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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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