Cast the best actor, not the race

Movies like “1917,” “The Irishman,” and “Ford v Ferrari” have all used their historical settings as a shield to deflect diversity critiques. – Aisha Harris, in an editorial in the New York Times, Feb. 6 2020

Human beings are strange animals. We’re the only species that loves to tell itself stories. And, being the unevolved species that we are, the story-tellers prefer to tell stories about themselves, or more usually, mythologized versions of themselves. For example, white male film producers, directors and actors just love to tell stories about super-duper white males. Even when they are telling a story about a black person, it’s usually really about a white person. Yes, I mean Green Book.

Hollywood’s ingrained exclusion of minorities is wrong, and effectively suppresses an enormous supply of great talent. But we wouldn’t want to live in a world without Once Upon a Time in…Hollywood. So here is a solution that will allow us to have our inclusion cake and eat our great entertainment, too.

Cast the best actor, not the (supposedly) appropriate race.

For example, why not cast Ford v Ferrari with Chiwetel Ejiofor and Chadwick Boseman instead of Matt Damon and Christian Bale?

“But then,” you say, “it wouldn’t be real.”

Oh, right. Reality.

When we’re watching Ford v Ferrari (so goes this line of thinking) we’re capable of forgetting that we’re sitting in a movie theater or a living-room couch, watching a digitally contrived recording of professional actors wearing silly costumes, speaking lines written by someone else. We can mentally block the experience of having seen these same actors, who now portray “real” people, perform the parts of Jason Bourne and Batman, among many others. Yes, we can delude ourselves into believing that somehow we are watching a live-stream reality show that is able to reach back in time to 1966.

We can do all this, and yet our suspension of disbelief is so fragile that the whole experience will be ruined if one of the lead actors happens to be black!

Oh really? Did the Greeks of Sophocles’ time grumble on their way home from the theater, “I hated that Electra! The real Electra didn’t go around wearing a mask!” Did the Elizabethan audience of Hamlet walk out midway through the performance, muttering, “The whole thing was so stupid! Everyone knows Ophelia was a girl!” No, and no.

Yet today we follow the silly and arbitrary convention that if a movie is about a real or imagined person of gender A and skin tone B, then the actor must be the same. What does that convention really do to enhance our movie-going experience? Nothing.

And once that convention is broken, all sorts of wonderful possibilities emerge. Samuel L. Jackson and Denzel Washington would have crushed the parts of Frank Sheeran and Jimmy Hoffa in The Irishman. And if it bothers anyone, they can damn well just pretend the actors are “white.” It’s no harder than pretending that the man you once pretended was Michael Corleone is now James Hoffa.

And why stop with racial correctness? I for one would pay green money to see a Once Upon a Time in…Hollywood headlined by Whoopi Goldberg and Awkwafina.

And don’t get me started on Little Women. I’m thinking John Lithgow, Rupaul, Nathan Lane, and Chris Tucker. And that’s just the girls!