No Escape From Now
In the pages of British Vogue, Ms Hanna Flint is dismayed that new adaptations of works by Emily Brontë and Jane Austen have,
How very dare they.
Says Ms Flint,
Richness and relevance, and imagination, being determined by race, of course.
I’m not at all sure what historical inclusivity might mean, given the racial demographics of rural England at the time of Brontë and Austen, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Indeed, what Ms Flint seems to want sounds more like ahistorical inclusivity. And whether incongruous, politically corrected racial casting choices constitute “imagination,” rather than a following of Very Modern Fashion, is a question I leave to the reader.
“Why Is The Next Wave Of Period Dramas So White?” asks the headline of the article, with the obligatory note of disapproval. An understood tutting, one presumed of its readers. Yet I’m struggling to picture Ms Flint making demands that period dramas produced in China and set in the Han Dynasty be adjusted so as to accommodate “excluded or marginalised” actors who resemble Jack Hawkins or Charles Gray.
Ms Flint, “a mixed-race woman, of British and Tunisian heritage,” informs us that, despite her enthusiasm for the genre, “I was left somewhat cold by the news that all these remakes had cast the protagonists as white once again.” Yet this train of thought terminates before reaching the possibility that others, perhaps some larger number, might be left somewhat cold by modish anachronism and jarring contrivance.
It seems to have escaped Ms Flint that, for many, the appeal of period dramas is, as it were, a holiday in time – a brief respite from modernity, its politics and paraphernalia, and perhaps even from those “diverse, multicultural surroundings” that Ms Flint feels should be the foundation of all drama and period-specific programming.
Whatever its merits in terms of modern “workforce inclusivity,” ahistorical, racially ostentatious casting does, for many viewers, risk breaking the spell, making any suspension of disbelief more difficult, while shifting the focus away from then and back to now.
Previously and related, on sex-swapping Bond.
What if I want a break from our diverse, multicultural surroundings?
Judging by Ms Flint and her peers, I’m guessing that’s very much frowned upon. There being nothing whatsoever, no detail of any kind, that anyone, anywhere, might find suboptimal about Our Glorious And Flawless Multiculturalism.
Likewise, any reminder that the past – say, the Yorkshire moors of the eighteenth century – did not entirely resemble twenty-first century London.
This came to mind:
Not entirely inapt, I think.
That.
Well, again, those lenses of which Ms Flint is so fond, the ones endlessly reflecting the here and now – or at least the here and now as experienced by Ms Flint – can easily undermine any suspension of disbelief. And it occurs to me that if you’re trying to immerse yourself in a period drama, events in another, quite particular time, it may not help to be reminded, repeatedly, this is not how it actually was.
There can be a tension between politically congenial casting choices and the experience of the audience. In terms of drama, of captivating viewers, this is not a trivial thing.
One might, for instance, contrast the racial diversity of a show like The Expanse, in which just about every shade of actor is included and yet none of it is distracting or inapt. It’s just the world in which the drama unfolds. But of course The Expanse takes place in an imaginary future, not a world that actually existed and whose racial demographics were quite clear and are widely known.
This is all well and fine with relatively non-violent period pieces but if we look at the darker side of history, who becomes the villain?
When I first moved to Knoxville back in 2011, my kids and I got a real laugh from a billboard advertising the Titanic attraction in Pigeon Forge. It showed a smiling Edwardian maid with the tagline “The Titanic – A Family Affair!”
So we started our own imagined exhibits. “The Rape of Nanking – A Family Affair!” “The Black Death – A Family Affair!” “The Holocaust – A Family Affair!” It’s now one of my family’s running jokes – take any page of history involving particularly heinous activity and make it a celebration by adding ” – A Family Affair!”
So, are we to cast Whites as Mongols and depict them raping and slaughtering villages of Blacks and Asians across the Ukraine steppes, not so much as to teach history but to make it more palatable to POCs and their allies? Would the trans-Atlantic slave trade be made “equitable” by switching roles? Actually, in that last example, there was real representation by POC – the West Africans who conducted raids into the interior to capture other Africans to sell to the Europeans.
I is all befused and confuzzled. When is it right and proper and appropriate to cast black people in black people roles, gay and lesbian people in gay and lesbian people roles, etc, and when is it simply the only way to cast transgender non-binary cross-dressing drag queens in Jane Austen period-dramas again?
The usual suspects.
And:
She just wants to eliminate Western culture and Western people, as do most MENA invaders. Conquest and genocide.
It’s not clear what the implicit rules are, or what the reciprocal principle might be.
For instance, the sight of Rex Harrison as Julius Caesar is, to the modern eye, slightly funny and perhaps distracting. Ditto Charlton Heston as Moses. Or John Wayne as Genghis Khan. But the prospect of the Yorkshire moors of the eighteenth century being populated by All Kinds Of Brown And Therefore Noble People, all history to the contrary, is not meant to be funny or distracting at all.
“We rule, you submit.”
The fictional characters in the 1953 version of Titanic are Clifton Webb trying to prevent wife Barbara Stanwyck from leaving him and taking the kids with her, so I guess you could say it’s a family affair.
Although, the Nazi version is, alongside A Night to Remember, the most interesting movie version.
There’s also the question of whether ostentatiously anachronistic racial casting risks making race a thing, an issue, a narrative feature, adding connotations not intended by the author of the novel that’s being adapted.
The race-swapping of Snape in the forthcoming Harry Potter HBO series comes to mind. In the books and films there are scenes – for instance, of bullying – that would risk quite different connotations with a black actor playing Snape. Perhaps this is the intent, something the writers wish to exploit, but if so, that seems a bit of a liberty. Foregrounding race where it wasn’t previously an issue – or the point of the scene.
Flint makes the scold’s bridle a bit of history worthy of inclusion.
If the story is a classic with timeless insights into human nature, why not simply adapt it to another time and place, in Africa, say, where black actors would be appropriate? A good example would be Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood, where MacBeth’s Scotland is transposed to medieval Japan.
Has Madam Flint concerns over sufficiently diverse casting in Tunisia for the filming of those classics of Saharan literature we all have in translation on our bookshelves. Danny DeVito would make a fine nomad in My Camel’s Got the Hump while, after a few Arabic lessons, Rosie O/Donnell in a burka is a natural for the lead in Omar! She’s Making Eyes at Me.
I’m just joking, I don’t give a flying fig about Middle Eastern culture as long as it stays where it belongs. Unfortunately, Flint isn’t joking — she really does want to adapt our literary heritage to fit her woke worldview. She can get lost.
I think she’ll find that it’s being hindrance comes from a dearth of viewers, not imagination.
Jodie Turner-Smith as Anne Boleyn a show of the same name resulted in a 5% audience approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
I’m told Turner-Smith is a good actress, and I’ve no reason to doubt that she is.
But that has nothing to do with the fact that this was one of the most preposterous casting decisions, if not the most preposterous.
But the real wonder of it all is just how many hands, very well-paid, likely expensively educated hands, that project had to pass through, and the blessings of how many signatures it had to acquire before it go into production:
Studio executives, producers, marketers, distributors, actors’ agents, directors, screenwriters, accountants, financial backers.
All those professional media and film people and not one them stopped for a moment and thought, ‘Wait, wait, wait a minute … What?!?’.
The superlative Squid Game is basically a science-fiction South Korean retelling of Spartacus.
Except where the slavery is rather skimpily and not very successfully clad in obscene amounts of personal debt and where the illusion of choice makes it seem like the exit is always open even when it isn’t.
The possibility that I might see the Bennet sisters twerking to some harsh hip-hop from Bingley and Darcy could persuade me to watch the BBC again for the first time in 15 years.
Heh.
I’ve also pondered this when walking past the National Theatre on London’s South Bank.
Because theatre is driven so much by audience imagination as much as (if you’re lucky) powerful performance on the part of the actor, it had never previously once bothered me to see Tanya Moody (a black British actress) play Nora in Ibsen’s A Doll’s House or a South Asian actor (I never learned his name) as Tartuffe in Moliere’s play of the same name and so on and I could give many other examples like that.
You know it’s a stage set, you can see its edges, hear the creak of the floorboards, see other audience members, but if it’s a good production you just get absorbed in it and lose sight of such superficial features.
Except I can no longer not notice that every time a production of a play from the western, anglophone and – for people who care about such things – ‘white’ canon, the cast is always diverse.
This is in complete contrast to productions written by and (or) centred on an ethnic minority community – then the diversity in the casting found in the western canon plays is conspicuously absent.
Some examples:
The casts of Coriolanus, Hamlet, The Importance of Being Earnest, and The Crucible.
The casts of The Hot Wing King, The Estate, and Bacchae (a new/updated version).
(An apparent exception seems to be the cast of The Playboy of the Western World – but then it turns out that’s a production from Dublin playing in London, hence, presumably, the all Irish cast).
This kind of ‘What’s mine is mine and what’s yours is mine’ attitude to casting seems quite extraordinary for a publicly funded National Theatre to take, doesn’t it?
Depends on what nation they think they serve.
As you say, many supposedly clever people must have nodded with approval in order to make that happen. Yet seemingly none of them registered the possibility that a common reaction to the racial stunt-casting might be one of annoyance, or weariness, or a sense of intrusion. A sense of one’s history being… what’s the word… oh yes, erased.
Unless, of course, such reactions were anticipated and found amusing. Which I suppose would imply a measure of spite.
It may be correct that she is a fine actress. I would not know from observation myself. However increasingly when someone I don’t know, especially the media, tells me that something is good, it gives me reason to doubt. Especially anything arty or the least bit subjective produced in this century.
Speaking of spite, from the Guardian‘s coverage of the same:
That’s Lucy Mangan, glibly dismissing those who registered the somewhat bizarre historical implications of the casting, and who felt it pushed them out of the drama. Again, making suspension of disbelief more difficult.
She went on:
But of course that didn’t work. It simply alienated much of the potential audience, including quite a few enthusiasts of British history. Not least because the actual motives in play were replaced by something more clumsy and tiresome.
And hey, who wouldn’t want to sit through three evenings of being reminded, in a cack-handed way, that racism is bad, m’kay?
Speaking of holidays in time, this is the sort of thing that makes them necessary.
Also, note the breezy dismissal of class prejudice as a viable dramatic motive in the modern world. This is done, lest we forget, by a Guardian journalist.
It’s almost funny.
In part due to Mangan being an historical ignoramus. There weren’t any ‘class, sex or religious prejudices’ against the Boleyn’s.
It’s a euphemism for abject, horrifying, race hatred. The very idea of objecting that white actors are playing the roles in a play about rural England in the mid-19th Century is nothing but hate.
No, there weren’t any non-White people in rural England in the 1850s. No, there weren’t any non-White people in the upper classes anywhere in England in the 1850s. If some history nerd manages to find one somewhere, the exception proves the rule. Yeah, bully for you, you found -one-. Hurrah. And all the rest are White Englishmen. Because it’s England. Duh.
We are meant to pretend that Denzel Washington (an American!) can play Mr. Darcy because it’s supposed to be good for us, being that we are all uncultured heathen swine or something similar.
Could British Vogue please hurry up and go out of business? I tire of seeing this sort of hatred in the interwebz. To quote Adam Baldwin from Serenity, “She is starting to damage my calm.”
Prior to 1660 women were not allowed to act on the stage. Sometimes the old ways are best.
The Guardian: All lies, all the time.
I should add that playful casting can sometimes work – Helena Bonham Carter as Princess Margaret in The Crown was not without charm – and ditto the revision of existing characters and storylines. The ITV Marple series, for instance, takes endless liberties, including inserting Miss Marple into mysteries in which she didn’t originally appear. And it works more often than I’d have guessed, sometimes quite effectively.
Though I suspect that making Princess Margaret inexplicably black – or indeed Miss Marple – might be a step too far.
Don’t give them ideas…
Donald Sutherland (an
American!Canadian!) played Mr. Bennet in 2005.As for Denzel Washington: he played Don Pedro (the Prince of Messina) in Much Ado About Nothing (1993).
I saw a production of HMS Pinafore with a black man as Captain Corcoran. Little Buttercup line’s “your poor pale face” was followed with a pause for the audience to chuckle.
It makes me wonder – having never bothered to watch the Black Panther series – how much of the population of Wakanda was depicted as White, Chinese or Indian.
@EmC
Nope. You can’t. You are stuck in this hell with the rest of us.
I’m now trying to imagine The Crown with an inexplicably black Princess Margaret.
Oh, come on. I’m only human.
Speaking of Wakanda, today I learned white boys stole sub-Saharan drums to make Morse code, telephones, and computers..
The mm-hmms are the icing on the cake.
Hard to tell, though, if those are “preach, brother” or “if I pretend to go along maybe he won’t blow up” mm-hmms.
I suspect the former, but still…
What I find amusing is when they DO race-swap characters, but can’t follow on their brave stance. In the recent “Murder Is Easy” (Agatha Christie, don’t cha know), Luke Fitzwilliam is played by David Jonsson as an educated Kenyan traveling to rural Britain. He meets with little trouble, beyond peculiar looks from the locals. Major Horton, who served for God and Empire, expresses regrets for colonialism (as someone who served in the back of beyond among the natives would, if only they were as intelligent as the script writers).
Luke even pairs off with Bridget Conway, played by Morfydd Clark.
The scriptwriter and director book ticked off the proper DEI boxes — Sian Ejiwunmi-Le Berre is Welsh/Kalabari and Yoruba Nigerian, and director Meenu Gaur is British-Indian.
All well and good, and I enjoyed their adaptation … until the end. Luke and Bridget were portrayed as potential lovers, and you expect them to pair off.
Except Luke has to go back to Kenya to help his people. And Bridget, who said she was going to leave the village and travel the world, could not say, “So … if I visit, can you show me Kenya?” And he — despite all the gooey eyes he was making at her — was not allowed to say, like Pepe le Pew, “Come with me to the casbah.”
If it was a white writer and director, I would suspect the R-word was involved. But what do we call it when progressives do it?
(In case you think I’m over-egging the batter, there was also an ITV adaptation of “Sparkling Cyanide” in 1993 in which a black footballer with an explosive temper was the literal boyfriend of the team owner’s daughter. After his cool introduction, he vanishes for the rest of the episode. When said daughter is kidnapped, during the street chase after the villain — we don’t get to see him slide-tackle the dude and use his head as a soccer ball. Again … why?)
There is no black culture in the world in which the behavior of the characters in Emily Brontë and Jane Austen books would occur or make any sense. It is only in the very structured, inhibited, class conscious, and white setting specifically of England that the stories do and can occur. Just making actors “diverse” causes it to not make sense and if the “diverse” actors are true to their own culture, the story breaks down entirely.
Or – or – hear me out… A version of The Crown in which, every two seasons, as the ensemble is recast to show the passing of time, more of the characters are played by black actors. Again, with no explanation whatsoever. So, in season three, Princess Anne would become black. And Prince Philip. And the Duke of Windsor. Until, by season six, almost the entire Windsor family has been liberated from whiteness.
This gin and tonic’s really kicking in.
Fool me once . . .
Still, Nell Gwyn makes up for rather a lot.
When you learn all your history from Far Side cartoons.
Don’t know who those fools are, but estimate their IQ’s in the 70-80 range.
.
Undoubtedly, they are where they are because of their leftist outlook, so why would they object?
Remember Professor Mary Lefkowitz’s Not Out of Africa, in which she refuted various deranged claims that the Greeks stole their philosophy from (black!) Egyptians? All those “African American Studies” professors ignored her and kept on teaching and publishing the same lies. Much as “Women’s Studies” professors keep telling the same lies no matter how often those lies are debunked. And so on for all the other “Studies” departments.
It’s also called baiting your enemy.