Tom Hanks Defends His Casting as Martin Luther King

TODAY, actor and director Tom Hanks had to defend himself online from criticism, after the reveal that he would be playing the role civil rights activist Dr. Martin Luther King in his upcoming biopic film “The Dream”. 

Mr. Hanks, who had reportedly spent nine hours in makeup having his skin recoloured and prosthetic lips and noses blended over his own, provided the following statement: “please refer to William West, Al Jolson, and Orson Welles for comment.”

Thinkers on the internet were quick to shoot down any criticism, warning that black people are “shooting themselves in the foot” for not letting a white actor portray one of the most significant figures in black civil rights history.

In his defence, Mr. Hanks’ producer was quick to speak to us: “Unfortunately there are few actors with the star power to pull this roll off. It’s our gut feeling that no one would watch a movie that doesn’t have Tom Hanks, Chris Pratt, or Jennnifer Lawrence in a lead roll. Of the three, only Hanks was available in this case. Of course we will start hiring black actors, once they get enough star power from being hired for major roles in other movies, I guess. But we are just making reasonable business decisions until then.”

His sentiments are echoed by twitter users online, who argue that the best thing for black representation would be for uppity black people to stop complaining, or voicing any opinions in general.

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Okay, heavy handed satire aside, this is a response to Scarlet Johansson’s decision to abandon playing a trans gangster Dante Gill in an upcoming biopic Rub and Tug, and specifically the jackasses blaming trans people (and those siding with them) for the movie now being canned. Whilst trans speakers are hardly unanimous on the issue, a good start would be to listen to them When they put their opinion forward.

 I for one hope that Johansson’s decision shows she is willing to listen to her critics, but that hope gets kind of squashed when she apparently hasn’t taken any steps to supporting a trans person into getting that now vacant roll. Here is my Frequently Made Arguments templates for dealing with the common reactions:

“But she’s an actor, it’s her job to play people they aren’t!”

It’s naive to think that anyone can play anyone else and it never has any political baggage attached, that’s never how it works. Come back to me when there is a completely proportionate number of trans actors being hired in to play every kind of role. Before then, I refer you to the above comedy analogy on blackface, which presumably you also think is totally okay by the reasoning you just gave.

“But this movie would only get made with a big name attached!”

All you’ve done is restate the problem on a wider scale. Much like the old “We only hire people to this job if they have experience, you only get experience by doing this job” problem, it’s a cyclical situation of the producer’s own making. Rather than take any responsibility for changing that dynamic, producers insist they are powerless and have to go with this arbitrary decision to have a big named actor in the lead. In truth, I have no sympathy for the gutless and cynical producers who are in a large part creating this problem whilst shirking any opportunity to do anything about it. Especially when “star power” is something of a myth in terms of box office draws. 

“But now this movie won’t get made!”

Maybe no movie is better than a compromised movie. One of the main target audiences for this movie would have been fans of queer and trans cinema, and these are the people most put off by the casting decisions. If this movie had been made and

Worst Movie Scene No. 299

In the last thirty odd years, traditionally male genres of fiction such as military, sci-fi, and fantasy, have undergone something of a revelation from the discovery that - incredibly - women exist too, complete with working arms and an ability to have thoughts outside of wondering when the hero will turn up to rescue them. Unfortunately this has also resulted in a slew of lazily written, high kicking, sass-talking female characters who still end up have absolutely no character outside of throwing shade at the boys. The way this is best exhibited is in the worse scene, No 177: 

INT. ARMY BARRACKS - DAY

A group of soldiers climb out of their bunks, and look around the hastily constructed army tent that serves as a barracks. None of these people have met each other before. A cigar chomping, probably black, COLONEL enters.

COLONEL

Alright listen up. I've got you together 

because you're the best of the best.

One of the soldiers, an obnoxious, stupid looking, buff one, puts up his hand.

COLONEL

What is it, marine?

STUPID MARINE

(pointing at a female marine)

Since when do we work with giiiirls?

The female marine smirks at the put down. Everyone rolls their eyes, but watches to see what happens. The female marine, smiling demurely, approaches the stupid marine. She is shorter than him, but clearly hard as nails herself. Without warning, she punches him hard across the face, knocking him to the floor. Everyone laughs, including the probably black Colonel. The stupid marine crawls off without a word, humbled. The female marine spits in a masculine way. Sexism is defeated.

END SCENE

So what's wrong with this scene, apart from it being a horrendous cliche that crops up in a dozen different variations, is that it insults everyone's intelligence. The audience these days (for the most part) respects women and stories enough to accept that there are female soldiers, enough that we doesn't need a demonstration every time to assure us that, yes, women can be as tough as men. The only way this scene can happen is if the story requires a ridiculously idiotic moron character to make overt sexist statements. This means that whilst the message may have meant to have been "don't say sexist things about women", no one relates to the big idiot. They don't see themselves making such stupid statements, so they go on to assume they are like the rest of the soldiers, and totally not a sexist. Meanwhile, things like implicit sexism, or the suggestion that even intelligent and well meaning men can have demeaning or quietly sexist attitudes that you can't punch, doesn't enter the picture. It's sexism for children, but in a militaristic setting aimed at adults.

It also means that these female characters are usually portrayed as hyper aggressive. If they don't like something, they punch it. They go way too far the other way, constantly asserting how tough they are, to the point where it starts to make them look really insecure about themselves. It puts these women in a position where they can't win; either they concede that they are somehow weaker than men, or they look like they are desperate to prove they aren't.

So how to avoid it? Don't have it. At all. Look to the most recent female heroes, like in Mad Max: Fury Road. At no point does Furiosa ever have to assert her own position. There is never a scene where someone doubts her ability, and there is never a scene where she has to slap them down to prove it. Alternatively, there is Wonder Woman, which takes the complete opposite approach. In this setting, literally every male character is a sexist who spends the whole movie trying to tell Diana what she can't do. Even Steve Trevor, the nice guy hero and love interest, gets in on the act. He, more than anyone else, undermines her power and authority, thus showing that even the well meaning, sensitive and intelligent people will still have their prejudices. Diana does not have to get physical with these people though. Instead, she is so self-assured and so much better at what she does than any of these guys, she marches up and does it. Now that's powerful. 

Worst Movie Scene No. 218

There is an atrocious scene that appears in pretty much every romance movie, or in any movie where a romance is included. I am of course talking about the misunderstanding scene. The misunderstanding scene always starts the same, and always about two thirds through the movie. The male romantic lead gets separated from his love interest for just a short while.  Then, out of nowhere, comes a horny, sexy, femme fatale who tries to have it off with the male lead. Him, being a gentleman, tries to push back her advances, but she manages to force her face against his. It is at this precise second that the man's female love interest barges in through the door and sees the kiss. She misunderstands the situation and runs off angry and sobbing, he runs after her, shouting "wait, its not what it looks like!", and we in the audience have to wait a good twenty minutes for the two to make up again and get the movie back on track. 

Can you think of anything more contrived? Every part of this situation feels so blatantly manufactured, you can practically see the writer in the room with the characters, shoving them into place to make sure it happens exactly as it does. Firstly, there is the timing of it; what are the odds that the female lead chooses that exact moment to barge in on the compromising situation? If she came in a literal second sooner or later, she'd see her partner's honest attempts to push away this mystery woman. If she was around any other time, it would have interrupted the other woman's attempt to woo the lead, or missed the situation entirely.

Then you have the whole issue of the second woman. Who is she? She's usually nameless. Often in movies, she literally just exists for this scene and doesn't appear any other time. We never get her perspective, or find out why she fancies the lead so much, or why she is willing to sexually assault him the moment she can catch him alone. Do writers believe that such women exist, waiting to ambush hapless men as soon as they're unsupervised? I can absolutely believe in the reverse happening, but - for now we must get into the sexism of it - we never see it happen in that context.

Ah yes, the sexism. Where do we start? The whole scene plays off on this adolescent fantasy wherein a guy can appeal to sexy strangers, get grappled into some fairly harmless horseplay, and then act the honourable guy who tries to push the woman away, only to get a nice big kiss out of it anyway. But this is clearly a sexual assault in progress. That would be painfully obvious if it were a man forcing himself onto the woman, but because of some societal preconceptions about men always up for it, it never gets regarded as a malicious criminal act. In the reverse, the male love interest would be diving in to rescue his girl from a would be rapist, but when the guy is kissed, he's seen as the guilty one by their partner, who apparently secretly believes all men think with their dicks.

Then there is the sexism against that other woman, who again, only exists in this story to be home-wrecking temptress. Movies really have it in for women in command of their own sexuality. In reality, a person that casual about sex with relative strangers would probably be seen as a cool and confident lady, but instead the movie takes this hyper conservative tone that such women are sluts and a threat to ordinary, decent conventional relationships. At the same time, it takes an even more conservative view that such women, whilst a problem, can't be seen as sexual predators.

And in the case of Transformers 2, a literal predator

Which leads me to the final problem - how do you resolve this situation? In movies, after a couple of tearful montages, the man will usually announce his love for the woman, she'll get all fluttery, and the whole misunderstanding thing that had just happened is completely forgotten about. At no point do they have a really important conversation about what the hell just actually had happened ("I was just assaulted by some woman and you've given me nothing but grief about it. Maybe we should be reporting this sort of thing, or at the very least, confront her about personal boundaries?")

Just once I'd like to see this big fat cliche subverted. Perhaps the man genuinely is into the adultery, so at least is the cheating jerk his partner thinks he is. Or maybe the second woman turns around and admits there and then that she might have been a bit too forward, and didn't realise she was jeopardising someone else's relationship.

How to Inform the Reader of Race

So you want to write more inclusive, diverse stories which include people of colour. Good! The problem is that a lot of writers don’t seem to know how to work this into the story very well. An even bigger problem is that writers don't even realise they are doing it badly in the first place.

What is the Problem, Anyway?

Currently I’m reading through Jim Butcher’s The Dresden Files. In these books, we get lots of description about the protagonist, Harry Dresden. We are told about his outfits, about how tall he is, his physical condition etc, but one thing the books doesn’t mention is his race (at least within two I’ve read so far). The same goes for almost every other character , unless they happen to be non-white, in which case there is a different approach used.  The character Susan, a journalist who is eventually identified as Latino, is repeatedly referred throughout as dark skinned. Then there are incidental characters, such as in one scene, where a group of prisoners are being attacked. One of the prisoners is black, and it’s literally the only thing about him that’s described. The other inmates do not have their race described.

The result of this approach is that the reader is encouraged to assume that everyone is white unless it is otherwise specified. Even in somewhere like the UK or US, where white people make up the most common skin colour, it is weird to picture a world where everyone is white. What it also does is single out people of colour for absolutely no reason. Describing a character as black, and absolutely nothing else about them, is unhelpful in a setting where it is quite normal for black people to exist. Unless there is some plot relevant detail to their skin colour (such as the story wanting to make explicit how race is viewed the society/narrator is), it is totally unnecessary for skin colour to even come up.

It can also cause cognitive dissonance when that character’s race clashes with how the reader is mentally pictured them. Not describing a protagonist’s race seems at first to be an open invitation to imagine a protagonist from whatever race you like, and someone new to a book like The Dresden Files may well picture Harry Dresden as non-white. You could go most the book thinking this, until Dresden starts pointing out the black people, then the reader says  “oh” and now has to adjust their mental image of the protagonist. They are not permitted their Latino Harry Dresden, he’s supposed to be white.

How to Do it Wrong

Some writers try to describe race by the back door; in fantasy novels, writers don’t think that “black” is a suitable descriptor for their setting, so they will describe the character as “dark skinned” or “dusky”, or them having “almond shaped eyes” if they are Asian. This is actually worse than the above methods, because on top of the previously mentioned problems, now the description is too vague – we know the writer wants us to picture this character as dark skinned, but how dark skinned? You can still be white and have a dark tan, so would they count as dark skinned? If this is a setting where race does matter, as is often the explicit case in fantasy novels, are these skin colours indicative of someone being of a different race, or are they simply tanned?

How to Do it Right

The simplest thing you can do is, when describing a character for the first time, ask yourself whether their race bears mentioning.

One method is to do what J.K Rowling does in Harry Potter , and leave race out completely. We are still encouraged to make assumptions about race based on the details provided (like hair colour or names), but we are still free to picture the characters however we like. Even if Rowling had a specific mental idea of how each character should look, it never jars with how the reader imagines them. Rowling was quick to point this out to critics of the stage production of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, when it cast a black actor to play Hermione Granger. As she made clear, her description of bushy brown hair and big front teeth is limited enough that the character could be any ethnicity.

Then there is Ben Aaronovitch’s, Rivers of London series, which does the complete opposite of Rowling by purposefully telling you almost every character’s race as soon as they’re introduced. This works because the narrator wants to emphasise how race plays a role in a modern London setting, especially from the perspective of a bi-racial, black protagonist living there. It’s also sly as to how it goes about introducing the protagonist’s race to the reader, mentioning it because the character worries about becoming a token person of colour on one of its teams most accused of racism. He similarly mentions every other character’s race too, often to inform some joke or observation, and he does this consistently throughout.

Finally, there is Ann Leckie's Ancillary Justice, a book in which identity is deliberately withheld from the viewer as much as possible as a consequence of the setting. We do eventually learn that the protagonist, Breq, is brown skinned, but this is treated as an incidental detail - it comes after the book has gone to the trouble of de-emphasising individual characteristics, to the point that we don't know anything about Breq's sex, race or general appearance. The refusal to use identifiers, like pronouns or skin colour, not only serve as part of the world building, but become a a major theme of the book. 

Wonder Woman: a Celebration of 75 Years

With only a month to go until Wonder Woman makes it to the big screen, I think its high time to look back over the last 75 years that made her the UN ambassador, feminist icon and BDSM pin up model that she is. And what better way to do that than with the new anthology, Wonder Woman: a Celebration of 75 Years?

It's a weird and wonderful collection, capturing the feverish imaginations of the various visionaries and perverts who simultaneously wanted to show a progressive world where women are in charge, whilst also undermining it with finding excuses to hogtie said women to the railway tracks every issue.

The book picks up some of the more notable stories of Wonder Woman, set out chronologically from the 50s first issue, when she was carved from mud by Hippolyta, to more recent times, when she becomes embroiled in the Middle Eastern conflicts.

The best story by far though is the one that illustrates not only why Wonder Woman is a feminist icon to this day, but also how comics have in increased relevance; This comic is about the time Wonder Woman ran for presidency.

This episode speculates what would happen should the Amazon ever run for POTUS. Tellingly, it is set in the year 3004, the earliest conceivable date that Americans could elect a woman to office. But what happens? Well, stop me if this starts to sound a bit familiar, but Wonder Woman runs against a certain blonde haired, orange skinned man called Trevor, a man who's desire to return America back to the good old days.

Despite Wonder Woman's efforts to criticise his retrograde views, and his sleazy attitude towards the women, Trevor is quick to garner adulation. Ultimately, despite Wonder Woman earning more votes, Steve Trevor wins anyway due to interference from a foreign oligarch called Mr. Handy, whose crookedness is apparent to everyone but Trevor. Fortunately (and in a departure to reality), Wonder Woman steps in just in time to stop Mr. handy take over the US, beat up his henchmen, and prevent a reformed Trevor  being frozen in liquid nitrogen. Sigh. 

What I like about the comic is seeing WW's fruitier villains, and imagining how the hell they are supposed to work them into DC's super serious, grim dark movie franchise.

How could they fail?

If I had any criticism of the book, and Wonder Woman as a series in general, is that the writers are obsessed with rewriting her origin story every few years. In a similar anthology for Superman, the book is padded out with stories of him marrying mermaids and making deals with evil Leprechauns, but in Wonder Woman: a Celebration of 75 Years, we revisit the whole "Amazons get captured and ravished by Hercules" plot arc way more often than is necessary. A lot of that is probably down to the creators themselves, feeling the need to retell the story through a more era specific (grimmer and mean-spirited) lens.

Other than that though, it is a good read and a helpful shortcut to getting a full perspective on the character without having to actually read through decades of back issues.

The Ending of Firewatch, The Anti-Climax, and the Limits of Escapism

One cricism I am seeing of Firewatch, more often than anything else, is the ending. People are kind of vague about there dissatisfaction with it, feeling that there was a lot of build up to something that largely fizzled out. But my play through of the game leads me to conclude that this was the entire point.

[BIG PLOT SPOILERS FROM HERE ON OUT - REALLY, GO PLAY THE GAME FIRST BEFORE READING ANY MORE]

Firewatch opens with a Pixar style emotional gut punching, where you spend five minutes watching Henry have his loving wife unfairly taken from him by circumstances beyond his control. Though Henry and Julia fight it, neither can stop the onset of a cruel, incurable disease. It is a sad reality that cannot be prevented, and for Henry, the situation is ultimately one of dis-empowerment. Once Julia is taken away, all he can do is try to get away from the situation, which leads to him running away to a distant job in a sparsely populated nature reserve. This is a story about regret and hope, but it is mostly a story about escapism. As humans we have a compulsion towards seeking out of getting away from the harsher realities of life. By doing so, we can empower ourselves with a layer of fiction and find security in a world of our own imagination.

By moving to Two Forks, Henry's life should be a lot less complicated. He has very limited human contact, managerial oversight, and he is essentially free from all but a few basic duties. Delilah is a similar free spirit. In the park, she regularly bends the rules, flirt with her married employees, drink to excess and generally gets to ignore the conventions of society. So what happens to Henry and Delilah when things change? What happens when things start getting weird, when strangers start interloping on their conversations and threaten their easygoing lifestyle? Simple, they start creating a fiction around it. Everywhere you look in Firewatch, there are fiction books lying around. There are a few classics, like Jane Eyre, but the majority are trashy conspiracy novels. And there is some overlap between the plots of in those, and Henry and Delilah's situation. They are just two individuals standing against what appears to be an every growing, all powerful, clandestine organisation. They are on the brink of discovering some hidden truth about the world, and bust it wide open. When Henry finds a fenced off research station, he and Delilah permit themselves to break in. When they find it is full of high-tech surveillance gear and notes on themselves, they go berserk with speculation.

But it is all an elaborate fiction for a much simpler situation. The station is for monitoring Elk. The individual who is watching them is just a loner survivalist called Ned. Ned is the biggest clue to this being a story of the power of escapism. His situation mirrors Henry's. He too lost someone he loved - possibly Ned murdered him, but I find it was far more likely an unfortunate accident - he too has felt dis-empowered and run away from society. He now lives in a kind of man-cave, where he can watch everyone, keep himself hidden, and generally ensure he has the upper hand. You can see this kind of behaviour in Franklin too, building his own fortified den in the mountain.

Whether it is Henry or Delilah, Ned or Franklin, they are all creating a place for themselves in a world that they are free define and re-define. There is this vain, human impulse to see one-self at the centre of the world, and the characters in Firewatch all seek out places where they can perch themselves in little forts and assert this self-image. Even when they feel themselves surrounded by a big, crazy conspiracy, they empower themselves by asserting themselves as the hero, who's role is to discover and defeat this obstacle. The threat actually feeds into that vain fantasy, and unlike death or dementia, it is something tangible that they can physically fight against.

But that is all a fantasy. The limits of escapism is that you eventually have to put the book down and find yourself in the real world. The player, inhabiting Henry's view, may find it unsatisfying to discover that actually the conspiracy was just one loner, because it butts against the fantasy they have manufactured. Both Henry and the player are disappointed that they will never get to run off with Delilah, because that is inconsistent with this romantic notion that they will "win" the girl. They are sad that all that is left to do is either abandon this perfectly isolated world, or die with it. And on seeing the ending credits role, players are confronted with the awkward fact that their power was just a power fantasy. Yes, people are disappointed with the ending, but that is the entire point. We desperately need fantasy, they give power to the powerless. But we also have to admit that the power is artificial, and has no ultimate means to control reality. In a way it is sad for Henry to discover he now has no choice but to return to his complicated, dis-empowered life within civilization, but it is necessary for him (like us) to put the fantasy to bed and muddle through our similarly difficult lives, perhaps a little more refreshed and emboldened to face the real challenges once again.