2021 Disclaimers

This is something I began last year, beginning the new year with looking back over some of my old posts and adding disclaimers to them, 12 posts for 12 months. For 2021, I have a mix of notes about alleged sexual predators involved in projects, acknowledgement of places where shows I love didn't step up where representation is concerned, an admission that I previous let one of my favorite comedians off the hook on a racist joke, and a few updated posts to account for accurate names/pronouns. As with last year, I'm only editing the posts to correct names and pronouns - otherwise, I'm adding the disclaimer to the top without changing the original content of the post.

Happy New Year. May 2021 be better as soon as possible, and may we all do our best to be better ourselves.

Soldier's Girl (07/07/15) - Although I do mention it in my review, it bears repeating more emphatically at the top. As excellent as his performance is, it isn’t right that Lee Pace was cast as Callie. It was a missed opportunity for a trans actress to play a leading role, and even though the film does a lot of things right, this is a wrong call that can’t be overlooked.

The Fosters (07/30/15) - While I really enjoy Noah Centineo on this show and prefer him as Jesus to Jake T. Austin’s 1.0 version, I acknowledge that it’s not a character he should’ve played. He’s one of a long line of white actors in Hollywood who’ve been cast as Latinx characters, something I didn't realize when I was first watching the series. The show also features a late-series ongoing plot in which an able-bodied actor plays a character with a disability (for the sake of spoilers, I won’t mention who.) How many more times do we need to see this happen?

A Single Man (11/20/14) - The last time I watched this movie, I exclaimed out loud when I saw the Weinstein Company ‘W’ logo during the opening credits – I hate that that man had a hand in so many great movies. In the case of A Single Man, the Weinstein Company didn’t produce it on the front end, but they did distribute it.

X-Men: The Last Stand (04/27/16) - Fixed Elliot Page’s name - the first of several for this year's disclaimers.

X-Men: Days of Future Past (06/17/14) - I added disclaimers to all my reviews of Bryan Singer movies last year, but I revisited this one again to fix Elliot Page’s name. (Note: I’m still using she/her pronouns to refer to Page’s character, Kitty Pryde/Shadowcat. Looking over the post, I never referred to Page himself using any pronouns, so I didn’t need to change anything there.)

News Satire Roundup: March 6th-March 10th (03/11/16) - Fixed Elliot Page’s name and pronouns.

Midnight in Paris (04/05/14) - As I said in this review, I was never a huge Woody Allen fan, and that was before I heard about Dylan Farrow’s allegations against him. I’ve only ever seen a few of his movies, and this was the only one I ever loved. This isn’t the first time I’ve said this, but it bears repeating – I hate it when predators taint beautiful and creative things. I used to love this movie, but Woody Allen wrecked it.

Blue Jasmine (04/14/14) - More Woody Allen. Seriously, eff this guy.

Supergirl (07/02/16) - Over the seasons, I’ve come to truly love Supergirl, handwavy silliness and all. However, that doesn’t change the fact that seasons 2 and 3 featured a major Latinx character played by a white actress. The extra-irritating thing about this is that, in the comics, Maggie Sawyer is white, so they could’ve just had the white actress play her as white. But they specified Maggie as a PoC in her first appearance and established her as clearly Chicana in season 3. Why?! It’s so frustrating – “diversity points” don’t count when they’re not real diversity, and this was an important example of Supergirl failing to live up to its own ideals.

Convict 13 (03/14/16) - When I first reviewed this short, I neglected to mention a racist joke involving Buster’s caddy on the golf course. It’s one that I didn’t initially connect to the caddy being Black – when he hears a whistle blow, he instantly sits down in the middle of the green, on his lunch break – but when I rewatched the short for 100 Years of Buster Keaton, I realized it was probably a link that audiences in 1920 would have made. Being a fan doesn’t mean you can’t be critical.

Orange is the New Black (05/04/14) - Like Supergirl, Orange is the New Black is a fine show that does a lot of things really well but falls short in certain aspects. Namely, like way, way too many shows, it features multiple characters with disabilities played by able-bodied actors. Seriously, if characters with disabilities were cast appropriately, actors with disabilities would be all over Hollywood in prominent roles.

Shakespeare in Love (08/16/19) - I remember that I’d had it in the back of my mind when I watched this movie that Harvey Weinstein was involved in some way, but when I didn’t see the Weinstein Company Logo in the opening credits, I assumed I was wrong. Turns out, he did produce it – the film just predated the Weinstein Company. Additionally, the cast includes Geoffrey Rush, another alleged sexual harasser. That’s something I ought to have mentioned when I wrote the review.

Everything New is Old Again?: Retroactive Representation in Fandom

Today, I’m staying home for Peter Davison.

(Spoilers for series 12 of Doctor Who, as well as Rogue One: A Star Wars Story and season 3 of Black Lightning.)

This is a topic I first wrote about after I saw Rogue One, but it came to me again with the most recent season of Doctor Who. Honestly, the thought occurred to me as soon as Jo Martin’s version of the intrepid Time Lord was introduced partway through the season, but I held off on revisiting the subject until getting confirmation on my “Nth Doctor” speculations in the season finale.

(Note: on the Doctor Who side of things, I’ll be using pronouns as I have before on this subject. I refer to particular regenerations of the Doctor or other Time Lords by their identified gender – i.e. “she/her” for the Thirteenth Doctor – and use “they/them” for speaking of the character as a whole, across all their lives.)

Quick recap: in “Fugitive of the Judoon,” Jodie Whittaker’s Thirteenth Doctor meets another version of herself, the Nth Doctor. While Thirteen automatically assumes the Nth Doctor must be a regeneration from her future, since she has no memory of ever having been this version, the Nth Doctor has no memory of Thirteen either and insists that Thirteen is the one from the future, not her. Most popular speculation on the subject took the Nth Doctor’s side in that debate, assuming she was the Doctor from the series’ distant past, possibly even an incarnation prior to William Hartnell’s First Doctor, and her existence was somehow erased from memory or undone/rewritten altogether.

Fast forward to the season finale, “The Timeless Children,” in which we get a little elucidation care of a mindbending trip through the Matrix narrated by the Master. There, it’s both heavily implied that the Nth Doctor is in fact an earlier, likely pre-One version and explicitly confirmed that the Doctor has had an untold number of previous regenerations erased from their memory. The Master is tormented by the revelation that the Doctor turns out to be the X factor that enabled Time Lords to regenerate in the first place, while the Doctor is overwhelmed by the enormity of realizing how much of their own personal history has been lost to them.

I could talk all day about the nerdy details of this twist and my reactions to it (in fact, I have.) But today, what I want to look at specifically is the Nth Doctor and other newly-revealed earlier regenerations and what that means for representation on the show.

This is where I bring in Star Wars. The casting of the new trilogy, to many, felt like a conscious “new Star Wars for a new generation” statement. While the original and prequel trilogies both gave the impression that, at any given point, there was one Black person and one to two women in the galaxy worth talking about, the new trilogy put women and people of color front and center. Our new trio starred a white woman, a Black man, and a Latino man, and for all the ways that the trilogy could have delivered better on how it took advantage of that increased diversity, there’s no question that it looks demonstrably different than the trilogies that preceded it.

With Doctor Who, it’s much the same. After being a white man twelve times in a row (technically fourteen, if you’re counting John Hurt and the fact that the Doctor was David Tennant twice,) Jodie Whittaker was brought in as Thirteen, the first (still white) female Doctor. This move was hailed on one side as an “it’s 2018, and the Doctor’s going to be a woman!!!” victory and on another as a “capitulate to SJWs and ruin my childhood!!!” disaster, with a lot more varied opinions in between, but either way, it felt new. Similarly new-feeling were the Thirteenth Doctor’s companions, which included Ryan, the first full-time Black male companion (sorry, Mickey!), and Yaz, the first South Asian companion. The Master has gotten in on this action in recent years as well, with Michelle Gomez getting a jump on the Doctor by playing the first female Master and Sacha Dhawan as the current incarnation playing the first Master of color.

That’s an easy attitude to fall into, that diversity is “new,” modern, progressive. A sign of the changing times. But of course, diversity in all kinds of forms has always been with us. After all, as the Twelfth Doctor tells Bill in Victorian London, “History’s a whitewash” – it’s not about existing, it’s about being visible.

Which brings us around to Rogue One. Although it was released after The Force Awakens ushered in the new trilogy, it’s set just prior to A New Hope. And it stars a white woman leading an ensemble made up of men of color. By uncovering this side story that turns out to be pivotal to the outcome of A New Hope, Rogue One doesn’t frame stories about women or people of color as new. Instead, intentionally or not, it says, “These stories have always been here, you just never heard them before. You all know about the white guy who blew up the Death Star. Now it’s time to learn about the woman and people of color whose heroic sacrifice allowed him to do that.”

That’s an idea that really resonated with me after I saw Rogue One. It helped, I think, that Hidden Figures came out around the same time, a movie about real-life Black women from history whose incredible achievements had mostly gone untold, because I realized that fiction could do the same. On a meta level, new stories set in the past of the canon can highlight voices and heroes that previously didn’t have a chance to be seen when the stories being told were mostly about white men. Other genre examples of this historical course-correction include Wonder Woman and Captain Marvel, the biggest female-led superhero movies in recent memory, bothtaking place in the past. In particular, Captain Marvel, the first solo female-superhero movie for Marvel, was the MCU’s 21^st film, but the film placed Carol’s story in the ‘90s, long before Tony Stark ever introduced himself to the world as Iron Man, and it’s shown that Nick Fury takes inspiration for naming the Avengers Initiative after Carol’s plane. The latest season of Black Lightning also established the first metahuman as a Black soldier from World War II.

And of course, we have Doctor Who. While the Thirteenth Doctor may have felt to some like dragging the show into the 21^st century, the Nth Doctor shows that diversity is nothing new. This is a show that’s been around for over 50 years, and the long, uninterrupted string of white-guy regenerations was how we were introduced to the Doctor, but that’s not how the Doctor has always been. Likely before the Doctor was ever William Hartnell, she was Jo Martin, a Black woman, and she wasn’t the only one. “The Timeless Children” shows us multiple young regenerations of the Child that would grow up to become the Doctor. The very first one we meet is a Black girl, and the subject regenerations we see include, among others, an Asian girl, an Asian boy, and a Black boy.

The cynical will call it retconning, an over-devotion to “woke culture,” and others will understandably argue that moves like this can’t make up for a lack of diversity in the past (this is probably especially true with Doctor Who, given that it’s unlikely we’ll see the Nth Doctor getting much real focus as a genuine character on the show and the various incarnations of the Child were unspeaking faces in a montage that we’ll probably never see again.) However, I do see it as an apology of sorts, albeit an unspoken one. Somewhere within it is an acknowledgment that “you haven’t seen these stories before, not because they didn’t exist, but because we chose not to tell them. We chose to focus on one perspective when we could have highlighted many. Have these stories now, with our recognition that we could have been telling them all along.” And I appreciate that.

A Few Thoughts on Kara & Mon-El (Supergirl)

Yep, another Supergirl post (can you tell I have Crisis on the brain?), but this one is looking back a bit. On the whole, I enjoyed Mon-El while he was on the show, and there was stuff I liked about him and Kara, but ultimately, I feel like this was a pairing that was never quite as interesting as it had the potential to be (some Kara/Mon-El spoilers.)

I was really interested in Mon-El and his interactions with Kara when he first showed up – maybe in part because I can sometimes be blind to love/hate ships right up until the moment they go there, so I didn’t realize he was introduced to be a love interest. But I digress. Back to Mon-El’s introduction. While I don’t know a lot about comic Superlore, I was intrigued by the idea of Daxam, a planet in the same system as Krypton that was destroyed along with it. Mon-El has a similar journey to Earth as Kara, although when he gets stuck in the Phantom Zone, it’s for a lot longer. Kara feels fascination and sympathy toward this similarly-adrift alien refugee, until she learns he’s a Daxamite. Then, she’s immediately ready to fight.

Even though Kara was a still child when she left Krypton, it was time enough to cement her people’s animosity toward Daxamites, and once she finds out that Mon-El is one, she stops seeing any kinship between them and only perceives a threat. Again, this was an idea that really interested me. We all know Kara as so generally open and loving, a champion of aliens on Earth, so the notion of her harboring prejudices seemed to promise a good exploration of her character.

Kara moves quickly from “DEFCON 1” to “not this guy’s biggest fan, but I’ll still help him out.” She decides to take it upon herself to be his alien-on-Earth mentor, teaching him the ways of his new planet and how to pass as a human. Again, interesting.

However, none of these plots go particularly where I want them to go. Kara’s mission to help the refugee acclimate to his new surroundings quickly becomes “Kara babysits Mon-El at Catco and is scandalized when he hooks up with Miss Tessmacher in the supply closet” and “Kara wants Mon-El to use his new powers to be a superhero/help others and is exasperated when he won’t.” While these things work well in the plot of her being both annoyed with and unknowingly-attracted to him, as well as the plot of him being a “bad boy” who reforms under her influence, they’re not nearly what I was hoping for them.

I wanted to really see Kara showing Mon-El around and helping him learn the ropes on Earth (I’ve since been able to get more of that with Brainy’s interactions with various characters, which is maybe one of the reasons I enjoy him so much.) I wanted to see him making mistakes and feeling overwhelmed and frustrated, and Kara relating because she went through the same thing when she first came to Earth. I wanted them to bond over both of them losing their planets in the same catastrophe, and I wanted Mon-El’s comparatively-recent reckoning with that (while both planets were destroyed decades ago, he only just got out of the Phantom Zone, so it still feels fresh) to stir up Kara’s feelings of loss over Krypton. I also wanted to see Kara start to interrogate her prejudices against Daxamites, realizing that a) what she was taught about them was a distortion, and b) Daxamite culture is different but not “bad.”

This last point is where I really get bummed when I think about these two. Part of the issue might again trace back to my lack of comic knowledge. I didn’t know anything about Daxam before Mon-El showed up on Supergirl, and it’s later brought up that the Daxamites practiced slavery, which is very obviously reprehensible. If Daxamites really are bad in the comics, then maybe the kind of storyline I was hoping for just wouldn’t have made sense, although that still wouldn’t preclude individual Daxamites being good people.

But like I said, when Kara first talks about how awful Daxamites are, she doesn’t lead with the slavery (which, why not?!) Instead, she focuses on their hedonistic lifestyles, full of drinking, sex, and partying. Given how seriously Kryptonian culture took itself, animosity/prejudice between Krypton and Daxam seems to track. Just as Kara looks at Mon-El as a party boy who doesn’t care about anything real, he sees her as a card-carrying member of the self-important Fun Police.

Since this was the first image the show gave me of Daxam and its dynamic with Krypton, and since Kara’s reaction to Mon-El being a Daxamite gave me serious, “Look, even Supergirl has unexplored biases!” vibes, I assumed this was where we were going, Kara and Mon-El learning to reevaluate one another and get passed the prejudices they were both taught. Unfortunately, that’s not what happens. While Kara and Mon-El’s opinions of one another do change, it’s not until Mon-El himself starts to change along with it.

Because Mon-El’s drinking and casual sex is portrayed as a bad thing. He’s painted as a frat boy, a shallow guy who’s basically a waste of potential until Kara inspires him to clean up his act. But while that’s what those characteristics might look like on Earth, there was no reason that, for Mon-El and Daxam, those things had to be framed in a negative light. There’s nothing inherently bad about liking a good time and being open about sex. We know how Kara feels about this, and plenty of people on Earth would be inclined to agree with her. But the narrative didn’t have to affirm that opinion, the idea that Mon-El needs to change in order to be “worthy” of Kara. Because when “change” appears to mean “be less like a Daxamite,” that seems to support Kara’s original prejudices.

I think of it this way. A number of cultures are far less focused on time and punctuality than what you’d call “mainstream” American culture (more specifically, white American culture.) In plenty of countries, camaraderie or giving others a hand takes priority over being on time, and showing up late to work because you were giving your brother a ride wouldn’t be a big deal. Now, if someone from a country that follows this norm moves to the U.S., they would need to learn how to adapt to U.S. norms about punctuality in order to be successful, yes, but that doesn’t mean the way they grew up doing things is inferior; it’s just different.

That’s what I would’ve appreciated seeing about Daxam. Why not look at traits that can be viewed on Earth (and apparently on Krypton) as character flaws or “moral failings” and recontextualize them? Rather than debauchery and promiscuity, make it about having a lust for life and not being repressed when it comes to sexuality. The show at least makes a nod to the latter, when Alex comes out to the group and Mon-El is confused as to why her being gay would ever be regarded as anything other than perfectly normal, but that’s really the only time. Other than that, it’s Mon-El the frat boy who, over the course of the season, stops drinking and sleeping around because Kara makes him want to be “better.” 1) This has already been done so many times before, and 2) that show had a chance to do something neat with the perspective of a different alien culture, and for my money, they didn’t take it.