SCREENLAND
Hollywood’s New Fantasy: A Magical, Colorblind
Past
Films and TV shows keep reimagining history as a
multiracial dream world. Is that really a step forward?
By Kabir
Chibber
March 31,
2024
Not long
ago, in the cinema, I found myself trying to focus on Timothée Chalamet’s
charming portrayal of a young Willy Wonka, arriving penniless in a new city.
What drew my attention instead was the population he encountered there. The
first person to greet him was a joyful British Indian. Soon we met a cute
orphan sidekick, played by a Black American actor, and the chief of police,
played by a biracial American. The vaguely Mitteleuropean city Wonka had come
to — Viennese shops, Italian architecture, English language — was a happy
melting pot: All races seemed to coexist without race meaning anything. The
story was set in a fantastical past, but its cast looked like a utopian
21st-century London, with actors of British and Caribbean and Asian backgrounds
all stirred together. The Oompa-Loompas, described by Roald Dahl as a pygmy
people found “in the very deepest and darkest part
of the African jungle where no white man had ever been before,” were played by Hugh Grant.
The series “Bridgerton” depicts a version of Regency
England ruled by a Black queen and an anachronistically multiracial royal
court.
When you
see these examples gathered, they’re often followed by some complaint of a
world gone mad with inclusion. In Britain, for instance, there was some outrage
when the protagonist of an otherwise faithful Agatha Christie adaptation was
revised to be a Nigerian immigrant. But the problem, for viewers, isn’t
wokeness run amok; it’s the incoherence of the world we are watching. We see an
African man solving crimes in a rural English village of the 1950s, as the sun
sets on the empire — yet his race is barely mentioned or considered and never
makes any material difference in his experience.
You might
call this kind of defiantly ahistorical setting the Magical Multiracial Past.
The bones of the world are familiar. There is only one change: Every race
exists, cheerfully and seemingly as equals, in the same place at the same time.
History becomes an emoji, its flesh tone changing as needed.
And yet
something is off, something that makes these stories impossible to get lost in.
You can never fully envision the Magical Multiracial Past without having to
mentally take apart the entire scaffolding of world history. “Bridgerton” is
set before Britain abolished slavery, an institution that apparently exists,
largely unmentioned, in the world of the show. What, precisely, are the rules
of a world in which a Black queen reigns over a British Empire that sanctions
the enslavement of Black people?
The impulse
behind such choices surely comes from a good place. Storytellers are struggling
with how to approach a historically white canon and a set of well-worn genres
(like the period costume drama) whose characters would, in reality, be almost
exclusively white. They are wary of simply omitting all the other ethnicities
that are part of the modern, multiracial West, either as performers or,
potentially, as viewers. Neither do they want to tell stories in which nonwhite
people must always appear as servants, or victims, or issues.
The Magical
Multiracial Past is one optimistic solution to this conundrum. We want to
include everyone in our storytelling, but we are not always prepared to change
the kinds of stories we tell. So we simply suspend disbelief; we imagine that
everyone who is currently a part of our Anglophone culture has been there, a
valued and equal participant, all along.
Thus have
all of us, from around the globe, been retconned into the history of the West.
Now we can watch ourselves speak languages we did not speak in rooms where we
were unlikely to have been welcome. We are included, but our actual history is
erased. We seldom see the stories of nonwhite people who, like my ancestors,
lived on their home soil, or the complex stories of nonwhite people in the West
in centuries past. The world’s history is reduced from many to one.
Some feel
that this sort of wishful casting can help model how a multiethnic society
should function. But whom, precisely, does it benefit? It is convenient that
the Magical Multiracial Past allows white viewers to watch white protagonists
move through history without anyone having to think uncomfortable thoughts;
indeed, the people of the Magical Multiracial Past get along better than we do
in the present. I don’t think this is principally for the benefit of those of
us who aren’t white. I think instead of a line from James Baldwin: “A great
deal of one’s energy,” he once wrote, “is expended in reassuring white
Americans that they do not see what they see.”
And maybe
this is why, while I struggle to cope with these revised pasts intellectually,
I also think they tend to fail emotionally, deep down in the places a good
story is meant to reach. The tales are often boring, marked by a well-meaning
blandness — by an avoidance of uncomfortable truths.
There are
alternatives to this fantasy. One obvious option is that, rather than trying to
fit the modern world into the canon, we could expand the canon itself. It’s not
difficult to tell stories from more parts of the world. In literature, the
writer Marlon James has worked to make his Dark Star trilogy, inspired by
ancient African folklore, avoid becoming a “European fantasy novel in brown
face.” Children’s entertainment offers stories like Disney’s “Moana,” immersed
in Polynesian culture, and “Iwájú,” set in a future Lagos. All sorts of films
find ways to acknowledge nonwhite people in Western history or to dramatize
their histories elsewhere.
Or we can
see the canon afresh. You can keep the cowboy but tear it to shreds, as Mel
Brooks did with the story of a Black sheriff in “Blazing Saddles.” Or you can
rebuild it, as Quentin Tarantino did in “Django Unchained” by making the hero a
former slave. (Tarantino called the cruel slave owners of his film a “grotesque
parody of European aristocracy,” a far more interesting take on the concept of
royalty, in my view, than pretending to be a royal myself.) There is also humor
here. A good joke in “Hot Tub Time Machine 2” is rooted in an unacknowledged
truth of time-travel stories: It’s mostly people who look like Marty McFly who
want to go all that far into American history.
There is
nothing wrong with dreaming of things that never were, but we shouldn’t use
that power to pretend bad things didn’t happen. Personally, I’m drawn to a good
counterfactual. I find myself thinking often about a 1995 film called “White
Man’s Burden.” Written and directed by Desmond Nakano, a third-generation
Japanese American, the movie places John Travolta in an alternate America in
which Black people hold all the power and white people live in drug-filled
ghettos. It opens with a lavish, all-Black dinner party at which the head of
the table muses about whether white people are, as a race, beyond saving — a
reversal heightened by the fact that this bad guy is played, with tremendous
charisma, by the civil rights icon Harry Belafonte.
Art should
explore our shared history and try to make sense of it. Consider the recent
uproar over Google’s artificial-intelligence model, so trained to produce “colorblind” images that it would offer the ridiculous: the founding fathers as
Native American men, racially diverse Nazis. Google’s trillion-dollar team of scientists tried to solve the problems of
racism by ignoring them and thereby found their own way to the Magical
Multiracial Past. It’s striking to think that humans
working in the arts have been making the same choices. The past is messy, and
depicting it can be unsettling. But understanding that is what separates us
from robots.
Kabir
Chibber is a writer and filmmaker based in New York. He last wrote for the
magazine about the prophetic power of the film “Demolition Man.”
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