A Woke Society? **Mod Warning In Post #435**

The way I look at it I am Irish, I don't use American invented terms such as 'woke' which are wrapped up in American politics (mostly on the internet) and culture surrounding it. If everyone did the same people would stop aping every little thing America does. A lot of boards.ie users seem to forget that it is an Irish site not an American one.

My advise don't pay heed to it and use your own common sense, remember where you are from.

I can see your point: I'd have no problem with a black Miss Marple (or whichever character it was) but the issue here seems to be twisting of the original stories, not the colour of the actor playing the lead. And I'd agree with you in that respect. Why not just do something original?

I've always wodered what the problem with a black little mermaid is seeing as mermaids are fictional characters to start off with. It's a bit like saying BoJack Horseman being a horse and set in a universe with animal/humans is pandering to animal rights activists and the character should have been human (that said, I haven't seen the final season yet, soooo....)

There were some lads getting all “worked up” over a black elf in the new Lord of the Rings show. The show was getting slated before it even aired.

Idris could do Bond now, but they'd want somebody for 10 years or so which goes against him. The new Doctor Who looks very good, very charismatic and has screen presence but early days yet.

I can see why they changed Agatha Christie, so many have been done and its a nice reminder that England had loads of black people before the Windrush generation. I can't imagine a black Sherlock Holmes, but Steven Moffitt did play around with the idea that him and Watson looked like a gay couple in the new ones.

But we are going down the road of adaptations. The Alex Baldwin character in Glengarry Glen Ross steals the show (some doing with one of the best ensemble casts ever), but good luck finding him in the original play; he doesn't exist!

Bit annoying if you go the play once you've watched the film, but makes the film even better, so good call. So the answer on race is probably, it depends. No different to screenplay adaptations, some work, some don't.

A nice summation that conveniently ignores lots of points made!

I'll leave yis at it.

We're about to hit 1,500 posts and so far, nobody has been able to define woke without copying and pasting or by providing multiple definitions which contradict each other.

To be fair, Feisar provided a definition earlier which is entirely reasonable; it doesn’t seem reasonable to provide a definition which is entirely subjective.

The obvious explanation is that some people don't want to see BAME, LGBT+, or disabled folks on screen. So far, nobody has provided any sensible explanation for the outrage so that's the explanation I have to go with.

That explanation is only obvious to you based upon your own biases, prejudices and preferences. I don’t foresee anyone being able to offer a satisfactory or reasonable explanation and I’m not about to do so either, because it’s obvious that you would not consider any explanation which didn’t already support your already held prejudices - your minds made up and that’s it.

However, at the risk of further confounding the issue of the lack of a satisfactory definition, while the explanation provided was appropriate, the examples Feisar provided as evidence of the phenomenon, even in the pejorative, weren’t great. The gender/sex/race/ethnicity swapping in modern storytelling is more an example of tokenism, an attempt to signal progressive virtues to demonstrate how attuned the person or the people behind the idea are attuned to issues of social injustice.

For example, you (and I don’t intend for you to take this as a personal criticism) and others continue to use the term ‘BAME’, in spite of the fact that the term has long been considered unhelpful by ethnic minorities to whom it refers, for numerous reasons which one would expect anyone using the term would be familiar with:

https://amp.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/apr/08/bame-britain-ethnic-minorities-acronym

Similarly, suggestions that an actor other than a white man in his 30’s could play the character of Bond ignores so many factors as to why such tokenism would be perceived as not only unhelpful, but completely ignorant of the source material and the context in which the character exists -

https://amp.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/oct/15/mi5-believed-black-people-posed-security-risk-papers-reveal

It’s not so much that anyone objects to representations of characters which don’t represent themselves in advertising media or culture or entertainment, it’s that much of that media or culture or entertainment is simply taking an existing idea or form or concept and applying it in a context where it simply doesn’t belong. People who have based so much of their identity around an idea are naturally inclined to object when the idea is being used to promote something which they feel is a misrepresentation of their identity.

Corporate entities are notorious for it, which is why there are objections to depicting narratives or stories outside of their traditional context. Not that this appropriation of other people’s stories matters a jot to entities whose bottom line is to make a profit from the work of others -

https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/woke-companies-broke-profits-1234710724/amp/

It stands to reason that a product is unlikely to appeal to new markets if it’s promoted with the message that “You too can now drink your own piss!”, which is why in attempting to market their products to minorities, the brewing company behind Bud Light sought to lean into the idea of social inclusion, because their primary target market was already saturated. The perceived benefits of capitalising on an underserved market outweighed the potential negatives of backlash from their established market. In the end, it turns out that they weren’t likely to convert anyone who wasn’t already invested in the idea of drinking their own piss. This is rather unlike their competitors in the same industry who have done their research and based their marketing decisions on data-driven strategies. Similar backlash ensued, but not anything like the extent of the Bud Light debacle -

https://www.newsweek.com/jack-daniels-whiskey-boycott-calls-lgbt-campaign-1792890

Perhaps best not to upset that particular individual any further with the reality that bourbon whiskey is more popular among gay men than he would like to believe it is solely the preserve of straight men:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/250039/sexual-orientation-preferred-drinks-of-gay-lesbian-and-straight-americans/

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1467-9566.12605

And the same is true of your example of women’s soccer - in order to gain acceptance, women’s soccer isn’t promoted on it’s own merits, but rather it’s promoted by means of aping the way the men’s game is promoted, which means it lacks authenticity, in much the same way as promoting social justice lacks authenticity when it’s just aping existing prejudice and discrimination in order to be perceived as acceptable to the masses, rather than being promoted in its own right on it’s own merits, on it’s own terms. In much the same way, stories from other cultures or even stories from our own culture are repackaged and promoted to uphold a particular narrative which it poorly represents, rather than giving minorities the opportunity to present and promote their own culture and values and identity as being equal to, rather than promoting them as being adjacent to, the predominant cultural narrative promoted by a well-meaning minority within the majority, kind of like the way the designation of the acronym BAME is well-intended, but ultimately misguided.

So if the original creator is dead then the source material can never be played with and adapted in different ways? That would take a huge amount of highly successful Shakespeare adaptations out of contention. Tonnes of adaptations of one kind or another of Dracula and Frankenstein. And all of the above deal with different themes to the original. This doesn't make them remotely bad or unoriginal by doing so.

I have it on good authority that Homer never approved of the making of O Brother, Where Art Thou?.

The issue is that this was deliberately used to push politics which had nothing to do with the source material therefore and was purely used a vanity project by the people who adapted it.

They want to do that then fine, but it doesn't mean I can't find it stupid to do that.

Why not simply write an original drama about the windrush generation rather than adapting something that has nothing to do with it but you still want to shoehorn a tribute to the windrush generation into it. Why not simply adapt stories written by the windrush generation.Seems like they didn't quite have the vision or creativity to do something worthwhile like that so instead decided to copy a famous authors work and use it for cheap publicity.

It's just incredibly lazy and testament to how poor TV and film has become in recent years when a large number of TV shows and films have as their sole selling point oh look all the cast are female oh look the lead character is black rather than oh look this is a really good TV show and film.

If they had simply chosen the lead actor to be black and because he was the best man for the job then that would have been fine but of course the writer said she wanted a black person as the lead not because they were the best person for the job but as a tribute to her grandfathers and the windrush generation which is just stupid in my opinion as this story has nothing to do with the windrush generation.

I think anything that can be linked to identity of a community etc is political for a lot of posters. It's absolutely news to me that race is integral to Poirot etc. I remember people similarly imploding when Deb Patel played David Copperfield. Directed by Armando Ianucci who has outputted some of the most original and creative works in the UK over the last 3 decades. Unsurprisingly it was another masterpiece but I'm pretty sure, some posters also view it as political and "woke".