I have come to the same conclusion as an author. My two thoughts why this happened:
1. Writers and directors use all the accumulated information about what viewers like and not like, extract patterns, and churn out new movies according to the same small set of rules. E.g. first time the main hero is approached to save the world, he/she/it should refuse. Then something bad happens and the main hero agrees to save the world.
This makes all movies and TV series pretty boring and predictable. Everything is written according to some meta-script. And I've read blogs of some writers so I know that such meta-scripts exist.
2. Storm of political correctness and other movements that took over USA, that look totally irrelevant and crazy outside of the USA. E.g. I won't be able to ever understand why historical persons in the movies should be black even if they couldn't be black in that position at that point of history. There're even more crazier examples.
Same reason why I stopped reading american Sci Fi written in the last 15 years. There're passages that are weird and loathsome.
Frankly, I'm happy that it happens. Movies, books, music is a powerful way to influence the people. USA used it successfully to spread its influence over the world. But if they continue pushing all their crazy beliefs down our throats, people start to avoid that.
I have a feeling that it's already happening although I don't know how to prove it. Probably Netflix has the numbers but it would be grossly politically incorrect to publish them. I know that Disney already experience losses from pushing current US ideology in their movies.
It's also interesting to watch what will win: ideology or greed.
> ” pushing all their crazy beliefs down our throats,”
It always sound both funny and silly to me when people use these terms to describe the presence of equality ideas in movies/shows. I read a review of Brooklyn 99 where the reviewer complained that the episode was ”force-feeding” political discussions to them.
Really? That’s the analogy for it? What is remotely mandatory about including a political topic in a movie? I couldn’t think of anything less mandatory than an arbitrary American movie or show. There are literally thousands and thousands of them. And movie watching is not “required” in any sense or circumstances.
And when you compare one black actor performing a role that you have an opinion that should not be black inside a movie with how much white washing and under representation of black people happen in Hollywood movies, it becomes even sillier to say that you are entitled to have your allegedly white roles being performed by white actors.
How can someone seriously use analogies such as “down the throat” for this kind of message?
Some things are germaine to a plot, some are not. This is a frequent issue in hero movies where a producer wants some particular detail added for nostalgia, or wants an extra villian added because they scored well in audience opinion testing.
The standard example of this is romantic subplots. Frequently stories with no romantic subplot are modified to have one to align with a studios research - and these romantic subplots always feel fake, pushed down your throat and overall contrived, especially for characters never written to have chemistry.
Social justice bingo is the romantic subplot of our time. I have no doubt there are general mandates around including certain ideas or themes, or removing others. See eg, the huge plot change in "WandaVision" where they even left in the Doctor Strange commercials (plot point from original story) but totally removed him from the ending.
I don't share the opinion that it's "foced down the throat", but at least for young adults, many conversations are about the currently popular TV show or movie. So while it's not "forced down your throat", I think many people watch them to fit in. From what I saw it started with Breaking Bad, then Game of Thrones, and then it started getting faster and faster.
Meh. Let me guess: you live in USA. You're obliged to justify all this out of the fear of being "canceled": fired from your job, removed from social networks for saying politically incorrect stuff or supporting wrong political party or saying that there're less or more genders that is proclaimed by some powerful minority organization with the right to cancel.
From other places this is experienced as craziness. What is "equal and ethical" about black women playing King of Sweden from IX century (this is a contrived example as I haven't even attempted to watch any of the contemporary historical movies from USA)? He wasn't black, he wasn't woman, why violate the history?
Especially, considering that most of the world has nothing to do with the slave trade in the US, or with genocide of Indians in the US, or any consequences of it. So why we should suffer raping of the history just so that Americans could "restore the balance"?.. Besides, I don't even think that it restores the balance. It's a superficial measure that is very cheap compared to restoring the equality indeed.
I live in Brazil, I am Brazilian. Why did you feel such strong rejection of a black woman playing a white king? I have no idea which movie are you talking about, but I am pretty sure their intention was not to trick, mislead, or miseducated viewers that the Swedish king was not a white male. You continue to sound silly to me.
1) I'm annoyed that US tries to impose its cultural norms on all other countries in the world, like they have monopoly on some absolute truth. Some of their cultural norms are weird and repulsive.
2) They include huge fragments dedicated to the ideology in all the movies and all the books, like it is obligatory by law. E.g. when I open almost any recent Sci Fi book of US author, it would be filled with graphic descriptions of various sexual deviations. Or something even less relevant, e.g. that "half of the country is filled with dumb bigots supporting Republican party". I didn't buy the book to read about US politics, I don't care. I want my Sci Fi, not read about gender 33 and gender 45 group sex orgy every second page.
I just made a conclusion that it's simply not worth the time to watch recent US movies and read US books.
It has almost nothing to do with equal rights, etc, etc. Besides, like I said in the other comment, including this in the movies doesn't make people equal. People at Amazon will work for measly pay, while Bezos will continue to get richer. Black people will be put in jails instead of giving them education and jobs - including them in the movies doesn't change that a single bit.
> He wasn't black, he wasn't woman, why violate the history?
Because it's acting. Maybe women are just trying to have some fun playing men, given that historically in the West, women were always played by men (or boys). Cross-gender and cross-race acting is nothing new. Have you ever seen a play? Are you upset whenever Othello is played by a white person?
> What is remotely mandatory about including a political topic in a movie?
We are talking about fairly subjective preferences or perceptions. You don't have to be a film student to know that films/movies/tv are frequently used as tools for social engineering. When you notice, you can either feel positively or negatively about it and most importantly, you dont need to have a "good reason" for feeling either way.
Re point number 2: The example you give is not really supporting your point, and is pretty much an on the nose example of (cognitive) bias that comes off looking quite hypocritical, and slightly racist (for lack of a less loaded term).
Please do not get your emotions up, I will try to explain. Your comment strongly implies a preference for movies from the past. Hollywood movies were/are notorious for “whitewashing” characters - i.e. using white characters / actors in roles where this would be very implausible according to the internal logic of the story (or history in cases where it applies). Objecting to one but not the other seems extremely hypocritical - there is a lack of consistency / fairness there. And then the question is why the preference for one vs the other?
The more interesting question IMO is whether that preference is something inherent, or the result of years of exposure / programming that has normalized the practice one way - such that you are still able to suspend disbelief - but not the other?
This is what I'm really talking about: this kind of craziness requires a lot of scaffolding and mental gymnastics to explain.
While you live in the states, you're surrounded by it. It's aggressively pushed from everywhere. You can't resist, because disobedience will likely cause harm to you (e.g. losing a job and failure to pay the mortgage).
So you naturally start to believe that it's all true and justified and the only way. I get it.
But if you're outside of your society, outside of the pressure of making everyone accept this, it looks weird, even deranged in many cases. I'm pretty sure it causes and will cause loss of sales outside of the US. It would be carefully hidden and hard to prove, but I don't have to prove it. E.g. I just know that nobody from my friends and family would like to watch such a movie. Yeah, we discuss it and the opinion is pretty much universal among my family, my friends, my coworkers.
It's even hard to understand it because we were not involved in the slave trade. And we really can't understand what problems experienced and continue to experience black people in the USA. This is true, but while it is hard to understand, it's much more easier to understand that making them play main roles in historical movies doesn't repair any injustices made to them.
> It's even hard to understand it because we were not involved in the slave trade. And we really can't understand what problems experienced and continue to experience black people in the USA. This is true, but while it is hard to understand, it's much more easier to understand that making them play main roles in historical movies doesn't repair any injustices made to them.
It (and this is usually fiction in historical settings, not historical movies, which are different genres, unless you are talking about black people playing black historical figures, which is a weird thing to object to) repairs (or, more accurately, mitigates) the injustice of current, active discrimination and underrepresentation of blacks in the film industry, not some distant historical injustice more closely tied to the slave trade.
> you live in the states, you're surrounded by it.
When you live in a different country, you are surrounded by cultural norms of your country and disobedience is punished too (usually much more harshly than in the US). Your assumptions about actors' skin colors are as much influenced by the culture of your country as they are influenced by the US culture in the US, as evidenced by the phrase "the opinion is pretty much universal among my family, my friends, my coworkers." Please don't conflate a view from your culture with nebulous "obvious objectivity".
> making them play main roles in historical movies doesn't repair any injustices made to them.
It does not repair injustices of the past, but it helps fix the injustices of today: non-white actors of today should not be kept out of movies just because of a specific historical setting.
Any historical movie is just a modern interpretation of true events. There is no actor that can be a completely authentic reflection of a historical character. A respectful, non-mocking actor play by a person of different race can be a good reminder of that.
> When you live in a different country, you are surrounded by cultural norms of your country and disobedience is punished too
Yes, it is true. But my country doesn't try to impose its cultural norms all over the world like they are universal truth that should be applied everywhere.
Also, I don't really want to argue whether the society and processes in the US are just or not. It's that they're not interesting to dive into for somebody living in another country.
E.g. I've started reading a sci fi book recently (won't name an author), and stopped after reading like 60 pages most of them describing all kinds of deviate sexual relationships. It's that I want to read the sci fi book, not an encyclopedia about 50 genders and how they mate with each other in all the intricate details.
But I have a feeling that writers and directors in the US are forced to put that in their work. It's like communist system is commonly described: not only you are forbidden to object, you must also constantly demonstrate that you support it.
Point 2 is completely backwards in my opinion. The "political correctness" not at all emanating from America. It's emanating from China. Sensitivity to Chinese censors has colored a lot of major blockbusters. There remains little to no filter on what gets produced for US audiences and the latest from Eric Andre on Netflix is proof positive of that. Eric Andre pushes some of the same buttons as Borat with more emphasize on physical danger than parody, but he still got his movie made and released and I thoroughly enjoyed it.
The difference is you expect that from China, but not from US that has something called a First Amendment that used to mean something in the past. If you justify censure in USA with examples from China, that's saying USA is going down.
But USA is ‘going down’ isn’t it? Media is created more and more for Chinese audiences. The market there is simply more appealing for producers. What gets produced has always been economically motivated, why would that change now?
The first amendment is very much in tact and is not applicable here at all. Artistic freedom in the US and Europe is arguably at all-time high from a public acceptance point of view.
The First is not about artistic freedom only and it is visibly under attack from all sides. I am an European and I don't take sides, it is just what I have observed.
> I won't be able to ever understand why historical persons in the movies should be black even if they couldn't be black in that position at that point of history. There're even more crazier examples.
A Whitewashed Earthsea
How the Sci Fi Channel wrecked my books.
By Ursula K. Le Guin
On Tuesday night, the Sci Fi Channel aired its final installment of Legend of Earthsea, the miniseries based—loosely, as it turns out—on my Earthsea books. The books, A Wizard of Earthsea and The Tombs of Atuan, which were published more than 30 years ago, are about two young people finding out what their power, their freedom, and their responsibilities are. I don’t know what the film is about. It’s full of scenes from the story, arranged differently, in an entirely different plot, so that they make no sense. My protagonist is Ged, a boy with red-brown skin. In the film, he’s a petulant white kid.
Maybe when things like this stop happening we'll understand what you mean by "storm of political correctness", but until then, it's too little, too late.
I've tried to find the proof but failed. Maybe I misremember something. Maybe it's my wishful thinking.
Although I'm pretty sure I've read something that impertinent pushing of current US values causes aversion and losses in the viewers. Such things are really hard to find, you won't ever find this on a first page of CNN or BBC because it is an inconvenient truth.
But I've found the confirmation that the first point (using big numbers and meta-script) is successful and increases revenue of Disney.
I think you need to open your mind more. 90% of entertainment has always been garbage, often with an agenda. Just look at "The Turner Diaries", or "Rise of the Nation".
There is plenty of good stuff on the screen. Movies, games, and television are all competing for the same audiences and I do think Movies are losing out. They are essentially Novellas, which are not as popular as Novels.
> I won't be able to ever understand why historical persons in the movies should be black even if they couldn't be black in that position at that point of history.
If they are historical persons, they either were or weren't black. You are probably talking about fictional persons in more-or-less historical fiction. And both inclusion that minimizes the racism of the historical period and exclusion are potentially seen as problematic (from the Left; obviously, you’ve kind-of articulated the Right objection to inclusion.)
Of course, whitewashing by placing White characters where they make no historical sense, often simply inserting white characters into adaptations of existing stories from other cultures (especially in lead roles) is still (not only historically) more common than implausible inclusion of non-Whites, and remains a big complaint by (AFAICT) lots more foreigners to US media than occasionally including black people in improbable historical positions.
Sensibilities have changed and the target audience has become larger. Since the 2000s films have sloooowly become less sexist, racist, homophobe and used less flat gross-out humor. Because you can make jokes that are not made at the expense of minorities.
And this is not something purely happening in the US. It might just be perceived that way because they have such a large cultural influence around the world. There is racism, sexism and all the other stuff everywhere in the world, and the cultural reckoning is happening there too, just in very different ways.
The article mentions a new Borat couldn't be made now, and the footnote, probably added after the new one came out, excuses the author being wrong by saying Sasha Baron Cohen already has popularity and support so could get away with it.
It's simpler than that though and fits other points made - the new Borat was actually a lot more politically correct and followed the American ideology that has emerged recently, adding a woman character and going after Trump republicans.
> the new Borat was actually a lot more politically correct
No it wasn't PC (IMHO). It went out of its way to offend and pushed the envelope. I couldn't watch it to the end because of this. It brought up tired old stereotypes which I thought were long gone.
Or because sequels often add new characters. And the Trump Republicans made themselves ridiculously easy targets...see the Four Seasons Landscaping fiasco, paying off Playboy models and pornstars, suggesting publicly that people inject themselves with bleach or somehow use sunlight internally...
People mock them because they do stupid things. Those are called consequences.
1. Writers and directors use all the accumulated information about what viewers like and not like, extract patterns, and churn out new movies according to the same small set of rules. E.g. first time the main hero is approached to save the world, he/she/it should refuse. Then something bad happens and the main hero agrees to save the world.
This makes all movies and TV series pretty boring and predictable. Everything is written according to some meta-script. And I've read blogs of some writers so I know that such meta-scripts exist.
2. Storm of political correctness and other movements that took over USA, that look totally irrelevant and crazy outside of the USA. E.g. I won't be able to ever understand why historical persons in the movies should be black even if they couldn't be black in that position at that point of history. There're even more crazier examples.
Same reason why I stopped reading american Sci Fi written in the last 15 years. There're passages that are weird and loathsome.
Frankly, I'm happy that it happens. Movies, books, music is a powerful way to influence the people. USA used it successfully to spread its influence over the world. But if they continue pushing all their crazy beliefs down our throats, people start to avoid that.
I have a feeling that it's already happening although I don't know how to prove it. Probably Netflix has the numbers but it would be grossly politically incorrect to publish them. I know that Disney already experience losses from pushing current US ideology in their movies.
It's also interesting to watch what will win: ideology or greed.