Diversity In Media

The majority of characters in Western media are straight white men. So much so that this is assumed to be the default for Western media and studios keep insisting that women, people of colour, LGBT people and so on just don't sell.

This is a thread for discussing the portrayal of minorities in media and on the enforced lack of diversity in Western media. Please keep the conversation on topic, and obey the forum rules.

Reality is that, which when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away. -Philip K. Dick

I assume you mean visual media, because I would think textual media doesn't have this problem nearly as much.

Even textual media has this issue. It's not as pronounced, but even so, it's still there.

Reality is that, which when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away. -Philip K. Dick

Point taken.

Do you think that a (possible) root cause of it might be that it might be deemed "unmarketable" if the characters weren't mostly white?

I think the reason is that subconsciously, a white male is seen as being the default without people reading into it. For example, what if Dirty Harry was black or if When Harry Met Sally was interracial? You would read the characters differently even if the actions were exactly the same. The white male is seen as a blank sheet, while others might have some sort of scribbling around the edges.

It's very much an issue with marketing. They still don't believe that minorities can sell media. As a result, they don't market media that stars minorities as much, and then compare it to media that they funded more. Or they blame failure entirely on having a minority lead where when a minority lead succeeds it's a fluke.

For example, Catwoman and Green Lantern were both terrible films, but Catwoman's failure was based on the fact that it stared a woman, while Green Lantern was blamed on being a terrible film.

There's also the Hunger Games which is huge, but is being seen as a fluke, or appealing to a niche market. Instead of an instance where a female run film is a huge success.

Reality is that, which when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away. -Philip K. Dick

The solution, then, is to make more diverse media that is also a success.

Which is... easier said than done.

I used to think the issue was something psychological, or having to do with the majority of straight white male writers; nowadays, however, I feel the issue is more with the publishers. It's the same reason you get tons of Follow the Leader garbage for every remotely inventive work out there - it's safe. The success of intentionally diverse franchises like Star Trek shows that an audience has no problem identifying with characters outside their comfort zone. Yet, the well-known internal issues with these same franchises belie the producers' conservative mentality. They simply regard non-standard characters as risky and controversial, while the audience, aside from a Vocal Minority or two, generally has no problem with them.

And making producers (or writers) change probably isn't a very easy thing to do.

On the contrary, it's too easy. Used to be a time where studios like Miramax would hunt for prospective indie writers like Kevin Smith whenever their line-up got so stifled it actually reduced profits. Nowadays however, independent developers have independent venues, so they don't really need studios. As a result, you actually get plenty of diversity, but it's just not that obvious to find, certainly not in Hollywood Land. Downside is, the production values are rarely as high, yet movies like Cloud Atlas are beginning to turn that one around as well. A one-hundred-million-dollar indie film. Wrap your head around that.

Why? And should we accept that?

Share it so that people can get into this conversation, 'cause we're not the only ones who think like this.

Perhaps it's a blank canvas because it's the default?

And no, we absolutely should not accept it.

It's considered the default because Hollywood assumes their target demographic to be white males. As I mentioned in the other thread, there's a self-feeding cycle in Hollywood that nobody's willing to put Big Money on a film starring a minority actor because the assumption is that minority actors don't sell well, an assumption that is supported by the fact that films starring minority actors often don't sell as well as Big Money Hollywood Blockbusters, which is to be expected because nobody's willing to put Big Money into them.

So it winds up being that nobody's willing to support Film X because Film X isn't going to make any money with nobody supporting it. To understand the Insane Troll Logic required to make this make sense, you need to understand that the job of a film executive is a crapshoot. They're paid to know what audiences will respond positively to and avoid anything that audiences will respond negatively to. Often, this translates to, "Whatever those other guys are doing in that movie that made big money? Do that."

edited 6th Aug '13 12:20:55 PM by TobiasDrake

My Tumblr. Currently liveblogging Haruhi Suzumiya and revisiting Danganronpa V3.

I'm reminded of this article on movies that star mostly women, and the general filmmaker response to it.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/monkeysee/2013/06/14/191568762/at-the-movies-the-women-are-gone

They simply aren't making that many movies about women. And those that are about women? Aren't shown nearly as widely as anything staring a straight white man. Or Will Smith.

A huge part of the problem right now is that the big-money films are all based on previously existing IPs—comic books, novels, TV series, remakes of older films, etc. Diversity is being held back because the film industry is shackled to past times when fewer people questioned the supremacy of the White Male Lead.

Stuff what I do.

Which is, itself, another symptom of "doing what worked before". Why take a chance on a bold new IP when you can just make Star Wars VII or Pirates of the Caribbean V? Those franchises make money, so executives want to see those franchises instead.

Ironically, the biggest successes are always the ones that aren't afraid to go to new places, but executives don't grasp this idea that audiences want to see something new.

edited 6th Aug '13 12:38:23 PM by TobiasDrake

My Tumblr. Currently liveblogging Haruhi Suzumiya and revisiting Danganronpa V3.

Entertainment executives are notoriously risk-averse.

Share it so that people can get into this conversation, 'cause we're not the only ones who think like this.

Some of those previously existing I Ps include women, though, so I'm not quite so sure there's any reason that nostalgia can't get us a female character. (IE, Wonder Woman. Why the fuck have they not made a modern Wonder Woman yet? They've already done Batman and Superman.)

So even if they're depending on old intellectual properties it isn't an excuse for not using female characters, since those very clearly and prominently exist. Lara Croft got made into a movie, I don't see why we can't have goddamn Wonder Woman already.

edited 6th Aug '13 12:48:16 PM by AceofSpades

Let's not oversimplify. Stories like Twilight or Harry Potter are anything but original, and they make effectively infinity cash. How creative a product is or isn't has nothing to do with its profitability. Arguably, even its overall quality has only a tenuous relationship to profit, at best.

But it's always the statistical outliers that drive the creative industries and pay for the little fish to keep on swimming. This is really only problematic in that blockbuster cinema is so incredibly expensive that big studios simply can't afford to diversity very much, there's not that many products coming out in a given year and there's a lot of invested capital to recoup.

We can combat this by being less beholden to special effects extravaganzas and focusing more on things like script writing, atmosphere and acting, things that are relatively cheap and can be done through indie companies just as easily as through the main studios. Cheaper products mean more products, more products means more room for diversity.

Furthermore, I think Guantanamo must be destroyed.

They've been trying to make a Wonder Woman movie. The problem is, they can't seem to decide what they actually want to do with it. They've been through multiple script revisions. They even had Joss Whedon - the feminist nerd-god who is worshipped with holy reverence in many corners of the internet and reviled in many others, and is thus automatically a talking point the moment he's involved in anything - on the project for a while before booting him so they could go back to squabbling over the best non-feminist way to portray Wonder Woman.

Whedon would go on to write The Avengers and make more money than actually exists in the world, while Wonder Woman remains in Development Hell.

My Tumblr. Currently liveblogging Haruhi Suzumiya and revisiting Danganronpa V3.

Joss Whedon making Wonderwoman. Given the themes in the underlying work, he would be perfect.

Sadly, at this point he's not going to go back to it after the way he was kicked off.

Reality is that, which when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away. -Philip K. Dick

It saddens me that women can be presented as an example of a minority.

Laws are made to be broken. You're next, thermodynamics.

As it does me, but in film, as in many cases, they're treated as one.

Reality is that, which when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away. -Philip K. Dick

I think that part of the problem is that Hollywood execs feel that they need to portray women, ethnic minorities, gay people, etc in a certain way to avoid audience backlash. So I think it turns into a situation where they feel that they need a film with a female lead to explicitly about feminism, or a (lesser-seen) film with a gay lead to be about sexual identity and such.

Maybe you could call it "Causesploitation"; I dunno.

Bare that in mind, and recall that Hollywood is basically the McDonald's of mainstream media. Their job is to make as quickly as possible and sell it to as many people as possible, over and over again. This makes it difficult to correctly handle complicated issues, which leads to a bomb, which leads to an aversion towards trying again.

Smaller, more independently-ran films don't have the restrictions that big-budget films do and generally do complicated issues better as a result. However, because their budget is relatively minuscule, they don't need to be a huge hit and won't receive the marketing attention.

And let us pray that come it may (As come it will for a' that)