Thinking about representation
I also posted this on FB, if you're interested in reading the comments there.
As you may be able to tell from some of my recent postings, I’ve been thinking a lot about representation in the media lately.
If you are a person of color, or LGBT, you may want to skip this as yet another “white people trying to figure out inclusivity” post. I welcome your comments and perspective and will listen hard to anything you choose to say, but I want to be clear that I don’t expect you to educate me here, unless you feel like it.
Similarly, I ask white men, in particular, to please listen more than you talk, here. Your perspective is welcome, but most of you lack the experience of not seeing yourself unrepresented, or represented only very narrowly.
With those notes out the way, here’s the thing...there has been a lot of discussion lately about various ways of expanding representation in order to make more opportunities for non-white, non-cismale, non-heteronormative actors; to increase the visibility of people in those categories in order to recognize the presence in our society of those they represent; and to address the historic and continuing imbalance of power and opportunity.
There are two basic ways of doing this. One is to examine every role, asking “is there a reason this character is an apparently straight, white, cisgendered man?” And then, whenever the answer is “No, not especially,” to make the effort to change that character and cast someone in another category. This is “colorblind” casting and it addresses the third goal, but usually without addressing the lack of stories about people in under-represented categories. The characters aren’t non-white, etc.--only the actors are--and this is another variation on invisibility.
The other way to do this is to recruit actors from the community represented by the character. So African-American characters are played by African-American actors, Asians by Asians, trans by trans, deaf by deaf, etc. This is great, I love this, we should do this a lot more. It should become the norm.
But--and I here’s where my thinking gets sticky--what decisions are fair game for criticism? I want to make clear that’s what I’m talking about: not censorship, not legislation, just criticism and changing norms. I also recognize that these are issues that we’ve really only begun to address, as a society, and that only on a limited basis as yet. If things were different, things would be different and it’s not up to us to decide on a global policy, but to encourage directors, casting agents, and audiences to think about their choices more deeply, and to be willing to engage with the problematic aspects, even of creations that we love. But how far are we willing to go in identifying these choices as problematic?
Jason points out that the fallacy of “so gay actors shouldn’t play straight roles” has been around as long as we’ve been talking about this--and there the answer is to look at power differentials. Openly LGBT actors have often been stuck in the rare gay roles (though that’s changing, a little) and the representation is still woefully inadequate. I think a similar question is being asked about trans folk playing roles that are not explicitly trans and I think the answer is similar--they should be considered for every role open to actors of their gender and to any role for which they can get a director to consider them, regardless of gender, and their trans identity should be just as much of an issue in that role as they, and the director, choose to make it.
But how deep should this go, and what room are we leaving for, well, acting? Elizabeth Olsen plays the Scarlet Witch in the Marvel movies with a charming vaguely Eastern European accent. Eastern Europeans with accents are definitely under-represented in the movies, and where they get roles, they’re usually villains--which the Scarlet Witch was in Age of Ultron. Would casting an Eastern European actor in that role have been stereotyping them as villains? Similarly--and I know there was some discussion of this when Selma came out--is it fine for the role of Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. to be played by a British man of Nigerian descent, rather than an African-American actor? Are the answers different for fantastical or historical characters than for characters in mimetic fiction? How about rape survivors? Is that information that actors should list on their resumes and directors should take into account when casting? Are the only appropriate acting challenges those of circumstance, rather than identity? If directors are going to cast big name white cisgendered actors, should they limit themselves to stories of white cisgendered characters and leave the stories of other communities to indie film?
I don’t know the answers. As a director in community theatre, my options are somewhat limited by our audition pool. We continue to recruit a wider pool of actors and to encourage directors to cast diversely, but unless we’re doing original scripts (where I notably screwed this up in the past, by the way) we don’t really have the option to tailor the roles to the actors’ identities. But I am thinking about it, on scales ranging from my own work, to blockbuster cinema. And I wonder what you think, what questions you have, what solutions you suggest, either in case-by-case situations, or more global norms. How do we think about this?
As you may be able to tell from some of my recent postings, I’ve been thinking a lot about representation in the media lately.
If you are a person of color, or LGBT, you may want to skip this as yet another “white people trying to figure out inclusivity” post. I welcome your comments and perspective and will listen hard to anything you choose to say, but I want to be clear that I don’t expect you to educate me here, unless you feel like it.
Similarly, I ask white men, in particular, to please listen more than you talk, here. Your perspective is welcome, but most of you lack the experience of not seeing yourself unrepresented, or represented only very narrowly.
With those notes out the way, here’s the thing...there has been a lot of discussion lately about various ways of expanding representation in order to make more opportunities for non-white, non-cismale, non-heteronormative actors; to increase the visibility of people in those categories in order to recognize the presence in our society of those they represent; and to address the historic and continuing imbalance of power and opportunity.
There are two basic ways of doing this. One is to examine every role, asking “is there a reason this character is an apparently straight, white, cisgendered man?” And then, whenever the answer is “No, not especially,” to make the effort to change that character and cast someone in another category. This is “colorblind” casting and it addresses the third goal, but usually without addressing the lack of stories about people in under-represented categories. The characters aren’t non-white, etc.--only the actors are--and this is another variation on invisibility.
The other way to do this is to recruit actors from the community represented by the character. So African-American characters are played by African-American actors, Asians by Asians, trans by trans, deaf by deaf, etc. This is great, I love this, we should do this a lot more. It should become the norm.
But--and I here’s where my thinking gets sticky--what decisions are fair game for criticism? I want to make clear that’s what I’m talking about: not censorship, not legislation, just criticism and changing norms. I also recognize that these are issues that we’ve really only begun to address, as a society, and that only on a limited basis as yet. If things were different, things would be different and it’s not up to us to decide on a global policy, but to encourage directors, casting agents, and audiences to think about their choices more deeply, and to be willing to engage with the problematic aspects, even of creations that we love. But how far are we willing to go in identifying these choices as problematic?
Jason points out that the fallacy of “so gay actors shouldn’t play straight roles” has been around as long as we’ve been talking about this--and there the answer is to look at power differentials. Openly LGBT actors have often been stuck in the rare gay roles (though that’s changing, a little) and the representation is still woefully inadequate. I think a similar question is being asked about trans folk playing roles that are not explicitly trans and I think the answer is similar--they should be considered for every role open to actors of their gender and to any role for which they can get a director to consider them, regardless of gender, and their trans identity should be just as much of an issue in that role as they, and the director, choose to make it.
But how deep should this go, and what room are we leaving for, well, acting? Elizabeth Olsen plays the Scarlet Witch in the Marvel movies with a charming vaguely Eastern European accent. Eastern Europeans with accents are definitely under-represented in the movies, and where they get roles, they’re usually villains--which the Scarlet Witch was in Age of Ultron. Would casting an Eastern European actor in that role have been stereotyping them as villains? Similarly--and I know there was some discussion of this when Selma came out--is it fine for the role of Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. to be played by a British man of Nigerian descent, rather than an African-American actor? Are the answers different for fantastical or historical characters than for characters in mimetic fiction? How about rape survivors? Is that information that actors should list on their resumes and directors should take into account when casting? Are the only appropriate acting challenges those of circumstance, rather than identity? If directors are going to cast big name white cisgendered actors, should they limit themselves to stories of white cisgendered characters and leave the stories of other communities to indie film?
I don’t know the answers. As a director in community theatre, my options are somewhat limited by our audition pool. We continue to recruit a wider pool of actors and to encourage directors to cast diversely, but unless we’re doing original scripts (where I notably screwed this up in the past, by the way) we don’t really have the option to tailor the roles to the actors’ identities. But I am thinking about it, on scales ranging from my own work, to blockbuster cinema. And I wonder what you think, what questions you have, what solutions you suggest, either in case-by-case situations, or more global norms. How do we think about this?