13.4: Three Strategies of Navigating Today's Hollywood
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- Kristen J. Warner
- University of California Press
Strategy 1: Blind Casting
The physical embodiment of visual difference rather than a qualitatively meaningful representation of difference, blind casting is an illusion of equality and parity in casting. In other words, it functions as a form of diversity you can count rather than a notion of diversity that accounts for the nature of the roles or content. Blind casting thus operates as a way to increase diversity in physical difference without investing in any associated cultural differences. Colorblind casting logic is useful to guilds like the Screen Actors Guild (SAG-AFTRA). Because the guild has no authority over or investment in the form or quality of the employment (that is, the guild does not regulate content), it cares less about the nature of the role than about counting that role as an employment gain for their members. Colorblind casting logic thus offers an easy method to assuage dual concerns: it makes available more job opportunities for the least employed sectors of the guild’s membership and imbues those job opportunities with an air of “respectability” because of the way colorblind logic evacuates any cultural specificity in its operating logic in favor of normative whiteness.
Yet, underpinned by neoliberal race logic, colorblind casting deploys a universal, “we are all the same” rhetoric that only superficially addresses the issues of diversity, employment, and racial representation in television and film. Its resolution relies solely on visible difference. Blind casting thus forces minority actors who desire employment to input cultural differences and output a standardized form of whiteness. Moreover, that this input/output practice has become so commonsensical makes acknowledging its existence a bit of a conundrum. Colorblind logic holds that race is no longer a meaningful barrier to accomplishments, so pointing out continuing injustice as a consequence of racist structures is now, in fact, a racist act. When I make visible the dissonance that occurs when blind casting places an actor of color in a narrative context that, say, isolates him or her from a larger community of color, I am the racist for making a fuss over what Stuart Hall calls “matter out of place.” 17 Rather than identifying how this process erases a community’s socio-historical specificity, the logic requires that we celebrate its evacuation of race as an issue at all. Diversity matters now only inasmuch as the networks (and guilds) can count the representation of visible difference.
Yet identifying “matter out of place” is one way to observe the failure of the blind casting strategy. If blind-casting roles for actors of color ultimately normalizes them to the degree that they become culturally illegible, the same effects can reveal the dangers of such an enterprise. When writers do not consider racial difference and history as part of their character’s backstory, they too often succumb to a set of unintended racially troped pitfalls. Consider the blind-cast role of the Black character Bonnie Bennett—a witch—in CW’s The Vampire Diaries ( TVD ). Bennett, whose original surname in the book series, McCullough, was changed to Bennett as a consequence of the casting decision, is a central character in the televised series. According to the original material, Bonnie McCullough is a fair-skinned redhead. Yet Bonnie Bennett signifies as an African American teenager. While it is a laudable effort on the part of the network and its executives to diversify TVD ’s ensemble cast, the failure to adjust the character’s backstory to account for the long history of racialized imagery of Black women and witchcraft opens the series to a number of accidental pitfalls. In the series, Bonnie belongs to a family of witches who historically served as slaves to the lead actors. Continuing in the tradition, Bonnie’s servitude to her white friends results in her sacrificing her life for theirs. Finally, unlike Bonnie’s female counterparts, who are immersed in teen sexuality and coupling—a vital convention of the teen drama—Bonnie is rarely paired with a love interest. Instead, her sole devotion is to those she serves. Collectively, these tropes raise troubling historical associations with Black representation and further perpetuate the sort of symbolic violence against Black female bodies that blind casting’s postracial ethos is intended to counter.
Despite the pitfalls, blind casting remains a viable option for employment when few other promising opportunities exist for actors of color. Moreover, because the parts are written normatively, many actors themselves celebrate the opportunities as “respectable” alternatives to race-specific casting calls, which often perpetuate troubling stereotypes.
Strategy 2: Racially Ambiguous Performance
A second strategy deployed by underrepresented groups to circumvent the industrial barriers to employment is self-fashioning as a racially ambiguous actor. Recalling the earlier statistic from SAG-AFTRA, racially unknown/other actors accounted for 4.1 percent of all roles in 2008. The category “racially unknown/ other” designates actors who did not select a racial or ethnic identity on the surveys SAG-AFTRA sends to identify the racial and ethnic makeup of its membership. According to interviews with guild representatives, members opt not to self-identify because they fear it will relegate them to the limited roles intended for a particular racialized group. Implicit in this trend is the practice of “passing” among those actors who believe they can be cast in roles with a racial identity other than their own.
For instance, the biracial identities of Jessica Szohr from CW’s Gossip Girl and Rashida Jones from NBC’s Parks and Recreation remain “unmarked” in these texts and others in which they appear. Similarly, Troian Bellisario’s racial ethnicity is ambiguous enough to allow her to pass as just one of the (white) girls in ABC Family’s Pretty Little Liars —even though reading her body suggests there is something “not quite white” about her character. Beyond indeterminate racial identities, racially or ethnically ambiguous performers find themselves cast as multiple races and ethnicities. Blair Redford’s ambiguous look allowed him to be Latino for ABC Family’s Switched at Birth and American Indian for ABC Family’s The Lying Game . While the logic behind this strategy might increase an actor’s employment opportunities by expanding the number of types through which his or her look is interpreted, it also privileges (oftentimes racist) assumptions about the look of a given racial group.
Racially ambiguous performers also amplify colorblindness’s insidious power. As a strategy, it not only makes race something that is “unseen” but detaches racialized bodies from their socio-historical contexts. In other words, the actors function as empty signifiers in that their bodies can be read by audiences in multiple ways, and they can be placed in infinite settings without being tethered to a reality rooted in the socio-historical specifics of their racial and cultural experiences. Furthermore, racial ambiguity allows the network to claim diversity without engaging with the concept beyond superficial (physical) differences.
Strategy 3: Universal Discourse
The final strategy I want to discuss is one that, unlike the first two, is applicable to a variety of laborers in the film and television industry. It concerns distributing and marketing film with predominately Black casts that are also written, directed, and/or produced by Black creative talent. From films like The Best Man Holiday (2013) to Think Like a Man (2012), and Think Like a Man Too (2014) to the About Last Night (2014) remake, publicity and advertising largely frame these films within a universalist discourse—one designed to assure (white) mainstream audiences that the experiences onscreen are both “human” and “relatable” even though the characters may not look like them and elements remain that are, in fact, quite culturally specific. 18 Consider the promotional strategy for Think Like a Man . According to a 2012 Vulture article, while Black producer Will Packer devoted a large portion of his marketing and advertising budget to flying the cast to events with large numbers of African Americans in the audience, he deployed an alternative strategy to draw white audiences. Here he relied heavily on “crossover” comedian Steve Harvey—who hosts the daytime game show Family Feud and wrote the film’s source material—as the movie’s messenger. “Packer has deployed Steve Harvey . . . to sell the ‘everybody’s welcome!’ message to the general public, sending him out to tub-thump . . . on CBS’s This Morning and ABC’s The View , shows that Packer explains, ‘don’t necessarily over-index with African Americans.’”19 Moreover, to target white women, Packer and his team stressed the romantic comedy conventions of the film via a television campaign that, according to one former studio marketing head, looked “like classic Romantic Comedy 101. In fact, it looks like a Nancy Meyers movie, with black people. Which is fine. . . . All it has to be is funny, and make it clear that the concept has no race.” 20
Yet at what cost comes this universal rhetoric? Extra labor taken on by the actors and producers during these press junkets and promotional events to sell the film as fitting for “all” is expected from marginalized bodies if they desire to reach a mainstream audience. Films with predominately white casts are not expected to sell their films (domestically at least) as universal and relatable because they always already operate within the normative and authentic standards by which we judge the human experience. Similar to blind casting, the burden falls on the person of color to perform his or her “sameness” as a mechanism to ensure that the preferred demographic is not alienated from the production. As Packer asserts, “There is a process to get those audiences. It starts with making a film like this, which is broad, smart, and one where there’s no cultural or ethnic specificity that would not be relatable to mainstream Americans.” 21 Black cast films, then, are not a niche production; they are the benign reflection of a large, multicultured world that poses no threat to liberal sensibilities and consumption practices.
Universal discourse underscores the historical precariousness of minorities in the creative industries whose labor always existed under this double bind structure that equates success with being both similar to and different from the normative order. Such a double bind recalls how Clyde Taylor defines the mode of Black film production in early cinema as one of “unequal development,” that is, a phenomenon that exists where there is “an exploitative/dependent relationship that ultimately results in a more powerful society drawing from the less powerful selected goods and resources without regard for what the loss of those resources will mean to the exploited.” 22 According to similar logic, universal discourse insists that for creative laborers of color to participate in the film and television industries, they must embrace a rhetoric of sameness that not only elides their unequal professional footing but also encourages them to lose any sense of socio-historical specificity. Yet what must it mean to be a minority worker who, to find employment, must not only cross over to mainstream filmmaking but also disavow elements of his or her own racial identity to remain gainfully employed? Unequal development epitomizes precarity. It considers the minority worker—whose skills are utilized and borrowed, or more specifically, appropriated, for a variety of purposes—always operating on a conditional and probationary basis. Once the current diversity zeitgeist ends, so does the work.
I would extend the universal discourse to branding and would draw attention to how showrunner Shonda Rhimes, most recently described as a “revolutionary,” 23 tells the story of how when she looked at an invitation for an award ceremony at which she was to be honored and saw that she was described as the most powerful Black female showrunner, she scratched out the modifiers Black and female . 24 While I understand her desire to not be limited or constrained by those modifiers if she, in fact, is the most powerful showrunner of any description, her rationale that white men do not have to name themselves is based in structural power and an inherent specialness that allows them to be ex-nominated. They don’t have to be named because it’s common sense. Thus, though Rhimes’s refusal to take the modifier may for her be an insistence to transcend, the rhetoric ultimately reinforces the very whiteness implicit in industry. Further, while her strategy attempts to upend the “unequal development” of being considered successful only in relation to other Black female television producers—of which there is one: Rhimes—as opposed to being placed in contention with the predominately white male showrunners, by shrugging off those identity modifiers Rhimes reinscribes herself in a universalist posture. A posture that ironically makes racial difference a type of pathology one needs to be cured of, thus reinvigorating the very tenets of unequal development she hopes to quash.