Nigella damascena: One last chance
Okay fandom. One last chance.
When M. Night cast white protagonists in his adaptation of Avatar: the Last Airbender, a lot of people got angry…
Y’all should read this particular reblog. SO MUCH EXCELLENT COMMENTARY ON BANE.
(via clari-clyde)
3 minute expert: Bane
vid from comicvine.com
Okay fandom. One last chance.
When M. Night cast white protagonists in his adaptation of Avatar: the Last Airbender, a lot of people got angry about that. And when a blonde white girl got cast as Katniss, I got plenty of articles on my dash about how a white Katniss undermines…
I haven’t seen DKR, so I can’t comment on how Bane is portrayed and how that could or could not have been improved by a more accurate depiction of his ethnicity. I think it’s fair to say that given the obvious themes of the film - proletarian/bourgeois, chaos/order, elitism/populism and all the gnarly problems of those dualities taken to their extreme - and the contemporary resonance of those themes, playing up Bane’s identity as a Latino would add extra layers of resonance that might or might not enhance Nolan’s overall point, if he has one. There’s a strong possibility it could be counterproductive.
Bane in the comics was a former prisoner from the fictional Latin American state of Pena Duro. There’s an intense geopolitical element to his quest to control Gotham because of this, and it taps into a rich and frightening vein of cultural paranoia. It’s fun to read the original Bane as some sort of third world avenger, an avatar of the rage and resentment of an economically and politically subjugated Latin America come to seize control of the elite systems of oppression that made him an animal. However, there isn’t much backing for this in the original Knightfall story; Bane has no nationalistic motives and his ethnicity plays a minor role, aside from his luchador-inspired costume and the occasional Spanish phrase thrown into his dialogue. He’s a xeno creature, really: a mysterious, vicious, unstoppable force working toward terrifying goals for unfathomable reasons. He’s the Other come home to roost, a hulking amalgamation of all our xenophobic fears, our primal dread that there are terrible people lurking out there in the world ready to do us harm.It’s also worth noting that none of Bane’s compatriots in Knightfall have any national or ethnic affiliation: they’re basically a cast of circus freaks. A cadaverous white knife thrower, an acrobatic bird handler with a blonde mullet, an honest-to-god neanderthal in combat fatigues; there’s no ethnic element to this cast of goons, just a general fear of the weird and the dispossessed, the things that go bump in the night, the somethings wicked coming this way. There’s no question that Bane is revolutionary chaos made flesh, but when his ethnicity is taken alongside the characteristics of his henchmen, it becomes just another piece of exoticism, ominous and rather racist. Scary ethnics from south of the border and carnival monstrosities out for blood, come to upset the nice clean order of America.
So in summation, I’m not sure that Bane as Latino matters nearly as much as Bane as the Other. The parts of the character that are ethnically identifiable exist for the same reason Trogg (the neanderthal) has fangs: it’s scary and alien. There’s a conversation to be had about how we as a society view the citizens of the “global south,” but I don’t know if it’s the right conversation to have in this film. I’m not even sure that portraying a vicious, violent revolutionary bent on destruction as strongly Latino is a net positive in today’s climate. It could very well backfire, enhancing all the wrong fears at precisely the wrong time.
Awesome commentary is awesome.
From what I’m hearing about the film, Nolan didn’t give a shit about the class conflict and it’s better from the POV of the film that Bane was pasty and British.
Whatevs. Imma go read me some Secret Six. Bane was awesome in that series.
Okay fandom. One last chance.
When M. Night cast white protagonists in his adaptation of Avatar: the Last Airbender, a lot of people got angry about that. And when a blonde white girl got cast as Katniss, I got plenty of articles on my dash about how a white Katniss undermines the central theme of oppression in The Hunger Games. I’ve seen at least one or two posts talking about the fact that GRRM Martin laces his depictions of POCs with all sorts of unfortunate implications and how all-white depictions of medieval Europe are actually historically inaccurate. So how have I had to actively seek out anyone willing to talk about the fact that Christopher Nolan cast a pasty British guy as a Latino character? How is practically NO ONE talking about this?
I mean, plenty of “fans” got their undies in a twist when a movie featuring a magical hammer, an eight-legged horse and a bridge made of rainbows cast a black man as a god. And you can find plenty of dumbasses writing detailed comments about how a black kid couldn’t possibly be bitten by a radioactive spider and become a superhero. So why not get mad about this, about changing something that is so central to the character?
I’ve been posting and ranting about this for a while and I haven’t even gotten any hatemail! WHY IS NO ONE TALKING ABOUT THIS?
So this is the last time I’m ever going to complain about it. Ever. The Dark Knight Rises comes out tomorrow. The critics will love it and it’ll make a shit ton of money and it will be the defining hero movie of our generation, blah, blah, blah. Tom Hardy will be fantastic in the role. Whatever.
Here’s a repost of a response I gave to the only other person on Tumblr who wondered why Nolan couldn’t be bothered to audition actual Latino men for the role of Bane. Just one last gasp of caring about this. And then I give up.
Christopher Nolan films have a very uniform look and feel to them.
- They’re dark and intense studies of some intellectual theme. He’s labelled the themes of his Batman trilogy as Fear (Batman Begins), Chaos (The Dark Knight) and Pain (The Dark Knight Rises).
- His films deal with obsession and the effects it has on the psyche: Leonard finding his wife’s killer (Memento), Dormer catching a girl’s killer (Insomnia), Batman’s crusade for justice (Batman Begins), Borden and Angier’s rivalry (The Prestige), the Joker’s obsession with chaos and irredeemable humanity (The Dark Knight), and Cobb’s guilt over his wife’s suicide (Inception).
- A dead woman, most often a wife figure, is often the catalyst for events in his films: Leonard’s dead wife (Memento), Borden’s accidental killing of Angier’s wife and Borden’s wife’s suicide (The Prestige), Rachel Dawes, the object of Bruce’s affections and 10-second-fiancee of Harvey (The Dark Knight), and Cobb’s wife’s suicide and his subconscious’s rendering of her (Inception).
- His protagonists are all well-dressed white men. I don’t think it’s even something he thinks about, they all start in his head that way. Most of the supporting cast tends to be white, with the occasional distinguished actor of color like Ken Watanabe or Morgan Freeman showing up every now and then.
- He also tends to reuse actors he likes: Ken Watanabe and Cillian Murphy appeared in both Batman Begins and Inception, Christian Bale and Michael Caine have both done the entire The Dark Knight Trilogy and appeared inThe Prestige. Tom Hardy, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, and Marion Cotillard all appeared in Inception right before Nolan started official pre-production onThe Dark Knight Rises.
- He has a history of whitewashing in the Batverse: to create the gasp-inducing moment where Henri Ducard is revealed to be the real Ra’s Al Ghul in Begins, Nolan cast a white actor as a character that has traditionally been portrayed as Arabic.
So my guess: It didn’t even occur to Nolan that Bane’s ethnicity as Latino would matter to anyone. He just wanted to cast Tom Hardy. And this really rubs me the wrong way because a lot of times whitewashing occurs because of studio mandate, for example, Lionsgate sent out ‘white only’ casting calls for the role of Katniss Everdeen, whose race was never made entirely clear but was implied to be non-white (she was described as olive-skinned in the books). But after the millions Nolan made with the first two Dark Knight films and the sheer critical acclaim they’ve gotten, I think Warner Brothers likely trusts Nolan enough to let him do his own thing. And I guess he just didn’t feel like auditioning a bunch of Latino actors for the role.
Furthermore, Nolan just seems to not care much for the comics at all. He’s taken his cues from a limited pool of material, a narrow characterization of Batman and when he needs characters to fulfill a plot role, he tends to just make up his own. Rather than bring the awesomeness that is Renee Montoya to the screen, he just filled in the blank with Ana Ramirez; rather than choose a love interest from Bruce Wayne’s rather interesting roster, Nolan created Rachel Dawes as the blandest female in fiction; and instead of giving us Dick Grayson, Nolan trusted his initial knee-jerk reaction to the character, somewhat denigrated in the mainstream as Batman’s useless goofy teen sidekick, and instead gave us John Blake.
At least, I’m told this is the void John Blake will fill. I just call him not!Dick Grayson and I’ve actually been strenuously avoiding this film because of Nolan’s kill-woman-to-advance-plot and whitewash-Bane-cause-why-not tendencies. I’ll see it when it comes out on DVD.
In the mean time, here’s some Latino actors who I think would have done a great job in the role (and no, I’m not saying Tom Hardy won’t be absolutely amazing, I just have a hard time believing there is absolutely no Latino actor out there who couldn’t have done just as well/better):
Danny Trejo
Javier Bardem
[HUGE EDIT: I’ve been informed that Javier Bardem is in fact Spanish and would constitute whitewashing. I failed to do the research and I’m a dumbass for it. Here’s someone’s reblog who did a fabulous job of finding Bane alternatives.]
Edgar Ramirez (I’ve seen several Secret Six fan casts featuring this guy)
EDIT: Something else: Nolan’s Batfilms usually feature some oddly specific tropes.
- Bruce will beat up a cadre of Asian men - Bhutanese prisoners in Begins and Li’s security detail in Dark Knight.
- A small blonde child will have SO MUCH FAITH IN BATMAN and get saved by him - Narrows child and future tyrant Joffrey in Begins and James Gordon Jr. in Knight (because, y’know, it’s not like Gordon has any well known children).
- Not a recurring thing, but he managed to pull the Dead Bro Walking trope twice in Dark Knight: the first criminal to die is black criminal Gambol and the first legal official to die is black Commissioner Loeb.
Got linked to this video by MovieBytes that briefly addresses whitewashing in Hollywood. It provides a pretty good overview of a number of films that have had whitewashing in them recently including Argo, Extraordinary Measures, Batman, 21, and Prince of Persia.
There are some parts of the video that were kind of nail biting, like referring to race as a “touchy” issue (uh huh) and arguing that “black men have surpassed white women in representation in films” (ehhh that’s intersectionality and male privilege coming into play.) Also,
both examples of Hispanic actors, Benecio DelToroand Javier Bardem, are from Spain. (Sadly, the most popular Hispanic actors in US are often not Latin@s from the United States; I would argue that Europeans from Spain have very different experiences from say, Chicanos in California.)But I do think the narrator does a good job calling out one very common derailing tactic:
The derailment tactic that often comes into play is that certain ethnicities are basically “Caucasian” or “white” (particularly Indo-European, Middle Eastern, and Latino cultures) so it doesn’t matter if a white actor is cast to play the role of the Prince of Persia or Bane, etc. Hence all of the “but Bane found out when he was 30 that his dad may or may not have been Thomas Wayne and then later found out that his dad was actually British so why are you offended by this non-whitewashing!1!111!” without taking into account that plenty of people of color around the world (due to a number of factors, including Imperialism and colonialism, historically) are part white but still people of color. And MovieBytes points out, that if these ethnicities are basically “white and “if it doesn’t matter, why not cast Latino and Persian actors?”
The other half of the equation, of course, is that if these ethnicities are really and truly racialized as white, then why aren’t PoC Latino and Persian actors regularly depicting white characters in movies? Playing leading roles on the same level as Tom Hardy, Ben Affleck, and Jake Gyllenhaal? Because the differential racialization used by Hollywood and mainstream society is different from any textbook definition based off of the Caucasus mountains.
And telling someone disappointed about not being represented that Bane’s dad was British doesn’t make the fact that there are barely any PoC in the Nolan Batverse—when there could have been some—any less marginalizing or okay.
EDIT: Benecio Del Toro is from Puerto Rico, not Spain.
(via stopwhitewashing)
Until I find my purpose as a tumblr participant, all I'm going to say is this: when I was little, I wanted to grow up to be Batgirl.
Isabela liked the aftermath most of all. She liked the way Fenris got sleepy and mumbly,...
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