roots with half of the African characters looking like Norwegians.
You can argue that the convention ought to be broken, but then you have to deal with what I noted in my first sentence and the Roots remake -- you also have to justify making it work one way only.
Well, that's where the usual affirmative-action argument comes in - "black actors deserve as many job opportunities and chances to shine as white actors, and they won't get them unless you go for race-blind casting and compromise on the convention of casting for physical resemblance". Notably, this argument works even without ascribing racist animus to any casting director - it's just an emergent consequence of e.g. most historical dramas being based on western history.
And you can certainly reject that argument if you want, for all sorts of reasons. I don't buy it all the way myself (I personally don't find race-blind casting distracting, and would encourage more productions to use it if it were up to me; but equally, if a director is really committed to a lifelike historical vision, I think that's their prerogative and it doesn't make them a racist, which is a hot take these days). The point I wanted to make is just that "the convention ought to be broken" is the serious pro-race-blind-casting position, which means the endless arguments about the plausibility of black WWII pilots or black Hobbits are a distraction. If they want to be taken seriously - and granted, that is an uphill battle to an unfair degree - retractors need to ask more questions like "Is it detrimental to a film's artistic worth for a white WWII pilot to be portrayed by a black actor?", and to make fewer snide comments about the apparent population genetics of the Ring of Powers Shire being implausible, which is, again, missing the point on a level with complaining that a Muppet doesn't look like a real barnyard animal.
I think the point is precisely this. Yes, it is.
If the film is creating a dramatic version of a historical event, I believe it's fundamentally important to try and nail a depiction of the time and place -- including important demographic features like race. Hoffmeister's point is that putting black actors in the shoes of white historical figures robs the white people who actually did those things of credit, and gives it to people from another background, which distorts people's understanding of what history was like, in a way that would never be tolerated if it happened in the other direction -- for good reasons.
I don't think people should be getting their opinions of the racial dynamics of the past from Hollywood, but nevertheless they do, and it's important that people not distort history unless they have an explicit artistic reason to do so, and "we would like to hire more black actors" is not an artistic reason, it's an HR reason, and a political reason.
I'm as angry at dramatizations that mislead in terms of plot and storytelling as I am about racial features, I just think the race-swapping is a uniquely silly element that's not about Hollywood being sensational -- which is something you can make an artistic argument for, however weak -- but about it being political. I agree with you that people should be able to make race-swapped movies about historical figures if they want, particularly if they have an artistic vision for it, but that's not what's happening and it's not applied fairly.
That's my view on the RAF situation -- and the critical point about this is that your comparison to Kermit is totally inapt, because Kermit the Frog isn't real, and the RAF pilots who save Britain from German bombers, and the British victims of the Blitz, were very, very real. We're talking about historical events that caused suffering and generated heroism among real people, in the real world. Titanic, for instance, is an interesting one -- and it's telling that this major film depicted the Titanic's passengers as very white and aimed for a realistic depiction of the dress and style of the period, even as it showed a love story that never happened.
Again, people shouldn't get their history from Hollywood dramas. But they do.
You wrote this:
It's certainly a modern idea, but so is the motion picture! "What we see on-screen" as a concept is very new, and so of course the ideas that exist surrounding it are new!
What people are responding to is the artistic concepts that have developed in response to a novel media; the motion picture has tropes, values, and consistent patterns as an artform, and violating those patterns involves a certain amount of intention. If people violate them to explore artistically, that's cool. They're not doing that, and it's detrimental to the artistic value of a film that they aren't.
What are those patterns?
Hollywood goes out of its way to depict the world -- real or imagined -- as convincingly as possible. They invest in massive CGI scenes to give people the impression that spaceships can travel faster than light. They burn render farms at full utilization to convince viewers that a beat-up old camero you see on the street could actually be a giant humanoid robot from the planet Cybertron. They have invented all manner of prosthetics to make Klingons from the planet Qo'noS seem plausible, and to convince people that Alex Murphy died and became a cyborg.
Your point that "what we see on-screen has to represent the literal truth of the fictional universe" is simply how Hollywood operates. That's what directors love about film! It's what actors are challenged by! It's why special effects are such a fascinating industry! And it's the unique blessing of the camera and the editor: the ability to carefully curate the experience to put the audience in the world as convincingly as possible. It's why people are enchanted by movies!
Pixar used to make fake bloopers for their movies -- yes, their animated movies -- because they knew that this enhanced the audience's feelings that what was happening on-screen was real, that the characters were, in a sense, "actors" in a live-action movie. That's how devoted Hollywood is to convincing people of the absolute reality of what's on screen!
What you're talking about, with "black actors can play white Hobbits", well, I simply do not agree in any way that this is the actual belief system of race-swapping casting. The point is that the Hobbits are themselves black, and always were. What you're arguing is not a steelman of the real views, it's just your own views that you're attributing to them. Which is fine! I like your views a lot better than theirs! But it's just not their views, and you're doing your own understanding, and your argument's strength, a real disservice to say that they are.
Actually, what you're talking about sounds like a play, which is a medium that grew up in a time of thespian scarcity and often acting troupes that had to make the best with the members they had. Obviously female roles were often played by men in certain time periods!
Plays require audiences to submit to what you call "the artifice of fiction" more intensely. That's the unique artistic opportunity of the play. But note that race-shifting historical figures in plays today is often an explicit artistic choice, not a "we chose the best actor for the role": Hamilton is exhibit A of this. Crucially, in Hamilton, there was an artistic purpose (however good or bad) for the race-swapping, and no one was under the impression that George Washington and Alexander Hamilton weren't white. With many historical films, that just isn't the case, and understanding of the historical figures' backgrounds are less ubiquitous.
But the artifice of fiction, as you describe it, was a time- and medium- based limitation of the theatre that audiences understood. In the world of Hollywood as it exists, to avoid making "what we see on-screen" different from "the literal truth of the fictional universe" is to violate the expectations, schemas, and assumptions the audience brings to the medium. That can be a fertile ground for artistic exploration! But you're not arguing that race-swapping is occurring for artistic reasons. You're arguing it's occurring for political and economic reasons -- and that the actual artistic vision is irrelevant to who people see on screen! That's not Hollywood's way.
But, I'll make you a deal: when Hollywood makes a Transformers movie where some guy just goes off-screen and goes, "bur-cha-church-cha-cha-ba-ba-ding-ding-church" and the frame cuts from a semi-truck to a guy in a haloween costume of Optimus Prime, we can talk about race-blind casting of historical figures and characters from tightly-constructed fictional universes.
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No, it isn't. It varies between "the convention ought to be broken but only in casting in the correct direction in the progressive stack" and "we aren't breaking the convention, there really were all these black people in Britain who were covered up by racist historians" (to be fair the latter was Dr. Who).
Yes, but I parse this as "the convention ought to be broken. separately, we should introduce a whole new convention about never making casting decisions that reduce the pool of roles available to POC actors". The reason a white actor playing a historically black character would be lambasted is not that it would break the norm of physically-realistic casting; the outrage you would get in such a situation would very much be rooted in "how dare you take this part away from deserving black actors".
This is a bad parse. The convention is not being broken for reasons separate from "woke" concerns. And it's not all about the well-being of the POC actors either; part of the point is to portray more POC characters.
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You have chosen an especially poor example with Rings Of Power, because it belies either an ignorance about the purpose behind Tolkien’s work, or else an intentional disregard for it. Tolkien’s Middle Earth stories are intended as an ersatz mythos for the historical peoples of the British Isles; the various peoples and factions of the world are rough stand-ins or symbolic idealizations of the various ethnic groups and their myths which have coalesced into the modern (white) peoples of England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland. (And, by extension, the Celtic and North Germanic peoples of Continental Europe.) Gondor as a rough analogue for Roman-Celtic Britain, Rohan as the horse-obsessed Anglo-Saxons, Elves as the remnants of the pre-Aryan Neolithic peoples, etc. To the extent that this matters to you, it should matter that the actors involved at least plausibly physically resemble somebody belonging to, or descending from, those peoples. It matters that they’re white in a way that it doesn’t matter if the actors in a Star Wars film are white.
You dodged Nybbler’s pretty incisive point about a non-black actor playing a historically black individual. If a director set out to make a Harriet Tubman biopic and chose to cast Saiorse Ronan in the title role, there is no amount of “she just really crushed the audition, and I’ve always wanted to work with her” that would suffice to excuse what would be (correctly) interpreted at a slap in the face to black Americans. They own Harriet Tubman’s legacy in a way that white people obviously don’t. She means something to them, it’s important for them to see themselves in her, and pretty much everybody understands that.
So then the question is, are white people allowed to own any historical figures or stories of their own? Is it right and fair for white British people, a great many of whom are directly descended from RAF pilots, to expect that a casting director honor the reality of what those men looked like, sounded like, etc.? Is it fair for Brits to want to see themselves reflected accurately on screen? What about their fictional/mythical but still important figures? King Arthur? Sherlock Holmes? Jeeves and Wooster? Mr. Darcy?
I expect that your answer might be, “Sure, but that doesn’t mean any individual casting director has any obligation to care about that.” But I don’t think you actually believe that. I think you recognize that there is an explicitly redistributive aspect to modern race-swapped casting. A desire to make up for past wrongs and throw a bone to non-white actors who’ve had a relatively rougher go of it than their white companions. Isn’t that why you would “encourage” directors to keep doing it if you had the power to do so?
This is expressly incorrect.
If you open up your copy of The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien writes in the appendices that the Rohirrim do not resemble the Anglo-Saxons:
He represents the language of Rohan as old English in order to express its linguistic relationship to the common speech spoken by the hobbits, which he represents as modern English, but he says clearly that the folk of Rohan do not especially resemble the ancient English otherwise.
Likewise for Gondor, note Tolkien's Letter #294, where he is responding to and criticising the draft of an interview of him for the Daily Telegraph:
Tolkien analogises the return of the king to Gondor to the re-establishment of the Holy Roman Empire, with its capital in Rome. It seems to me that this would make Gondor or Minas Tirith the proper analogue to Rome itself, or Italy more generally. This seems supported by his intention that Gondor is, in terms of latitude, somewhere roughly between northern Italy and Greece or western Turkey.
I agree that The Rings of Power is garbage and that, in general, actors should be cast who plausibly resemble the characters they are intended to portray, but I want to nitpick that your claim about Tolkien's intentions here is just false.
I really appreciate this comment, because it reveals that I have put too much trust in commentators who are either extrapolating from incomplete information, or simply grasping at straws. I should have used more humility before speaking confidently regarding a topic about which I lacked sufficient direct knowledge!
To be fair most visual adaptations I've seen of LotR go pretty hard on Anglo-Saxon Rohirrim, and all the white horse imagery makes it tempting. Nonetheless I think it would be just as reasonable to present them as something more Scythian, which would fit well if you're inclined to a more Byzantine vision of Gondor - the eastern/southern half of the great empire of antiquity, its western/northern cousin long since fallen, but still holding out and serving as a bulwark against the east. I have seen people draw comparisons between the Black Speech and Turkic languages before. I could also see maybe a comparison between the Rohirrim and the Cumans?
At any rate, the Rohirrim are clearly fair of skin and fair of hair, so that would definitely constrain my casting of them.
I should also say, to be fair, you are correct that one of Tolkien's motives was to create a kind of mythology for England. Here's Letter #131:
So my nitpick does not pertain to this motive in any way. It's only that I don't think this motive constrained Tolkien to depicting places geographically analogous to England. I suppose this is inevitable; any fair reflection of the historical or mythic consciousness of England qua England must surely also include a sense of Europe, or of the lands to the south that have, for better or worse, shaped England's history and identity.
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No. You are still missing the point I was trying to make. By all means, perhaps it matters that the characters are white. My argument is that (the pro-race-blind-casting position is that) it shouldn't matter if a character who is theoretically white within the story is played by an actor who is visibly black. This is precisely what I meant about Hobbit genetics being neither here nor there to the debate: I am not denying that the Hobbits are meant to be white. I am saying that you can cast a bunch of black actors as white Hobbits.
Well, yeah. Notably, however, this is a very different argument from it being wrong because Saiorse Ronan is physically too different from the historical Tubman and casting her would be unrealistic. The outrage would be rooted in the racial politics of denying a job from some other, black actress who rightfully "deserved" it more than a white actress ever could. If, say, a black actress with dwarfism were to be cast as Harriet Tubman, this would scarcely be more physically accurate than casting Saiorse Ronan, and yet I predict you'd see much fewer complaints.
(Also, in an ideal world, I, for one, believe a director who sincerely wanted to make that movie for the reasons you ascribe to him ought to be able to make it and not be branded a racist for having made it. That's neither here nor there because I'm trying to steelman the pro-race-blind-casting position as it actually exists, not mount my own argument, but I thought it would be worth clarifying so we know where we stand.)
Indeed I do, and I've recognized it explicitly in this thread.
Even in cases where it doesn't really matter what race the characters are, like The Little Mermaid or Ghostbusters, it's usually a red flag for a lazy retelling where the film makers are going to respond to criticisms about how lazy it is by whining about racism.
Something like Bridgerton is in the middle, where they acknowledge what's going on, that it's historical revisionism, and people think that's fun. I haven't watched it to see if it's any good or not.
Bridgerton came into my thoughts. I would put that with Hamilton where they made a historical situation multiracial because that was a vision for the story, and no one’s under the impression that they’re depicting a realistic vision of the past.
I've seen people stating they essentially believe Bridgerton's portrait of the period is racially correct, even if they acknowledge that the queen figure doesn't exist.
Well, that sucks. People really are getting their history in all the wrong places.
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Are you saying that when we see black actors on the screen or the stage, we should imagine they are actually white (if the characters are supposedly white)?
I am not sure if you're trolling or serious.
Like, first of all, are you proposing that this is actually the intent of casting black women as Viking leaders and black people as elves and hobbits? Like, the director was thinking "This black actress is actually playing a white Swedish man, but she really nailed the role and the audience will get that she's actually supposed to be a white man? And the audience watching black elves and hobbits will just imagine them being white?"
I think that is extraordinarily unlikely. I don't think anyone from the director to the actors were actually thinking that, and they certainly didn't intend the audience to think that, and imagine if anyone did say "Actually, their characters are really white." That would... not be accepted. It would be black erasure. It would be white fragility for being unable to imagine characters as anything but white. It would #hollywoodsowhite and white supremacy. Come on.
There is a thin argument to be made for affirmative action in casting, and likewise a thin argument based on historical inequity to say "It's okay to cast a black actor as a historically white character but not okay to cast a white character as a historically black character." I don't really agree with this (I think some roles don't matter much - a black James Bond, sure. A black King Arthur? Please. Hamilton was a special case where casting everyone as black was intentional to make a point) but I get why the one provokes outrage and the other we're just supposed to accept.
But when you go all-in on detaching race and physical appearance from any kind of historical or fictional verisimilitude, but only ever in one direction, that doesn't seem like affirmative action, that seems like a fuck you that they are basically daring you to object to. I am not fond of the frequent alt-right claims of "humiliation rituals," but goddamn if this doesn't feel like it.
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Buddy… appearance is part of acting. One uses one’s physical body to portray actions, emotion, intent, etc. This is also why we use costuming and make-up to alter actors’ appearances to better fit the story we’re attempting to tell. The hypothetical “steel-manned pro-race-blind-casting advocate” would readily acknowledge the absurdity of making a Pride and Prejudice film in which one of the actors (and only one) decided to wear a Led Zeppelin t-shirt and cargo shorts while the rest of the actors wore period clothing. The only artistically-defensible reason to do so is if one were trying to make some sort of meta-commentary. And sure, I could definitely imagine an artfully-done version of this, intentionally poking at the conventions of filmmaking and storytelling, forcing audiences to confront their own expectations, etc. That’s its own genre, though, and is obviously very distinct from genres in which verisimilitude is valued and important.
What you’re failing to grapple with is the distinct expectations that separate different genres. The Muppets can get away with what they do because they’re in a specific genre in which verisimilitude does not, and cannot, exist as an expectation. There are no real-world analogues for talking frogs and green furry guys who live in trash cans. The conventions of the genre have specific demands and expectations, and the audience is already bought into them. What you’re now asking audiences to do is alter their expectations such that all genres throw out previous expectations of visual verisimilitude, and adopt ones closer to madcap puppet comedy. And you don’t seem to have a coherent artistic reason why, since you don’t seem to have properly internalized why so many genres had that expectation in the first place.
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