Dumb, Yes, But Fashionable
From the world of cinema and pretentious agonising:
The world is big and different people will be interested in different things, but this seems like a really stupid thing to think about for more than two seconds https://t.co/qWAKhVNMKG
— wanye (@wanyeburkett) June 20, 2025
The implications of Mr Boyle’s modish piety, presumably unintended yet implied nonetheless, are explored quite pithily in the replies.
Among which, the implication that white writers and directors should only concern themselves with suitably pale-skinned characters, carefully excluding non-white characters, and non-white actors, lest they appropriate or colonise something or other.
Likewise, the implication that a white person couldn’t possibly comprehend the inner life of a brown person – these magical, put-upon beings – which itself rather implies that white audiences needn’t turn up to films in which non-white people appear prominently. Due to their alleged incomprehensibility.
Strange basis for a global film industry, if you ask me. But there we are.
Update, via the comments:
Previously in the world of pretentious agonising:
Do follow the link for the inevitable twist and colossal hypocrisy.
And from the comments following which, this:
But no, we must all become twitchy and neurotic. That’s bound to go well.
Amazing the sort of trickery AI makes available these days.
Very few sushi restaurants and grocery store sushi corners and shopping mall sushi bars are owned or run by Japanese*. Where I come from they’re mostly Korean or Chinese owned and operated. These people are no more Japanese than the blond white guy.
*The west coast might be the exception, but only the really high end places seem to be Japanese run. Even Vancouver’s cheap sushi places are run by OAs (other Asians).
[ Adds more ice to drink. ]
FTFY
There goes the price of drinks up again.
I hadn’t thought of that. There’s all that wear and tear on the bar stools.
[ Ups price of drinks. ]
[ Everyone glares at aelfheld. ]
I’ve been sneaking my own booze in for years. No offense but that cheap knock-off three-penis liquor just doesn’t cut it. Let’s face it, hamster penis is no substitute for Cantonese dog penis.
I’ve been saying for years that this place is educational.
I should get a grant, or a statue or something.
India: They have a lot of policies inspired by socialism. For example, it is illegal for a business to simply declare bankruptcy. They must petition the gov for that right, a process that can take 4 years. Meanwhile, whatever assets might have gone to creditors get pissed away. Thus creditors are not happy to loan to Indian businesses. There are lots of other restrictions. It is very difficult to fire anyone, much like Europe, so Indian businesses are very slow to grow and risk averse. There is lots of nepotism: if a person gets a shop or business going, relatives (of which there are many) expect jobs (same in Africa by the way) so entrepreneurs are reluctant to expand lest all the relatives descend on them.
I wouldn’t wish a Danny Boyle film on any country.
He seems to be under the delusion that it’s the role of the British film industry to tell Indian stories, fund Indian projects, promote Indian personnel, propagandize Indian points of view. As a first generation immigrant who’s been treated very well by the British film industry, it would be a nice display of gratitude for him to spend his distinguished emeritus years sponsoring young British talent, but the way that moral debt is usually paid is that resentful outsiders thank their hosts by importing more resentful outsiders.
In Florida it was the Vietnamese running sushi and a few “Chinese” restaurants. I had noticed that the sushi places were mostly Vietnamese or Chinese run but it was something I didn’t really notice about many of the Chinese restaurants until a Vietnamese coworker pointed it out at our favorite “Mongolian Barbecue”. Turned out to be fairly common. Then I felt silly and raaaycisss for not noticing. Mostly just silly tho.
[ Peter Sellers Indian Voice ] “I though you said a statute.”
If not a statute, at least a restraining order.
The biggest change in the “Chinese Community” has been the shift from Cantonese-speaking Hong Kong Chinese to Mandarin-speaking Mainland-China-based Chinese. Canada, and I suspect the US, Chinese population prior to the return of Hong Kong were Cantonese Chinese. They grew up with a British tradition and were anti-communist. As a population, they are vastly outnumbered now by Mainland Chinese who grew up and some cases are loyal to Communist China. This is very much an unspoken issue in Canada today.
Also, when it’s fashionable to be seen agonising, tearfully, about popular TV comedies with a “very white legacy”:
Given the nature of the retrospective hand-wringing, and assuming the hand-wringers had time machines to go back and re-do their most popular and lucrative work, you can’t help but wonder how hideously self-conscious, and therefore unfunny, any racial correction would be.
I mean, if you and your entire creative team are so tearfully preoccupied with “representation” and making sure you “do enough” and “do better” about “diversity,” if everyone involved is so insufferably neurotic, it seems likely that being funny would be somewhat sidelined. A lower priority.
Seen in replies: “That ladder I climbed is terrible, the only just thing to do is to immediately pull it up behind me.”
Has Danny Boyle tried smack? As a fan of both Trainspotting films, Ibl think we should be told!
Friends co-creator Marta Kauffman teared up while recounting the show’s relative lack of minority representation
Until I stopped to think about it five minutes ago, I thought all the Friends were living in one big apartment, in which case the producers should have assigned them at least one black and one gay roommate. But that would be mixing it up with The Real World, a “reality” show that started around the same time whose premise was getting people to live together who’d never choose to live together in the real world.
Plausibility requires the Friends sextet to be built from the bottom up, siblings in one case, and relationships with the implicit trust to share apartments or drop in unannounced. Like goes with like, as some whites in those ignorant days of the 90’s were even bold enough to express as a desirable thing.
We now know that it set a bad example that six whites were allowed to be in a room on TV in the 1990’s without a black. Which makes it especially frustrating that a generation that wasn’t even born when the TV show was on has revived Friends on streaming, which would be like 1990’s teens watching the Dobie Gillis or Patty Duke shows. Even though they’ve been given a list of sitcoms with six blacks in a room. Do the work, Gen Z. And if you must watch Friends, look into your heart and ask yourself whether you find the show cozy and aspirational because of and not despite its story world where like assembles with like and there’s no racial walking on eggshells.
It doesn’t appear to have occurred to these Feigners Of Statusful Distress that the appeal and success of their past creations may in part be due to the problematic whiteness that they now see fit to disdain and disavow. If only in the sense that their own hand-wringing implies that any corrective minority characters would have been written in a such a way as to foreground their race as a thing.
A thing we, the audience, are expected to find, or pretend to find, inexhaustibly fascinating. And which in reality is almost always tedious, grating and hackneyed – and rarely funny. All with the prospect of racial issues – as conceived exclusively by hand-wringing progressives – as recurring subject matter, all carefully filtered to the very narrow menu of noises one is expected to make.
I somehow doubt that the hand-wingers would be content with the kind of racial variety seen in, say, The Expanse, which had a racially diverse cast, plausibly, but didn’t foreground race as a thing, and which was all the better for it.
Funny thing: I work with a lot of late millennial/Gen Z types (software, you know) and according to them the reason they like Friends so much is that in the early seasons, everyone is poor, has no career prospects, and is forced by economic necessity to share housing well into their thirties. Because they have no money, they mostly do things that don’t cost very much.
It resonates with them on that level.
Now, software engineering is a very white profession, so that may be confounding the issue. But when I asked about shows like Happy Endings or The New Girl the response was universally that they all had good jobs and were only living together because the premise demanded it.
The People’s Front of Judea have blocked a march by the Judean People’s Front.
[ Quietly fixes formatting atrocity, pours gin and tonic. ]
I didn’t watch much of Friends, but the show was built around roommates. Outside of marriage, a roommate situation carries many of the same concerns “do I know this person well enough to share a home and daily life with?” People pick family members or close friends and even that can be fraught with drama.
This goes for all melaninated people, too. An all black or all Japanese cast for a Friends type show would make more sense than trying to force some hackneyed backstory to explain the token white/black/other in the mix.
Want successful “diverse” casts in a show? Premise it in the workplace with an ensemble cast. A couple of my fave shows from the 80s were St. Elsewhere and Hill Street Blues. Diverse casts without stories that centered race and lectured the audience about it.
I watch fictional shows to be entertained … good story, good acting … if I want to be hectored, I’ll take a college course in anger studies.
[ Shelled, fluff-encrusted hard-boiled egg, mentioned previously, now approximately size of boulder in Raiders of the Lost Ark. It rolls towards Darleen. ]
Tonight I shall be watching the 1985 Joan Hickson version of the Miss Marple mystery The Moving Finger. It’s slower, sterner and much less fruity than the 2006 Geraldine McEwan version, which was entertaining. But I shall be brave.
It’s comfort TV. But with poisonings, tea and scandal, and schemes involving typewriters, gas ovens, and adhesive paste.
#YouWishYouHadMyGlamorousLife
How ironic that Hector should become the eponym for a bully when it was his killer Achilles was the unappeaseably wrathful one.
I miss the days when Popes recognized that sometimes you have to fight.
Full text of soggy appeal can be found here.
And this is the kind of stuff why Indians loathe the Boyle genre of movies, and the image they propagate.
In decades, both in India and among Indian expats, I can count barely two occasions when someone cared or mentioned about caste. If anything, thanks for massive reservations for lower castes, they in fact find it easier.
Take toilets as another example. Just a few decades back, middle and upper class Indians all used them Issue was most of the population was half starving and destitute, and toilets aren’t higher priority than food.
India went from 10% of the population having toilets in 1947 to 80% ish now. Even the lower castes don’t think about “shitting in the streets”, and you only see that in the disorganised urban slums and the poorest of villages.
But that doesn’t make good cinema, does it?
And this is a bit of a gem:
Firstly, Canada?
And secondly, the Indians migrants who come and slog away in IT, medicine, etc in the West come from a wide mix of backgrounds, often from dirt poor families. The Indian higher education system is brutally meritocratic, and many who succeed are the lowest of income classes who just worked very hard.
You seriously need to find better sources of information than Boyle movies or Guardian columns on India.
@S Ike: Thank you for your comments.
I suppose the language barrier is a significant part of the problem.
Then the show may well have flopped. There’s a principle in engineering that the more requirements you add to whatever you’re making inherently makes it more difficult to meet them. It’s one of those “principles” that are kinda obvious, but the same applies to tv show production as well. If you’re suddenly trying to make it diverse then it’ll make it harder to also make it funny, or entertaining. All those requirements are competing for limited resources like time, budget and mental effort.
It’s why so many people instinctively recoil at being told how diverse a new show or movie is; it’s a sign it’s not going to be good, because of this principle.
My point back then wasn’t so much the wealth but definitely the drive and desire. A willingness and skill set to migrate 180 degrees around the world, often on your own or with limited social support, to a fairly different culture, use a second language (yes, English is the lingua franca of India but there’s still a big difference for many), adapt to different customs, etc. When the first wave of Indian IT immigrants came to the US I was somewhat intimidated by their collective average brilliance. By the late 1990’s the quality dropped off to something more mundane. The cream had been skimmed.
Yes, quite often. There’s the suspicion – not unfounded – that the stressing of “diversity” as some unassailable selling feature also means that viewers will be expected to sit through cack-handed writing of supposed political relevance. As imagined by the kinds of people who bang on about diversity and representation. Which, while it may be clunky and predictable, and while it may undermine any suspension of disbelief, will nonetheless supposedly make you a better person.
And frankly, fuck that.
With a dynamite dildo.
I have to say, I find the Joan Hickson iteration of Marple, which is widely praised among Agatha Christie purists, rather flat and colourless. It’s not bad as such, and most likely it’s closer to the novels than subsequent interpretations, but it is much less fun. With a protagonist who’s distant and not entirely charming.
While the more recent ITV series, with Geraldine McEwan and later Julia McKenzie, may take liberties with the source material – say, by inserting Marple into stories where she didn’t originally feature – it is generally entertaining. With some amusing casting choices and a touch of slightly camp knowingness.
Which, I think, actually suits the material.
Now is the time on David’s blog where we juxtapose.
Every single one of the problems I mentioned are happening right now, epidemically, in all major Canadian cities. Because we’ve imported close to 4 million Indians over the last ten years – over 10% of the previous population – and we’re not being selective about who we’re letting in.
My “better sources of information” are everywhere I go.
That is the key.
Re: S Ike and the India thing – I’m afraid you are very ignorant on this topic. Here’s just a few links to information you apparently didn’t know:
https://www.wired.com/story/trapped-in-silicon-valleys-hidden-caste-system/
https://www.zdnet.com/article/commentary-how-indias-ancient-caste-system-is-ruining-lives-in-silicon-valley/
https://www.vice.com/en/article/silicon-valley-has-a-caste-discrimination-problem/
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-03-11/how-big-tech-is-importing-india-s-caste-legacy-to-silicon-valley
Just google it and you can find so many more articles about this problem from all kinds of sources. If you’re going to be smug, at least be better informed.
If only we could have media which more accurately reflected reality.
@scotty0206
Please don’t tell me about knowing about caste based on some press articles and an absurd California lawsuit.
I grew up in India, spent decades there across various cities, jobs, schools, and am not a brahmin or upper caste – in fact don’t even know what caste I am, nobody cares, including my wife who is most likely of a relatively higher caste, but was indifferent.
All those articles, and vague stories about how supposedly lower castes are horribly treated.
The one concrete example though, which is representative of the role of caste in India?
“University of Mumbai, where he benefited from India’s system of affirmative action in admissions for Dalits”
THAT is the only real place where caste comes into play in India – and ironically, in favour of lower castes.
Massive “affirmative ” quotas (at universities, sometimes most government jobs) for them.
And just like black DEI students at US universities, lower caste students admitted to leading universities INVARIABLY come at the bottom of the class – one of the stories you posted is precisely about the resentment of a lower caste student because of this, which he blamed on….guess what? Not the quotas that put him in a place unsuited for someone with his grades and intellect, but the awful “caste system”.
Does it occur to you that alleging castle discrimination, is like alleging racism? An easy way for underperforming employees from “victim groups” to “get even”?
And those stories about some lower caste supposedly”hidden her identity and even used fake names to get work.”?
Nope. There are many different castes, and at every stage, school, college, job, nobody cared, everyone ate together. Across castes, lower and upper. Nobody even knew or asked what caste anyone else was.
@S Ike
Yes, many Indians are perfectly nice people. Let them be perfectly nice in India.