Reader Stuart Thompson sent the following email, which I reprint with his permission:
Being flush with anticipation over the dual Matrices, opening this week and November, respectively, I happened upon a review in the LA Times. One comment captured my attention, and even my imagination — almost as if I had, by happenstance, entered my own virtual reality. The reviewer offered:
Also worth noting is the Wachowskis’ extensive (and welcome) use of color-blind casting. Starting with Fishburne and … Pinkett Smith, a good half-dozen key heroic roles are taken by African American actors, and that doesn’t include cameos … from boxer Roy Jones Jr. and Harvard scholar and self-caricatured pseudo-prison philosopher Cornel West.
All right, I took some artistic license with the adjectives for Corny West, but the balance is verbatim. So what, precisely, is being said here? Now I take it as an article of faith that any self-respecting Times writer (NY or LA) would prefer to see the extensive use of black actors in lieu of white. But how, pray tell, does one go about consciously making extensive use of color-blind casting? Presumably, the same way one goes about proving a negative. But if one were truly color-blind in selecting actors, would the results be so manifest as this reviewer suggests? Or instead, would the actors, selected without regard to race and of equal skill, be something other than monochromatic? Perhaps he means that black actors are inherently superior performers, and thus a race neutral platform will necessarily result in their exclusive use. However, he does state that most key roles were assigned to blacks, and implies that this was a “welcome” conscious decision. So then, is bald racial discrimination now prima facie evidence of equal opportunity? And conversely, would race neutrality then be the only certain marker of racism?
Whoa! I’ve swallowed the red pill, gone through the rabbit hole … and ended-up at the University of Michigan.
Believing At Least Two Impossible Things Before Breakfast
John Rosenberg has an amusing letter from a reader. At least, I found it amusing, so it goes without saying that if you don’t, there’s…
Funny.
Roger Ebert observed the same thing and concluded that the Bros. W were trolling for the maximum number of young white males who seem to buy into the cachet of black hipness, i.e., hip-hop culture, etc…
But even Ebert didn’t mention Cornel West. THAT bit of casting struck me as, well, kind of weird.
Color-blind, huh? Many Indians, Mexicans, or Chinese or Arabs in that movie?
The Today show said the same thing. They were interviewing Jada Pinkett Smith and the interviewer pointed out how many African-Americans were in prominent roles: possibly the most of any major motion picutre.
Well, Keanu Reeves is the lead and he’s white, as is the female lead. I suspect the directors wanted other key roles played by blacks to give a multiracial look, but you can’t say the whites are the better actors.
Did you see the MSNBC story about an albino group complaining that the villians in Matrix II are albino-ish? The directors say they’re pasty white because they’re dead. They do seem to have pasty, dead dreadlocks.
Well, Keanu Reeves is the lead and he’s white, as is the female lead. I suspect the directors wanted other key roles played by blacks to give a multiracial look, but you can’t say the whites are the better actors.
Did you see the MSNBC story about an albino group complaining that the villians in Matrix II are albino-ish? The directors say they’re pasty white because they’re dead. They do seem to have pasty, dead dreadlocks.
As Zion stands (inter alia) for the pop entertainment industry which is, in fact, disproportionately black or wants to be, the casting makes perfect sense.
Keanu, we tend to forget, is Chinese-Hawaiian-English, born in Lebanon, and holds a Canadian passport. No discrimination there!