ENFORCING
DIVERSITY IN POST-MODERN STORYTELLING AND HOW IT AFFECTS THE QUALITY OF MOTION
PICTURES
By Nabil Bakri
(American Studies 2018)
how to cite: Bakri, Nabil. 2019. "Enforcing Diversity in Post-Modern Story-Telling and how it Affects the Quality of Motion Pictures". Platinum Generation: https://nabilbakri.blogspot.com. Accessed (add time and date).
INTRODUCTION
With
the release of Frozen in 2013, Disney
tried to change the image of traditional Disney Princess formula of a girl meets boy and the involvement of a true love’s kiss to break an evil
spell. Disney received negative criticism from the third-wave feminist for
their depictions of the Disney Princess(es) (Hains, 2016 and Willet (n.d)) that were
considered as the opposite of women empowerment and a support to patriarchy in
which a prince is always depicted as the saviour. Although Disney had already
released a heroine Princess character in 1995 with Pocahontas and the film was praised for its beautiful style and
songs, it was panned for its depiction of Pocahontas, and the depictions of
Indian tribes in general. Thus, Disney’s first attempt to bring (major racial) diversity to the audience
through its iconic Animation Production series was a failure. In 1998, however,
Disney’s Mulan received positive
reviews from both critics and audience. It was not because Mulan is a Chinese Disney Princess voiced by Ming-Na Wen, but
simply because Mulan is considered as
a good-solid animation (Ebert, 1998 and IMDB
User Reviews as of 2018) that happens
to tell the story of a strong Asian woman (Mulan being Asian is not the point
of the overall story). The failure of Pocahontas
in delivering solid narrative, then, propels the question whether diversity
alone is enough to turn a mediocre story to a masterpiece. Is diversity that
important to a story? Is diversity a must?
Is diversity the point of a movie or is it story-telling in general?
Although
the demand for human rights acknowledgments (Blacks, Colours, and LGBTQ) started to take place in the second half
of the twentieth century, the demand for representations in entertainment
industries began to overwhelm the film studios in the second decade of the
twenty-first century with the emergence of a supposedly fourth-wave feminism,
the legalization and acceptance of gay rights and gay marriage, and the
continuing flows of racism (McNary, 2015). In 2013, Frozen became the new standard in Disney Princess story-telling by
implementing an opposite formula to the previous Disney Princess movies.
Instead of presenting the saviour in the form of a prince, the film questions
the motives behind the dashing good look of a prince and Frozen deliberately shattered the clichéd formula that is true love’s kiss. Although Frozen received all the praise for being
new (Nagra, 2018), the credit should be directed to Disney PIXAR’s Brave released one year prior to Frozen as a movie about a Princess that
hates all the rules that bind a Princess which ultimately criticize the old/traditional
paradigm of women’s role, the very paradigm all feminists pledge to combat.
With the already-powerful image of Disney Animation Studios (the Disney Classics series starting from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in 1937),
however, it was Frozen that managed
to stir the public’s imagination and shift their understanding on Princess
stories. The live-action Princess movie, Maleficent
released in 2014, borrows Frozen’s
different formula and the live action remake of Beauty and the Beast released in 2017, pushed further the idea of
women’s empowerment.
Although
Beauty and the Beast received mixed
reviews from critics and audience, it was a huge commercial success. Movies
that promise diversity and representation to the audience had always, since Frozen, seem to find the way to success.
This phenomena is not very hard to explain because it is essentially the demand
of the public (Dickerson, (n.d)). A single tweet #GiveElsaAGirlfriend (Give Elsa a Girlfriend) managed to overwhelm
the internet in 2016. It was first tweeted by Alexis Isabel Mocanda who then
wrote an article on MTV News concerning her tweet. She claimed that she has
always wanted diversity—particularly involving LGBTQ characters—to be presented
by Disney, the animation studio that has the power to influence children due to
its popularity. She, however, would have never thought that her tweet could be
viral in seconds. The popularity of her tweet with massive numbers of like(s)
and share(s), somehow signalling the clue that the public—the internet user, at
least—want more diversity in movies to let children know that there are
situations that were considered not normal in the past, are normal today; that
everything is normal and it is okay to be not normal, because there is no such
thing as not normal because essentially, nothing is normal as not even today’s
Psychologist can be sure about the definition of ‘normal’ anymore (as seen on Maisel,
2011).
I
recently thought about this in relation to Disney’s Frozen, a movie I have seen
multiple times. Many in the LGBT community view this movie as a metaphor for
the experience of coming out and accepting who you are. Yet Elsa, the film's
protagonist, will probably end up with a male prince or king in the upcoming
Frozen sequel. These thoughts soon drenched my mind and pushed me to tweet
about how “iconic” it would be if Frozen's Elsa were cast alongside a princess
instead…………………………............................................
My Twitter followers are overwhelmingly dedicated to
supporting LGBT representation and were therefore ecstatic about the idea.
Their enthusiasm pushed me to further create a hashtag to spread the idea
across the Internet. So, on the night of April 30, I decided to start the
hashtag "#GiveElsaAGirlfriend." Just a few tweets later, my idea had
become a sensation. People all over Twitter were talking about it, sharing
their support and even their opposition. People tweeted at Disney and even at
the actors who voice the film's characters. (Mocanda)
Alexis
Isabel Mocanda, in her own words, explains how Frozen gave a huge impact on the LGBTQ community and the idea to
give Princess Elsa, the animated heroine for the LGBTQ community, a prince or a
king thus make her straight is an
awful idea. This remarks the very first time a huge population of internet
users condemn a cartoon character for being straight.
This remarks the very first time the idea of straight is not normal. This might sound a little bit too
far-fetched, but since Frozen,
studios have been changing supposedly straight characters as gay and,
supposedly male characters as females, and supposedly white characters as
black. The remake of Beauty and the Beast
changed the sexuality of the character LeFou. In the original 1991, in every
single frame in the 85 minutes of moving pictures, there is none whatsoever
found a clue of LeFou’s sexuality thus claiming LeFou as gay in 2016 is indeed
too far-fetched (Reynolds, 2017). Iceman from Marvel was also changed from his
straight-masculine persona in the 60s to a gay character (BBC’s interview with
the creator, Stan Lee, in 2015 who admits he was not creating Iceman as a gay
character). Prior to this, JK Rowling claimed that Dumbledore, the powerful
head-master in her Harry Potter
novels, is gay and she has been changing more characters for more diversity
since then (Oulton, 2016). Studios released Ghost
Busters in 2016 with all female characters denouncing the original Ghostbusters for being all male, Oceans 8 in 2018 presenting the formula
of George Clooney’s acclaimed heist movie, Oceans
11, but with all women stars/characters. The biggest change of direction
might be best addressed to Star Wars
by adding more female heroines for the purpose of diversity. All of these new
additions to the entertainment industry might seem positive, according to the
LGBTQ community, civil rights activists and feminists, but, the new requirement
to diversify everything actually hurts studios with hundreds of millions of
dollars loss due to less people paying to see these activist-approved diverse movies (Ranganathan, 2018). The biggest
case was Disney’s decision to change the direction of Star Wars by casting more important female roles by diminishing the roles of male characters
as the original Star Wars were
suddenly considered in favour of males only. Fans of the original Star Wars, both males and females,
decided to boycott Star Wars and the
impact was massive, causing any Star Wars-related
project that follows (including action figures) to flop (Kyriaziz, 2018).
If
diversity is the key, according to groups that endorse the idea, to make movies
more appealing to ‘new’ generations, why there are movies more diverse than
anything in the past that suffer from the audience’s backlash demanding for ‘a
good story’ instead of ‘diversity’? Were stories (including those in novels and
poems) created to promote diversity in the first place, or simply to tell stories?
If movies are being forced by certain groups of people to convey the idea
and/or situation they hold as true the most, what differentiate a moving
picture as being a movie or a piece of art from being a propaganda? This analysis
means to see the status of movies as art and disclose the initial and most
essential purpose of movies. This analysis also means to disclose the impacts
of enforcing diversity in movies, of whether the enforcement elevates the value
of art and story-telling in movies or weakens them.
FINDINGS AND
DISCUSSIONS
 |
| (Gone with the Wind ||| picture belongs to Warner Bros., taken from The Commercial Appeal) |
Motion Pictures
as Art
Stories
in literature, whether it be the extensive detailed exposition that is Margaret
Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind or the
short and simplistic paragraphs that is Charles Perrault’s Sleeping Beauty, are, according to their forms, works of art
(Graham, 2005:127-148). This also apply to poems, even though literary arts, in
general, are rarely discussed heavily in art discussions compared to the visual
arts that include paintings, sculpture, and architecture (Graham, 2005:103). Film, a rather new form of visual arts
that, similar to literature, conveys stories to tell, appeared in the late 19th
century to gain much more attentions and discussions in decades to come. It has
multiple names throughout the many times and places in the Western Culture;
motion pictures, film, cinema, feature length, and movies, but the debate of
whether the new form of visual arts
should be strictly named with one of the variations or not is somehow less
necessary today since both critics
and the public recognize that the variations in name signify the somewhat
similar form of art. Critics and the public, however, experienced difficulties
in defining art and therefore, the
criticism of movies and art in general for that matter, became too difficult to
be done objectively, hence the claim that diversity matters over stories in movies (with the
assumption that any claim is subjectively valid).
Some philosophers have thought that the value of art
is necessarily connected with pleasure or enjoyment because, they argue, to say
that a painting, a poem, a play or a piece of music is good is just the same as
saying that it pleases us. The best known philosopher who to hold this view was
the eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher David Hume (1711-76). In a famous
essay entitled ‘Of the Standard of Taste’ Hume argues that the important thing
about art is its ‘agreeableness’, the pleasure we derive from it, and that this
is a matter of our sentiments, not its intrinsic nature.” (Graham)
It is clear that art, according to Hume, is something
that pleases the spectator. Since every spectator is essentially different, art
is, therefore, subjective. As directly cited from the book Philosophy of the Arts (Graham, 2005:4), “…if I like a thing, I
like it, irrespective of any characteristics it possesses”, the demand from
people who want more diversity in movies cannot be judged as subjectively inaccurate. Thus, if a
person subjectively consider diversity as the most important and appealing part
of a movie, the perspective should be, at best, understandable. However, the
idea of everything is subjective is
highly ambiguous and therefore, there is no way to address standards and/or objective
analysis on any form of art. Is it true that art has no characteristics
(standards) that can be judged objectively? Is there no specific quality of art
that makes it universally appealing or not appealing? Essentially, though
sentimentality seems to overwhelm objectivity, works of arts have values and
characteristics depending on the form and/or genre and those characteristics
can be used as the basis of objective analysis.
“…even
though taste is a matter of feeling things to be agreeable or disagreeable,
there is still a standard of taste………………………………………………………………………
Hume’s answer is that the standard of taste arises
from the nature of human beings. Since they share a common nature, broadly
speaking they like the same things. When it comes to art, he thinks, ‘[s]ome
particular forms or qualities, from the original structure of the internal
fabric [of the human mind], are calculated to please, and others to displease’
(1963:271). There are of course strange reactions and opinions; people can
prefer the oddest things. But Hume believes that the test of time will
eventually tell, and that only those things which truly are aesthetically
pleasing will go on calling forth approbation as the years pass.” (Graham)
Based on Hume’s idea, even though he acknowledges
subjectivity, there are unique attributes embedded in art that can be judged
objectively. His notion that an objectively-good work of art should endure the
test of time can be used to explain why the original 1991 Beauty and the Beast, in the end, is more popular than the 2016
remakes filled with diversity. If the movie is never about diversity to begin
with, why should adding diversity makes it better? According to Alexis Isabel,
more and more people are wanting to see more diversity in movies and if
diversity is indeed a very crucial attribute of a movie, the addition of
diversity should make a movie with more diversity vastly superior than other
versions minus diversity. The reality, however, is the opposite. Many critics
and YouTubers with hundreds of thousands of subscribers and millions of viewers
started to address their concern about how forced diversity ruins movies as
studios released more movies with more diversities. There are Black Aristocrat
characters in movies set during the period of slavery (Cinderella (2015), Beauty and
the Beast (2017), BBC’s Merlin
(2008)), women in everything (Star Wars’
Kathleen Kennedy: “The force is female”),
gay characters popping out for no reason simply to serve diversity (Mitovich,
2017). Instead of acknowledging, by
presenting historically inaccurate depictions of a society, according to Warner
Brothers Studios, a studio means denying
that racism, gender inequality, and rejections toward gays never existed on
earth. This is the fundamental reason why Warner Brothers insisted to release their unaltered offensive cartoon shorts
to the public.
Picture
1: A frame taken from the DVD of Looney Tunes’ Porky and Friends (WB. /2012)
There are, as explicitly shown in Philosophy of the Arts, characteristics of works of art that can be
judged objectively. This could explain why the original 1991 Beauty and the Beast, in the end, is
vastly more popular and timeless than the 2017 remake as more critics and
popular YouTubers (such as Nostalgia
Critic (1.1 million subscribers), Lindsay
Ellis (523,000 subscribers), CellSpex
(119,000 subscribers), and JLongbone
(20,000 subscribers) (subscriber counts are as of December 18th
2018)), continuously praise the traditional animation and prefer it over the
remake thus underlines Hume’s argument about objectively outstanding art being
timeless. The 2017 Beauty and the Beast
had actually passed the qualifications of a good
movie according to Alexis Isabel’s and many other who retweeted her tweets’
ideals. The movie casts Emma Watson, the UN Women Goodwill Ambassador (UN
Women, (n.d)) as Princess Belle, (supposedly) African-American Aristocrats, and
the first openly gay Disney character, LeFou. The movie is blessed with
diversity, it should be way more popular and powerful than the original. Could
the backlash addressed to Beauty and the
Beast and the disastrous flops of highly diverse movies such as Ghostbusters remake (Mendelson, 2016), Oceans 8 (Butler, 2018 (“Ocean’s 8: A
Feminist Flop”)), and Star Wars: The Last Jedi (Kyriazis, 2018) indicate
that diversity is not necessarily the most important objective characteristic
of a work of art when it comes with the expense of the story? The book Philosophy of the Arts argues that art
involves pleasure, beauty, emotion, and understanding (Graham, 2005). When it
comes to matching the attributes of diversity
to the values of art, it might represent, to some people, one or two values (if
not none), but fail to cover all of
them. Literature consists of stories, on the other hand, does represent the values
of art. Thus, diversity is never more important than story and any addition concerning diversity to any story, should
not be at the expense of the story. If diversity is more important than a
decent story, why movies like the followings became highly popular and
influential: The Lord of the Rings (2001-2003),
with no concern for promoting diversity, yet claimed by many to be the best
fantasy movie ever made (Laidlaw, 2017), Titanic
(1997), a movie with almost all-white characters that also includes gender
inequality, yet bestowed by the Academy Awards with no less than 11 Oscars
including Best Picture and played in theatres for nearly a year (Box Office Mojo, 2018), Men in Black (1997), a movie that casts
Will Smith as an African-American lead character that focuses on Alien invasion
instead of race, yet became so popular that Columbia-Tri Star decided to
release its sequels (Marshall, 2018)? Why movies such as Terminator (franchise) (1984-1991) that focuses on the attack of
artificial intelligence instead of women empowerment and Alien (franchise) (1979-1997) that focuses on the horror of an
alien attack instead of women empowerment, have strong female characters (Sarah
Connor and Ellen Ripley, respectively) and praised by critics and audience
(Variety, 2017)?
The
Impacts of Enforcing Diversity in Movies
 |
| (King Arthur and Queen Guinevere from the TV Series Merlin ||| picture taken from BBC/bbc.co.uk) |
In
the previous part, Graham and Hall’s ideas concerning art and its values had
been unveiled and apart from the fact that art has standards and can be judged
objectively, diversity is not considered as the key factor to a good movie. In
literature, story is the most important factor to a good narrative. In movies,
however, there are aspects such as technical achievements (Park, 2014), award
nominations (Zain, 2009), and crucial parts including acting, music, and
cinematography that should be considered as factors to a good movie (Gibson and
Hill (editors), 2000:28-41). However, as important as those factors may be,
they are presented in movies not to present themselves, but to present or
convey a story. The music, acting, cinematography, special effects, and so on,
are chosen and/or designed after the
director knows what he/she wants to make/direct. And yet, even if all of those
movie elements are presented to present a story, the story cannot be separated
from other elements depending on the genre of the movie (Billson, 2011). Thus,
diversity might elevate the value of a movie if it is indeed the concern of the story that eventually leads to
the selection of the actors, songs, costumes, and cinematography. Alexis
Isabel’s demand, however, is not directed to movies bearing the topic of
diversity to begin with, but all movies no matter how unrelated the story is to
the topic of diversity. The demand for all movies to represent the minority
seemed very positive and it is indeed politically correct, but does shifting
the pedestal of movies from outstanding stories to diversity elevate movies,
or, as many online reviewers allege, ruin the movies?
There
is an almost compulsive desire today to interpret throwaway blockbusters like
Ocean’s 8 through the lens of identity politics. Many commentators are keen to
celebrate these gender-swap remakes as major breakthroughs for women. The
pretence of progressive politics in middle-of-the-road movies has allowed the
filmmakers to deflect a great deal of well-deserved criticism. As was notably
the case with 2016’s all-female Ghostbusters, anyone who dislikes these films
can be dismissed as a misogynist…………………………………………………………………………...
As
for Ocean’s 8, the cast has even suggested that it is inappropriate for men to
review the film. Blanchett claimed that male critics see the film through a
‘prism of misunderstanding’. Mindy Kaling slammed white, male critics, ‘who
would enjoy it… but will damn it in a way because they don’t understand it,
because they come at it at a different point of view’. A classic tenet of
identity politics is that the majority can never ‘understand’ anything about a
minority, unless they identify as a part of it. But if Ocean’s 8 is a film only
for women, ironically this suggests that the male critics who praised it do so
without any clear understanding of it, while the numerous female critics who
have panned it do so with a superior insight……………………………………………………
Those wishing to champion the representation of women
in cinema should promote original, challenging material, not the lazy co-option
of tired old franchises that most of us thought had died long ago. We shouldn’t
put up with formulaic remakes from men, and we shouldn’t tolerate it from women
either. How’s that for equality? (Butler)
Ocean’s Eleven
is a successful 2001 heist movie directed by Steven Soderbergh and currently
(as of December 20th 2018) holds positive scores of 7.8/10, 82%, 90%,
and 74% on IMDb, Rotten Tomatoes, Google User, and Metacritic, respectively.
The success of the movie enabled the director to create two sequels, Ocean’s Twelve and Ocean’s Thirteen, making it a trilogy. Even though the trilogy has
two lead female stars Julia Roberts and Catherine Zeta-Jones, the trilogy is
still all about male criminals.
George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Matt Damon, Casey Affleck, and many more straight white males are the real stars
of the trilogy, and the director is also a straight
white male. Ocean’s Eight, as
mentioned by Butler, means to respond the demand from the public for diversity
and representation in movies. Instead of presenting new ideas and a decent
story, Ocean’s Eight focuses heavily
on diversity and representation that it simply denounces the all-male cast of Ocean’s Eleven to present all female
cast plus a (supposedly) lesbian important character. Butler argues that, in
order to promote diversity, the focus of the movie should not be diversity, but
“original, challenging materials”. If the story is never about diversity to
begin with, adding diversity will only show the audience that the addition is forced instead of a necessity. The similar situation also happens with studios’ and
filmmakers’ decisions to change the actual race of a character to a different
race (mostly from white to black) (Merlin
(2009), Avatar: The Last Airbender
(2010)) and straight characters to gays, as disclosed in the previous section.
The pattern of enforcing diversity reached a new peak in late 2018 when YouTube
released the YouTube Rewind 2018. The
video stuffed with diversity received (as of December 13th 2018) 10
million dislikes from users, dethroning Justin Bieber’s Baby music video from the list of the most disliked YouTube video.
While it took Baby 8 years to gain 10
million dislikes, the YouTube Rewind 2018 only needed 8 days to top the record
(Alexander, 2018).
To say that this year’s YouTube Rewind didn’t go over
well with the YouTube community would be quite an understatement. This year’s
Rewind, an annual video made by YouTube that’s supposed to encompass a year in
YouTube culture, is officially the most disliked video on the platform. It has
more than 10 million dislikes, overtaking Justin Bieber’s 2010 song “Baby,”
which has just under 10 million dislikes. While it took Bieber’s video
approximately eight years to rack up that dislike count, YouTube Rewind beat it
in closer to eight days…………………………............... It’s quite a feat, and a
fascinating case of how an innocuous video used by YouTube’s marketing team to
appeal to advertisers can have an adverse effect when it doesn’t put the
community first. (Alexander)
Alexander summarizes people’s complains of how YouTube
has gone too far in promoting diversity and representation on the expense of
its own community. As YouTube received backlash for not “put(ting) the
community first”, this particular case is strikingly similar to how studios
enforcing diversity in movies by sacrificing a decent story. In other words,
similar to YouTube, the studios and filmmakers do not put what is considered as
the most important part of a movie first. In a nutshell, YouTube is an online
video-sharing platform for content creators (Alexander, 2018) and instead of
capturing essential YouTube moments by presenting the Rewind in a form of a yearbook stuffed with the year’s biggest
sensation such as the competition for the most-subscribed YouTube channel
between PewDiePie and T-Series (Romano, 2018), The Lion King 2019 Trailer ascended as
Disney’s most-viewed trailer in a mere 24 hours (Nyren, 2018), new YouTubers
that encountered break-through in 2018, and many other YouTube-related
sensations that summarizes the platform in minutes, YouTube decided to present
as many diversity and representations that have little to nothing to do with
the platform, hence Alexander’s claim that YouTube neglects its own community
to pursue politically correct atmosphere outside the community, because YouTube
is never dedicated exclusively to diversity to begin with. Such a backlash, as
previously mentioned, also happened to movie studios and their diverse
products. The rapidly growing negative criticism towards 2017 Beauty and the Beast, the failure of Ocean’s 8, 2016 Ghostbusters, and Star Wars:
The Last Jedi are the results of forced diversity in movies. In addition,
such a failure seemed to cause a domino effect in which the failure of The Last Jedi caused the failure of Solo: A Star Wars Story and the decline
in merchandise sales including toys even in Christmas (source).
CONCLUSSION
 |
| (Mulan, a lead female character, she's Chinese and regarded as Princess even though she has no royal blood ||| this picture belongs to The Walt Disney Company, taken from Slash Film) |
Diversity is indeed an important issue that should not be
considered as trivial. With the ability to attract even more people than the
previous works of art, movies are certainly essential in delivering important
messages deemed to be positive according to the existing paradigm. However, it
is also crucially important to understand that even though diversity is
important in real life, it is not the most important aspect of a good movie. If
a movie is never about diversity to begin with, adding diversity will only make
the addition seems forced and can potentially affect the well-established
narrative to an obvious propaganda thus eliminating the difference between art
and propaganda. Diversity can be meaningful and it should be meaningful, if the
story is indeed concern about diversity to begin with. Movies do not
essentially need bloated diversity agendas to present powerful female
characters (Princess Diana of Amazon from Wonder
Woman, Lieutenant Ellen Ripley from Alien),
inspirational black leading characters (Nick Fury from The Avengers, Hancock from Hancock),
and even influential gay and transgender characters (Ennis Del Mar from Brokeback Mountain, Alexis Meade from Ugly Betty), if these representations
are combined naturally with the story thus enables plausibility (Lukens, 1999:4-30). The whole idea of filmmaking (or
story-telling in general, for that matter) should not be about using a form of art to promote diversity
thus using art to preach instead of to teach (Lukens, 1999:3-10), it should be
about using a form of art to tell a story and, if possible, deliver moral
values (to teach through experiencing the text instead of to preach by making
the agenda as obvious as possible). If the story is objectively favourable,
that is, if the story is well-structured, solid, and plausible (Lukens, 1999:15)
it will eventually enthrals the audience. In addition, if the
critically-acclaimed story happens to concern about diversity, the audience
would absorb the value that eventually shaped their understanding (Graham,
2005:52-75) (The Terminator is never
about women empowerment, but the story happens to present a strong-independent
woman thus deemed empowering to women).
REFERENCES
The list is not available online to avoid plagiarism. Please contact the author via email or follow him on instagram @skywalkerhunter95
how to cite: Bakri, Nabil. 2019. "Enforcing Diversity in Post-Modern Story-Telling and how it Affects the Quality of Motion Pictures". Platinum Generation: https://nabilbakri.blogspot.com. Accessed (add time and date).