Total Misrepresentation

 I love Netflix. It allows me to binge trash night after night, rather than think for myself.

I do try to pepper my viewing with 'alternative' shows & 'unknown' productions to widen my perspective or laugh at a different level, but I often watch a series right through, for example, committing to four seasons of something I would have stopped watching after the pilot back in the old days of free-to-air TV.

I also have a habit of sitting in front of the TV with 'alternative entertainment', just in case. This will be my trusty tablet (& my reading glasses), so that I can play mindless games to alleviate the mindlessness of the TV. When I start watching something (even a movie), I like to look into the production of the thing & play 'spot the Aussie' (there is almost always one in the cast), or else find the real locations used. This usually leaves me with some disappointment that there's a man in his 60s in desperate need of a stunt double to do any action scenes - like running a few metres or taking a flight of stairs. This would make some sense if the actor in question is a 'name' extending their career beyond their physical capability, but it's often a 'nobody' getting their big break by being a 'face' whose portfolio has floated around LA for 30 years. Of course, the man in his 60s is playing a character in his 40s, but he got the role because he could act better than anyone younger.

Watching all of these shows, & then knowing that someone is much older than the person they're portraying, or does not have the cultural background because they arrived in LA - in the US! - only the year before, gives you an entirely different slant on the 'quality' of the experience. It's as if the production didn't care enough to think it through, or else is treating the audience like morons. I don't like being treated like a moron. Listen to me - I binge-watch Netflix. I have cultured tastes. I did, once. I doubt that I have any taste left at all, now. I have eaten too much blancmange to appreciate an added twist of lemon rind or raspberry puree.

I can't blame Netflix. It was all happening a long time ago, when LA became just too expensive for a show to be based, so a lot of shows & movies came out of Vancouver, purporting to be based in the North-West of the USA. As long as the extras were careful with their dialect, everything was fine - the lead actors had all worked in the US for years, so they had the accent down pat. To me, so far away, Canadians are just Americans with a conscience. What would I know?

What used to get up my nose was the use of 'diversity' to populate shows. This is all well & good for representing 'now', because I am very used to every corner of the globe being represented in my local shopping centre. My community is that real, so my TV shows should be. However, anything historical becomes quite jarring. Why is Queen Charlotte so brown? She was German. Who is that sub-continental man supposed to represent? Indians hadn't even been invented in King Arthur's time. 

Ah, but it gets worse again! I was watching the dramatisation of a book where the main character apologised for looking a particular way, ethnically, as if explaining the deviation to the fourth wall. I decided to read the book. It made no mention of the character's ethnicity relative to other characters. In fact, further books in the series almost imply that the chosen actress was perfect for the role, from the point of view of how she looked ethnically. Please withdraw your apology. You have every right to that role, even if you are a year or two older than the book says.

For me, if I have some awareness of a book being 'from a period or in a place', then I have in my head certain expectations of uniform ethnicity, unless the opposite is a strong theme in the book itself. If we're talking about Regency London, then I expect all aristocrats to be Caucasian. Anything else is to be remarked upon as out of the norm & also treated as a curiosity by the close-minded English of the time. Even if the author has never been to England, if they convey that expectation of normalcy, then surely it should be followed up with the visuals. If an author represents one continent of their fantasy novels as being dominated almost exclusively by one ethnic group, then it makes sense that the dramatisation would also be exactly that. If you don't like that, then you won't like the book. If the whole point of the dramatisation was to attract the fans of the book, then surely you would be expected to follow it as closely as possible. You wouldn't use a normal-statured person to 'represent' a dwarf any more than you would employ an African to represent someone of pale skin & naturally silver hair.

Long ago, there was a movement of reactionists who would chant that things were 'too PC' sometimes, when certain phrases should be avoided on TV. Now, we simply avoid them out of habit, because it's just polite & inoffensive to avoid such words & no-one has the 'right' to call someone ... anything, really. In the same way, representation is probably something we still need to be made aware of, be conscious of, in the day to day, because society still just doesn't get it. Society still struggles to elect enough women to parliament, let alone non-Caucasian representatives. We think of these 'aspects' of society as 'minorities' (diminishing to single lesbian rural Vietnamese women in wheelchairs with dependents), which is laughable, because that would mean that the Caucasian male population of Australia, which has to be less than a third, & of which I am a fully-paid-up member, has successfully introduced gerrymandering.

I am not advocating diversity. I am only advocating representation of the truth. Once we accept the truth, then all of this nonsense just becomes normal & not worth commenting on.

To Kill a Cultural Icon

 I didn't like To Kill a Mockingbird.

I read it only recently, usually avoiding 'that kind of book' because I thought it was both 'too modern' & 'not of my culture', without having the vaguest notion of what it was about. I've never seen the movie. I'm vaguely aware that Gregory Peck has a powerful scene in it. I had no idea how that famous scene related to the book, so it was definitely time to find out for myself, not knowing anyone who'd read it, & being vaguely aware that the author's only other book was published posthumously.

Very quickly, I formed a dislike for the book in the way it portrays a young child (of about five) with big ideas explaining their philosophy & incidental schooling in a US backwater around the time of the Depression. It tried to be Tom Sawyer, but failed miserably for being too highbrow & hokey at the same time, without the subtlety or innocence of Clements. I kept wondering where it was going, as a book, & what the fuss was about, as a legacy.

I mentioned that I was reading it & disliked it to a colleague, who said that she'd loved it. Because I hadn't finished, maybe it did have a powerful ending ... but it had a lot to make up for. Then it twigged - in what language did she read it? I was reading an untranslated version. Sure enough, she'd read it in Farsi. She'd looked into the process, & had been assured that the book she read was considered the best translation. The problem is, the dialect of the original would have to be translated into English first. I could understand it as it was, but I'm not sure that 'yessum' conveys the right tone when translated into Farsi. 

I've had this problem before. I told another friend I was reading A Hundred Years of Solitude, & she was in raptures over the imagery of one particular passage that I had quite missed. I had read it in English. She had read it in Farsi (coincidence), & the original was in Spanish. Now, we could both be getting it wrong. In this case, it was a noble-prize-winning author that could well have been butchered in multiple languages.

But let's get back to the book at hand. Mockingbird was a bestseller, & the movie was a box-office hit. Americans (if only them) have been reading the book compulsorily since the 1950s. That's the key. It was a book of its time. It was a book that spoke to a movement to recognise (finally) African Americans as no different to any other Americans. That is not the point of the book, but it's an observation within it, mostly shown through the naiveté of the heroine, who is often told that she doesn't understand how the world works, or that she's too young to have her opinion matter.

That's the author, because the book is in first person. The author considered her message - if that truly was germane to the book - as no more than an alternative view to what her upbringing provided. It wasn't just about black Americans being treated as second class - below white trash - or children being ignored, but also state-controlled education, vigilante justice, poverty within a small community, the treatment of fringe dwellers, religious intolerance, & a whole raft of social issues put into the mouth of a child who would not normally see any of this (or recognise it), but is more likely to accept prejudice as the norm than to question it. Repeatedly, the heroine reminds us that she was allowed to question her father, even if other kids couldn't.

The book itself does not come under criticism - is rarely critiqued - simply because no-one wants to touch that subject matter: inequality ... no, specifically the treatment of African Americans. It was then & is now a taboo subject - criticising books that justifiably criticise an historical society. White Americans never treated black Americans with such contempt. How could they possibly have done? But they did, & only a denialist can shout 'fake news' at that without crossing their fingers. The book is a representation of history, for being strictly fiction, & it is ugly rather than being inspiring, because no-one gets a happy ending. This is rather reminiscent of the work of Harper Lee's chief supporter, Truman Capote. I wonder if, if it wasn't for him, the book would ever have been published, or at least published in time. It was timely, but if it had missed its moment in history, it would not have been missed by the passage of time.

 It doesn't matter what language you translate it into, the book's moment has now passed. It is not timeless in itself. It reflects a period in that country's history that was shameful (a long period from the freeing of slaves to the recognition of equality) & should now be considered almost laughable (how could they think that back then?). If you are moved by such a book, then you are yourself living in the Southern states of the USA in the 1950s, because there is no modern revelation to be had from it.

As an afterthought, any counter-argument that suggests that the book is still relevant because there is still prejudice, not just in the Southern states of the USA, but across the world, should take into consideration that the 70 years since its publication should be considered sufficient time for it to 'work its magic'. The world is full of prejudice, but nothing so insular can change that, because the work can be happily pigeonholed in a time & place that no longer exist.