|
Post by Bob Reyer on Apr 8, 2015 6:38:13 GMT -5
Angela, As one whom I hope has shown his bona fides in terms of speaking on diversity and representation in comics, I would like to add that there is a third reason, and that is hoping for fidelity to the source material. Personally speaking, whilst I understand and support the idea that comics and the films based on them should more accurately reflect the world around us, I'd prefer for that diversity to occur through either the usage of strong, pre-existing minority characters or the creation of new ones, and not by usurping the heritage of others, a stance that I also take against changes to origins, motivations, behavior, etc. As you so rightly said, non-comics-readers will assume the movies are accurately depicting how these heroes and villains appear in print, so as a student of the medium, I'd much rather hew closer to what has been set down by a character's creators or the vast majority of their history. Perhaps this makes me a "moldy fig" (the term used to denigrate fans of traditional jazz who disliked be-bop), but just as I'd prefer the filmic Johnny Storm to be the one created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, I'm hoping for the Gal Gadot Wonder Woman to strive for peace before brandishing a sword. Just a thought from an old-timer, Bob Awesomely well-worded response (as I would expect from you), and that's sort of the angle I wanted to point as a possible opposing viewpoint, as you do definitely have a point. I think that's a more interesting counter-point than "all heroes should be white blah blah!!" For my own point of view, I'm a big fan of adaptations and of changes within adaptations. I sort of theme my literature class around that idea: the adaptation says more about our own society than it does about the original text. So Baz Lurmann's Romeo and Juliet is not the best Shakespeare production ever, but it's an interesting and lively adaptation of the play for the 90s, and at least at the time it came to define the play for young people. I still think of Mercutio as Harold Perrineau, by the way. Just as I can read Casino Royale and picture the M in that book as Judi Dench, even though I know Ian Fleming never meant for that character to be a woman. I guess what I'm trying to say is that I like to see smart changes made to a character, while the core of the character remain the same. I see race as part of the window-dressing, not part of the core... which I realize is an opinion with problems. For instance, I've read that Peter Parker, a poor teenaged orphan from Queens having to support his aunt with little to no outside help, works just as well, if not better, as race-bent. Particularly since we've gotten two white Peter Parkers in the 21st century, I tend to agree. Race-bent characters that completely work for me right now is Joe and Iris West. I know literally nothing about them in current iterations of comics, but I do know both characters from the old Silver Age Flash comics. Iris, to me, was sort of a Lois Lane clone... at least at first (I think she gets more personality later on), and Ira West was amusing as the absent-minded scientist who might possibly know who Barry is, but it doesn't go much beyond that. (And let's not forget Iris's real parents from the future whose president was a robot Abraham Lincoln.) In the new show, they change the window-dressing: Joe is a cop and surrogate-father for Barry, and Iris is a young professional grad student and reporter. Oh, and they're black. The show doesn't make a big deal out of that. It's show-casing a possible interracial couple (and I still remember when that was WAY more controversial) with no mention of race. And it works because of the (mostly) smart story-telling. (I have my own Iris issues... the article I wrote in December about superheroes and secret-keeping is still valid with this show). I guess I went on a while. I just think it's fascinating what people expect in adaptations, and how I kind of have a weird opinion about adaptations in a lot of ways. Angela, I love that literature can be so adaptable! As you point out about the flexabilty of Shakespeare's works, they've been adapted into everything from musicals like "Kiss Me, Kate" and "West Side Story" to science-fiction as "The Tempest" became "Forbidden Planet"; heck, "Macbeth" alone has seen the screen as a samurai epic (Kurosawa's "Throne of Blood"), an American gangster movie ("Men of Respect"), and a black comedy about a burger restaurant ("Scotland, PA")! I guess for me the problem lies in that with comics as serialized fiction, we've had decades of stories about the lives of these characters, which (if done well, hopefully) creates an investment in those characters and their relationships, and since film can't approximate that experience, I prefer that the slice we're shown of these characters represents the majority of that life, boiled down to its essence, of course, but there for a new audience to discover in its purest form. After serving up the "original", I'm all for letting loose the reins and letting imagination run wild! Good luck with the class!
|
|
|
Post by supertaxnerd on Apr 8, 2015 9:02:10 GMT -5
For my own point of view, I'm a big fan of adaptations and of changes within adaptations. I sort of theme my literature class around that idea: the adaptation says more about our own society than it does about the original text. So Baz Lurmann's Romeo and Juliet is not the best Shakespeare production ever, but it's an interesting and lively adaptation of the play for the 90s, and at least at the time it came to define the play for young people. I still think of Mercutio as Harold Perrineau, by the way. Just as I can read Casino Royale and picture the M in that book as Judi Dench, even though I know Ian Fleming never meant for that character to be a woman. Angela, I love that literature can be so adaptable! As you point out about the flexabilty of Shakespeare's works, they've been adapted into everything from musicals like "Kiss Me, Kate" and "West Side Story" to science-fiction as "The Tempest" became "Forbidden Planet"; heck, "Macbeth" alone has seen the screen as a samurai epic (Kurosawa's "Throne of Blood"), an American gangster movie ("Men of Respect"), and a black comedy about a burger restaurant ("Scotland, PA")! I guess for me the problem lies in that with comics as serialized fiction, we've had decades of stories about the lives of these characters, which (if done well, hopefully) creates an investment in those characters and their relationships, and since film can't approximate that experience, I prefer that the slice we're shown of these characters represents the majority of that life, boiled down to its essence, of course, but there for a new audience to discover in its purest form. After serving up the "original", I'm all for letting loose the reins and letting imagination run wild! Good luck with the class! ___________________________________________________ For some reason this quoted oddly. Here begins my comments, separate and distinct from the thoughts of the one and only Bob Reyer. 1 - Do you think that Shakespeare's work was written to be gender neutral? To an extent, since all the roles played by men at that time, I think it is. Which reminds me of the point Kellysue made back when she appeared during the Women in Comics week(I think?) - correct me if I am wrong, but it was something like(paraphrased): "Don't write strong female characters, just write a strong character and make them a woman." 2 - I think that your point, Bob, comes at it from an anthropological perspective. A person is the sum of their culture, ethnicity, socio-economic status, national origin, gender, age, etc. and the characters that we know and love are people subject to those same constraints. When you change them, you change the character, which changes the story. Its easy to see the imagine Kingpin as Michael Clark Duncan because the character is hits 5 of the 6 things listed above, his ethnicity is not a defining characteristic. Conversely, if Bruce Wayne was a farmer in Brazil, it takes a completely different story to turn him into the world's greatest detective. You can do it, but you have to tell a very different version of the hero or heroine's journey to get the audience there to enjoy it because you have changed his socio-economic status, national origin, culture, and more likely than not his ethnicity. so my point is that if you bend the essential characteristics of a person, you change their story - and you cannot tell in a believable way, the exact same story. side note - i say "ethnicity" instead of "race" because I had an anthro prof in college who was a forensic anthropologist, and he wrote a paper which argued that race is not something that exists in our bones and hair, but some markers can tell you more or less what part of the world our ancestors came from. link to full article for light reading: anthropology.msu.edu/anp202-us13/files/2012/05/Sauer-1992-Forensic-Anthropology-Race-Concept-1.pdfJust for funzies - King Lear was, in part, the inspiration for Kurosawa's "Ran" - which I watched when I was 12 and have been madly in love with ever since. I have not seen "Throne of Blood" but will have to look for it now.
|
|
|
Post by Bob Reyer on Apr 8, 2015 20:43:37 GMT -5
Angela, I love that literature can be so adaptable! As you point out about the flexabilty of Shakespeare's works, they've been adapted into everything from musicals like "Kiss Me, Kate" and "West Side Story" to science-fiction as "The Tempest" became "Forbidden Planet"; heck, "Macbeth" alone has seen the screen as a samurai epic (Kurosawa's "Throne of Blood"), an American gangster movie ("Men of Respect"), and a black comedy about a burger restaurant ("Scotland, PA")! I guess for me the problem lies in that with comics as serialized fiction, we've had decades of stories about the lives of these characters, which (if done well, hopefully) creates an investment in those characters and their relationships, and since film can't approximate that experience, I prefer that the slice we're shown of these characters represents the majority of that life, boiled down to its essence, of course, but there for a new audience to discover in its purest form. After serving up the "original", I'm all for letting loose the reins and letting imagination run wild! Good luck with the class! ___________________________________________________ For some reason this quoted oddly. Here begins my comments, separate and distinct from the thoughts of the one and only Bob Reyer. 1 - Do you think that Shakespeare's work was written to be gender neutral? To an extent, since all the roles played by men at that time, I think it is. Which reminds me of the point Kellysue made back when she appeared during the Women in Comics week(I think?) - correct me if I am wrong, but it was something like(paraphrased): "Don't write strong female characters, just write a strong character and make them a woman." 2 - I think that your point, Bob, comes at it from an anthropological perspective. A person is the sum of their culture, ethnicity, socio-economic status, national origin, gender, age, etc. and the characters that we know and love are people subject to those same constraints. When you change them, you change the character, which changes the story. Its easy to see the imagine Kingpin as Michael Clark Duncan because the character is hits 5 of the 6 things listed above, his ethnicity is not a defining characteristic. Conversely, if Bruce Wayne was a farmer in Brazil, it takes a completely different story to turn him into the world's greatest detective. You can do it, but you have to tell a very different version of the hero or heroine's journey to get the audience there to enjoy it because you have changed his socio-economic status, national origin, culture, and more likely than not his ethnicity. so my point is that if you bend the essential characteristics of a person, you change their story - and you cannot tell in a believable way, the exact same story. side note - i say "ethnicity" instead of "race" because I had an anthro prof in college who was a forensic anthropologist, and he wrote a paper which argued that race is not something that exists in our bones and hair, but some markers can tell you more or less what part of the world our ancestors came from. link to full article for light reading: anthropology.msu.edu/anp202-us13/files/2012/05/Sauer-1992-Forensic-Anthropology-Race-Concept-1.pdfJust for funzies - King Lear was, in part, the inspiration for Kurosawa's "Ran" - which I watched when I was 12 and have been madly in love with ever since. I have not seen "Throne of Blood" but will have to look for it now. Kevin, To use your point about "different story", for me it was far superior to have there be a John Stewart Green Lantern with his own agency and his own road to travel than to try to have him re-trace the steps of Hal Jordan.
|
|
|
Post by wylietimes on Apr 9, 2015 8:14:07 GMT -5
Not to get off topic but I really enjoyed the anthro article you linked to and wonder who else read it. I have always been a believer in the idea that the only race is the "human race" as we call it.
Furthermore when you break it down by DNA, the differences between the "races" as we have them organized now is such a tiny percent that it can be the differences that causes b people of color to have more melatonin in their skin than others.
I unfortunately do not have a link but during a course on crime and justice across the ages you can see how societies used race and ethnicities to diminish others and create discrimination. My professor handed out a sheet where the early "experts" in criminology in England once had a sheet of physical characteristics that are typical of criminals and showed very stereotypical depictions of various people the English typically didn't get along with. As a man of Irish descent, I got a good look at how they viewed the Irish if you get what I mean.
I'm a firm believer in being proud of your roots and where your family originated from but at the end of the day my mindset is one race, one love, hopefully peace if we all just accept that we are all one unified human race.
|
|