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A Defense of Race Swapping in Adaptations
In the 13th or 14th century, an unknown author writing in Middle English decided to adapt the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. This retelling cast him as the noble Sir Orfeo, a harper-king of England, chasing his wife, Heurodis, spirited away by the fairy king into the Celtic Otherworld. It's a fascinating adaptation, taking the Thracian demigod's journey to the Greek underworld, and putting it into terms more familiar to English readers of the time. But for me, the most interesting part of this adaptation is at the end. Instead of the tragic ending of the original myth, the story ends with Sir Orfeo and Heurodis happily reclaiming their place on the throne.
I feel like people rarely put the changing of stories in its larger context historically and contemporaneously. Stories are changed all the time, and it rarely goes remarked upon. Modern retellings of the Greek myths for kids often omit some of the more violent or sexual parts of the stories. A recent example of this can be seen in this segment of the video game Immortals Fenyx Rising, where Zeus recounts the birth of Aphrodite. While the original myth, involving the severing of Uranus' genitals, is hinted at in the dialogue, the game manages to make it about a pearl falling from an oyster. These kinds of santized retellings of stories are so widespread that they're barely commented upon by people nowadays, and they have a lineage going back at least to the likes of Thomas Bowlder's 1807 The Family Shakespeare, which included such changes as making Ophelia's suicide in Hamlet into an accidental drowning.
I have a strange relationship to the changing of stories in this way. I can recall being a kindergartner in my Elementary school's library, and finding myself drawn to the nonfiction section where a kid's version of the Greek myths awaited me. Much of my love for mythology grew from that initial exposure, even if I would only encounter the more adult themes of these myths later in life as I read translations of the Iliad, the Odyssey, and Ovid's Metamorphoses.
I remember being amused while reading chapbooks from the 1600's , when I found a retelling of the story of the philosopher Diogenes the Cynic, though I also found it a bit odd that a Christian sermon was put into his mouth instead of his original Cynic philosophy.
I have a great respect for stories and the storytelling tradition. Stories help us understand the world and ourselves. They can convey important values, or, when written down, preserve the values of peoples and places far off in time. The people on the pages can become both alien and familiar to us, as we read about what they did and thought about so long ago. I find accounts of cross-cultural encounters like Laura Bohannan's Shakespeare in the Bush incredibly fascinating.
But I think our culture has a strange way of thinking about retellings. Many would consider "Sir Orfeo" in some way to be second rate - a mere retelling, and not a very good one, considering it removes one of the "most important" scenes of the whole myth: where Orpheus turns around, and loses Eurydice to Hades a second time.
But I don't share this view. While the musical Hadestown, another retelling of the same myth, might say:
I respect the unknown author of Sir Orfeo for refusing to bow to tradition. This isn't mere novelty for novelty's sake. This is something so very, very human. Seeing a tragedy, and turning it into a happy ending. I love this about us humans. That we see a tale, told for hundreds of years always with the same sad ending, and yet sometimes, we allow ourselves the indulgence of a happy version of the tale. See also Nahum Tate's 1681 retelling of King Lear with a happy ending.
Of course, a great deal of Shakespeare is just retelling stories that would have been well-known to his contemporaries, and of course even the oldest versions of myths we have from the likes of Pseudo-Apollodorus or Ovid or even Homer are not the originals. To me, the fact that we tell the same stories again and again, making changes with each teller is a beautiful thing.
And so I wander back to the topic of race swapping in adaptations. Why is it that when I hear about a 13th century Middle English author changing Orpheus from a Thracian to an Englishman, I feel nothing but delight? Why is it that when I hear about the Turkish trickster Nasreddin Hodja being depicted like this in far flung China it fills me with a strange awe at the unity of the human spirit?
I'm even a fan of changes made to a story for political reasons. I find beauty in Virgil's Aeneid, even if Virgil took some liberties with the existing Greek myths to find a place for Rome, and his opinions on Augustus in the book. Roman propaganda can be beautiful, in the hands of a skilled storyteller.
In the face of stories that have taken every possible form in thousands or hundreds of years of existence, there's something to me a little silly about insisting that Superman's Jimmy Olsen must always be a light-skinned redhead, or that Aragorn was, and can only ever be a white man. The story of Superman is only 85 years old. The story of Aragorn is less than 70 years old. If these characters endure, if your children's children are still telling their tales 1000 years from now, they will take many forms once they are as old as Orpheus is. Once these characters have passed through the hands of a thousand generations of storytellers and interpreters, who can say whether they will be the same. In fact, I daresay they will not be the same. If we could live to see these future takes on Superman and Aragorn, they might seem very strange to us indeed.
Even if I agreed that the decision of large corporations to raceswap well known characters was only made for cynical reasons, isn't that too human? A story that can only have one shape is a dead thing. Books preserve the words of a story, but until they are in the minds of readers, until they are imbued with meaning and given a new, alien shape, one which the author could scarcely have imagined, they are just a graveyard of ink and dead trees.
The problem with race swapping is that people (rightfully) associate it with lazy cash grabs. Characters like Miles Morales generally have pretty high approval ratings because he is an interesting character in his own right and they didn't just make Peter Parker black. They actually put them in the same movie in a pretty creative way and I think most people appreciated that they actually put in effort. But when I see a "diverse" character that is just making Ariel black with some woke tropes inserted in the old story then I make the jerk off hand sign until the end of time. I also think people aren't dumb enough to not realize it's anti-white and essentially iconoclasm as part of a coordinated demoralization campaign. But I honestly have no problem with race swapping in theory. I would have probably watched an Idris Elba James Bond for example as long as they made his back story interesting.
Elba as bond I think is an interesting point. Mainly because most of the race swapping doesn't seem to be for any reason other than race swapping.
Remember when Halle Berry was Catwoman? Aside from the movie being garbage I don't remember anyone caring that Catwoman had been race swapped and that was because they chose an A-list (maybe at the time) actor with talent to play the character. Or when Michael Clarke Duncan was Kingpin? How about Sam Jackson as Nick Fury? Will Smith as Jim West? Similar feelings I assume will resonate with an Elba Bond. How about Morgan Freeman as Red in Shawshank Redemption?
It just feels like regardless of acting ability fifteen years ago they'd race swap Bond to Elba, or Doctor Who to someone with the star power of like Chiwetal Ejiofor. But nowadays they'll race swap the doctor to a third lead on a Netflix comedy. I'm sure he's a good actor but it's just an easy trend to spot where the race swapping also ends up making things cheaper production-wise. The Little Mermaid's black, "who's playing her?" someone who's black. The doctor is black, "who's playing the doctor?" someone who's black, and gay, and wasn't born in the UK. I think it's obvious that it feels different now because they really do it different now and it has a lot to do with agenda pushing or the pretense of agenda pushing to get a cheaper actor.
Catwoman is a particularly interesting example of race-swapping, because her actresses were white, white, black, white, black, white, white, and mixed black/white. The first black Catwoman was Eartha Kitt, in the final season of the Adam West Batman TV show, taking over from Julie Newmar (TV) and Lee Meriwether (movie). Catwoman was white again when Michelle Pfeiffer played her in Batman Returns; then back in black when Halle Berry played her in Catwoman; white with Anne Hathaway in The Dark Knight Rises; still white with Camren Bicondova in Gotham; and most recently split the difference* with the mixed black/white Zoe Kravitz in The Batman.
In the live-action versions, Catwoman has firmly established a pattern of inconsistency on the question of her race. Eartha Kitt's portrayal was still part of the original live-action Batman franchise, and was long enough ago that if it was influenced by politics, it wasn't modern politics. (Plus, Kitt could chew the scenery with the best of them, and the Adam West era was extremely camp.) Berry and Kravitz can be fairly described as continuing the legacy of Kitt, rather than an appeal to Modern Audiences (/echo effect); there hasn't been a one-way racial ratchet, as Catwoman has switched back and forth multiple times; and given that Gotham is a major metropolis (no pun intended), any ethnicity is reasonably plausible.
*Technically, for the second time. Halle Berry is usually described as a black actress, but she's the daughter of an interracial black/white couple, like Zoe Kravitz.
Once again I'm reminded that American racial vocabulary is fucking weird. I have seen Catwoman and there is no way I'd assume Berry was black if not told.
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