Mary Robinette Kowal - Middle Earth's Civil Rights Movement
One of the draws to fantasy for me has always been the rich worlds and strange cultures inherent in the genre. Give me the wide world of Middle Earth and I'm a happy girl: Elves and hobbits and humans, oh my. And I was happy in that fantasy world, until a friend of mine asked, "Where are the brown elves?" It's funny how just one question will make you see things through a different lens: Can it be that the only characters in The Lord of the Rings who are black are the orcs? Sadly, yes.
Quick, without hitting Google, name as many American fantasy movies with a non-Caucasian lead as you can. Go ahead, use the broad definition of fantasy that counts any film that breaks the laws of the natural world.
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, right? Except that doesn't count since the movie comes from China. Come on, we're talking about Hollywood, the movie capital of the world! I have to admit, aside from Jackie Chan movies and 2002's The Scorpion King, I'm hard-pressed to name a single American fantasy movie with a lead of color. You've got to wonder, when Will Smith has proven that science fiction can be a blockbuster with a black star, why can't fantasy follow suit?
I recognize there are a few excuses: With The Lord of the Rings, for example, people will point out that it's based on European mythology, which is naturally going to lead to European casting. And anyway, they'll say, Tolkien specified that orcs were black in the book. There's a problem with this, from my point of view: Tolkien created more than one race of orcs. One race he describes as "sallow-skinned" and unable to tolerate daylight. The black orcs, or Uruk-hai, were specially bred to do just that, and so their skin tone makes a certain kind of evolutionary sense. I didn't see that distinction in the movie -- it just looked like good guys are white; bad guys are black.
You see this pattern in fantasy again and again. Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford), for example, faces endless streams of "natives" whose skin tone makes them easy to distinguish from the European good guys. Sure there are exceptions. Sallah, for instance, is Indy's faithful native sidekick... of course I should mention that he's played by the white actor John Rhys-Davies (who, as long as we're counting, plays Gimli in The Lord of the Rings).
There's a term for such sidekicks: "Noble savage" or "magic negro." These are the non-European characters who appear, seemingly from nowhere, to dispense advice to the hero of the story in order to help him or her on the quest. An example of this is would be The Legend of Bagger Vance. The golf pro, Rannulph Junuh (Matt Damon), is stuck in his game until legendary caddy Bagger Vance (Will Smith) appears out of the mists of time to teach Rannulph how to play. His job done, he disappears again. Morgan Freeman, as God in Bruce Almighty, doles out advice to Jim Carrey in much the same way. And John Coffey (Michael Clarke Duncan) in The Green Mile exists more as a plot device than a character. The thing that these men have in common is that none of them are actually allowed to do the quest on their own.
Of course there are also the fantasy flicks where the main character's skin tone is the source of a joke: Take a look at Black Knight starring Martin Lawrence, in which a black man working in an amusement park goes back in time to 1328. Sure, it might be a modern take on A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, but it's a little questionable in terms of appropriateness. Or how about Down to Earth (2001), which remakes Heaven Can Wait (1978) but derives its humor from seeing a rich white man acting black. Really?
And... that's it. Those are the ones I could find. It's not like the situation is improving, either. M. Night Shymalan recently announced casting for his live-action version of Avatar: The Last Airbender. Guess what happened to the story's ethnically diverse crop of characters? All white. You know, my friend asked where the brown elves were, but what I want to know is: Where are the brown heroes? I want to see them. I love fantasy because of the magic and wonder, but also because it reflects the human condition. The real world is diverse and wonderful. The world of fantasy should be even more so.
Mary Robinette Kowal is the winner of the 2008 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. She is also the art director at Shimmer Magazine and a professional puppeteer. Her column appears every Friday.
Hi Mary,
That is a strange contrast, that while SF has many non-Caucasian leads, fantasy does not. Even the lead in "The Nightmare Before Christmas" is white. If we go to the animal kingdom, then King Kong is black-furred and black-skinned. Does the black-furred Mickey Mouse in the most popular segment of Fantasia count? But I had to go to the animal kingdom for these two. Here's the top 50 highest rated fantasy movies on imdb.com - near as I can tell, none of the American ones have non-Caucasian human leads.
http://www.imdb.com/chart/fantasy
-Larry Hodges
This reminds me of that scene in Chasing Amy when the black character is trying to explain how sf-fantasy didn't have any strong black leads. When Jason Lee tries to invoke Lando Calrissean in Star Wars, he retorts that Star Wars is really a metaphor for gentrification, with Luke Skywalker and his friends going to bust of Darth Vader's ("Nubian God") hood, the Death Star. Hilarious!
Well...there's Wesley Snipes being awesome as Blade...I suppose it would be a stretch to count Disney movies like Aladdin or Mulan (lawd knows I had enough issues with Hercules).
Good question, Mary. Very thought-provoking.
I was going to suggest Bulletproof Monk, but of course the Monk *was* the Noble "Savage". At least the bad guys were overtly white.
The first thing that came to mind was the 'Cinderella' remake, starring Brandy, Whitney Houston, Whoopi Goldberg, and Paolo Montalban. I love this version of the movie. The diverse cast works well.
I was going to say, "A big-budget Hollywood fantasy with a black hero will happen when Will Smith decides to do one," and then I realized that he already did: Hancock. Sure, it's modern, super-hero fantasy, but it is fantasy.
I remembered that Disney will be releasing "The Princess and the Frog". That is a major fantasy movie being released with a black heroine.
You ask good questions... I can't think of any big-screen fantasy movies that fit the bill of having a non-white lead.
Penny brings up the Rogers and Hammerstein made-for-TV musical Cinderella: great example! That had quite the multicolored cast, and Brandy as the lead.
There's also the Wizard of Earthsea TV movie, which cast caucasians for roles that were non-caucasian in the book, much to the dismay of author Le Guin
The orcs in LOTR were just as fair skinned as the hobbits, elves, etc. After all, the orcs were the fictional representatives of German and Russian totalitarianism the Tolkien saw rising in the east. The only clearly dark skinned characters were the muslim inspired elephant riding guys. Fascism, Communism, Islamic fundamentalism; seems like we should be amazed at Tolkien's prescience rather than congratulation ourselves on our superior sensitivities. But I don't recall much interest in diversity in "Gilgamesh" or "Ramayana" or "The Tale of Genji". Perhaps this scolding of Tolkien reflects our prejudices as much has his.
I was gonna say Pan's Labyrinth but I guess that wouldn't qualify as a Hollywood movie, either. It really is pretty mindblowing when you say it put it that way.
I wonder if we'll ever get an Anansi Boys adaptation? But I feel like even Neil Gaiman said "Hollywood" felt averse to the idea of a multi-cultural cast headlining a fantasy comedy. Really kind of unbelievable...
I'm somewhat reluctant to say that fantasy creatures and "monstrous races" = racism. But to complicate matters, Tolkien explictly wrote in LOTR books about dark-skinned humans from "the East" riding oliphants and siding with Sauron (or at least seduced by evil).
Maybe this vindicates the movie-makers a little, because they show pale men riding and marching alongside the oliphants, as if to ignore the straightforward racism in the books.
For all it's worth, Hobbits in the book and film seem to be a minority race experiencing some discrimination as they pass through human settlements in still-segregated Middle Earth. It's a story about people overcoming their fear and hostility towards other "races" and work together to confront evil. It's just that these races are distinguished by height and age and pointy-ness of ears instead of skin color.
Re: Hollywood fantasies needing more leads of color, agreed.