Disney and Lucasfilm have debuted the first official look at J.J. Abrams'
Star Wars: The Force Awakens. Very little is known publicly about the plot of the film, and the teaser trailer above reveals next to nothing. Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher, Mark Hamill, Anthony Daniels, Peter Mayhew, and Kenny Baker will reprise their roles from the original
Star Wars trilogy.
What is known is that it's set approximately 30 years after Return of the Jedi, and it seems as if the party with the Ewoks at the end of that film may have been a premature celebration.
But the reaction to the trailer was interesting, especially in light of what's been happening in the country the past week. Among some Star Wars fans, they were irked by the addition of actor John Boyega as a "black Stormtrooper." On Reddit and Twitter, there was a fair amount of racism displayed toward Boyega, and some argued the entire idea was based in liberal political correctness being "racial bean counters."
If media presentations are responsible in some way for cultural stereotypes and how those stereotypes spread through a society, then the way race is handled in the arts becomes both influential and a reflection of present conditions. There was a time when the only black people, or people of color, you saw on TV shows and in movies were either playing the criminals, athletes, entertainers, or the servants in the background. Times have changed, but there are still real arguments over whether when dealing with fiction, something that by its very nature can be unrealistic, does that fiction have to at least represent race, gender, orientation, etc., in a realistic way? With science fiction, race can be handled in a myriad of ways that are both engaging and problematic.
Follow beneath the fold for more.
What's been interesting to me is the reaction this time around compared to
16 years ago when the
trailer for
The Phantom Menace was released. The interest in
The Force Awakens is huge since this is the first
Star Wars film released by Disney, the first
Star Wars film without George Lucas being a significant part of the production, and the first
Star Wars film to be in the hands of J.J. Abrams. But I still get the feeling this is a franchise that's still trying to recapture something it lost during the prequel trilogy: depth and the trust of its fans.
For those who may have forgotten, The Phantom Menace was quite possibly one of the most hyped films of all-time. In the run-up to the release of Phantom Menace, there were serious discussions among the media and even some academics about Star Wars and its artistic legacy. The prequel films destroyed that legitimacy with movies that were dull, too concerned with CGI instead of story, and were little more than vehicles to sell toys at Walmart.
From Andrew Bridgman at Dorkly: This Was the Reaction to the 'Phantom Menace' Trailer
The Tuscaloosa News - November 25, 1998
But this new teaser trailer also brought out familiar aspects of racial stereotypes within "fanboy" dumbness.
Star Wars has been criticized in the past for how it treats racial stereotypes.
The Phantom Menace was
accused of using villains with Asian and Jewish stereotypes, and that Jar Jar Binks was basically a "Stepin Fetchit" character. This new teaser doesn't depict anything like that, but the reaction falls back into fan preconceptions of how things are supposed to be.
From Alex Stedman at
Variety:
“Star Wars: The Force Awakens” star John Boyega has one thing to say to those questioning the inclusion of a black Stormtrooper in the upcoming pic: “Get used to it.” ... After the teaser for the highly anticipated seventh installment of the “Star Wars” dropped on Friday, some of the Internet’s chatter included criticism at the idea of a black Stormtrooper. Boyega appears in frame in the first few seconds of the teaser, donning one of the iconic Stormtrooper uniforms.
The 22-year-old Brit took to Instagram on Saturday to both thank fans for their support and address the criticism.
There have been more than a few race-related casting controversies in recent memory. For example, Disney's
Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time encountered some
bad press when the titular prince was played by "Hancock Park's own Swedish-Jewish-American prince, Jake Gyllenhaal." And there have been several instances in which Hollywood decided to replace Asian (or Asian-ish) characters with white characters that led some to complain of a "
whitewashing" of the source material. Director M. Night Shyamalan was
heavily criticized for casting white actors in lead roles instead of Asian actors, for the
movie adaptation of Avatar: The Last Airbender. A live-action adaption of the anime
Akira has been stuck in development hell, but fans of the original animated film have
raged against some of the possible changes that have leaked, which includes replacing the Asian characters of the original with white equivalents. Going back a bit further, back in the late '80s and early '90s the producers of the musical
Miss Saigon got a lot of grief for casting Jonathan Pryce in the role of a Vietnamese pimp, with some likening the production to a minstrel show.
And then there have been instances where people of color seem to have been excluded from the casting process. Donald Glover, also known as
Childish Gambino and formerly of NBC's
Community, publicly
lobbied for an audition to portray Spider-Man in
The Amazing Spider-Man. However, from all reports, Sony only considered white actors for the role of Peter Parker, with it eventually going to Andrew Garfield. In this instance, you get a reverse of the examples above in fidelity to the source material. There is nothing innate to the
Spider-Man story that says Peter Parker must be a white teenager. But some of the more rabid fanboys feel that because Stan Lee and Steve Ditko drew Peter Parker/Spider-Man as a white teenage boy, he must always be a white teenage boy. Likewise, the Marvel Studios films are huge moneymakers, but they've been
criticized for the lack of women and/or minorities being the lead character in any of their movies.
Chris Evans is Marvel's Steve Rogers/Captain America, but there was some
talk of casting Will Smith. Among some of the fanbase, there was a backlash that argued casting a black man to be Captain America was the equivalent of casting a white actor to be Marvel's
Black Panther. Back when the first
Thor film was released, the Council of Conservative Citizens and other racists called for a boycott because of the casting of Idris Elba as the Norse god Heimdall.
The all-seeing, all-hearing Asgardian sentry of the bifröst bridge.
From Andy Khouri at
Comics Alliance:
Marvel is similarly criticized on the politically conservative Boycott-Thor.com, whose motto is “Keep social engineering out of European mythology.” Apparently unaware that Marvel orchestrated an elaborate and embarrassing plotline by which Spider-Man and his wife made a deal with the devil to erase their marriage from memory rather than see the iconic superhero suffer the destructive liberal indignity of divorce, Boycott-Thor.com put forth the following indictment of the publisher:
Marvel is headed by radical left-wingers who insert their ideologies and agendas into their comic books and movies. In February 2010, the TEA Party movement was viciously attacked in an issue of Captain America. Marvel editor-in-chief Joe Qesada publicly defended the issue.
Marvel creator and front man Stan “Lee” Lieber is a notorious left-winger and financier of left-wing political candidates."
Back in March, Noah Berlatsky had an
article discussing the ways in which science fiction deals with questions of race.
- Inclusion without commentary: Berlatsky calls this tokenism, which in some cases it can absolutely devolve towards. You include people of all races as members of the group, and the idea of race is never mentioned or touched upon. People are people. Star Trek is probably the biggest example of this, and one of the most progressive TV shows in the history of the medium when it comes to race. According to Trek, by the 23rd century humanity will eliminate poverty, war, racism, sexism, and crime on Earth. But the show also has a few examples of tokenism. For example, Star Trek: Voyager's Chakotay is a '90s-era attempt at diversity that comes off as really offensive. In the entirety of Trek, hardly if ever do the characters mention or even acknowledge racial divisions among humanity, and if they do it's usually in a historical context. There have been episodes where the main characters or aliens are searching for someone, and they will go through the vital statistics (age, weight, height, etc.) and when it comes to race the only thing that's said is "human." But with Chakotay, the writers and producers of Voyager treated Native Americans as almost an alien race with customs and "powers" that were separate and distinct from humanity. And in fact, Voyager has an episode that reveals some of Native American culture is alien in origin.
- Whiteness is not the default race: Ursula K. LeGuin's Left Hand of Darkness and Earthsea books are probably the best-known examples. But other authors play around with this. Many of the main characters in Robert Heinlein's works are people of color, but he only hints at it before making it explicit. For example, Johnny "Juan" Rico of Starship Troopers is ultimately revealed to be Filipino. In some ways, Heinlein plays on the reader's preconceptions of what the "hero" is supposed to be before revealing that fact.
- The future is like the present: Racism still exists, and exists in the same ways. But the issue informs whatever fantastical situation that's occurring. Derrick Bell's The Space Traders was adapted into an HBO sci-fi series in the '90s. It imagines a situation in the near-future where aliens arrive and offer the United States technology that would solve all of our energy, ecological, and economic problems. They only require in exchange every American child, woman, and man with at least 2,500 mg/cm2 melanin pigment in their skin (i.e., black people). Back in 2012, the story became news when conservatives argued it was offensive and indicative of President Obama's views on race.