It really is based on Casablanca. No. Really. |
Ironman
is now a woman.
Should
everyone be up in arms about this?
Not
really.
The
comics industry isn’t adjusting to fit in with “progressive” times—whatever
that is meant to mean. There isn’t some agenda-toting cabal going around
telling the artists and the writers that they have to adapt. There is a long,
long, really long tradition of riffing and stealing the stories of other
artists and cultures, and then using them as a vehicle to tell your own story.
Playwrites and authors have been doing it for nearly as long as there has been
paper and ink. Othello, Shakespeare’s dark moor, has been played by every
spectrum of color across the board, including very white actors. Akira Kuroawa
told the fantastic Seven Samurai, a
decidedly Japanese movie. It was later retold as The Magnificent Seven, a decidedly American movie. It’s true that Kurosawa sued, but not because
the race of the characters has been changed to white and Mexican, but because
they’d blatantly ripped off his story. Otherwise, Kurosawa loved the adaptation
of his work, and presented the director, John Sturges, with a katana. If that
wasn’t enough, The Guns of Navarone (first
in the book then in the movie) recast the entire group as US, British and Greek
allies in World War II. Finally, Pixar
picked up the exact same theme again when it used bugs to tell the exact same
story in A Bug’s Life. Most audiences
enjoyed the film and had no issue with Bonnie Hunt (a white woman) portraying
Rosie, a black widow.
All that jazz! |
There
are countless other examples, so many that it makes my head hurt a little just
trying to select from them for review. But I would like to point out that The Three Musketeers most recent BBC
version cast a mixed-race Porthos. That’s not just an attempt to check a box on
a diversity worksheet, but rather as an homage to the author himself, Alexandre
Dumas. Most audience don’t know that Dumas’ father, General Thomas-Alexandre Dumas, was
the son of an enslaved African. Whatever folk think of the show itself, this
was a nice little nod to the author’s origins.
But, but . . . it's in the name! |
That’s
really the crux of the matter. Storytellers of any stripe aren’t necessarily
trying to win points on some amorphous “progressive” agenda. A lot of times
we’re (myself included) just trying to give a new and interesting spin on a
story that has been told many, many times before. Writing is like playing
jazz—the notes are all the same, but when you’re doing it right, your
particular riff on a theme will become something almost magical. Changing
gender or race is like changing the setting or the time. It’s another tool in
the storyteller’s “box of tricks” that allows them to explore a slightly
different variation on a known theme. Ovid’s Pyramus and Thisbe of Babylon became Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet
of fair Verona, Italy. A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley is in fact a retelling
of Shakespeare’s own King Lear, which
was also adapted by Akira Kurosawa in Ran.
It’s
all circles and more circles, expanding as more stories are told, but
essentially harking to the same themes over and over, with variations to try to
keep it entertaining. The attempt doesn’t always result in a hit knocked out of
the park (see Pamela Anderson’s Barb Wire
as a counterpoint to the classic Casablanca)
but sometimes you get Ursula K. LeGuin’s Lavina,
a retold version of Virgil’s The Aeneid.
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