Being human is a curse and a blessing, in so many ways. Animals are lucky: with very few deviations lions look like lions and so on, but unless you’re a multiple birth person, nobody looks like you. This also gives rise to our constantly picking each other apart for unusual reasons. With the election and a controversy surrounding the new Marvel feature Dr. Strange, I realized how petty we are and how it all really doesn’t matter.
The news was that Tibetans would be protesting the casting of actor Tilda Swinton as The Ancient One in the movie because she is scripted as a Celtic woman, and the story-line was originally based upon a Tibetan monk and, naturally, a man. The movie industry is being called out for not representing other races properly and skirting the issue by hiring white casts for principal roles and nominating them for awards over less non-white cast films. I recall a little movie called Slumdog Millionaire with a mostly non-white cast and which portrayed some aspects of India as, shall we say, less than developed, yet it won the Academy Award for Best Picture and seven other Oscars ™. Yet there are still those who grumble that white people just aren’t getting it right.
I beg to differ: we do. It’s just that you pick apart ours more than we pick apart non-white efforts to portray white people. Nobody laughed louder than me when Eddie Murphy did comic portrayals of white people, because I could relate to exactly the type of people he was creating onstage. He even went so far as to get into a full body makeup as a white man and took to the streets, and didn’t get recognized. There are men out there who do a better job looking like a woman than many women. I don’t protest. I admire.
Having seen Dr. Strange, I was impressed by Tilda Swinton. She looked rather nondescript as far as nationality was concerned. Sure the folks at Marvel could have gone with by-the-book casting, but in a world in which we are being led to believe that it is not the only one, who says what an “Ancient One” is supposed to be? If they had cast a kid in the part, and it was true to the ideals of the story, why pick on it? Why not just accept it?
So what does this all have to do with the election? Well, the party lines are being blurred because many people don’t like either of our two major choices (we will put aside the independent candidates for now, especially since one seemed to have no awareness of what the situation in Aleppo is), and the political ads and stumping show how much we pick each other apart for being not what we want. One points out that somebody was “a Mexican,” and anticipates us filling in the blanks with whatever prejudices we have about people from Mexico. The other is reminding us that male candidates can be crude and think too highly of themselves to realize how horrible an attitude they have. Yeah, they’re human, just like us, full of prejudicial baggage that keeps a wonderful world at bay so we can try to group ourselves into convenient ideals of what is normal and refer to outliers as “the other guys.” Or the wrong guys.
If I were casting a movie, how would I have enough of an understanding to write a part for a Tibetan monk unless I had a Tibetan monk write the script? Then how do I find a good Tibetan actor who would appeal to a world audience? Any place that hated Tibet would not want to see the movie. Also I should point out that Dr. Strange’s assistant, Wong, appears in the film as a rather dour (but kick-ass) scholarly librarian, and is played by Benedict Wong, an Englishman born to parents from Hong Kong. So there was international casting going on. Just not what some folks wanted.
So I would recommend voting and seeing Dr. Strange. And stop picking on your fellow man.
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