By Kevin D. Williamson
Friday, January 10, 2020
Marissa Martinelli has a peculiar criticism of the latest
installment in the Star Wars
franchise. The first sentence in her essay on the film reads: “Kelly Marie Tran
has one minute and 16 seconds of screen time as Rose Tico in Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, and no
one has yet produced a convincing explanation for why that’s the case.”
I have “a convincing explanation for why that’s the
case.” Kelly Marie Tran has one minute and 16 seconds of screen time because
she has neither more nor less than that. Martinelli’s complaint leaves the
moral demand unspoken in her opening, assuming, as she obviously does, that it
must be self-evident that the actress should have more screen time than she does.
Why? Martinelli does not really answer that. She notes
that Tran “was the first woman of color to play a leading role in a Star Wars
movie” and adds that Tran’s lack of additional time on screen is “bad for The Rise of Skywalker and the trilogy as a
whole.” This, too, is presented as though it were self-evident: If some Tran is
good, then more is better. Instead of giving any serious consideration to the
narrative role of Tran’s character in the film, Martinelli instead works to
establish if the actress was “deliberately sidelined,” i.e. whether this defect
represents oversight or malevolence.
The issue of “representation” — nose-counting how many
seconds of screen time are dedicated to actors who are female, black, Asian,
Latino, gay, transgender, disabled, etc. — has come to dominate American film
and television criticism to a remarkable degree. Martinelli’s absurd
quantification-first approach to writing about film obviously did not strike
her editors at Slate as peculiar, and
it isn’t. It is the new normal, although the question of “representation” is
generally approached in a less robustly empirical fashion.
(Maybe it should
be more empirical; more about that at the end.)
Professional writing about the television series Mad Men, for example, was in large part
focused on whether the story arcs of certain female characters were being
presented in a way that furthered feminist interests; less attention was given
to the issue of race in that grand social narrative of the 1960s, but it
commanded many critics’ attention as well. The series’s acting and writing, and
the great deficiencies of these, were given relatively little attention.
In the very different world of Game of Thrones, the gruesome murder of one character was greeted
with especial horror by critics such as Slate’s
Inkoo Kang, who lamented that the death “was particularly disappointing to
viewers who’d grown attached to the show’s sole prominent woman of color.”
Nathalie Emmanuel, the actress who played the character, gave the usual
hostage-video statement, sitting for an interview with Vanity Fair that offered a reminder of why actors speak lines
written by other people:
“It’s safe to say that Game of Thrones has been under criticism
for their lack of representation, and the truth of it is that Missandei and
Grey Worm have represented so many people because there’s only two of them,”
she said. “So this is a conversation going forward about when you’re casting
shows like this, that you are inclusive in your casting. I knew what it meant
that she was there, I know what it means that I am existing in the spaces that
I am because when I was growing up, I didn’t see people like me, but it wasn’t
until she was gone that I really felt what it really, truly meant until I saw
the outcry and outpouring of love and outrage and upset about it, I really
understood what it meant. . . . The anger about it speaks to that conversation
of why representation matters. So much responsibility falls on these two
characters because it’s only them, but if we were more generally inclusive,
that probably won’t be as prevalent.”
Similar lines of criticism were directed at shows such as
Breaking Bad — “Why does everybody
hate the wife? Why are all the criminals in this Latin American drug syndicate
Latino?” — and at films such as Avatar
and Guardians of the Galaxy, in which
Zoe Saldana was forced to reckon with the “reality of being an actress of color
in today’s Hollywood” in roles in which she was blue and green, respectively.
In fact, it is difficult to find film and television
criticism being written today that does not put the question of
“representation” at the center of the discussion, with aesthetic and literary
considerations given attention that is for the most part scanty, clumsy, and
illiterate.
So maybe Marissa Martinelli is on to something. Hear me
out.
This is a problem with a technical solution. The film and
television business are heavily unionized and regimented, and it would not be
terribly difficult to give every actor working in mainstream film and
television an intersectionality score (i)
on, say, a 100-point scale ranging from Matt Damon to . . . whoever is the dead
opposite of Matt Damon. (We could even assign negative scores to Jon Hamm and
Chris Pratt.) From there, it would be relatively easy to develop an
artificial-intelligence tool to scan every major piece of commercial film and
television, automatically tally up how many minutes of screen time (t) each actor has, and produce a score
relative to total running time (r) —
something simple like (i*t) ÷ r
— adding up the scores for each of the actors (perhaps normalizing for cast
size) to produce a cumulative quantitative judgment on the work as a whole.
Who needs film and television critics when AI can do the
job?
Of course, the nation’s newly unemployed film and
television critics would be forced to find some new useful occupation, if
you’ll forgive my begging the question.
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