Race, gender, actors, and highly selective indignation

It was probably foreseeable that casting Joseph Fiennes, a white guy, as Michael Jackson, a black guy who desperately mimicked whiteness, would not set well with some people. Never mind that the TV episode was obviously pure silliness or that it played with a whole lot of other identities. No, a white guy playing a black guy, even if the black guy spent his life and fortune badly attempting to play a white guy, is verboten.

After the standard indignation, the episode of the show was pulled before airing. Never mind more sensible people (here’s Tom Knapp) raising their hands to point out that … um, actors act. They pretend to be other people. For a living. So what’s the problem?

Yet for certain groups, and only certain groups, it’s such a problem that nobody dares cross them. The multiple flaps over “cis-gendered” actors playing (and winning Oscars and Emmys for playing) trans-gendered characters is another case in point. These days producers cast non-trans actors in such parts at their peril. Never mind that Jared Leto, Jeffrey Tambor, Hillary Swank, et al. did brilliant jobs in their roles.

Sure, hire trans actors when they’re great for the role (Laverne Cox as Sophia in Orange is the New Black; Ian Alexander (so I hear) as Buck in The OA). But hiring someone simply because they’re trans denies the whole point of the acting profession.

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I watch lots of movies and I’ve given a lot of thought to what’s appropriate casting and what’s not. This issue goes back a long, long way.

By modern standards, it clearly looks bad, really bad, to have cast a Swede, Warner Oland, as detective Charlie Chan. But in that same era, was it really that much better to cast authentic Chinese-American actress Anna May Wong as all those mysterious Dragon Ladies? Both Chan and Wong’s characters were excruciating stereotypes, no matter who played them.

Similarly, it would now be outrageous for a pair of white guys to play Amos ‘n’ Andy, as Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll did for decades on radio. But was the show any less insulting to blacks when it was played by black actors on TV? I don’t know. It did give black actors opportunity and a salary in an era where that wasn’t an everyday thing, but at what cost?

Of course, Hollywood, like our culture itself, is an ever-changing stew of ingredients. In 1961, when Rogers & Hammerstein’s Flower Drum Song came to film with a cast of Chinese, Japanese, and mixed-race actors, dancers, and singers (including one famous black woman, Juanita Hall as a Chinese matriarch) it was considered a golden opportunity for ethnic actors. Within just a handful of years, those same actors began to consider it an embarrassment.

All that was long ago, but really not that much has changed. We just can’t perceive a lot of what will eventually be perceived as cultural or artistic missteps.

Casting Johnny Depp as Tonto in The Lone Ranger? Clearly a bad move, but then so apparently was the whole movie, which bombed in both reviews and at the box office. But what about other movies with American Indian parts (or is it Native American now; it’s hard to keep track of who’s offended by what term at any given moment)? Indian advocates complain if Navajos are cast to play Comanches or if Iroquois actors aren’t speaking dialect appropriate to their fictional time and place. And sure, if you really, really know your native tribes and cultures, that matters (just as proper gun handling in movies matters to people who know guns but doesn’t matter to anybody else watching). But how big a sin is it?

Just this week I watched the beautifully magical animated film Kubo and the Two Strings. This is as “Japanese” a movie you’d ever want to see. The characters are Japanese. The setting is Japan. The culture is Samurai-era Japanese. The architecture, the myths, the magic, the musical instruments, and the origami-come-to-life are all Japanese. Except that the movie was made by rich white guys in Oregon and all the lead voice roles — every one of them — are played by non-Japanese actors. Kubo (Art Parkinson), Irish. The monkey (Charlize Theron), South-African/American. The beetle (Matthew McConaughey), Texan-American. The Moon King (Ralph Fiennes) British. Not until you get down to characters so minor I didn’t know who they were when the credits rolled did we get to George Takei and a host of lesser-known actors of Japanese ancestry.

Cultural appropriation? Abuse of ethnic actors? I had uneasy feelings about both even though I enjoyed the movie. But nobody’s complaining! Critics have it at 97% on RottenTomatoes.com. Audiences rated it 87%. I haven’t heard about any boycotts. No picket lines set up by Japanese actors. (And in my book, as long as those Oregon guys go on making movies of the quality of Coraline, ParaNorman, and Kubo, they can appropriate anything they want. With Kubo I’m just struck by the lack of objections from the Usual Suspects.)

And who’s a substantial and rising star, deliberately and willingly playing to every hoary stereotype of his race? Kevin Hart, a black comedian who sometimes makes “Amos ‘n’ Andy” look like sophisticated racial comedy. Hart and Duane “The Rock” Johnson made a hilarious pair in Central Intelligence, but the flailing panic of Hart’s stock comic persona made me wonder if he was going to up and hollar, “Feets, don’t fail me now!” In The Secret Life of Pets, Hart voices a stereotypical edgy black gang leader (never mind that the character is also a fluffy white bunny). Even as black actors have risen in prominence in high-quality roles, there’s always somebody willing to choose to be a stereotype — and somebody willing to write and hire for stereotypes. The future may be less — or more — forgiving of these gaffes than we are.

Then there’s the famous/infamous stage musical Hamilton. It’s now in development to become a movie. Yet this is a show that features black guys pretending to be white guys. It’s even a show that infamously held a “no whites allowed” casting in disregard of multiple laws. Yet it’s a show so beloved by liberals that they’ll blow thousands of dollars to see it (don’t miss that eloquent put-down by Nicholas Pell). How is black actors playing dead white guys okay when Joseph Fiennes as Michael Jackson is an abomination? How is this not “cultural appropriation” in the most egregious form?

And speaking of MJ again, why was he never accused of “cultural appropriation” for so desperately trying to make himself over as white? Major double standard, I’m thinking.

You can never see what the future will think of your own culture’s entertainments. Or concepts of culture. It’s simply a sure bet that something you love or something you don’t even think about will strike your descendents as positively awful.

And sometimes the awfulness should be obvious even to us, but isn’t. Example: One of my “favorite” (not) things in the more pretentious and highfalutin American movies is the goofy use of accents. Doing a movie about the French revolution? Or about Nazi Germany? The actors playing French aristocrats or Nazi officers will likely speak with uppercrust British accents. The peasants or the footsoldiers? They’ll be pure London Cockneys. In other American-made but set-in-Europe productions, you might have German actors speaking English with authentic German accents, while other “Germans” voice an assortment of U.S. and British dialects.

It’s ridiculous! And classist in the silliest, most ignorant way. But we accept it. Partly because our particular class stereotypes are expressed so well by British accents, even when the context for using those accents is nutty. Partially because, as Tom Knapp pointed out above … actors act. Sometimes well. Sometimes not so much. But they’re all pretending

It may come as a great surprise to the defenders of racial, cultural, or gender “purity” in acting, but Elijah Wood and Sean Astin were not actually hobbits! Robert Downey, Jr. in Tropic Thunder was not actually an Australian thespian playing a black guy. Tobey Maguire, James McAvoy, Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellen, Christopher Reeve, and their ilk did not actually have superpowers! The straight actors in the classic Some Like it Hot were — believe it or not — actually funnier than real women or real-life gender-bending people would have been in those cross-dressing parts. Leonard Nemoy was not actually a being of pure logic. Benedict Cumberbatch is neither a dragon nor is he autistic or sociopathic as some of the characters he plays. Groot is not a really sentient plant and Rocket is not a real raccoon!

I know. I know. It’s truly shocking to learn that actors act. And sometimes act like members of a species, sex, or race that they’re not.

If you’re really going to insist on racial, cultural, or other forms of purity in movies, that’s going to put some of the best out of business. American Meryl Streep, the greatest-ever at foreign accents, will never be allowed to play anything but native-born Americans. Michael Fassbender, one of the finest actors in the world today, will never play another role ever because heck, the guy is German-Irish! You ever see a single part in any movie, anywhere, at any time, for a German-Irish character? There will be no giants in movies, now that Andre, the only authentic acting giant, is long dead. Nobody but Jews will ever be allowed to play Jews onscreen. Nobody but Comanches will be allowed to play Comanches. Nobody but — gasp! — some white guy will ever be allowed to play Alexander Hamilton.

And ultimately, as movies become more and more “pure,” there won’t be any movies at all. Because every, single person in the movies is just pretending to be someone he or she is not.