Diversity Problem

If good movies and good movies are governed by anything it is focus. The drum being constantly beat by certain characters in the Toronto writing community has to do with diversity in general, as in anything other than white straight male and the much talked-about privilege it supposedly has provided. The subtext of that observation - sometimes overtly spoken - is step aside white guy and let the others lead. Well, first of all, the loudest voice I see on this is a woman who produces TV and is a celebrated screenwriter. Being lectured about power by the powerful has a bit of a false ring to it. Might even call it bullying. The "kind" voice adopted at least in text form has a tone of condescension. A topic is brought up regardless of whether or not there can be an honest answer. There is a "diversity problem," said someone to Aaron Sorkin. Well, considering that from Demi Moore's lawyer character in A Few Good Men to the very political, diverse and issue conscious TV series The Newsroom, Sorkin himself is not the guy that you blast for a diversity problem. So much is said condemning the three act narrative and Joseph Campbell these days, and TV is being heralded as breaking new ground in storytelling. But with few exceptions (Breaking Bad, to an extent) the storytelling trade-off is that with the unpredictability there is also perpetuity for the sake of perpetuity, leading to an ending that will feel arbitrary. I'm not sure it breaks down to gender or to writer's rooms full of contributors, but I can watch an episode of The Walking Dead or Orphan Black and wonder why I need to see this scene or whether it is leading anywhere. If I begin wondering why I'm there, it's not a good sign of engagement. Are we being hit over the head with a false world selling us what is cool? At least on Orange is the New Black the characters can say loathsome things and we give them a pass because they are criminals or corrupt officials or mentally disturbed after all. When Alex fears an incoming inmate might be an assassin, she describes a darker suspect by saying, "Her Disney princess is definitely Jasmine." I would hate to see the kind of suffocating climate in which that kind of writing is banned. I can see us getting to a point where it is almost like a choice to prefer pre-2011 TV and film, retreating to the time before Twitter. The weaponization of blogs and discussion boards to insist that every potato chip must be All Dressed and that every Pizza slice must have Every topping would make no sense. Nor does the idea that we shouldn't know whether a character is male or female or how we are to engage our empathy with an apparent crisis being played out. Just as there are action movie templates that are full of clichés like the retirement age cop who gets paired with a crazy partner who takes risks, there are drama clichés that could be retired as well. Among them would be the closeted gay character, the aggressively out character who either is killed by homophobes or by disease, the suicide that was tried or the one that succeeds, the abortion that was denied or the one that is revealed, or the abusive husband/criminal who justifies his acting out of rage because of how the white folks treated him. These are no longer, after hundreds of the finest dramatic depictions, likely to draw much more than a rolled eye. Been there, done that. And just as movie studios buy properties from around the world and remake them with white actors (what is called whitewashing now), remaking American or white cast films with diverse casts won't make them better. Breakfast Club might work with an all Chinese cast, so the archetypes are not seen as allocated according to social judgments about race nor as reactions against that. But I doubt those in charge would see it that way.

Mel Gibson INTERVIEW 1999