The movie “The Legend of Bagger Vance” popped into my head this morning. (And you think you have problems…) Thinking about it reminded me about how back when it came out, there was a big debate ovSer the movie’s use of the “magical negro” stereotype. I remember agreeing with the people who pointed this out, but not without some reservations…after all, I pointed out, if George Lucas had cast Sidney Poitier as Obi-Wan Kenobi instead of Sir Alec Guinness, would he have automatically become a magical negro even though the script hadn’t changed?
Which, in turn, reminded me of “women in refrigerators”. The list is well-known by now among comics fans, as are some of the excuses different writers have come up with for its existence. But the fact is, the most common one (“Hey, it’s not like men have it easy either!”) is actually sorta kinda true…Steve Trevor bit the big one a couple of times, the Vision was gruesomely dismembered and revived as a pale imitation of himself in order to put a little conflict into the Scarlet Witch’s story arc, the first couple of guys who even thought about dating Ms Marvel bit it, and let’s not even get into the whole Terry Long thing. (Husband and son both bit it there…)
But that’s the thing: Only an idiot would actually try to use these as arguments against the prevalence of racism and sexism in popular culture. Even though you can say, legitimately, that the “magical negro” is simply a mentor archetype that happens to be black, and even though you can say, legitimately, that a “woman in (a) refrigerator” is simply a supporting character that gets bumped off in order to provide a little drama for the main character who happens to be female, we can all recognize that there’s still something skeezy about it all. (Well, most of us can. I know all the enlightened, wise readers here can.) So what is it? Why is it not okay?
The answer is that there are so few other roles for these characters to take that the supporting roles become disproportionate representations of the characters in popular culture. Or, to put that a little less fancy, it’s not that there are lots of black “wise mentor” characters, it’s that there are so few black heroes getting mentored. It’s not that there are so many women in comics who die, it’s that there are so few who get to go off and avenge the deaths. These things are symptoms of a far deeper, more fundamental problem in pop culture, namely a dearth of protagonists who aren’t white guys. Nobody thinks to cast a black guy in the Luke Skywalker role; he’s relegated to the Obi-Wan (or more accurately, Mace Windu) part. We’ve reached a plateau in bringing diversity into our cult fiction, where characters outside the white male “standard” are included, but almost never in a leading role. Until that changes, you’ll continue to see the same stereotypes. Because they’re not stereotypes, they’re archetypes….but they’re the only archetypes women and minorities are allowed to inhabit.
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Thank you.
Well-done, sir.
I think that gets close to it. The issue with something like Women in Refrigerators isn’t that it only happens to women – it is that it happens to them *disproportionately*. If 90% of women have rape crop up in their backstory, or 90% of supporting female characters have something tragic happen to them to advance the male lead – while 5% of male support characters might be in the same situation – clearly, something is wrong.
Moving more on to your actual conclusion, half the issue is that it is a self-perpetuating problem. Movie and game companies see far fewer works with female leads that product big hits, so they in turn avoid having as many female leads as male leads. But the reason they don’t see as many big hits with female leads is because they aren’t producing as many works focused around female characters!
As for the initial point itself… yeah, its a tricky situation. Even more than these specific cliches, and whether you can pull them off ‘properly’ in the service of a good story… writing realized characters of a race/culture/gender not your own involves walking a very thin line. Avoiding them because you don’t know how to write them, or just writing them without any cultural personality outside of your own, and you risk sidelining them and ignoring their culture. But put in too much, especially with material you aren’t as personally familiar with, and you end up perpetuating stereotypes rather than creating a genuine character.
What’s the answer? Other than just, “Be a better writer.” I’m not sure if there is any ‘easy’ solution – but certainly the first step is simply becoming aware of the problem and thinking about it, and hopefully finding a better way from there.
“The answer is that there are so few other roles for these characters to take that the supporting roles become disproportionate representations of the characters in popular culture. Or, to put that a little less fancy, it’s not that there are lots of black “wise mentor” characters, it’s that there are so few black heroes getting mentored. ”
You get it.
Exactly. For instance, the “women in refrigerators” happens–in part, I feel–because a lot of these characters are love interests / otherwise important to the main character. In order to get an emotional kick out of things, something bad happens to these supporting characters in order to motivate the main character. So if you consider it solely from that angle, it’s not necessarily sexist.
The problem is that the majority of main characters in comics are straight males, so most of their love interests, to whom these bad things happen, are female. In your counterexamples, the male characters whom the writers abused were the love interests of main female characters: Steve Trevor for Wonder Woman, the Vision for Scarlet Witch, and Terry Long for Donna Troy. If we had male and female main characters in equal proportions, then this might not be such a big deal.
As it is, “women in refrigerators” is another symptom of having (white, straight) males as the norm in comics (and other media).
Supporting casts have it rough in adventure stories. Look at Obi Wan.
Unless that black lead is Will Smith or Denzel Washington…
Exactly, Skemono. The love interest of the main character always has a rough deal, because the easiest way to change love interests is to kill off the old one. Nobody wants to read about a long, messy break-up, or a rebound relationship, or a divorce…but if you bump off Gwen Stacy, then it’s just a quick revenge story and a few issues of mourning, and Peter Parker’s ready to date again!
Comic book universes are the one place where a feminist quoting the infamous “1 in 4 women” statistic for rape would be laughed out of the room for *under* estimating the problem.
Well comic book universes and anarchist states…
Very well put.
Am I the only one looking forward to the combination of these themes as “Magical Negroes in Refrigerators”?
Actually, just reading that, I’m not looking forward to it at all.
Well, if you’re talking about killing off your Magical Negro and sticking the corpse in a refrigerator, yeah, that’s a bad thing.
But if he just stays in the fridge to keep fresh until you need some mentoring, that’s ok I guess.
You know,you just open that vegetable crisper, and BAM! Morgan Freeman dispensing wisdom….
Do you like Jar-Jar Binks?
Don’t you see he wouldn’t be any better as the protagonist? (Jar-Jar Skywalker?!)
Actually, there used to be big roles for minorities- specifically, all those “Oriental Detective” types- but they became regarded as “politically incorrect” because they were played by WHITE GUYS.
I think it might be time to reclaim them…after all,although aspects of Charlie Chan ARE a little bit cliched, he was always the smartest and most competent guy in the room.(Now that he’s too old for the kung fu, Sammo Hung would be perfect for the role- or maybe Chow Yun-Fat.)
Similarily, people dismiss the various “ethnic sidekicks”, but with a bit of reworking, they could be fleshed out into equal partners (heck, we’ve started to see this- witness characters like The Falcon…and,hey, don’t most people think of The Green Hornet as “Kato’s Boss”?)
Of course, this shouldn’t be a replacement for creating new,strong characters.
Also: highlyverbal, Jar-Jar might have actually BEEN an improvement over Hayden Christenson in the Anakin role- if only because he had better romantic chemistry with Natalie Portman.
Since they’re played by white people, they’re not exactly big roles for “minorities”, now are they?
Man, the Legend of Bagger Vance seems like such a poor example of this. Not because it isn’t true. But because, I mean — somebody read the Mahabharata and said, “I bet we could rewrite this to be about white Southern gentlemen playing golf.” Just, you know… what is there to say past that?
But then I run across a quote from the writer of that movie saying he had to make Bagger Vance black because he had to portray the immense social distance between Arjuna and his charioteer, Krishna. So I’m not even sure he read the Mahabharata before embarking on this project.
The question is, what helps solve this? I think that Character such as Buffy, most of Will Smith’s and Wesley Snipes characters help. Joss Whedon will give us kick-ass warrior women (Zoe and River) Jms will create charactes such as Susan Ivanova, Lockley, Lyta, and others. Who is breaking new ground these days? Kurt Buseik has had a varied amount of minority protagonists, Mark Waid had put women and minorites in important action roles in Irredeemable. We need to look at Renee as the Question, maybe Batwoman, and ask which stories we read that have cool protagonist of all stripes. (Thron and Grandma Ben in Bone anyone?)
This has become one of those bits of received wisdom that isn’t entirely accurate; while it’s true that Mr. Moto and Mr. Wong, the Charlie Chan knockoff film franchises, were played by Peter Lorre and Boris Karloff respectively, Charlie Chan himself was played by Werner Olund – who, despite his name, was half-Mongolian by birth and was very much Asian in appearance.
I’m probably gonna say that having black main characters being mentored by a white guy might also cause people to become squeamish, for completely different reasons.
At first. Then they got Sidney Toler (who made more Chan films than Oland), and after that Roland Winters.
“I’m probably gonna say that having black main characters being mentored by a white guy might also cause people to become squeamish, for completely different reasons.”
You’re the man now, dog!
Read the first paragraph and went all OF COURSE IT IS BECAUSE THERE STILL AIN’T NO BLACK LUKE SKYWALKER and then I read through and I was like oh okay he got there, good.