Shame

  8 Responses to “Shame”

1. Ramblings of a little Blue Gnoll says:

   February 6, 2006 at 7:00 am

   Blogroll Joel on Software Raph Koster Sunny Walker Thoughts for Now Sex, Lies and Advertising
2. Acid for Blood says:

   April 12, 2006 at 6:55 pm

   Via Raph Koster’s blog
3. Friends says:

   January 13, 2006 at 6:01 pm

   […] https://www.raphkoster.com/?p=258Worth reading. […]
4. Tess says:

   January 14, 2006 at 1:34 am

   Oh wow. Thanks for linking to that article.

   I grew up in Prince Georges County, Maryland, in a small predominantly black suburb of Washington, DC. I was never one of those white kids who tried to be black. But, at the same time, my sense of a normal, real world is a place full of black people. White people were part of the fake world on the television.

   So, I feel distinctly weird living in places which are largely devoid of black people. Sometimes, I feel like all of the real people have been replaced by fake TV pod people from another planet. Someone told me that when he was in Sydney to film “The Matrix,” Laurence Fishburne once said that black people were so scarce here that every time he saw one, he wanted to go up and give ’em a hug. I sure know where he was coming from.

   I used to get very angry at TV shows and movies that depicted supposed DC city blocks bustling with white people. “There aren’t that many white people in the entire city!” I used to rail.

   So, I guess what I’m getting at is that for me, it feels distinctly weird to have fantasy worlds without brown people in them. I don’t want to hear any claptrap about such-and-such mythology didn’t have any black people, or the racial makeup of that region didn’t have any blacks, or whatever. If you have tiny women running around in platemail, carrying two-handed swords, fighting dragons, how can anyone possibly be worried that black people might damage the sense of historical realism? Give me a break.

   As for the SciFi channel’s casting decisions, I’m of mixed feelings about that. I should explain: I am a strong proponent of colorblind casting in theatre — even in historical plays — except where it’s plot-relevant (e.g. Othello). Good theatre completely transcends race. Good stage performances make you curl your toes, and melt in your seat, and stare in awe and wonder — and things like skin coloration simply melt away into an irrelevant stew somewhere below the stage, where the mice live.

   Film is a completely different animal, however. The experience of viewing a film is entirely different from the experience of viewing a play. Plays, in some ways, benefit from abstraction. You cannot create a perfect reproduction of a heath in Scotland on your stage. So, you create suggestions of it, and the imagination of the viewers fill in the rest. It’s like gaming in the Atari days. You slap some big pixels up on the screen, and people just get the fact that they’re representing people, monsters, alien ships, or whatever. We’ve had this power since we were children. It’s the power that lets us shape our hands like a gun, and say bang, and knock our friends down. *BANG*

   Film, however, demands a certain level of realism — or at least faithfulness to its source material. If you need to film a scene on a Scottish heath, you are not confined to a stage. You can haul your camera out to a heath in Scotland, you can find a place somewhere else that looks like a heath in Scotland, or you can spend lots of time dressing a sound stage to look like a heath in Scotland. People expect that. You don’t have the luxury of letting them down.

   There was a time in movie history when you could cast John Wayne as Ghengis Khan. There weren’t any Asians in Hollywood with that kind of star power, and most Americans had never seen an Asian person up close anyway. Audiences are much more sophisticated, aware, and demanding, these days. Heck, people even pitched huge fits over Zhang Ziyi being cast in the lead role in “Memoirs of a Geisha,” because she’s Chinese, and not Japanese.

   If that is the standard of accuracy we hold our film to these days, and if it is stated quite clearly that Ged is bronze-skinned in the text, then why not cast someone bronze-skinned? Is it that hard? If they’re determined to be chicken about it, they could’ve at least cast somebody racially ambiguous. I would have loved to have seen somebody like Gael Garcia Bernal cast in that role. Good heavens, it’s not like the world has any shortage of quality brown-skinned actors. And it’s not like you’re going to scare away modern white sci fi fans. Wesley Snipes, Vin Diesel, The Rock, Will Smith, Laurence Fishburne, Gina Torres, Avery Brooks, Halle Berry, Angela Basset… Sci fi has moved on.
5. Evangolis says:

   January 14, 2006 at 2:34 am

   I grew up in the rural Midwest, lived for many years on the campus of Ronald Reagan’s alma mater, where my dad taught. There were only whites in my world, and despite having the civil rights movement on the TV every night, I grew up what is best described as color oblivious. Skin color just didn’t mean anything to me.

   That is no virtue. Just because we didn’t have people of color anywhere around my home didn’t mean there wasn’t racism. The most chilling lesson I’ve ever had in both racism and the casual abuse of power was listening to a member of the County Posse tell the harshest of anti-black jokes to the crowd during a set break at a private concert and party for local law enforcement. He was a big hit.

   The matter of race in Earthsea was something I noticed only peripherally, but just because it didn’t have the impact for me that it did for the author of that excellent article, didn’t mean I was unaware that it was important. That a film adaptation should ignore the things that mattered to the author is unsurprising. And that the genre press should ignore it is also surprising.

   I still dwell among the color oblivious, although I now live in Chicago, among techies instead of rednecks. The college that was my playground now brings diversity to a small town that ignores it as best it can. And my friends and I ignore it too. My circle of friends includes more transgender people than people of color. The company I’m presently working at employs a wide diversity of people, but in the cafeteria the tables tend toward segregation. And if I go to the convention most of my fannish friends will be at next month, come Saturday night, I’ll be more likely to see a forty year old man dressed in a Sailor Moon outfit than a person of color.

   My friends and I, we remain color oblivious, despite the effort it takes to pretend it isn’t there.
6. moo says:

   January 14, 2006 at 8:27 am

   I have never read Earthsea, though it sounds like I really should. (I really liked Left Hand of Darkness, her only book I can remember reading).

   I remember a few years ago watching an interesting movie–White Man’s Burden. It starred John Travolta as a “disadvantaged white guy” in a world where the stereotypical social roles of white and black people were reversed. The black guys were all rich and carried cell phones and took their upper middle-class families to charity dinners for poor, white children. The white guys worked all day in factories owned by the black guys just trying to feed their family. Through no fault of his own, Travolta’s character lost his job, and his situation got more and more desperate until he eventually snapped and took his black boss hostage. I don’t want to spoil the ending, but it was a classic racist stereotype that made me cringe.

   Throughout the movie, I saw little things that seemed outrageous. “He can’t say that! That’s totally racist!” etc. And they did exaggerate some things slightly for effect–but only slightly! The truth is that if you exchanged the skin color of the white characters and black characters, many of us white folks would find the movie totally unremarkable. We would not even notice most of the racism being portrayed in the movie, because we are just used to it and it’s “under the radar”.

   Watching that movie opened my eyes a bit. I’ll never know what the experience of being an ethnic minority and watching white-dominated media and movies all the time is like. But I can see how it would wear on your soul.
7. Evangolis says:

   January 14, 2006 at 10:27 am

   If you haven’t read it, I’d also strongly recommend LeGuin’s ‘The Dispossessed’, an interesting tale of a functional anarchy.
8. Raguel says:

   January 14, 2006 at 2:34 pm

   I don’t like admitting how important race matters in fiction (or talk about race in general), but I know exactly how the author feels. Im embarrased to say that it didn’t come with reading Earthsea. That completely went over my head, but then at the time I just skipped over sentences that described characters’ features (don’t ask why; I don’t remember). My moment came as an adult, while reading a comic book. One of the covers featured a black hero touching his (very pregnant) wife’s belly (for those interested it’s from Astro City. You can find the story in the Family Album trade paperback, and the cover’s near the back of the book.)

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