I’m chuckling about it even now.

And when it’s a writing decision, if it doesn’t go the way you like, and you’re a producer, just tell them to change it, and they will, no matter who they are.

Re: “if you want to put an Asian face on a character, just have that character played by an Asian actor.”
First of all, that doesn’t apply to the male/female thing at all: those decisions are made at the level of the script. Second, if it does work for race – which is arguable – that just means that there should be more casting directors of [insert ethnic background]. Is that because they have the magical ability to recognize talents of all shapes and colors? No, it’s because they are less likely to commit the unconscious racism of assuming that the character should be a straight white man.

I guess I’ll try to reconstitute it:

Steel Magnolias
Sophie’s Choice
Atonement
“Before He Cheats”
“Total Eclipse of the Heart”
“It’s All Coming Back to Me Now”

All written by white dudes

“Shoop Shoop” from Waiting to Exhale
How Stella Got Her Groove Back
“Whatta Man”

All written by black dudes

You can narrativize after the fact how you can tell these are all written by dudes, but it’s very hard to tell ahead of time which are written by dudes and which are not (Would you be able to tell that “Steel Magnolias” is by a dude, but “Fried Green Tomatoes” is by a woman just by watching them? I doubt it.).

And in fact, that’s all this exercise is — narrativizing after the fact to try to find a neat explanation for something that is not nearly so neat and not nearly so explicable — the creative process.

Race and gender are constructions, and thus not natural. Therefore, very little, if anything, proceeds from them “naturally.”

The whole misunderstanding is motivated by three essential problems

1. The naturalistic fallacy — that matters such as where or in what circumstances someone is born is in itself normative. (Oh, they have an effect, but it does not have an inherent purpose, and it doesn’t give rise to a coherent teleological system; that is exactly the sort of fiction that racial superiority theories look to create.)

2. What Naseer Taleb refers to as the “Great Intellectual Fraud” — that is, the misapplications of Gassian notions of probability to human endeavors that are not governed by Gaussian distributions, but where in fact almost the whole of meaningful contribution comes from extreme outliers — also known as the “fat tail” phenomenon.

(That is, Hollywood writers are such a small subsection of the population at large and individual successes outweigh the net effect of literally millions of attempts; therefore statistical predictions are meaningless. If you like Sci-Fi, think of it as the “Mule effect” from Isaac Asimov’s _Foundation and Empire_ or I guess sort of related to the “Butterfly Effect” from that Ashton Kutcher movie.)

3. The illusions created by circles of readership that tend to align with self-identifying socioeconomic and ethnic groups. What appears to be cultural conditioning or an essential quality given to a group of artists that share certain specific perspectives and experience often has more to do with the specific other artists they are copying than with their identities in a demographic context.

A whole bunch of people who read a lot of Maxine Hong Kingston are going to have a lot in common with each other in their work as long as they’re all copying Maxine Hong Kingston. Chances are they are from similar backgrounds, but it’s not a causal correlation with their work itself, just with who they read.

In my previous post, I also listed a host of factors more influential than the social identity of the author in determining whether an effort to write a given character of a given ethnicity is going to be successful, including the insurmountable challenge of actually capturing an entire human being of any sort in writing, and especially the value of interpretation in collaborative art — that, again, if you want to put an Asian face on a character, just have that character played by an Asian actor. You really need very little else.

Developing talent across ethnicities and genders is a very good thing both for art and for the business of art. It’s actually quite necessary. But that has to do with maximizing fairness and opportunity — not shutting out potential genius and resources from opportunities to make art — and nothing to do with broad concerns of subject matter like we’re discussing here.

We want there to be more women who make movies, more black people who make movies, because we know that they can make good _movies_, not because we know they can make good movies about women and black people.

I mean, if we just want to keep them around to make movies about themselves and their own perspective, that’s not going to lead to any sort of meaningful advancement for anybody. That’s just ghettoization. That’s just more cultural isolation and preaching to the choir.

And I believe I ended my deleted post with:

“Rick Rubin! For Christ’s sake, Rick Rubin!”

Although I’ll end this one with,

“Ernest Tidyman! For Christ’s sake, Ernest Tidyman!”

But the idea that white, male, middle class American authors of a certain generation are able to write characters that are raceless, genderless, and without culture sounds impossible. If a writing staff has all white, male, middle class American writers, the fact is that they are probably going to write characters that act and think like they do. It’s not that a piece of dialogue will “sound white” because it uses certain words or phrases; it’s that these films will naturally concern certain themes and character archetypes that are important to people living in a certain place and time. Sometimes those themes are timeless and transcend boundaries of race, ethnicity, gender, and so on. Other times, these writers think they are being timeless but are clearly writing within a certain cultural context that may not speak to members of other groups.

As a white girl, I can’t speak about the racial issues very well, but I can speak from the “girl” POV. Only 11% of writers in Hollywood were women in 2005, and only 7% of directors. Even if I didn’t know these statistics, I’d know just from watching movies that the film industry is run by men. Just look at the Best Picture nominees from last year. In some ways, pictures like “No Country for Old Men” and “There Will Be Blood” were timeless films that anyone could enjoy, but, from another point of view, they were movies by men, about men, and for men.

I’m not saying the producers of those films should have made romantic comedies instead or made Anton Chigurh female. But if there were more female writers, directors, producers, etc., there would likely be more movies that talked to people like my mother. For all my dislike of Juno (long story), at least it had a different kind of voice.