Yeah, we’re spoiled now. We’ve gotten a taste of the good stuff in movies like Roma, Fury Road, Wonder Woman, the coming of age stories of girls, lgbtq of color, and events like Black Panther, and now that we’ve gotten that taste of what filmmaking could be like, with a greater variety of stories, we don’t want to go back. We want to keep moving forward. Whiteness loves to sit exactly wherever it is though.
This whole issue may have started out being about representation, and it still is, but now it’s about moving forward. I never in life want to see, yet another, movie about some white boy’s coming of age story, set in the suburbs. That story has been told umpteen million times, and it seems every straight, white, male filmmaker wants to tell that story because it’s what interests them, and they’re nothing if not self-centered. I’m tired of us begging white filmmakers to tell different peoples stories, which they’re only going to get wrong anyway. We all know exceptionally well what issues white men think are important, and their opinions of everyone else in the world, because they tell us that throughout all of pop culture.
It’s weird and funny. About every ten years or so Hollywood simply seems to reset. Every decade, women, and PoC, make some minuscule progress, that gets undone in the ensuing years, and we need to start all over again.
I blame it on all those white graduating film students. Every year hundreds of mediocre white filmmakers get released into Hollywood, and they all think they’re gonna be the next Hemingway of film, telling the next great all American story. They’re all gonna be the next Scorsese, or Spielberg, or Coppola. But they’re not! Those directors came of age in an entirely different time and place. There’s never gonna be another of any of them.
This resetting happened in the sixties with casting black male leads, in the seventies with the addition of female leads, which all got undone, until it was redone in the eighties, with black men and white women as leads in movies, then black men and some WoC were rediscovered in the nineties, the 2000s seem to lose the thread again, and since 2010 the casting of directors and actors of color has gotten a little better, with television having moved much faster on all fronts.
Progress is incredibly slow because of these backlash movements to keep reasserting the status quo of whiteness in Hollywood. If television is a speedboat, than I envision Hollywood as a massive ocean liner, full of old people, slow to get up to speed, and slow to change course, wanting to stay exactly where it is.
