This is less a response to the piece than the inciting thread(s) on X.
Successful art doesn't have to be accurate. Successful entertainment even less so!
It's super telling that you get people essentially complaining about AAVE like it's an existential issue for the movie, but silence on any other anachronisms not related to race.
Denzel played a great Macbeth in the recent Joel Coen movie, despite not once being Scottish. Acting!
This is exactly the sort of dumb reactionary politics that I don’t want in my life. People can make a movie with a black Roman emperor if they want to, but I prefer my entertainment to not be somebody’s political soapbox. Especially for an ideological that demands I must agree with it or be labeled a “bigoted Karen” (or any number of other worse things).
I think you're free to take your money and buy the entertainment you prefer.
Is it political soapboxing, or trying to make show business fairer? Because if Hollywood listened to your preferences, minority actors have less oppportunities for roles.
I was watching "A Gentleman in Moscow", a series about an aristocrat living in house arrest in a luxury hotel in 1920s-1950s Soviet Russia. Everyone in it spoke English since it is an US/UK production, and there were black and Indian actors in it, I guess because of "DEI". I found it awkward at first, but I thought "I guess this is progress, better get with the times.". No one moaned about all the Russian characters speaking English, the show didn't have any race-related topics (a movie about the KKK with black Klan members would be incongrous), but with actors of different color skin? That series had lots of IMDb reviews complaining about "political soapboxing"...
I must be one of those people^W sheep who don't mind being oppressed by the woke-mafia, huh?
As an addendum, I find it obnoxious if people insist straight actors can't play gay characters, or genteel actors playing Jewish characters. It's called fucking acting! Scarlett Johansson should've been able to play a fictional Japanese cyborg in Ghost in the Shell without idiots complaining about it...
"I think you're free to take your money and buy the entertainment you prefer" doesn't really jive with "I guess this is progress, better get with the times" or "Scarlett Johansson should've been able to play a fictional Japanese cyborg in Ghost in the Shell without idiots complaining about it"
I didn't sulk and stop watching that series even though the black/Indian Russians were awkward for me in the beginning (ooh let's cancel me, I'm admitting the sight of minority actors was awkward for me), and I didn't care about "white-washing" and I didn't boycott Ghost in the Shell.
I disliked the ATLA movie before even seeing it because most of the characters didn't look like the original. This isn't some moral stance, there is simply such a thing as bad casting in a live adaptation. The movie sucked for plenty of other reasons of course, but even if it didn't, this would've detracted from it.
Idk if anyone was actually not watching the Ghost in the Shell remake over the casting. The characters look right. If someone out there is upset that the main character wasn't played by someone Japanese, I don't get it, the original character didn't even look Japanese.
> I must be one of those people^W sheep who don't mind being oppressed by the woke-mafia, huh?
I don’t think that at all. I believe very strongly that nobody should ever feel the need to apologise for liking something. I simply don’t like this political ideology at all, I think it’s turning everything into monocultural forum for activism, and I’m not interested in the entertainment it’s producing. If you used a bit less prejudgment you’d be able to see it’s possible for me to have a distaste for this kind of product without being a horrible bigot.
I think you should give way more thought to why you don't like current entertainment. Why are you so convinced it's the racial composition of the cast that makes the content bad?
There are plenty of reasons TV and movies are bad these days. With the glut of new shows, writing and directing in particular seems to be suffering.
The Witcher (for instance) fell off a cliff after its first season, and its shittiness had nothing to do with "DEI" and everything to do with Netflix's belief that cheaper creative doesn't hurt the bottom line.
> This is exactly the sort of dumb reactionary politics that I don’t want in my life
Hey, that's what I thought when I read your comment!
What about the fact that the treatment of women and slaves is almost certainly significantly toned down from what we know to be the reality?
Also there was almost certainly way more gay sex going on among any number of historical personages. Commodus (Gladiator's main villain) in particular was said to have "defil[ed] every part of his body in dealings with persons of either sex." Where is your outrage at this lack of accurate representation?
The implication here is that it's really your own baggage that ruins the immersion for you. You suggest that you can't watch a movie now without cataloguing and mourning the places where a character was more likely in your opinion to be white, male and/or straight.
This is not something anyone can help you with.
White actors have dominated in Hollywood since the beginning, and I don't remember anybody complaining that Mickey Rooney's character in Breakfast at Tiffany's ruined the immersion. Or that literally all of the ethnic Asian characters in the Manchurian Candidate were played by white actors.
Could there ever be an instance not motivated by politics where a black actor portrayed a white character? Not everything everyone does is virtue signaling or politically motivated, but we have somehow arrived at a place culturally where the perception is that a huge fraction of the population is making decisions disingenuously. It's such a coarse and dismissive heuristic.
I thought Idris Elba would have been an excellent James Bond. The alternative they went with doesn’t leave much room for interpretation on its DEI-ness though.
How would you defend against an accusation that you seem to prefer the historically accurate version of events that allows for the most white characters?
Macrinus was descended from Berbers, who generally consider themselves to be white. Moor is what christians called Muslim North Africans, a concept that was neither an ethnicity, nor in existence at the time of Macrinus' birth.
Moor is accurate here because Macrinus was born in Mauretania. No relation to the much later "Moors" of Muslim North Africa, or to the modern nation of Mauritania.
This doesn't look like the Netflix African Cleopatra situation. She was Greek IRL, which is actually interesting for anyone who didn't know about the Ptolemaic dynasty, and it's relevant because even today the Coptic minority in Egypt is (sorta) Greek.
The website I linked wasn't the creator of the show. Modern Berbers are post Arab Conquests, so I wouldn't expect them to look similar to ancient Mauri.
This is a thoroughly nonsensical take. What is 'white' is very arbitrary in the first place. Where ancient Romans 'white'? Does it make it any more accurate to have an Englishman play an ancient roman than to have an Arabian or Japanese man? How about the debates over the historical portrayal of Jesus, a semitic man, as a blue-eyed Scandinavian. You're simply wedded to the hollywood convention which has nothing to do with logic or historical accuracy. Those conventions reflect the current culture and can change at any time. So it was the fashion before to use certain type of actors because the Hollywood elite decided those are the people audiences would be most comfortable with (not because it had anything to do with being accurate). And now demographics of audiences have changed so Hollywood has (slowly) adapted. It's just entertainment not Truth. Get with the times.
The Scottish in 1600s were. Not to say it matters, as Macbeth is a quasi-fantasy play and it's been adapted a million times. At this point "black everything Macbeth" might draw more viewers than "just another fucking Macbeth" (maybe, idk but producers may have a better idea).
The question is always "who is this for" and "will people pay to see it"
Well that's ironic. You do know many of Shakespeare's plays were adapted from elsewhere outside of England or Scotland. So Shakespeare would've been committing the same sins you're all getting twisted about by having Englishmen play characters called 'Malveolo' and 'Othello' and 'Titus Andronicus' etc. I'm really not understanding this slavish devotion to the skin color and ethnicity of who plays fictional characters.
Not really. You can transpose a plot and/or create something based on another work with the freedom to do anything you want (see: Throne of Blood, based on MacBeth), and people will be singing your praises generations later. If conversely you take on the original name, script, characters, historical setting, aesthetic, etc collectively as if to approximate high faithfulness to the original work (one that is not genre fantasy), then putting a brazen change front-and-center (like a black Scottish king) sticks out. It will draw more attention than anything else, and maybe that's the point. There are a ton of Macbeth adaptations, they're not super-duper cheap to make, and they often lose money.
It's just an artistic/stylistic judgement, not a complaint (very few readers here are likely to go see another in the pile of Macbeth movies). A modern day adaptation even with all the original names and dialog would still work better. I don't have a horse in the race because I don't care to see yet another Macbeth.
>You can transpose a plot and/or create something based on another work with the freedom to do anything you want
Lol. That is exactly what they're doing. You just don't like a black Macbeth, but others do and are fine with it. For the record, there have been black, green, orange, purple, yellow Macbeths since the dawn of time, ever since Shakespeare became a global cultural touchstone performed all over the world. I'm pretty sure whoever he is, wherever he is now, he must be pretty pleased to see his work continue to have cultural relevance through adaptation and appealing to audiences he could not have imagined rather than limited by the lack of imagination of hidebound tradition.
> What is 'white' is very arbitrary in the first place
Sure, I agree. As far as I’m concerned the earth is populated by ~8 billion individual human beings. But this is heresy according to the idiotic identity politics that has slowly taken over bits and pieces of western culture. It’s an ideology that demands everybody be shoehorned into race/gender/sexuality tribes. When it comes to DEI scores, there’s no ambiguity about who’s white and who’s not white. It’s an ideology that I don’t like at all, and it’s been constantly forced into a lot of entertainment. Whether this role was cast as a part of that mission or not doesn’t really matter, because it’s tainted the whole industry.
> And now demographics of audiences have changed so Hollywood has (slowly) adapted
I would say this isn’t a response to audience changes at all, and simply the result of a small elite of political activists, often producing product that directly defy the tastes of the core audience. But that doesn’t really matter either, because the people that don’t like it will simply disengage (though some will complain about it more than others).
I personally don’t really care very much either, I’m just offering my perspective. I barely watch any TV or movies any more, and I couldn’t say my life has suffered for it at all.
> the result of a small elite of political activists
Conspiratorial thinking based on absolutely nothing.
Anything that "directly defies the tastes of the core audience" will fail. It's obvious you're choosing to put yourself in this "core" audience. What if you're wrong about that?
And what if I told you that the free market is the most powerful cultural force in the US, and TV/film studios produce content in ways they think will make the most money? That if they aren't making enough money, they change their strategy?
"TV/film studios produce content in ways they think will make the most money" isn't always true. Sometimes a movie really has a purpose. And when it doesn't, it's a very inexact business (unless maybe it's Nostalgia Avengers part 99), so personal interests can creep in. Like how Microsoft built up DEI departments only to fire them recently.
Even if Hollywood were a well-oiled machine, what would you say if they estimate they're losing sales from diversity casting, due to upsetting part of their audience, and decides to undo that?
> And what if I told you that the free market is the most powerful cultural force in the US, and TV/film studios produce content in ways they think will make the most money?
These DEI products fail all the time. The most recent Star Wars series is a great example. These failures are also well documented in every TV show/movie where the critics score and the audience score are miles apart on rotten tomatoes.
You really thought that link was a smoking gun, didn't you. Have you read this thing? Do you understand how hard it is NOT to check two of these four boxes?
Basically all of your film's department heads have to be white straight men, you have to fail to hire just 6(!) women/POC/etc in other significant jobs, and the studio's executives all belong to over-represented groups. As in, they are whiter and straighter than THE COUNTRY.
That you insist on seeing evil and bad faith in efforts to make our culture more representative of our actual population is very depressing to me.
It dictates choice between major casting requirements, or major storyline requirements. I’m not sure why you’ve only mentioned the crew requirements, which I also think are bad, but are irrelevant to this thread. Can I take it you’re admitting this is a conspiracy implemented by a small group of political activist elites, but that you just want to downplay its impact a bit?
First, I'm afraid you are very confused about your own link.
My point was that the things I mentioned are sufficient on their own to qualify a movie for the Best Picture category.
Pick any TWO of these four:
- "Diverse" casting (aka roughly in line with US pop demographics and even then, STILL favoring white men) OR storyline centered on non-white OR non-male OR non-heterosexual theme
- "Diverse" leadership (Simply have two dept heads that aren't white, straight, male, AND fully-abled)
- Opportunities for training and advancement for people who are not white, straight, male AND fully-abled
- Studio has >1 senior executive OR consultant that has a significantly different background from the rich, white, straight, fully-abled men that ran Hollywood for the better part of a century. Just find two people!
Second, the word "elites" perfectly describes the people who run the system people are trying to change. Elites don't want to change anything. Why would they?
Now I'm not sure you can tell apart bad writing from diverse casting. Both are having a moment right now, but that's not really an excuse to confuse them.
The demographics have changed and that has A LOT to do with it. Not only inside of American, movies must now sell in places like China and India and to a lesser extent in Africa and satisfy very different kinds of audiences and worldviews very different from yours. It's business. Success at the global box office is just about a necessity these days for movies with gargantuan budgets. Sure there might be a DEI push and it might seem heavy-handed and forced at times but imo it is kind of necessary because Hollywood has been very slow to adapt. You might think you hate it but there are millions of people with equally valid opinion who actually think it is not enough. Somewhere between 'DEI' and the backlash (whether well meaning or not) there's hopefully a happy medium that satisfies most people, not just a minority.
I get equally annoyed about intentionally portraying Jesus, ancient Italians, etc as English people as I do about making Cleopatra black. Especially if it's a movie about multiple different peoples, like Romans invading Egypt.
maybe look at it outside of the lens that you want everything to be like you, and realise there are billions of people who bring their own talent and culture to roles, most of whom are not white.
gay and black people exist, and the people they are portraying are dead. it’s called acting for that reason, the character isnt really cleopatra.
There is a time and place for demographic accuracy. If you are shooting some kind of historical reenactment I can see the argument it enhances immersion (or at very least, doesn't break immersion) to use actors that fit the demographic of the group being portrayed. I can also see an exception for historical figures that have a widely known image (eg: I could buy that it would be little jarring to see Denzel Washington play George Washington).
However, most "historical" films are not historical reenactments. They are usually character dramas that are using a historical period as a backdrop to tell some other type of story. For me personally I see this more in the tradition of live theater. If the race (or even gender) of the characters isn't massively integral to the plot, it's fine and good to cast whoever acts well in the role. Cleopatra and the little mermaid are literally fairly tale characters, could not imagine caring what the race of the actress playing them is.
> There is a time and place for demographic accuracy. If you are shooting some kind of historical reenactment I can see the argument it enhances immersion
Of course, and I can’t say I ever noticed the race or gender of characters until recently. If movies/TV were was always just equally non-accurate then it would be fine, but that’s not how entertainment works. A man can be replaced by a woman or a transgender, a white character can be replaced by a non-white actor, and anybody can be made gay/bi/++. But the reverse is never allowed. It’s not some insane conspiracy theory either, these are basically the new rules of film making.
For people that are aligned with this political agenda, I’m sure it’s good for them. But I’m personally just not interested, and I think there’s quite a few people out there with the same views as me on this.
I'm fascinated to know what you think of Mickey Rooney's performance in Breakfast at Tiffany's. Or the travesty of yellowface that is the flashback sequence in the Manchurian Candidate.
Macbeth is fiction, albeit written long ago. Even so, I think some approaches to modern adaptation are better than others.
For instance, you can go the route of Throne of Blood. It transposes the plot to feudal Japan, and doesn't call itself Macbeth. This allows you to hit all the story beats with the freedom to change literally anything else you want, and still be "faithful" in its adaptation. I'd argue it's also a more intriguing approach for film.
Alternatively, you can opt for the original dialog, names, historical setting, and aesthetic. If you go this way, with a story set in Medieval Scotland that is not genre fantasy, then having something as incongruent as a change of race in the main character will stick out. Notwithstanding, here no one cares because a) Macbeth's been done to death, b) no one gives a damn about Macbeth. You can of course suggest that people are nonplussed about this for movies in general, but if they aren't invested in any way they may not see your film either.
So in fact you aren't likely to see this done for every film set in a historical period all the time, and the minor controversy and trolling if anything helps create buzz for a film that will otherwise flop anyway. Were you going to see it in theaters? Statistically, not likely.
Gladiator is fiction that is extremely loosely based on historical people and events. Gladiator 2 must necessarily be even more inaccurate if it maintains continuity with the first movie.
Ridley Scott is on record as being extremely exasperated with historians when it comes to his historical films. So I'm not quite sure what you're getting at.
> a) Macbeth's been done to death
> b) no one gives a damn about Macbeth
These are very bizarre claims you make very confidently.
I don't see how both of these aren't equally applicable to Gladiator 2, the sequel(!) to one of the worst Best Picture winners in history.
> So in fact you aren't likely to see this done for every film set in a historical period all the time, and the minor controversy and trolling if anything helps create buzz for a film that will otherwise flop anyway. Were you going to see it in theaters? Statistically, not likely.
So... what are you saying exactly? It was fine to make Macbeth black because no one was going to see it anyway? It was a good idea to make Macbeth black because controversy?
The clearest point you are making is that you cannot see outside your own point of view when it comes to race in cinema.
> Ridley Scott is on record as being extremely exasperated with historians when it comes to his historical films. So I'm not quite sure what you're getting at.
This is a bizarre non-sequitur. You might as well have said "My friend Mike likes pizza, so I'm not sure what you're getting at". What's the point?
> These are very bizarre claims you make very confidently.
The latest ones were flops. For instance Macbeth 2015 grossed $16 million worldwide against its production budget of $20 million. So yeah, I make the claim "confidently".
> I don't see how both of these aren't equally applicable to Gladiator 2
You brought up Gladiator 2! And speaking of bizarre claims, for Gladiator to have been "done to death", it would have needed a sequel!
> It was fine to make Macbeth black because no one was going to see it anyway?
No. This has to be a weird projection because I did not say anything near that.
Whitey Macbeth has been done many times, no one's being deprived of Whitey Macbeth. My answer to those who complain is: if you're watching, it's for you. If not you're not watching, it's not for you. Producers are banking on someone watching.
> It was a good idea to make Macbeth black because controversy?
You don't understand why I would point out that Gladiator is unapologetically fiction in my reply to your comment?
I'm not sure why you're denying that you implied that diversity is fine in movies that don't do well. What other conclusion am I supposed to draw - especially in the context of this discussion - from your assertion that "no one cares about Macbeth" ?
I'm puzzled why your points are all now strictly based on how well the movies have done at the box office.
You were talking about artistic and stylistic judgments before. Now it's about the business?
> You don't understand why I would point out that Gladiator is unapologetically fiction in my reply to your comment?
Nope. That would be unsurprising, it being fiction and all.
> I'm not sure why you're denying that you implied that diversity is fine in movies that don't do well.
Because that isn't what I fucking said.
> What other conclusion am I supposed to draw - especially in the context of this discussion - from your assertion that "no one cares about Macbeth" ?
That no one cares; it's a moot point, there will not be that much discourse surrounding it. That is the observation. There's no possible way to contrive that suggests "it's only justifiable to have diversity in films that don't do well".
The important part of the paragraph that belonged to is that some stylistic changes can seem incongruent with the whole of a film. A black Scottish medieval king is incongruent. That's not even a value judgement, and it's not always clear whether audiences will be drawn or repelled.
> I'm puzzled why your points are all now strictly based on how well the movies have done at the box office. You were talking about artistic and stylistic judgments before. Now it's about the business?
Wow, you are obtuse. Be puzzled then, run off and do something else.
- Macbeth is old fiction, but some approaches to adapting it are BETTER than others
- Don't do something "incongruent" and "brazen" like cast a black man and call your movie Macbeth, because that isn't one of the BETTER approaches.
- But honestly, no one cares because ugh Macbeth is so played out, NO ONE gives a damn.
Then you shouldn't have said those things?
As it stands, you have drawn a rhetorical distinction between fictional Macbeth and the also-fictional Gladiator 2 without actually saying how they're different vis a vis performer ethnicity, other than "more people care about" Gladiator 2.
You accuse me of being obtuse and then fail to actually make a point about why people are complaining about Gladiator 2, only that bringing up Macbeth is dumb because who cares about stupid Macbeth.
> - Macbeth is old fiction, but some approaches to adapting it are BETTER than others
I did say and mean that.
> - Don't do something "incongruent" and "brazen" like cast a black man and call your movie Macbeth, because that isn't one of the BETTER approaches.
That isn't what I said.
Do cast a black man, do call it Macbeth. But seriously, keep going. It's weird to set something in Medieval Scotland and make just one guy a-historical. Make half the cast black, or whatever. It's seems like restraint or half-measure to try to keep in tradition in every other way but a single character. There's no reason you can't go full Bridgerton. I think that would serve it better.
I hope that's clear. I'm not sure if you actually aren't capable of grasping, or refuse to do so because you'd rather project racism. It's a bit weird.
Another user mentioned people are looking for "depth and coherent world building". I think if it feels coherent then it works.
> fail to actually make a point about why people are complaining about Gladiator 2
Dude. You brought up Gladiator 2, not me. Ask them why they're complaining, because I sure didn't.
> As it stands, you have drawn a rhetorical distinction between fictional Macbeth and the also-fictional Gladiator 2 without actually saying how they're different vis a vis performer ethnicity, other than "more people care about" Gladiator 2.
I don't know anything about Gladiator 2 other than it's an entirely new spectacle.
Sorry that you had to discover that there are different kinds of people with different preferences!
Also, how people started to use "being woke" (alert to racial prejudice and discrimination) and "DEI" (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) as swear words is beyond me.
Seeing DEI as a slur depresses me. On Instagram in the comments of videos of Trump getting shot, there are so many it's due to the SS having female members, which they conclude is because of DEI.
It makes me want to ask Putin to just launch those nukes already...
The worst part of this is that it writes racism out of history, and leaves young people with bizarre, unrealistic impressions of the past. It leaves them without the tools to understand their racist experience and environment in the present, which can be nothing but a comfort to racists.
If you're doing an artistic thing, fine. But I'm really getting sick of virulently racist eras being portrayed by a multiracial cast becoming standard. 20 years from now, young people may not even understand what the problem was, never having seen a depiction of racism, and watching black Scottish kings, while the descendants of slaves will still be living in the gutter with about the same wealth that we were released from the plantations with: zero.
the Chernobyl miniseries handled accents perfectly. Ostensibly in Russia it had everyone speaking English accents. The educated spoke in RP, but the miners spoke with working class regional British accents. It added a lot of texture to the show.
I've often wondered if Monty Python was just doing a big meta-parody of RP. That is, you speak like a proper Oxford man while also being absurd, and the comedy almost writes itself.
Monty Python were mostly making fun of the BBC; the BBC at the time had very stiff and paternalistic presenters. It's why the BBC had the nickname "Auntie", after your old-fashioned Auntie who know's what's best for you.
I think the requirement that they must speak RP had ended by the 1960s, but the BBC still had a lot of programmes and presenters with that schtick. Here's an example from 1968: https://youtu.be/GwRRSJ_wtIg?t=152
In terms of comedy, a lot of what Monty Python did had already been done in the 1950s by The Goon Show - the surreal situations, the funny voices, the silly noises; Python were massive fans of the Goons, and to their credit, the Pythons were able to bring that energy to television in a way that the Goons couldn't.
The Death of Stalin also handled the accent issues well. The actors used a lot of English accents to help represent the many accents that Russian also has.
The HBO series Rome handled it well. People of noble birth used RP, plebeians had middle-class accents and soldiers tended to have working-class accents from the southeast. Foreign slaves had a mix of foreign accents.
IIRC Game of Thrones took a similar approach for noble families and the rabble of Lannisport, but leaned more heavily on northern accents for people from northern regions.
I don't recall American accents in Rome, but there may have been some in GoT. If the story is good and the acting and characterizations are top-notch, it doesn't matter IMHO.
The game of thrones accents are pretty cringe though, leaning way too hard on the "dark featured eastern beauty with an unintelligible accent" trope whenever there is a brothel scene. I'm glad they realized this was stupid and had Myseria unceremoniously drop much of her fake accent for Season 2 House of the Dragon.
As someone from a country where brothels are legal I can assure you being cringe is very on-brand for brothels. The rich people of Westeros just all have a fetish for the exotic
I don't think they were doing it for a deep lore reason. Lets consider going from season 1 to season 2 in the shows chronology. It represents a gap of maybe 2 weeks, and in that time they gave Jacaerys 8 inch longer hair with a perm.
Apropos Rome, there is the other semi-recent roman series, Spartacus, which obviously isn’t on the niveau of Rome, concentrating more on violence and nudity. But it did something very interesting with the language, making it through vocabulary far more archaic sounding, and as this blog post argues possibly somewhat "latin":
RP English wasn't always used for Romans in Hollywood. But given that you're speaking English, not Latin, demanding "accuracy" is a category mistake. It's a matter of analogy: which English dialect today is most fitting, by analogy?
RP English has a certain perception in the US, but is it really the best accent in our times? The British Empire is gone, and did not rule the US. The American Empire, though hurtling fast toward extinction, is a sensible analogue. So some variety of American English seems fitting, and in general, an English language American movie will need to translate into American linguistic categories. For example, among Romans, you can vary dialects based on social class, ethnic origin, and so on.
But that's if you want analogical accuracy, and that kind of accuracy can work well when the subject matter of Rome is used as an occasion to critique our society.
It's an interesting question. If you want "historical accuracy", you would have the actors speak in Latin or Greek, but these days I'm not sure it'd find an audience. The only place you're likely to find spoken Latin is ecclesiasticly.
So your show's in English but not set in England, what accent should you have? For quite a while, I'd have said "what native speakers from that area sound like when trying to speak English"...
But when I watched the HBO Chernobyl mini-series, they had a different approach. All the various Russian, Ukrainian, etc. accents were instead regional English accents. And that was pretty good, because, honestly, as someone who doesn't speak any Slavic languages, I can't easily tell the differences between them, and I'd miss the implicit cultural and social judgements the speakers make of each other. But I know exactly how an RP speaker looks down on an Estuary English speaker who in turn looks down on a Yorkshireman or Scotsman. By using my own country's accents, the narcissism of small differences comes through loud and clear.
The accompanying podcast said they did it to make the actors "act their roles and not their accents". But it is a balancing act - do you want the versimilitude of having people sound like they're from the place on-screen (while still speaking English)? Or do you want the nuances of language translated properly for you?
In purely fantasy worlds, there's no reason why elves speak RP, dwarves speak Scots and orcs speak Cockney... if anything, the dwarves should speak Old Norse!
On a final note, watch the British take the piss out of those self-serving Hollywood movies where they have Americans play the heroes despite their country not existing until several centuries later (and of course giving the baddies British accents): Jerry Brickhammer presents "The Crusades", the movie in honour of all the Americans who died in the early middle ages: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IbzlUQwaC4Q
> If you want "historical accuracy", you would have the actors speak in Latin or Greek, but these days I'm not sure it'd find an audience
I think Barbarians had quite a bit of viewers on Netflix, right? I can highly, highly recommend the latin-german version[1] of season 1 - even though the Barbarians wouldn't have spoken modern German, it's still superb!
I've always wanted to see whether it would work to have a story where the Romans speak with US accents and the Greeks speak with UK accents, being all properly educated and cultured and so forth. But maybe it's so normalized to think that Romans in movies should speak like Brits that it wouldn't work.
It's so rare that anyone has an American accent in any American movie set in a non-English-speaking country. Usually they're either British or idk, some fake Spanish-like accent.
This reminds me of the scene in Toy Story where Buzz Lightyear starts speaking Spanish instead of English. There are two official Spanish dialect dubs of the movie, where he speaks the same language but has a different accent. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bDZcycnhni0
For me, someone from outside the Anglosphere, the British Empire is a distant and unfamiliar concept. I am always bothered by characters in historical fiction speaking with a British accent just to make an impression of ancientness. The antiquity was not ancient back then -- it was modern for its contemporaries.
Rome was as much the dominant economic, cultural and military power of the ancient world as the US is of the present. I would actually prefer American accents being used in movies set in the Roman Empire.
I have found that the only way to live a sane life these days is to just ignore all the culture warriors who show up and start the same tired fight every day. "XYZ should/shouldn't be black/white/asian/gay/straight/trans/irish/accented/disabled/male/female/young/old/tall..."
I don't care. If the movie looks interesting to me I'll buy a ticket. You should do the same. Regular people spend way too much time and energy jumping into the pointless debates for no reason thinking they will fix everything, but only amplify the idiocy by giving it attention.
The first time a woman performed in one of Shakespeare's plays in England, he'd been dead for half a century. He wrote all his plays knowing the women would be played by men.
How else do you explain the comic irony and theatrical resonance of Lady M saying "Come, you spirits that tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here, [...] come to my woman's breasts and take my milk for gall."
What I'm saying is you are not purely interested in artistic faithfulness to the original. You are interested in particular aesthetics that fit your own perspective, and you're using box office receipts to defend your own aesthetics, which is weird.
Yes that was the convention, for all plays, and in film today it's decidedly not (not to mention, films.. aren't plays, and that in itself is a deviation).
I didn't express any preference for any particular aesthetic. Everyone has them, but it's neither here nor there.
"some approaches to modern adaptation are better than others", and I believe you went on to say that a race-blind period Macbeth is not an approach you like. Maybe I'm crazy, sounded like a preference to me.
> you went on to say that a race-blind period Macbeth is not an approach you like
I didn't explicitly say so. But given race-blind adaptations, do it or don't. If you're going to turn a historical period on its head, then going all the way would be better.
Going back to something you said:
> What I'm saying is you are not purely interested in artistic faithfulness to the original. You are interested in particular aesthetics that fit your own perspective, and you're using box office receipts to defend your own aesthetics, which is weird.
Consistency and approximating faithfulness to an original is itself an aesthetic. It does not itself make an adaptation superior, it's a stylistic choice, and no one said it's the only good one.
Another user mentioned people are looking for "depth and coherent world building". All I said is in keeping with that.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 163 ms ] threadSuccessful art doesn't have to be accurate. Successful entertainment even less so!
It's super telling that you get people essentially complaining about AAVE like it's an existential issue for the movie, but silence on any other anachronisms not related to race.
Denzel played a great Macbeth in the recent Joel Coen movie, despite not once being Scottish. Acting!
Is it political soapboxing, or trying to make show business fairer? Because if Hollywood listened to your preferences, minority actors have less oppportunities for roles.
I was watching "A Gentleman in Moscow", a series about an aristocrat living in house arrest in a luxury hotel in 1920s-1950s Soviet Russia. Everyone in it spoke English since it is an US/UK production, and there were black and Indian actors in it, I guess because of "DEI". I found it awkward at first, but I thought "I guess this is progress, better get with the times.". No one moaned about all the Russian characters speaking English, the show didn't have any race-related topics (a movie about the KKK with black Klan members would be incongrous), but with actors of different color skin? That series had lots of IMDb reviews complaining about "political soapboxing"...
I must be one of those people^W sheep who don't mind being oppressed by the woke-mafia, huh?
As an addendum, I find it obnoxious if people insist straight actors can't play gay characters, or genteel actors playing Jewish characters. It's called fucking acting! Scarlett Johansson should've been able to play a fictional Japanese cyborg in Ghost in the Shell without idiots complaining about it...
Idk if anyone was actually not watching the Ghost in the Shell remake over the casting. The characters look right. If someone out there is upset that the main character wasn't played by someone Japanese, I don't get it, the original character didn't even look Japanese.
I don’t think that at all. I believe very strongly that nobody should ever feel the need to apologise for liking something. I simply don’t like this political ideology at all, I think it’s turning everything into monocultural forum for activism, and I’m not interested in the entertainment it’s producing. If you used a bit less prejudgment you’d be able to see it’s possible for me to have a distaste for this kind of product without being a horrible bigot.
There are plenty of reasons TV and movies are bad these days. With the glut of new shows, writing and directing in particular seems to be suffering.
The Witcher (for instance) fell off a cliff after its first season, and its shittiness had nothing to do with "DEI" and everything to do with Netflix's belief that cheaper creative doesn't hurt the bottom line.
What if more than one trend is happening at once?
Hey, that's what I thought when I read your comment!
What about the fact that the treatment of women and slaves is almost certainly significantly toned down from what we know to be the reality?
Also there was almost certainly way more gay sex going on among any number of historical personages. Commodus (Gladiator's main villain) in particular was said to have "defil[ed] every part of his body in dealings with persons of either sex." Where is your outrage at this lack of accurate representation?
The implication here is that it's really your own baggage that ruins the immersion for you. You suggest that you can't watch a movie now without cataloguing and mourning the places where a character was more likely in your opinion to be white, male and/or straight.
This is not something anyone can help you with.
White actors have dominated in Hollywood since the beginning, and I don't remember anybody complaining that Mickey Rooney's character in Breakfast at Tiffany's ruined the immersion. Or that literally all of the ethnic Asian characters in the Manchurian Candidate were played by white actors.
They didn't announce her as the new "Bond", and she is not confirmed to continue the character.
She didn't even have that designation at the end of the movie.
It's literally a number.
How eager are you to find things to be mad at?
Just because he was born in africa doesn't mean he is black or 'african'. Elon Musk was born in africa too but nobody would claim he is a black man.
I don't know what the Mauri looked like, but probably not like Italians, and I wouldn't be surprised if some of them had dark skin. The same website thinks that emperor looked like this: https://www.worldhistory.org/image/13005/macrinus-facial-rec... and if so, Denzel Washington's portrayal looks pretty good https://i0.wp.com/www.thewrap.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/07...
This doesn't look like the Netflix African Cleopatra situation. She was Greek IRL, which is actually interesting for anyone who didn't know about the Ptolemaic dynasty, and it's relevant because even today the Coptic minority in Egypt is (sorta) Greek.
Amazighs Algerians are an ethnic group that exists today, you can google them yourself to see how close they look to Denzel Washington.
The Scottish in 1600s were. Not to say it matters, as Macbeth is a quasi-fantasy play and it's been adapted a million times. At this point "black everything Macbeth" might draw more viewers than "just another fucking Macbeth" (maybe, idk but producers may have a better idea).
The question is always "who is this for" and "will people pay to see it"
It's just an artistic/stylistic judgement, not a complaint (very few readers here are likely to go see another in the pile of Macbeth movies). A modern day adaptation even with all the original names and dialog would still work better. I don't have a horse in the race because I don't care to see yet another Macbeth.
Lol. That is exactly what they're doing. You just don't like a black Macbeth, but others do and are fine with it. For the record, there have been black, green, orange, purple, yellow Macbeths since the dawn of time, ever since Shakespeare became a global cultural touchstone performed all over the world. I'm pretty sure whoever he is, wherever he is now, he must be pretty pleased to see his work continue to have cultural relevance through adaptation and appealing to audiences he could not have imagined rather than limited by the lack of imagination of hidebound tradition.
I think I made it clear, it isn't.
> You just don't like a black Macbeth, but others do and are fine with it.
Wrong.
Sure, I agree. As far as I’m concerned the earth is populated by ~8 billion individual human beings. But this is heresy according to the idiotic identity politics that has slowly taken over bits and pieces of western culture. It’s an ideology that demands everybody be shoehorned into race/gender/sexuality tribes. When it comes to DEI scores, there’s no ambiguity about who’s white and who’s not white. It’s an ideology that I don’t like at all, and it’s been constantly forced into a lot of entertainment. Whether this role was cast as a part of that mission or not doesn’t really matter, because it’s tainted the whole industry.
> And now demographics of audiences have changed so Hollywood has (slowly) adapted
I would say this isn’t a response to audience changes at all, and simply the result of a small elite of political activists, often producing product that directly defy the tastes of the core audience. But that doesn’t really matter either, because the people that don’t like it will simply disengage (though some will complain about it more than others).
I personally don’t really care very much either, I’m just offering my perspective. I barely watch any TV or movies any more, and I couldn’t say my life has suffered for it at all.
Conspiratorial thinking based on absolutely nothing.
Anything that "directly defies the tastes of the core audience" will fail. It's obvious you're choosing to put yourself in this "core" audience. What if you're wrong about that?
And what if I told you that the free market is the most powerful cultural force in the US, and TV/film studios produce content in ways they think will make the most money? That if they aren't making enough money, they change their strategy?
Would that be new information to you?
Even if Hollywood were a well-oiled machine, what would you say if they estimate they're losing sales from diversity casting, due to upsetting part of their audience, and decides to undo that?
https://www.oscars.org/awards/representation-and-inclusion-s...
> And what if I told you that the free market is the most powerful cultural force in the US, and TV/film studios produce content in ways they think will make the most money?
These DEI products fail all the time. The most recent Star Wars series is a great example. These failures are also well documented in every TV show/movie where the critics score and the audience score are miles apart on rotten tomatoes.
Basically all of your film's department heads have to be white straight men, you have to fail to hire just 6(!) women/POC/etc in other significant jobs, and the studio's executives all belong to over-represented groups. As in, they are whiter and straighter than THE COUNTRY.
That you insist on seeing evil and bad faith in efforts to make our culture more representative of our actual population is very depressing to me.
My point was that the things I mentioned are sufficient on their own to qualify a movie for the Best Picture category.
Pick any TWO of these four:
- "Diverse" casting (aka roughly in line with US pop demographics and even then, STILL favoring white men) OR storyline centered on non-white OR non-male OR non-heterosexual theme
- "Diverse" leadership (Simply have two dept heads that aren't white, straight, male, AND fully-abled)
- Opportunities for training and advancement for people who are not white, straight, male AND fully-abled
- Studio has >1 senior executive OR consultant that has a significantly different background from the rich, white, straight, fully-abled men that ran Hollywood for the better part of a century. Just find two people!
Second, the word "elites" perfectly describes the people who run the system people are trying to change. Elites don't want to change anything. Why would they?
gay and black people exist, and the people they are portraying are dead. it’s called acting for that reason, the character isnt really cleopatra.
However, most "historical" films are not historical reenactments. They are usually character dramas that are using a historical period as a backdrop to tell some other type of story. For me personally I see this more in the tradition of live theater. If the race (or even gender) of the characters isn't massively integral to the plot, it's fine and good to cast whoever acts well in the role. Cleopatra and the little mermaid are literally fairly tale characters, could not imagine caring what the race of the actress playing them is.
Of course, and I can’t say I ever noticed the race or gender of characters until recently. If movies/TV were was always just equally non-accurate then it would be fine, but that’s not how entertainment works. A man can be replaced by a woman or a transgender, a white character can be replaced by a non-white actor, and anybody can be made gay/bi/++. But the reverse is never allowed. It’s not some insane conspiracy theory either, these are basically the new rules of film making.
https://www.oscars.org/awards/representation-and-inclusion-s...
For people that are aligned with this political agenda, I’m sure it’s good for them. But I’m personally just not interested, and I think there’s quite a few people out there with the same views as me on this.
For instance, you can go the route of Throne of Blood. It transposes the plot to feudal Japan, and doesn't call itself Macbeth. This allows you to hit all the story beats with the freedom to change literally anything else you want, and still be "faithful" in its adaptation. I'd argue it's also a more intriguing approach for film.
Alternatively, you can opt for the original dialog, names, historical setting, and aesthetic. If you go this way, with a story set in Medieval Scotland that is not genre fantasy, then having something as incongruent as a change of race in the main character will stick out. Notwithstanding, here no one cares because a) Macbeth's been done to death, b) no one gives a damn about Macbeth. You can of course suggest that people are nonplussed about this for movies in general, but if they aren't invested in any way they may not see your film either.
So in fact you aren't likely to see this done for every film set in a historical period all the time, and the minor controversy and trolling if anything helps create buzz for a film that will otherwise flop anyway. Were you going to see it in theaters? Statistically, not likely.
Ridley Scott is on record as being extremely exasperated with historians when it comes to his historical films. So I'm not quite sure what you're getting at.
> a) Macbeth's been done to death > b) no one gives a damn about Macbeth
These are very bizarre claims you make very confidently.
I don't see how both of these aren't equally applicable to Gladiator 2, the sequel(!) to one of the worst Best Picture winners in history.
> So in fact you aren't likely to see this done for every film set in a historical period all the time, and the minor controversy and trolling if anything helps create buzz for a film that will otherwise flop anyway. Were you going to see it in theaters? Statistically, not likely.
So... what are you saying exactly? It was fine to make Macbeth black because no one was going to see it anyway? It was a good idea to make Macbeth black because controversy?
The clearest point you are making is that you cannot see outside your own point of view when it comes to race in cinema.
> Ridley Scott is on record as being extremely exasperated with historians when it comes to his historical films. So I'm not quite sure what you're getting at.
This is a bizarre non-sequitur. You might as well have said "My friend Mike likes pizza, so I'm not sure what you're getting at". What's the point?
> These are very bizarre claims you make very confidently.
https://www.imdb.com/find/?q=macbeth -- count them.
The latest ones were flops. For instance Macbeth 2015 grossed $16 million worldwide against its production budget of $20 million. So yeah, I make the claim "confidently".
> I don't see how both of these aren't equally applicable to Gladiator 2
You brought up Gladiator 2! And speaking of bizarre claims, for Gladiator to have been "done to death", it would have needed a sequel!
> It was fine to make Macbeth black because no one was going to see it anyway?
No. This has to be a weird projection because I did not say anything near that.
Whitey Macbeth has been done many times, no one's being deprived of Whitey Macbeth. My answer to those who complain is: if you're watching, it's for you. If not you're not watching, it's not for you. Producers are banking on someone watching.
> It was a good idea to make Macbeth black because controversy?
Probably.
I'm not sure why you're denying that you implied that diversity is fine in movies that don't do well. What other conclusion am I supposed to draw - especially in the context of this discussion - from your assertion that "no one cares about Macbeth" ?
I'm puzzled why your points are all now strictly based on how well the movies have done at the box office. You were talking about artistic and stylistic judgments before. Now it's about the business?
Nope. That would be unsurprising, it being fiction and all.
> I'm not sure why you're denying that you implied that diversity is fine in movies that don't do well.
Because that isn't what I fucking said.
> What other conclusion am I supposed to draw - especially in the context of this discussion - from your assertion that "no one cares about Macbeth" ?
That no one cares; it's a moot point, there will not be that much discourse surrounding it. That is the observation. There's no possible way to contrive that suggests "it's only justifiable to have diversity in films that don't do well".
The important part of the paragraph that belonged to is that some stylistic changes can seem incongruent with the whole of a film. A black Scottish medieval king is incongruent. That's not even a value judgement, and it's not always clear whether audiences will be drawn or repelled.
> I'm puzzled why your points are all now strictly based on how well the movies have done at the box office. You were talking about artistic and stylistic judgments before. Now it's about the business?
Wow, you are obtuse. Be puzzled then, run off and do something else.
- Macbeth is old fiction, but some approaches to adapting it are BETTER than others
- Don't do something "incongruent" and "brazen" like cast a black man and call your movie Macbeth, because that isn't one of the BETTER approaches.
- But honestly, no one cares because ugh Macbeth is so played out, NO ONE gives a damn.
Then you shouldn't have said those things?
As it stands, you have drawn a rhetorical distinction between fictional Macbeth and the also-fictional Gladiator 2 without actually saying how they're different vis a vis performer ethnicity, other than "more people care about" Gladiator 2.
You accuse me of being obtuse and then fail to actually make a point about why people are complaining about Gladiator 2, only that bringing up Macbeth is dumb because who cares about stupid Macbeth.
I did say and mean that.
> - Don't do something "incongruent" and "brazen" like cast a black man and call your movie Macbeth, because that isn't one of the BETTER approaches.
That isn't what I said.
Do cast a black man, do call it Macbeth. But seriously, keep going. It's weird to set something in Medieval Scotland and make just one guy a-historical. Make half the cast black, or whatever. It's seems like restraint or half-measure to try to keep in tradition in every other way but a single character. There's no reason you can't go full Bridgerton. I think that would serve it better.
I hope that's clear. I'm not sure if you actually aren't capable of grasping, or refuse to do so because you'd rather project racism. It's a bit weird.
Another user mentioned people are looking for "depth and coherent world building". I think if it feels coherent then it works.
> fail to actually make a point about why people are complaining about Gladiator 2
Dude. You brought up Gladiator 2, not me. Ask them why they're complaining, because I sure didn't.
> As it stands, you have drawn a rhetorical distinction between fictional Macbeth and the also-fictional Gladiator 2 without actually saying how they're different vis a vis performer ethnicity, other than "more people care about" Gladiator 2.
I don't know anything about Gladiator 2 other than it's an entirely new spectacle.
Also, how people started to use "being woke" (alert to racial prejudice and discrimination) and "DEI" (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) as swear words is beyond me.
It makes me want to ask Putin to just launch those nukes already...
What's with accounts here wanting Putin to use nukes all of a sudden?
'If I could have one wish it would be for Putin to nuke Warsaw.'
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41051619
It is some meme I'm not getting? Bizarre.
Before this war I've said "Kim Jong-Un has my permission to nuke X"...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slough_(poem)
If you're doing an artistic thing, fine. But I'm really getting sick of virulently racist eras being portrayed by a multiracial cast becoming standard. 20 years from now, young people may not even understand what the problem was, never having seen a depiction of racism, and watching black Scottish kings, while the descendants of slaves will still be living in the gutter with about the same wealth that we were released from the plantations with: zero.
If racism is a 'was' in 20 years, I would be happy to take the win.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Received_Pronunciation
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h09RqgrDgv4
https://youtu.be/ZArgEvK2R1s
I think the requirement that they must speak RP had ended by the 1960s, but the BBC still had a lot of programmes and presenters with that schtick. Here's an example from 1968: https://youtu.be/GwRRSJ_wtIg?t=152
They do make fun of the upper class speech in e.g. Woody and Tinny Words https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M3-51DhOzHE
In terms of comedy, a lot of what Monty Python did had already been done in the 1950s by The Goon Show - the surreal situations, the funny voices, the silly noises; Python were massive fans of the Goons, and to their credit, the Pythons were able to bring that energy to television in a way that the Goons couldn't.
IIRC Game of Thrones took a similar approach for noble families and the rabble of Lannisport, but leaned more heavily on northern accents for people from northern regions.
I don't recall American accents in Rome, but there may have been some in GoT. If the story is good and the acting and characterizations are top-notch, it doesn't matter IMHO.
http://bachae.blogspot.com/2012/02/language-of-spartacus.htm...
(Don’t know if that’s true; back in school I wrongly chose French instead of Latin as a third language. Maybe someone else knows more.)
RP English has a certain perception in the US, but is it really the best accent in our times? The British Empire is gone, and did not rule the US. The American Empire, though hurtling fast toward extinction, is a sensible analogue. So some variety of American English seems fitting, and in general, an English language American movie will need to translate into American linguistic categories. For example, among Romans, you can vary dialects based on social class, ethnic origin, and so on.
But that's if you want analogical accuracy, and that kind of accuracy can work well when the subject matter of Rome is used as an occasion to critique our society.
So your show's in English but not set in England, what accent should you have? For quite a while, I'd have said "what native speakers from that area sound like when trying to speak English"...
But when I watched the HBO Chernobyl mini-series, they had a different approach. All the various Russian, Ukrainian, etc. accents were instead regional English accents. And that was pretty good, because, honestly, as someone who doesn't speak any Slavic languages, I can't easily tell the differences between them, and I'd miss the implicit cultural and social judgements the speakers make of each other. But I know exactly how an RP speaker looks down on an Estuary English speaker who in turn looks down on a Yorkshireman or Scotsman. By using my own country's accents, the narcissism of small differences comes through loud and clear.
The accompanying podcast said they did it to make the actors "act their roles and not their accents". But it is a balancing act - do you want the versimilitude of having people sound like they're from the place on-screen (while still speaking English)? Or do you want the nuances of language translated properly for you?
In purely fantasy worlds, there's no reason why elves speak RP, dwarves speak Scots and orcs speak Cockney... if anything, the dwarves should speak Old Norse!
On a final note, watch the British take the piss out of those self-serving Hollywood movies where they have Americans play the heroes despite their country not existing until several centuries later (and of course giving the baddies British accents): Jerry Brickhammer presents "The Crusades", the movie in honour of all the Americans who died in the early middle ages: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IbzlUQwaC4Q
I think Barbarians had quite a bit of viewers on Netflix, right? I can highly, highly recommend the latin-german version[1] of season 1 - even though the Barbarians wouldn't have spoken modern German, it's still superb!
[1] sneak-peak: https://youtube.com/watch?v=ojC-zTXSAsY
Rome was as much the dominant economic, cultural and military power of the ancient world as the US is of the present. I would actually prefer American accents being used in movies set in the Roman Empire.
I don't care. If the movie looks interesting to me I'll buy a ticket. You should do the same. Regular people spend way too much time and energy jumping into the pointless debates for no reason thinking they will fix everything, but only amplify the idiocy by giving it attention.
How else do you explain the comic irony and theatrical resonance of Lady M saying "Come, you spirits that tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here, [...] come to my woman's breasts and take my milk for gall."
What I'm saying is you are not purely interested in artistic faithfulness to the original. You are interested in particular aesthetics that fit your own perspective, and you're using box office receipts to defend your own aesthetics, which is weird.
I didn't express any preference for any particular aesthetic. Everyone has them, but it's neither here nor there.
I didn't explicitly say so. But given race-blind adaptations, do it or don't. If you're going to turn a historical period on its head, then going all the way would be better.
Going back to something you said:
> What I'm saying is you are not purely interested in artistic faithfulness to the original. You are interested in particular aesthetics that fit your own perspective, and you're using box office receipts to defend your own aesthetics, which is weird.
Consistency and approximating faithfulness to an original is itself an aesthetic. It does not itself make an adaptation superior, it's a stylistic choice, and no one said it's the only good one.
Another user mentioned people are looking for "depth and coherent world building". All I said is in keeping with that.