Race, Gender, Sexuality & "Historical Accuracy"
Michael J. Carlisle
Unedited Essay/Rant
Recently I have viewed a number of social media posts about Bridgerton , Netflix's new show about about the powerful Bridgerton family of Regency-era England. The controversy is that it is not historically accurate because characters that should be white are played by POC (people of color). After-all, if it's racist to portray Scarlett Johansson as asian in the live action Ghost in the Shell, then it should be wrong for any race to play something that is traditionally not their race. Reverse racism!
What side do the scales fall on again? How many decades have minorities had to deal with their culture being mocked? The main image of Jesus we see is it as a white man, even though it would be more "historically accurate" for him to have a darker complexion. Is the history we are taught in school actually "accurate"? Every American is taught that Columbus "discovered" America, even though a vast amount of indigenous cultures were here long ago & Columbus was more of a colonizing masochist than any real hero.
There are letters upon letters of men writing love notes to each other in WW1 & WWII, but we are taught they were "just good friends!". We are taught Joan of Arc was burnt at the stake for heresy, but we aren't taught that the "heresy" in question was for wearing men's clothing. She could have been trans, but we tend to ignore that when reviewing her life.
I believe that "History" as we know it is fluid and constantly evolving. We will forever have an incomplete picture that will change the more information we have access to & it is partially shaped by our attitudes and understanding of our world at the time. The history we have access to also depends on who is in power & what policies are in place.
When people say they want "historical accuracy" it really means they want the history they perceive to be accurate. In the West "historical accuracy" is history from the white male colonizer's point of view. See every Western ever made and you'll notice that none of them portray events from the indigenous perspective. Adding women, poc or lgbtt people as main characters instead is seen as "woke", "liberal", "pc", "leftist" (insert buzzword)
Quite frankly visual art (movies, tv shows) shouldn't be constricted to any notion of "historical accuracy". That ship sailed long ago with Amadeus, Braveheart and *gasp* are you telling me The Sound of Music really didn't happen that way? I think an audience is smart enough to understand that Thomas Jefferson in the hit Broadway musical Hamilton wasn't actually black. The themes, subtext, visual language & message of the show should be on your mind more than trivial differences between stage and reality.
POC deserve to see themselves in any role they please. Generations of black people had to view their race in film as slaves or servants or portrayed as literal Jim Crows from Dumbo. They should be able to view themselves as kings, heroes, queens, scientists, doctors etc. even if that wasn't actually possible in that time, at that place. The audience is smart enough to get past race & see the bigger picture.
Even when it comes to fictional characters, like James Bond ("based" on a real person does not count as "historical") people have a stick up their butt about how they should be portrayed. In No Time to Die the actor is still portrayed by a middle aged white guy, but because he's more sensitive it isn't TrUE to ThE cHarActEr and obviously made for cuck libs. We've had the same character do the same schtick for 29 movies, over a period of 50+ years. At what point are we allowed to move on? At what point does the Franchise become stale because "it must be this way!".
LGBT people have been, and still are, underrepresented in cinema despite there being a significant presence of lgbt actors throughout the history of Hollywood like Cary Grant, James Stewart & Greta Garbo. If movies can pretend there are more straight people than there actually are irl, then why can't we pretend there are more gay people? Cinema often demands we suspend our disbelief for far more dramatic events. If I can believe in plausibility of The Hulk in The Avengers, then surely a gay Hulk is not much of a leap in reality.
I hope this messy, unedited rant of an essay was comprehensible. I just despise when people try to force art to maintain the boundaries of their limited worldview. We should keep art accessible for everyone & part of that is stepping away from colonialist tradition and transforming characters into people that a wide variety of people can see themselves as. If white cis people complain that they want to "see themselves" too...they have nearly a century where they dominated television & film. The majority of films still are being made to cater to them.
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