adiva_calandia (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
adiva_calandia) wrote2013-05-19 09:47 pm
adiva_calandia) wrote2013-05-19 09:47 pm
Entry tags:
On Dark Knight and Into Darkness. Darky dark darko.
Two caveats before I start:
1. I have not seen Star Trek and do not intend to any time soon; I have read a number of reviews, both positive and negative, and synopses that treat on the issue I am about to discuss.
2. I am putting this behind a cut partly because of length and partly because I'm sure some people are tired of debating the casting thing. I am also cutting because the casting thing is technically a spoile,r because the studio and Abrams went to great lengths to make the casting thing a spoiler. I am extremely unhappy about the fact that I feel obligated to spoiler cut this, because it should never have been a spoiler. For a more eloquent explanation of my feelings, check out this post. I shouldn't even have to say it, but SPOILER: IT'S ABOUT THE SPOILER.
So this is me boycotting Star Trek: Into Darkness -- explicitly because of the casting, with a side order of mixed reviews on the movie as a whole. I know people who found it really enjoyable, and it sounds like there are elements that I would like (IE, John Cho, forever), but.
My thoughts on the whitewashing have gotten -- well, not exactly more complicated. Here's what happened:
Roommate Zoidberg came home yesterday and related a conversation he had with someone at rehearsal that went basically like this:
Zoidberg: It's really problematic the way they cast Khan with a white guy and a lot of people are mad about it.
Guy He Was Talking To: You know, nobody got up in arms about Tom Hardy playing Bane.
Which really did give me pause. I think Zoidberg and I had similar reactions: pausing for a second, blinking, and then saying "Well, that doesn't make what Abrams did better. It makes The Dark Knight Rises worse." Zoidberg added that he didn't mind, because he didn't much like TDKR anyway. I did enjoy TDKR, but thinking of it in this light does make me like the movie a lot less.
Bane is supposed to be from Santa Prisca, a Caribbean island colonized from the Spanish, and in a lot of the non-comics media he's portrayed with a Latin American accent. Hardy's Bane has . . . some kind of accent, but not one I would readily identify as Latin American (although EW reported that Hardy listed Bane's Caribbean heritage in his influences for developing the voice); the location of the Pit is really obnoxiously vague but I've always read it as being somewhere in Central Asia, implying that Bane should be of Asian or Middle Eastern descent; and Tom Hardy is as white a Brit as they come.
There are layers, here. Latino can still mean white -- Ricardo Montalban, appropriately, is an example of a Latino actor who people have mistaken for white (although, okay, the only people I've seen saying Montalban was white are people trying to claim that Khan was white, when in reality Montalban faced a fuckton of prejudice and opposition in his own time because he was Latino, and also fucking watch "Space Seed," he's not white) -- but Tom Hardy isn't a white Latino, he's a white Brit. In Knightfall, the Batman comics arc that TDKR draws most of its plot from, there's practically no emphasis on Bane's heritage aside from his luchador-inspired outfit, and the way he's drawn sure looks white. And maybe it'd be problematic for Batman to beat up and kill a Hispanic villain, right?
But Bane, like Khan, isn't just a thug. The central part of his character is not just that he's stronger than Batman, he's smarter than Batman: he's one of the few characters who deduces Batman's identity as Bruce Wayne. And Nolan's Bane is particularly fascinating and complex because he's driven by his love for Talia -- much the way Khan is driven by his loyalty to his fellow supermen, his family. Other people have talked much more eloquently than I can about what it means for Khan to be a non-white ubermensch, but what it comes down to is the recognition that intelligence, cunning, strength of body and strength of will are not exclusively white traits. We all love antiheroes, and Khan is one of the best antiheroes out there, and he is decidedly not white. By casting a white actor -- apart from accidentally rehearsing a history of appropriation where white Brits and Americans take over things that belonged to people of color, WHOOPS LOL -- Abrams created the implication that only white people can be cunning and strong and brilliant and interesting.
(Tangential point: ST:ID is still doing better at diversity than TDKR by a long ways, because of the presence of Sulu and Uhura being BAMFs. The only truly significant non-white characters in Nolan's Batman trilogy I can think of are Lucius Fox and Mayor Garcia; other than that you get Ken Watanabe's fake Ra's al Ghul, Commissioner Loeb, Lau, and . . . well, Surrillo, I guess. Whomp-whoooooomp.)
So what conclusion can I draw from all this? Nothing about Star Trek that I didn't already know. Abrams fucked up, majorly, and the studio compounded that fuck-up by doubling down for months and claiming that Cumberbatch wasn't Khan. This isn't really news at this point.
But I am a hell of a lot more frustrated with Nolan now than I was before, and his persistent problem with diversity in his casts is becoming more and more clear to me the more I thinkg about it. Perhaps the real conclusion to draw here is that this shit is deeply ingrained in Hollywood. Abrams is just the most recent and most egregious example.
And boy howdy do I want to see him explain this fuckery in some interviews.
1. I have not seen Star Trek and do not intend to any time soon; I have read a number of reviews, both positive and negative, and synopses that treat on the issue I am about to discuss.
2. I am putting this behind a cut partly because of length and partly because I'm sure some people are tired of debating the casting thing. I am also cutting because the casting thing is technically a spoile,r because the studio and Abrams went to great lengths to make the casting thing a spoiler. I am extremely unhappy about the fact that I feel obligated to spoiler cut this, because it should never have been a spoiler. For a more eloquent explanation of my feelings, check out this post. I shouldn't even have to say it, but SPOILER: IT'S ABOUT THE SPOILER.
So this is me boycotting Star Trek: Into Darkness -- explicitly because of the casting, with a side order of mixed reviews on the movie as a whole. I know people who found it really enjoyable, and it sounds like there are elements that I would like (IE, John Cho, forever), but.
My thoughts on the whitewashing have gotten -- well, not exactly more complicated. Here's what happened:
Roommate Zoidberg came home yesterday and related a conversation he had with someone at rehearsal that went basically like this:
Zoidberg: It's really problematic the way they cast Khan with a white guy and a lot of people are mad about it.
Guy He Was Talking To: You know, nobody got up in arms about Tom Hardy playing Bane.
Which really did give me pause. I think Zoidberg and I had similar reactions: pausing for a second, blinking, and then saying "Well, that doesn't make what Abrams did better. It makes The Dark Knight Rises worse." Zoidberg added that he didn't mind, because he didn't much like TDKR anyway. I did enjoy TDKR, but thinking of it in this light does make me like the movie a lot less.
Bane is supposed to be from Santa Prisca, a Caribbean island colonized from the Spanish, and in a lot of the non-comics media he's portrayed with a Latin American accent. Hardy's Bane has . . . some kind of accent, but not one I would readily identify as Latin American (although EW reported that Hardy listed Bane's Caribbean heritage in his influences for developing the voice); the location of the Pit is really obnoxiously vague but I've always read it as being somewhere in Central Asia, implying that Bane should be of Asian or Middle Eastern descent; and Tom Hardy is as white a Brit as they come.
There are layers, here. Latino can still mean white -- Ricardo Montalban, appropriately, is an example of a Latino actor who people have mistaken for white (although, okay, the only people I've seen saying Montalban was white are people trying to claim that Khan was white, when in reality Montalban faced a fuckton of prejudice and opposition in his own time because he was Latino, and also fucking watch "Space Seed," he's not white) -- but Tom Hardy isn't a white Latino, he's a white Brit. In Knightfall, the Batman comics arc that TDKR draws most of its plot from, there's practically no emphasis on Bane's heritage aside from his luchador-inspired outfit, and the way he's drawn sure looks white. And maybe it'd be problematic for Batman to beat up and kill a Hispanic villain, right?
But Bane, like Khan, isn't just a thug. The central part of his character is not just that he's stronger than Batman, he's smarter than Batman: he's one of the few characters who deduces Batman's identity as Bruce Wayne. And Nolan's Bane is particularly fascinating and complex because he's driven by his love for Talia -- much the way Khan is driven by his loyalty to his fellow supermen, his family. Other people have talked much more eloquently than I can about what it means for Khan to be a non-white ubermensch, but what it comes down to is the recognition that intelligence, cunning, strength of body and strength of will are not exclusively white traits. We all love antiheroes, and Khan is one of the best antiheroes out there, and he is decidedly not white. By casting a white actor -- apart from accidentally rehearsing a history of appropriation where white Brits and Americans take over things that belonged to people of color, WHOOPS LOL -- Abrams created the implication that only white people can be cunning and strong and brilliant and interesting.
(Tangential point: ST:ID is still doing better at diversity than TDKR by a long ways, because of the presence of Sulu and Uhura being BAMFs. The only truly significant non-white characters in Nolan's Batman trilogy I can think of are Lucius Fox and Mayor Garcia; other than that you get Ken Watanabe's fake Ra's al Ghul, Commissioner Loeb, Lau, and . . . well, Surrillo, I guess. Whomp-whoooooomp.)
So what conclusion can I draw from all this? Nothing about Star Trek that I didn't already know. Abrams fucked up, majorly, and the studio compounded that fuck-up by doubling down for months and claiming that Cumberbatch wasn't Khan. This isn't really news at this point.
But I am a hell of a lot more frustrated with Nolan now than I was before, and his persistent problem with diversity in his casts is becoming more and more clear to me the more I thinkg about it. Perhaps the real conclusion to draw here is that this shit is deeply ingrained in Hollywood. Abrams is just the most recent and most egregious example.
And boy howdy do I want to see him explain this fuckery in some interviews.