woke.

[no user name]

Just now, SuperBacon said:

This is a fantastic post. Bravo.

I can't work out if you're being sarcastic or not ha ha 

[westlondonmist]

58 minutes ago, SuperBacon said:

I'm not sure, I always found Shakespeare boring.

To your earlier point about the 2000s being the golden years if tolerance, I think you're sort of right. Look at Hayley in Corrie, which was (and I might be wrong) the first openly trans character in a major TV show, and by and large, one of the most positive (and positively received) portrayals of all time.

We've gone massively backwards and it's all for bullshit reasons.

So you think people would have been as polite if it was a trans woman playing the part? I'm not sure they would.

 

I find it all so odd, people even complaining about drag queens? Drag queens have been around for years, as a kid Barry Humphreys and Paul O'Grady were household names, doing family TV in the 80s and 90s and I feel like nobody batted an eyelid? Am I remembering it wrong. 

Edited April 11, 2024 by westlondonmist

[SuperBacon]

1 minute ago, westlondonmist said:

So you think people would have been as polite if it was a trans woman playing the part? I'm not sure they would.

Good point, I'm not sure they would've been no. I just remember at the time it was well received and was handled well that's all. 

[Carbomb]

23 minutes ago, no user name said:

Does anyone else wanna see a black James Bond just because it will be so funny seeing so many people  get so mad over it?  And then  try to explain why they aren't racist they just don't think bond can be played by a black person? 

In fairness, there's quite a bit of commentary from people of colour as to why Bond shouldn't be played by a black person, because it ends up glossing over a certain political uncomfortability: that James Bond, as a spy for a Western government and the world's former foremost imperial power, is only able to be effective as a white, middle class, Anglophone man, and as such is of the one demographic that can go anywhere in the world and mingle with any level of wealth or power without his presence being questioned at all.

EDIT: @wordsfromlee - thanks, genuinely didn't know that. Feel like my misheard lyric makes more sense though.

Edited April 11, 2024 by Carbomb
arf arf arf

[no user name]

@Carbomb Fair enough but also its a film that probably half of it doesn't make sense if you think about it. I don't think it's really an issue. If people made a massive big deal about it a lot of it would be down to racist views I imagine 

[westlondonmist]

14 minutes ago, SuperBacon said:

Good point, I'm not sure they would've been no. I just remember at the time it was well received and was handled well that's all. 

It was dealt with well, a lovely triumphs story. Maybe it worked as something that people didn't really see or hear of outside of this storyline so people didn't think to hard about it. It was probably pretty ground breaking. Now days it would be seen as shoving an agenda down our faces, sadly. A phrase I see and hear a lot. I don't hate (insert minority group here) and I understand the want for equality I just don't want their agenda shoved down my throat. So you want them to have equality, you just don't want to see or hear them.

[deathrey]

I think @westlondonmist summed that up really well. The character of Hayley was embraced - she was not the butt of public jokes or sneered at, it was generally very positively received as a storyline. Another example is Orange is the New Black which debuted in 2013, Laverne Cox's character didn't really stir up a controversy, people just watched and embraced it.

For me the turning point for the hate influx began after the Brexit vote - all the cretins came out thinking their questionable views were valid and that most people secretly thought like them but we're too afraid to admit it in public. Anecdotally all the marginally people I know felt some impact of this. I don't know if any of you have been watching Defiance in Channel 4? Its been a very difficult but compelling watch for me, I've had to watch it in small chunks as it's a lot to stomach but I think a lot of the extreme thinking Brexit voters felt Brexit was going to usher in some of the suggested laws that are discussed in that show (but never saw the light of day) were actually going to happen now. Laws such as all people of colour 'black, brown and yellow, regardless of their country of birth will be forced to leave the country within 6 months [of the National Front] being voted in'. I had heard of laws like this being proposed but assumed they were very much in the past but it was actually 1979 - a few years before I was born. At the time of my birth, I wasn't eligible for a British passport because my parents were both born in India so my first passport was an Indian one despite the fact I'd never even been to the country. Anyway, I think I've gone off on a tangent now, I should probably stop typing and go to sleep.

Edited April 11, 2024 by deathrey

[deathrey]

3 hours ago, Carbomb said:

History often moves like this, though. The pendulum swings one way, as people fight for their world to be better, and then the pendulum swings back when those who benefited from the previous eras start to weaponise the anger of those who feel like they were left behind by the progressives by telling them they never figured in the plan, or at worst are having their own way of life threatened by the changes pushed for. Then there's a load of grief and fighting, and the process begins again.

I still maintain some optimism; I feel like we're on an upward spiral, in that everything keeps coming around full circle and we go through a lot of the same kind of shit again, but at least one or two things are better than the last cycle. I just hope we manage to sort ourselves out before we blow ourselves up.

All very fair points @Carbomb but I am finding it all very heavy at the moment, it's easy to forget the decent people out there. 

 

2 hours ago, SuperBacon said:

So the role has previously been played by a black man and no one kicked off. 

Misogynoir, my friend.

(I know you are joking)

[SuperBacon]

15 minutes ago, deathrey said:

I don't know if any of you have been watching Defiance in Channel 4?

Yeah I posted about in the documentary thread, it was fantastic.

Of course my experiences are nothing like those of an Asian person, but as someone with two sisters who are half Indian, racism towards them was a part of growing up, but nothing like portrayed on the documentary. Horrific.

I think I've told this before, but until I was about 6 or 7 I thought my sisters were from Cyprus, as that's what I'd been told from my Mum and Dad (who is not their Dad) which is quite messed up, but I think it was to protect me (us?) in a way. And we lived on an estate in Isleworth that was at least half black and Asian. This country has always been mental.

My sisters Dad told me not long ago just how controversial it was him marrying my Mum and having two daughters together, even within our family, and how appallingly he was treated in the 70s, his parents even more so.

Sorry, went off on a tangent myself there. Bed time for sure.

[Surf Digby]

2 hours ago, westlondonmist said:

I find it all so odd, people even complaining about drag queens? Drag queens have been around for years, as a kid Barry Humphreys and Paul O'Grady were household names, doing family TV in the 80s and 90s and I feel like nobody batted an eyelid? Am I remembering it wrong. 

To this day. I've never met or spoke to anyone that gave a fuck about Wendy Carlos being trans, or responded with anything other than mild curiosity when they found out.

[Carbomb]

25 minutes ago, deathrey said:

All very fair points @Carbomb but I am finding it all very heavy at the moment, it's easy to forget the decent people out there. 

Oh, believe me: I am not far from where you are. My mental health has taken a constant battering from the political situation for the last decade or so. Tories, Brexit as driven by the racist right wing (as opposed to Lexiters), Farage, Johnson, Trump, Ben Shapiro and his ilk, Thomas Sowell and his lies by distortion, the betrayal of Corbyn, GBNews, COVID, anti-vaxxers, anti-maskers, TERFs, Russia/Ukraine, Israel/Palestine, it's just been one long litany of shit.

Despite my frequent rants on here, there have been so many times I've just wanted to turtle up, and not engage with anything at all except ordinary, everyday life because it's so much less exhausting and depressing than having to re-litigate stuff that my dad and his generation had to in the fucking 60s. Sure, I don't have to deal with the "No Blacks, No Dogs, No Irish" signs, but the kind of cunt that used to defend that shit has just taken on a different form now.

 

[lanky316]

12 hours ago, deathrey said:

Oh I know the answer it just astounds me that we aren't past this yet. Its something that has been debated to death over the last few years and people are still getting there knickers in a twist about it. Is Juliet's appearance even described in Romeo & Juliet?

Short answer is no. Closest we have is “Oh, she does teach the torches to burn bright! It seems she hangs upon the cheek of night like a rich jewel in an Ethiops ear, beauty to rich for use, for earth too dear. - Did my heart love till now? Foreswear it sight for I never saw true beauty till this night.” which is basically "she's well fit she is" with no real description apart from her being 13. Shakespeare understandably couldn't necessarily be certain on who and where his stuff would be performed and rarely gave much of a physical description of people. There are exceptions of course, but essentially there's a fully blank slate for casting.

Thing is Romeo & Juliet is essentially about pettiness. Literally nobody actually knows why the families keep fighting each other, it's never explained and they do it more out of tradition than any real animosity. There's no reason you couldn't say that Romeos great great grand-father had issues with Juliets great great grand-father who was a mercenary or immigrant (the idea that 15th/16th century Verona was full of white people is pretty funny as a starting point - especially when a couple of years later we have a play about a black Venetian general, also taken from an older Italian work) and the feud has gone on ever since. It can and always has been able to work in almost any way, set in Liverpool with rowing Liverpool and Everton fans, two farmers from Kentucky, New York street gangs and a million other ways. The whole point is that some old people are too stubborn and set in their ways and two kids ignore all that. I guess that makes it quite fitting that in the end the bottom half of the internet are raging about something they've clearly never actually paid attention to. It feels "cheap" to say, yeah lets just do it as being a bit of racism (and I'm not saying this production is doing that aside from this casting I know bugger all about it) but it's no less valid and perhaps more pertinent at the moment a take than any other.

[deathrey]

Great post, thanks @lanky316. I'm guessing this production is getting a lot more press than other productions because Tom Holland (of Spiderman fame) is playing Romeo and it's not everyday that big Hollywood starts do theatre. 

It interesting, whilst I know it's not a description of her, but the only race that is mentioned in that quote that you posted is Ethiop which was common parlance for black back in Ye Olde days.

[Loki]

1 hour ago, lanky316 said:

Short answer is no. Closest we have is “Oh, she does teach the torches to burn bright! It seems she hangs upon the cheek of night like a rich jewel in an Ethiops ear, beauty to rich for use, for earth too dear. - Did my heart love till now? Foreswear it sight for I never saw true beauty till this night.” which is basically "she's well fit she is" with no real description apart from her being 13. Shakespeare understandably couldn't necessarily be certain on who and where his stuff would be performed and rarely gave much of a physical description of people. There are exceptions of course, but essentially there's a fully blank slate for casting.

The only roles that really get descriptions are the ones which are not-white, so Othello or Shylock where their appearance deviates from the norm and in some way reflects their nature (or not depending on how you read the subtext).

This makes sense when you think that until probably the 1960s you'd just get a white actor to paint some dark slap on their face to play Othello.  Otherwise every character is assumed to be white, as indeed the vast majority of people in England in Elizabethan England would have been white.  It's in our lifetimes that having people who LOOK like the characters so be routinely cast as those characters.   Ben Kingsley being cast as Gandhi is the example that always amazes me.   Shows how far we've come already.  

It's an interesting debate that's happening in the US over casting generally.  Having got to the point of having trans actors cast in trans roles is a huge step forward for the acting profession.  But then you have Hunter Schafer saying, quite understandably, that she doesn't WANT to play trans roles as it's pigeonholing.  She just wants to be cast for her acting talent.  The answer really is for writers to write characters that aren't simply defined by their visual appearance / sexuality / gender - that way casting can be completely open and free.  But that's obviously incredibly hard, not many writers can do that.  Famously the characters in Alien weren't gender specific and Sigourney Weaver ended up getting the lead role.  Shonda Rimes I think writes like this, which is perhaps why Bridgerton ended up with such a fantastically diverse cast.

 

 

[BomberPat]

11 minutes ago, Loki said:

Ben Kingsley being cast as Gandhi is the example that always amazes me. 

This is actually a more nuanced example than you might expect, as Kingsley is half-Gujarati. So it's not "John Wayne as Genghis Khan" territory.
 

Other than tabloid ghouls knowing that it'll generate clicks, this kind of casting controversy comes down to the assumption that white, male and straight, or at least two out of the three, is the default option. That all roles would naturally go to white men and white women, and that it's only a conscious and political choice when a casting director deviates from that and casts a woman in a conventionally male role, or an ethnic minority in a role that was historically white (though, in many cases, it doesn't even need that caveat, as some people get angry about non-white actors being cast at all). When a white actor is cast in a play or a film, you don't get people wringing their hands and demanding to know if they were really "the best person for the job", but if a black actor gets the same part, you're inundated with comments about how the role should go to the best candidate, not just ticking boxes, without any consideration that maybe the black actor was the best candidate for the role, and that the people who saw them audition had a lot more evidence with which to make that decision than some random commenter on Facebook who's never going to see the play anyway. 

It's not just in acting, sadly. At my mate's wedding a couple of years ago I had to put up with his Dad complaining about how his mate didn't get a job he went for because they hired a black guy instead, and he just got the job because of diversity campaigns - but how the fuck do you know? You didn't see the other guy's CV, you weren't in his interview, why just assume that the only reason a black man would be hired over a white man is to tick boxes, and why assume that a random white bloke is always the best candidate? Again, if your mate had missed out on the job to another white bloke, you'd maybe make up some other excuses, but generally you'd assume your mate either didn't do well enough in the interview or the other guy did better, you wouldn't invent a culture-wide conspiracy to explain not getting the job you wanted. 

 

In terms of Shakespeare, though, the people complaining about a black Juliet were fine with Baz Luhrmann setting his version of the story in present-day America, so they can't even cling to their usual thin argument of "historical accuracy". I even saw one prick say that it was an issue because Juliet wasn't black "in the original film". The beauty of Shakespeare is that it's incredibly malleable - Orson Welles directed an all-black Macbeth set in the Caribbean, Akala set up the Hip-Hop Shakespeare Company, Hamlet has been performed in Klingon, a 20-something John Gielgud played an 80-something King Lear and an 80-something year old Ian McKellen played a 20-something year Hamlet. The script can survive a black actor in a role that has absolutely nothing about it to suggest it can't be played by a black actor, has probably been played by black actors countless times in the past, and being played by a black actor may even uncover nuances and interpretations that audiences hadn't previously considered. Aside from being clickbait for racists, there's no issue.