Marginalized people have a unique perspective primed for storytelling. Why are they still accessories for the ones white people already tell?
What do we want from stories: originality or universal themes? Paradoxically, audiences seem to want both at once, and impressively, sometimes storytellers manage to deliver. Severance, for example, is widely praised as fresh and exciting even though it centres on painfully average, cubicle-ridden office workers. The first season of Arcane also meets the originality mark despite being a spin-off of a generic battle arena game. On the other end of the spectrum, Disney’s live-action remakes of repeatedly-rehashed fairytales continue to top box office charts even amidst rather brutal backlash, and classics are, as the saying goes, classic for a reason.
Before the written word, all storytelling was iterative due to the limits of human memory and the whims of each subsequent storyteller. However, in our modern age of information everything is recorded, which opens the door to judgmental comparison between past and present versions. The accessibility of online archives and libraries also makes it easier than ever to preserve and translate texts faithfully and to recreate historical settings accurately. Yet accuracy is not always the goal. In fact, the purpose of fiction is to rewrite reality.
The question becomes: what do we rewrite, and how? Take the works of Jane Austen, which have retained their popularity due to their evergreen themes such as familial duty and successful or unrequited love. Emma (2020) is a historically faithful recreation down to the hand-embroidered buttons on its costumes, but it is not inherently “better” than Clueless, which references the original book about as closely as The SpongeBob Squarepants Movie (2004) follows the Odyssey.
Our politically polarized world is filled with heated debate around racialized and genderbent versions of classic characters. Some defend movies like The Little Mermaid (2023) as good representation, and while it’s true they provide roles for marginalized actors beyond the work they’re usually typecasted for, the characters, settings, and stories are not really made for or about them. Often, casting a person of colour in a role originally played by a white actor only conceals the real history of the racialized group. Similarly, casting women to play previously male characters defined by their brute strength and stoicism reaffirms the harmful ideas that masculinity is more desirable than femininity, and that women find success by “leaning in” to masculine norms. Therefore, it is more valuable to tell stories written by marginalized voices as opposed to exchanging authenticity for visibility.
Stage plays are a notable exception because they exist to be reproduced: night after night, production after production, century after century. The prestige of a Shakespeare play cannot be rivalled by a modern one, so while expanding opportunities for new playwrights and directors is important, it is not defensible to reject an actor from a Shakespeare role on account of their race or gender. A higher degree of suspension of disbelief is required in the theatre than in the cinema: if we can accept that a few carefully rigged pieces of particle board are roiling ocean waves, why can’t we accept that an African man is playing a Danish prince? I can’t even see his face from the balcony. But when an actor’s face is blown up onto a high-fidelity screen, the details become so tangible that we are convinced the screen shows reality. We are not suspending our disbelief—we are simply believing.
In recent years, studios have been trying to push audiences towards passive consumption in a new way. The new target demographic is not an unthinking one, but one who’s not even paying attention. Writers and showrunners receive critiques from studio executives that their stories aren’t “second screen enough.” Nuanced, carefully crafted shows are remade into uninteresting, over-explained slop—/Avatar: The Last Airbender/ comes to mind, where ‘tell, don’t show’ seems to be the guiding principle. All subtleties of the original’s meticulous storytelling are abandoned to accommodate a distracted, apathetic audience.
I believe this assessment of viewers is unfair. They cannot be blamed for losing interest in media designed as “background noise,” especially in a world where mobile apps profit off shortening our attention spans and lowering our cognitive willingness.
So long as viewers are treated this way, we are in danger. Seeing this vicious cycle of diminishing audience attention, what’s to stop studios or streaming platforms from going one step further? They may not see the point of creating anything original when generative AI content like /Fruit Love Island/ sees widespread success. A studio that sees diversity as a checklist could efficiently fulfill their quotas without employing marginalized creatives. In the music industry, AI ‘singers’ represented by racialized virtual avatars are already prevalent.
Failures such as the /Stranger Things/ finale have prompted the internet to wonder if they were written by ChatGPT. While these accusations are usually unprovable even if true, they represent a larger complaint: the media industry is prioritizing appeal to a common denominator over original content. It is far more profitable, after all, to make a broadly sanitary and crowd-pleasing movie than a well-crafted but niche one.
Power structures in the media industry are frequently horribly unfair. News stories about predacious executives and underpaid writers circulate constantly, including the famous SAG-AFTRA labour strike in 2023. However, we as the collective audience ultimately decide whether to consciously consume original, narratively stimulating stories told from marginalized perspectives, call out injustices when we see them, and boycott creators of soulless content.
We are a diverse audience deserving of diverse stories told by us, about us, and for us.