(Right before I joined this group, I wrote this essay one Saturday morning and put it on my own Timeline. I figured its the sort of thing people here ought to see. I hope people appreciate it and get what Im trying to say with it. It is rather long, so I hope you can bear with it.) FANTASTIC FOUR: INTEGRITY TAKES A CLOBBERING Yesterday I came a cross an article by a writer named Noah Berlatsky on the Website of The Atlantic Magazine (theatlantic). It’s called--get this, now--”The Incoherent Backlashes to Black Actors Playing ‘White’ Superheroes.” I should thank Noah at least for writing the article, if not for the content of it, for it has made my personal reactions to the casting of young Mr. Michael B. Jordan (whom I used to enjoy in the role of Erica’s stepson Reggie on the original All My Children) as Johnny Storm, the Human Torch of The Fantastic Four, decidedly coherent. Noah is one of the people who have been annoying me online this week, who think it’s okay and even praiseworthy, for the purposes of a Hollywood feature film, to change the race and with it the very identity of one of the foundation characters of Marvel Comics, who has been a multigenerational pop-culture icon in the form in which he was created. Noah, in fact, actually calls it “a minor alteration” as if to dismiss the whole thing as a trifle. I haven’t addressed people on Facebook who have touted and praised this foolishness because if I did, all I’d do online is fight with them and I don’t need the aggravation. But Noah cites the words of a Georgia Tech doctoral student who contends, “[Marvel] Superhero comics were developed in the cultural context of 60s America, where it was just normal for all the characters to be white,” and adds that “[t]his default assumption of whiteness is no longer acceptable.” This goes towards the central argument of the article--and of a lot of people you meet online--that the accurate casting of characters who were created white and have become multigenerational icons the way they were created is racist, and that the integrity of those creations is of no consequence compared to the need for “inclusion” and “diversity”. We’re hearing a lot of this now, and in response I am going to raise my voice and be less than civilized for the one and only time during what I’m sure will be a lengthy debate. Are you ready? Brace yourselves, here it comes. IT IS NOT RACISM, GODDAMNIT! IT IS PURITY OF CONCEPT! THEY ARE NOT THE SAME FRICKIN’ THING! GET A FRICKIN’ CLUE; LEARN THE GODDAMN DIFFERENCE BETWEEN RACISM AND CONCEPTUAL PURITY! There, I shouted it and I’m not taking it back. Not only am I not repudiating it, I’m backing it up. Noah points out with great aplomb that classic super-heroes who were created white have at various times been made black in the comic books, but his argument is so blatantly, egregiously flawed that if it weren’t so stupid it would be laughable. He says that at one time Iron Man, Spider-Man, and Green Lantern were all black. Excuse me, Noah, but please re-read your comic books and re-check your facts. Tony Stark was never recreated as a black man; they took his black friend, Jim Rhodes--a separate character--and put him in the Iron Man armor. (In fact, longtime readers will remember that there was even a black Iron Man before Rhodey; a boxer named Eddie March once donned the armor as well.) Peter Parker was never recreated as a black character either. They took a completely new character who was African-American and Latino, IN A COMPLETELY SEPARATE UNIVERSE FROM REGULAR MARVEL COMICS, and had that character take on the role of Spider-Man. As for Green Lantern, sorry, Hal Jordan of DC Comics was never rendered African-American either; the character to whom Noah is referring is another guy, John Stewart. Jordan, the character who to generations of people is and will always be “the” Green Lantern, is a white guy. Caucasian, Canadian Ryan Reynolds played him perfectly--and with perfect fidelity--in the movie. You don’t get to rationalize away the violation of a classic character by holding up the substitution of people of color for the icons who originated other classic characters. Noah also brings up that “it’s not like there’s been one, true, unwavering Fantastic Four over the decades”; that the Thing’s appearance and the Invisible Girl/Woman’s powers have evolved over time; and that there was a lengthy period when they swapped out the Thing for She-Hulk. Okay, I’ll play this game and go him even better. Not only did they swap out the Thing for She-Hulk, but when Sue was on maternity leave having Franklin they brought in the Torch’s girlfriend Crystal; and when Reed and Sue separated and nearly divorced they brought in Medusa from the Inhumans. And that’s not nearly all the substitutions that have been made with the team. Heck, if Noah wants to talk about black characters in the FF, there was a short time when Reed and Sue went on sabbatical and no less than the Black Panther himself and Storm replaced them! But you see, these were all understood to be substitutions. Yes, there is “one true, unwavering Fantastic Four”; it’s the one they’ve kept restoring because any other combination of characters does not have the same bond as the original. The Fantastic Four is four specific people--an engaged couple, his best friend, and her younger brother--who took a ride in a spaceship and were shot up and rendered superhuman by cosmic rays. The Fantastic Four is Dr. Reed Richards, Mr. Fantastic; Susan Storm Richards, the Invisible Girl/Woman; Johnny Storm, the Human Torch; and Ben Grimm, the Thing. In the eyes of the world, that’s who the Fantastic Four are, substitutions notwithstanding, and Marvel Comics knows that. Noah Berlatsky, who seems to have some kind of background reading Marvel Comics, should know that. Holding up substitutions in the team’s lineup as an excuse for swapping out one character’s identity for something that we know he’s not, is the flimsiest of arguments. If people are going to make a movie of The Fantastic Four, it seems to me that they should want to use the most universally recognized and embraced version of the creation. A Fantastic Four with a cast of characters of different races, or one with original members swapped for different ones, could be argued to be “a” Fantastic Four. And that’s okay; there have been times in the comic books when they’ve done great stories about “a” Fantastic Four. But if you’re talking about making a movie of it, you should want to do THE Fantastic Four. Those four specific people, including a young blond, blue-eyed white boy, who got the cosmic rays on the space flight--that’s THE Fantastic Four. And if people want to get me out of the house and paying money to see a feature film version of this creation, they had bloody well better give me THE Fantastic Four. The real deal, the genuine article, the thing that Stan Lee and Jack Kirby created in 1961. Because I’m here to tell you I’m not going to accept one iota less. Crying racism doesn’t work. Don’t even bother bringing that to me; you and your argument will wind up on the doorstep rubbing your behind where I dumped you. The first time there EVER WAS a black super-hero in a comic book it was the intro story for the Black Panther in Fantastic Four #52; look it up. (Private Gabriel Jones in Sgt. Fury predates the Panther, but Gabe wasn’t “super”.) And don’t whine to me about “inclusion” and “diversity” either. Every time I see my family I see “inclusion” and “diversity” in action. I’m black myself. And my family and our friends are a beautiful melting pot of blacks, Italians, Jews, Canadians, recently Asians, and (on the west coast) Hispanics. I live “diversity and inclusion”. I’m proud of that. Shout “racism, inclusion, and diversity” at me and I’ll shout back just as loud, “Integrity! Authenticity! Purity of concept!” What drew me to The Fantastic Four in the first place was obviously not what race or color the characters were. I couldn’t have cared less about that. If they’d been created black, I wouldn’t have cared. What attracted me to this most conceptually perfect of all comic books was--believe it or not--what the stories were about. That’s it, that’s all. Folks, The Fantastic Four is about science. People always go on saying it’s about a super-powered family (like The Incredibles, which deals with HALF of what The FF is about), and yes, it is. But it’s about science. Not the science they teach you in school, but what science means; the hopes and ideals and aspirations and dreams, and the fears and anxieties and nightmares, of science. Space flight, cosmic rays, genetic mutation, extraterrestrial life, computers and robots and artificial intelligence, the mysteries of the universe, the mysteries of the ocean and the subatomic level of reality, the theories of time travel and other dimensions, all of these and so much more, and all the wonderful and terrible things that might come of them--every time I read a truly great Fantastic Four story I go to a place where people have played with these ideas. It’s pulp science fiction in super-hero drag. And I’m here to tell you that in five decades of reading Fantastic Four adventures, never once--not at any time--did it matter to me that I, a black reader, was reading about three Caucasians and a Jew. It never happened and it never mattered. But you see, there are people, including obviously some in Hollywood, who have the utterly wrongheaded idea that it does. And I feel like shaking them and slapping them and demanding, “Why the hell don’t you get it?” I honestly believe that there are people at 20th Century Fox who don’t want to make a Fantastic Four movie that is accurate to, and preserves the integrity of, the original creation because they are afraid that in our politically correct, up-with-multiculturalism world, some people will not want to see it because they will feel excluded. “If we make them three Caucasians and a Jew the way they were created, the African-American audience will stay home! We’ll lose their business!” You see what the thinking is here. Movie studios are not run by creative people; they are run by business people who are not capable of creative thought. These things are nothing to them but “product,” and to sell their product all they understand is things like demographics and market analyses and focus groups and fitting things into market niches. They are terrified of perhaps not appealing to the widest demographic, and for that they feel as though they must “invite everyone to the party,” which feeds into the mentality of “inclusion and diversity,” which is every bit to be praised and defended under most circumstances but becomes pernicious now. They want to “sell to everybody,” and what they’re trying to sell is not characters, ideas, or stories. They only understand selling “product”. The implicit message that they’re sending me--and every other person of color in the movie-going world--is that they don’t think we will go out for a movie if no one in it is black. We’ll only pony up to the box office to see people who look like us. And it is one of the most pandering, patronizing, condescending ideas that I have ever encountered. It tells me that I must live in my life in a box in which I have nothing to do with anyone who doesn’t have brown skin, that I should care only about those things that concern or pertain to brown-skinned people. It tells me that that is my whole life. Well, as someone who is not just African-American but also gay, I find boxes no more fit to live in than closets. I don’t need the Fantastic Four to look like me. I have never once felt excluded, marginalized, or diminished by the fact that they do not. I keep their statues on my mantle. I need them to be the characters who for most of my life I have loved visiting and spending time with. I need them to be the characters that I followed to the Moon and to space, and to the bottom of the sea and the Microverse and Latveria and Attilan and Wakanda and the Negative Zone and the Beehive. I need them to be the characters who came off of Jack Kirby’s drawing board. And I’m sorry, Michael B. Jordan may be a brilliant young actor, but he is not ac acceptable casting of Johnny Storm and I will not have him packaged and mass-marketed to me as if he were. People who love The Fantastic Four want to see the characters they love on screen, not a lot of false ringers created out of some perceived, shallow, obligatory need for “inclusion.” I want THE Fantastic Four. I want MY Fantastic Four. In the movies, on TV, in comics, in every medium of entertainment. This brilliant creation deserves nothing less than to be what it was created to be, in story, in characters, in who the characters are. Anything less is a disservice and will not be getting my business. In trying to patronize, condescend, and pander to me for a crass, low, shallow, cynical, obligatory bid for “inclusiveness” and “diversity,” Fox has cheated itself of my business, and I strongly suspect the business of a lot of other people like me. (I know my brother isn’t buying it either.) When you swap commercial cynicism for the integrity of a great creation, that, as the Thing might put it, is the “clobberin’ “ you get.
Posted on: Tue, 11 Mar 2014 18:44:52 +0000
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