I'm a cultural moderate. It doesn't bother me if someone wants to do a gender reversed reboot of the Ghostbusters, or if Doctor Who is a woman (or, starting next year, a skinny young black Scottish dude). I may enjoy these things or not, taken on a case by case basis.
But if you have to do a hard sell, that's often a sign that you lack confidence in your work. And it's especially unfortunate if you wind up insulting your core audience.
And sad to say, this is where Disney has landed with its latest round of Star Wars promotions. Moses Ingram, who has a prominent part on the new Obi Wan Kenobi streaming show, has already been featured in The Queen's Gambit and played Lady Macduff in Joel Coen's The Tragedy of Macbeth. If you want to hype her, talent seems like a better basis to do so than saying that she drives the racists and haterz crazy. And sending her out to talk about having "talking droids and aliens but no people of colour" makes no sense to anyone who's seen a <i>Star Wars</i> movie from <i>The Empire Strikes Back</i> onward.
But maybe the corporations who control these properties would rather have their fans freaked out about bigots under the bed than face scrutiny over their own business practices.
2 comments:
Considering Billy Dee Williams was in the second Star Wars and, of course, James Earl Jones as the voice of Darth Vader I don't understand why the sudden interest in a particular black character so many years after. I know we saw the second series (the prequel) but I really have no memory. There were likely black actors in those as well but black actors have been in all sorts of movies long before now, including Moses Ingram in The Queen's Gambit. It sounds like the Disney corp trying to squeeze every dollar they can out of an already washed up franchise. Once the magic is gone it's gone forever and you know what they say about the treatment of dead horses.
I agree with you about being a cultural moderate in that I don't care about the race or gender of any character yet invented. Is the actress complaining about bad reviews? Labelling valid criticism as 'toxic' or 'hate' is never going to change that. Instead we get empty virtue signalling, approved narratives, forced diversity and all of the charades which undercut so much of our entertainment and pop culture these days. The uncle Walt I remember would not be pleased.
In a sense I could see discounting James Earl Jones because he was doing an uncredited voice dub of the bad guy. At the same time, c'mon, he made the movie. Billy Dee Williams was more visible, and got a chance to turn on the charm. While the prequels that George Lucas made weren't as satisfying you can't really deny that Samuel L. Jackson got some good screen time in them.
Disney at this point owns Star Wars, Marvel, and the Muppets. And probably other stuff that was created outside of their walls and that I'm not thinking of right now. They can take hold of those properties and make them reliable revenue streams. And yet in many cases there's a sense that the real party is over.
I can't blame the actress because she seems to have been a script, slightly different from the one she memorized while she was in character. Pretty much everyone involved is saying variations on the same thing, reacting to, like, seven little-seen tweets. They seem to have taken "sincerity: once you can fake that you can fake anything" to heart.
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