Under the sea. They're there too.

Ramblings Post #406
Long is the night, the sounds of traffic and the city outside my window, the last of the summer air hanging about my house. Quiet reigns, and in the stillness the weight of years presses down upon the soul and mind drifts back along the halls of memory, looking for something. It finds words. It's always the words there, waiting to dance, scurrying about, waiting to sing, waiting for me.   

There is so much to unpack here.

Just as my feed became dotted with collages of images of young black girls - and some older black girls - excited to the point of tears of seeing The Little Mermaid's Ariel as portrayed by Halle Bailey, as if on cue, triggered by the idea of some iota, some of a sliver of joy for someone other than themselves - those people arrived. You know who I'm talking about. And in my feed I found where someone had pointed out this comment. And honestly, it begs the question.  

Why would changing this character "fix" the whole movie?

I once theorized in long ago entry that one day something like this would come pass for the film industry. Where the tech would be so good you wouldn't really need actors, just the specs of the people you wanted in the film, and we'd be able to create films whole cloth for a few thousand dollars that looked like they cost a many millions to make. Of course that cheap price tag would be bootleg, as famous actors (or just beautiful people) would definitely charge big bucks to license their images just like now. And I imagined studios remaking films from the libraries with actors who previously could never have worked together, like a prime Marlon Brando co-starring with a young Humphrey Bogart and Brad Pitt in something together. I follow a guy on Instagram who makes posters and everything. It's pretty cool.

But in my naivete, I missed this concept as a possibility.

In retrospect I should have been able to put to the pieces together. There are already a few firms that specialize in sanitizing films for religious audiences, Ala edited for TV only in those cases edited for sin. And the ongoing shenanigans over the very existence of non-white folks in fantasy settings, where people are okay with dragons, magic that works and demons but draw the line at black people. I mean, that's just too unrealistic. And I know that new generation deep fakes which are going to be a real headache for politics in the future. So the idea that somewhere a guy wouldn't work overtime to remove what he might see as "undesirable elements" from his favorite piece of cinema shouldn't have been a stretch at all.   

Why would changing this character "fix" the whole movie?

It's the use of the word "fix" that gets me. As though the idea of a non-white version of an entirely fictional character being the center of the story somehow breaks that story. (Point of order - Disney's live action remakes of cartoon classics have been of dubious quality of late, so I hope they realize they're on thin ice here and take extra care.) It is a STORY, purely fiction and as such it can always be revised. The previous Disney version isn't even the original story. Let's be honest, when studios want to they don't even care if it was a true story,  they switch facts all the time to fit the tale that sells tickets..um, I mean, that they want to tell. So why the outrage? 

These are the stars of 2016's Gods Of Egypt. They gonna "fix" this too? 

Well, the other word he used, the term "woke." It's become the new slur that fills in for the N-word to certain crowd, much like "Brandon" fills in for another not polite term they can use in public. That's the tell here. And the quick realization of what they'd done, that they were no longer just talking to friends but possibly to the whole world - they offered up some sort of half-assed attempt an apology. I mean, not even the courage of conviction at the end. And I say the end because Twitter swiftly suspended this account not long after it hit critical exposure. Yes, the use of the word woke tells me why he was mad.

And I for one hope he stays mad.

Barkeep, let me get some whiskey and Sprite. Two cubes of ice. Long day.