Ethnicity, Cinema, and the Fanbase: Let Us Reason Together

With the advent of the teaser trailer for Amazon Prime’s The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power (LOTRTROP or TROP for my sanity) and the resultant internet flame-wars between diehard Tolkien-fans and their cousins in the Peter Jackson camp, the issue of race remains center-stage in a polarized pop-culture society. Some might argue that the best route forward is to drop the issue entirely, for one camp or the other to cease their foul sputtering and cede ground to the side with the greater moral clout. However, to marry Rahm Emanuel’s infamous quotation “never let a serious crisis go to waste” with St. Paul’s injunction to “overcome evil with good,” it is my persistent belief that honest and articulate discussion encourages mutual understanding and is anathema to the rampant, nonsensical, and counter-productive race baiting so pervasive in today’s social discourse. 

One perspective commonly argued is that more representation in media cannot be a bad thing. Art for art’s sake, as it were. I question this assumption on a number of grounds, but if the fundamental issue is that of hiring and firing actors based on their merits, then I find myself in total agreement. But an ancillary consideration should not be lost in the argument that all and sundry ought to be welcome to the casting couch: that a person’s appearance can be of as much substance as their acting caliber. Let me explain.

It should go without saying that casting actors appropriate to the role is of equal importance to casting actors whose abilities measure up to the producers’ very high expectations. One would not cast a woman in the role of Abraham Lincoln, for instance, unless the intent is to subvert tropes in a specific way that requires the casting of a woman. Now, I know nothing about show-biz, but I have been advised to surround myself with people whose expertise make up for my lack. For which I now turn to comedian and sometimes actor Gabriel Iglesias. In recounting his first casting call, Iglesias observed that the producers were clearly looking for a type because competitors for the slot all looked like him—to the point where he described the atmosphere in the room as that of everyone trying to show how they were more like themselves than the next fellow. The producers clearly knew the sort of person they wanted to represent a character; thus, appearance took on equal if not more precedence than acting chops. 

So perhaps a discussion of race in film is to mischaracterize the central argument: it is not the ethnicity of the actor, but their appearance that ought to be considered. One can blithely argue that it should not matter that a given performer’s complexion is darker than Pantone 727, but the altruism of that enlightened sentiment falls rather flat if a 5’3” Inuit is considered for the role of Lincoln. But neither should the role be denied a man who can convincingly portray the sixteenth president. An historical example: I have a vague memory from high school of having read excerpts from the diary of a black man who wanted very much to fight for the Union in the days before that was legal. Happily, all he needed to do was tuck his hair into his cap and, like Clark Kent donning glasses, he suddenly looked like a completely different person. So complete the transformation, in fact, that he not only served at the Battle of Gettysburg but also acted as the unit’s scribe (being the only literate soldier available to transcribe his comrades’ letters), which required close-quarters interaction with the other men, who remained none the wiser. Could not this man, were he dropped into the present day, walk into a studio and offer his acting services in the role of a white character? Perhaps one need only reference the cast of Broadway’s Hamilton for validation here. 

In a world riven with racial angst, it is perfectly reasonable to expect proponents of representation-in-media to argue in favor of breaking any glass ceiling that may exist for actors of color. Yet it remains essential to temper that elevated desire with the realistic expectation that producers can and should cast only those actors who can accurately interpret the characters that they are hired to represent. And meanwhile among the fanbase, it is equally important that frank discussions of race, ethnicity, and representation be held frequently and freely, because if the culture is really as divided as some would have the rest of us believe, then honest talk can do nothing but good.

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*I hope to make this the first of several blog entries exploring diversity in cinema—where it succeeds, where it fails, and how its implementation contributes to or detracts from storytelling. This need not be about race alone, but cultures, women, accents, and anything else employed by producers to best bring their world to life.