Letters to the Editor: Remakes and Race-swapping

Let’s talk about race-swapping in movies (and sexuality-swapping).

I don’t really go to the movies much these days.

Very rarely does something come out that I want to see, and even when something good does come out it’s usually not that good, so I don’t mind waiting for a clean copy to appear on torrent sites.

Modern cinema has become so bogged down by bullshit that it’s lost its appeal to me. Everything is either a remake, thinly-veiled propaganda, or capeshit (which lately has been thinly-veiled propaganda). The art of telling a good story seems to be lost. Nobody wants to take chances anymore, everyone wants to just rehash the same tired old shit because it’s “the safe bet”. When directors do step outside the norm, it’s usually to make over-the-top grotesque shock value trash, or boring artsy fartsy pretentious bullshit. What happened to just coming up with a cool concept and telling a good story?

Everything also has to hit imaginary diversity points. Your movie needs to meet some stupid quota of women and minorities to even consider getting made. Does it matter if those women or minorities are good actors? Fuck no, just throw them in there! The fatter and uglier the better.

Before I forget that this was supposed to be a “Letters to the Editor” article and go into a fullblown rant, today’s letter comes from Henry. Henry, who has been reading the site off and on for 15 years, wants to know my take on race-swapping in movies:

Hey AJ,

I used to read angryjerk.net in 2010 (found you on Rant Lister). I even sent you fan mail and you replied, not like Maddox who never replied.

I was sitting here wondering what happened to you so I looked you up on Google and found this site again. Can’t believe you’re still at it after all these years. Angryjerk.net is a breath of fresh air in this pc world.

Anyway the wife just made me sit through the live action Snow White movie. It fucking sucks big black dicks but you probably already knew that. You should do an article about Hollywood race changing and Disney diversity that’s ruining movies.

Stay angry.

Henry M.

 

Thanks for the fan mail, Henry. I’m sorry, I don’t remember your email, and I don’t see it in my mailbag. Did you send it under another name? I did a whole article on old fan mail not that long ago, maybe yours was one of them. In any case, glad you found the site again. Those bastards at The Angry Jerk restaurant in Maryland really fucked us over on Google, but we’re still holding our own. I may have to send Frosty and Juan on a company business trip to Silver Spring one of these days.

As far as race-swapping and diversity in movies and TV, it’s something I’ve wanted to do an article on for a while now, but I just haven’t gotten around to it.

The thing is, I don’t necessarily have a problem with changing a character up. When there was all the hoopla about a black James Bond, I was actually kind of excited, because I thought for sure that it would be Idris Elba. Idris is a very talented actor, nobody can deny that. If any black man could play Bond, it would be him.

We didn’t get Elba as Bond though, because he had the sense to know that black Bond was only being done to pander to ivory tower white liberals, who never seem to run out of groups to get offended for. As sad as I am that we’ll never get to see Idris Elba play James Bond, he made the right call to turn down the role, and I wish more black actors would turn down these bullshit diversity roles. Unfortunately, this meant that we got Lashana Lynch, an actress who’s about as entertaining as a turnip. God only knows what’s going to happen to the franchise now.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with changing a character’s race if race isn’t important to the story or the character. For example, say you’re casting for a superhero that’s traditionally white. Two actors audition for the role, one black guy and one white guy. The white guy looks exactly like the character, but he just doesn’t seem to “get” them. He might have read a few of the more popular comics, but not enough to completely understand the character. Meanwhile, the black guy has went and read as much of the source material as he could, he has all the character’s traits and mannerisms down almost flawlessly, and just overall delivers the better performance. I know I’d rather see the black actor in the role, even if the character was white in the comics. We saw this with LaKeith Stanfield as L in Netflix’s live-action Death Note (which I’ve reviewed). LaKeith did an amazing job because he watched the source material, and if he hadn’t been handed a bum script I guarantee he would have done even better.

Nobody really complained when Samuel L. Jackson was cast as Nick Fury. It’s all about the quality of the actor. At least, for me. I’m sure there’s plenty of racist idiots out there who don’t care about talent and are just hung up on race, but I don’t think they’re representative of the average audience.

With that said, there’s times when you really shouldn’t change the race. The live action Snow White movie (which I’m sorry you had to sit through, Henry) for example. Snow White’s main trait is being white, it’s literally in her name. Instead of casting a white actress, Disney intentionally casted Rachel Zegler, a Latina actress. I’m not against Latinas by any stretch, as I’ve made abundantly clear in my Riverdale reviews. But this change was done purely for PC brownie points. And not only that, but Zegler is a terrible actress with an ugly face and eyes so far apart that she can probably see behind herself. Disney’s current business model seems to be “Fuck being creative, let’s generate controversy instead.” Then when the movie bombs they can just say that it was review-bombed and anyone who didn’t like it was racist or misogynistic. Walt’s probably rolling in his grave right now at the mismanagement of his company.

Another example of when race-swapping can damage the story is the upcoming Harry Potter series on HBO. It was announced that a black actor by the name of Paapa Essiedu was cast to play Professor Snape. I don’t know much about this guy, so I can’t say if he’s a good actor or not. What I can say though is that this damages the overall story by adding racial undertones to Harry’s dislike of Snape, as well as Harry’s dad bullying Snape when they were in school together. This was a terrible choice, no matter how good of an actor Essiedu might be. A black Professor McGonagall wouldn’t have been an issue, even a black Dumbledore would have been fine (I’m now imagining Samuel L. Jackson calling Voldemort a “snake-faced bitch ass motherfucker” during their duel in the Ministry of Magic). But Snape was the one character where changing his race can actually affect the story negatively.

There are some changes I’ve seen to shows that made sense though. While it’s not race-swapping, in the recent Rugrats reboot, they made Phil and Lil’s mom a lesbian. So many people were outraged by this, but I think it actually made sense. Anyone who grew up watching the original cartoon has long suspected that Betty was a lesbian. The obvious joke was, of course, the subversion of gender roles. Betty was butch and Howard was effeminate. But Howard wasn’t that important of a character. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that Phil and Lil’s dad was the least important character on the entire show. The only scene I can even remember with Howard was him helping the guys paint Chuckie’s dad’s apartment. Writing him out and making Betty DeVille a lesbian is a perfectly sensible update to the series that doesn’t damage it in anyway. The reboot sucked, but this wasn’t one of the reasons.

So I’m not against changing up a character’s race. There are plenty of talented non-white actors out there who would do great in roles that are traditionally white. The problem is when companies change up characters and shoehorn in diversity under the (false) pretense of being progressive. Companies like Disney continually do this race-swapping bullshit because they lack any real creativity, and the controversy gives them a convenient scapegoat when their movie inevitably fails. Rather than admit that most audiences don’t want forced diversity or more remakes of classic movies, Disney can say “It’s not our fault, the movie just got review-bombed by racists!”, and Lily White and all her liberal progressive friends who live 50 miles from the nearest black person will blindly agree and give themselves a pat on the back for “taking a stand”.

But hey, nobody’s forcing me to watch this shit, so if Disney wants to run their company into the ground and die on Diversity Hill then let them.

Hopefully Hollywood gets their shit together soon. But until they do, I’ll just keep watching the classics and watching the propaganda machine slowly grind itself off a cliff.