CGI and Race

Once you understand the system out here, what's amazes you is not that so many bad movies get made. It's that any good movies get made at all.
– Cory Watson

Two days ago I was making the 6,200 mile journey from London to Los Angeles via Dreamliner. The actual distance between the two cities is 5,437 miles, but for reasons unknown to me the chosen fight path, over Canada, Greenland and Iceland, adds a solid 800 miles to the trip. The result is a dull ten to twelve hours in an airplane seat, wedged between two Cockneys (on my right) and a gaggle of Germans whose rapid-fire banter told me I ought to have paid more attention when I was studying their language in high school. To pass the seemingly interminable journey, I read, played video games on my laptop, and watched no less than four movies, including Roland Emmerich's Independence Day: Resurgence, the original Matrix, and James Cameron's Aliens. It is the first film, a recent sequel to the 1997 Roland Emmerich blockbuster, which got me thinking about two seemingly unconnected topics: computer generated imagery, and the issue of race, sex and ethnicity in Hollywood.

Hollywood, where I have lived and worked for ten years, is no stranger to controversies regarding ethnicity and skin color, going all the way back to Birth of a Nation, which made its debut in theaters 102 years ago. And indeed, in the last few decades there has been a concerted effort to prise open the lock which the white Caucasian has traditionally maintained on the film industry, particularly in terms of casting, but also in terms of production, direction, screenwriting, and so forth. The rise of such non-white stars as Will Smith, Dwayne Johnson, and Viola Davis, and of directors such as Ang Lee, M. Night Shamalayn, Jordan Peele and Kathryn Bigelow, are all indicative of a tectonic shift in the external appearance of American film and the industry which drives it. The very existence of a black film mogul like Tyler Perry would have, just a few short years ago, been almost unthinkable outside of, well, a Hollywood movie, and by Hollywood standards, the 2017 Oscars were a veritable orgy of diversity in regards to both nominations and wins. At the same time, no one would argue with a straight face that Hollywood has changed internally in regards to how it views the role of so-called “minorities” or people of color in film. According to a piece in the Los Angeles Times, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the people who hand out Oscar nominations and decide who goes home with the gold statue, is 94% white and 77% male. Non-white and female directors remain pathetically infrequent in terms of overall numbers. And in a recent article by Vulture, “people of color directed less than ten percent of the last decade's top-grossing films,” while the Hollywood Reporter discovered that women directed only seven percent of the top 250 movies of 2016, a decline of two percent from 2015. This year there has been fresh controversy about the process of “whitewashing,” or casting white people in roles which were originally intended for non-whites. The casting choices for films like Ghost in the Shell, The Great Wall, and Doctor Strange, just to name a few, is at least evidence for argument that many of Hollywood's recent changes toward diversity are, if you will pardon the pun, no more than skin deep.

When I watched Independence Day: Resurgence, my initial reaction, aside from a feeling that the movie itself was a real piece of crap, was that the writers (or possibly the casting director) had bent over backwards to make the film a “full spectrum” project. In what can only be described as a huge cast are four women cast in “strong” roles – the President of the United States, a heroic doctor, and two fighter pilots – three Asians (a general and fighter pilot among them), and three blacks, including a squadron commander and a doctor. And among the white folks, no less than three are Jewish. On the surface (I use the word specifically), it would seem that this movie, abysmal as it was, is proof positive that the times, they are a changin'; that honest efforts are being made to reflect the fact that America, like the world itself, is not composed entirely of people of European ancestry. So the question has to be asked: why didn't it work? Why does the diversity of casting in Independence Day feel as inauthentic as a wooden nickel or a three dollar bill? Why do the people of color feel like tokens put in place to satisfy a racial quota, and the strong female characters like, well, “strong female characters” rather than genuine human beings?

At the risk of making a clumsy segue, let me take a moment to talk about one of the reasons why Independence Day: Resurgence fails as a film. There are a number of severe problems with it, including the basic story, the script, the lead character (Liam Helmsworth doing his best to imitate both Chris Pratt and Chris Pine and failing at both), the overly fractured narrative, etc. and so on; but what turned me off as much as anything else was the excessive use of computer generated imagery, or CGI. Obviously, a story about an alien ship the size of North America on a mission to destroy Earth was going to rely very heavily on digitally-generated visual effects, but it was obvious to me as I watched that Hollywood has yet to find a way to integrate even the most advanced CGI into a frame crowded with flesh-and-blood human beings. The human eye remains far too sophisticated a piece of biomechanical equipment to be deceived into believing that all those pixelated tidal waves, nuclear explosions, toppling buildings, zooming spaceships and so forth are actually real. As a result, all the mayhem I was witnessing – cities being annihilated, dogfights wheeling over the sky, a huge monster battling U.S. Air Force fighters in the Nevada desert – left me as bored as if I were watching someone else play a particularly noisy and mindless video game. Despite a huge budget of $150 million, the movie felt, if you will forgive the vulgarism, fake as fuck.

On the other hand, Aliens, a much older (1986) film using far more primitive special effects, including scale models and rear-projection, struck me over and over again not only with its excellence in acting, production design, screenwriting, etc. but with its sense of absolute authenticity. It shares this quality with its predecessor, Ridley Scott's 1979 masterpiece Alien, in that every frame of the film strikes the viewer as not only something that could be, but something which actually is. The sets, props, costumes, weapons, and even the aliens themselves all look absolutely real, in no small part because they were. And this despite the fact that the budgets for these two films combined add up to $29.5 million, which, even with inflation factored in, make them each about 1/10 as expensive as the forgettable Resurgence. But the differences are not merely that Scott and Cameron utilized practical effects rather than CGI which didn't then exist; they lie within the fact that the characters in both movies strike the viewer, then as now, as real people. The black engineer in Alien, Parker, does not feel like a token black dude; he feels like an engineer who happens to be black, just as the two female characters, Ripley and Lambert, feel not like archetypes but rather real women of widely differing temperament. And the characters of color in Aliens – Apone, Frost and Vasquez – likewise do not strike us as Cameron's attempt to add some token color to a white cast, but as organic outgrowths of a good script. That is to say, the characters do not feel like characters at all, but like people. Their sex, color and ethnicity do not feel contrived but organic and necessary, which is precisely the opposite achieved by the characters in Resurgence, who strike me as the result of a Hollywood executive ticking sex, race and ethnicity off a checklist. And just as my two physical eyes cannot be fooled by computer generated charlatanism, my mystical third eye is not fooled Hollywood's clumsy attempts to force racial and sexual diversity into a story in an inauthentic manner. I did not believe Sela Ward as the president in Resurgence, any more than I believed the two extremely pretty and extremely young women (one Asian, one white) as fighter pilots, or, for that matter, the extremely young black guy as a fighter squadron leader. Nor did I buy the Jewish nerd suddenly finding his inner warrior when he hefts an alien machine gun. Like a bad placebo, it goes down bitter, and the mind, obeying an age-old impulse that saved many a caveman from slow death, orders the mouth to spit it out.

As a writer, albeit one who happens to be of pure North European descent who possesses all the tanning ability of your average vampire, I pride myself the strength of my character generation. On the fact my characters feel real. It goes without saying that to reach a point where I feel that I can make this claim, I suffered through many failed experiments, but I believe that establishing the reality of characters and characterization are the most crucial elements in storytelling, more important even than plot. And the most crucial aspect of that crucial element – the holy of holies, so to speak – is never forcing a character into existence. Strictly speaking, this is achieved by an inversion of logic: in the strictest sense, you do not create a character, you stand aside and let the character create themselves. The act of creation and the act of stepping aside are, as it were, one and the same. This Zen-like process requires understanding what both the character and the story demand. It also involves a principle laid down by Bruce Lee, who once wrote that “The consciousness of self is the greatest hindrance to the proper execution of all physical action.” This principle, that thinking gets in the way of execution, applies no less to creativity, where the consciousness of the desire to create “a character” is often the greatest obstacle to the creation of one.

As a novelist and short-story writer, I am well aware when I have succeeded in creating, or more strictly speaking, allowed to be created, a “good” character, i.e. one who feels like a real person, at least to me. Such an awareness is triggered by two specific things. One is a strong physical sense of what the person looks like, and the other in an equally strong sense of the way they behave – the way they dress, act, speak, etc. When I came up with the character of Megan Mullaney in my as-yet-unreleased novel The Hardest Part of January, not only was I struck by how clearly I envisioned her physically, but by my instant, instinctive understanding of what she should do in any situation. I knew that Megan dressed neatly and well, rarely swore, that she spoke without pretense, yet using very precise and well-educated diction, and that her sense of humor was always conveyed in a serious manner. And indeed, in every scene in which she appeared, I was limited in my freedom of action by this understanding. In a very real sense, the character had a will of her own, and when it occasionally conflicted with mine, Megan was invariably the winner. There could be no other outcome without commission of that most egregious of writing sins, “characterization rape.” This somewhat unfortunate term applies to writers who force their characters to behave in a way which is untrue to the character as we understand them; it is most common in series television, where different writers handle the same characters over long periods of time and may have differing opinions as to their essential natures. Indeed, there was a rumor going around this town a few years ago that George Eads left CSI in exasperation over this very issue. But characterization rape is also common among authors who, for whatever reason, try to bend a character's behavior in a direction convenient to the story, rather than the story in the direction of the character's natural actions. And in another form it occurs when producers decide to change the race, ethnicity of sexual orientation of a character for what are presumably commercial reasons – for example, casting the extremely Nordic-appearing Scarlet Johansson in Ghost in the Shell instead of the Asian woman the character was originally intended to be, or when Ridley Scott, who exactly zero people have ever accused of any type of racism, made all the principal Egyptian characters in Exodus: Gods and Kings white Caucasians when DNA has shown us that they were almost certainly racial “hybrids” created by constant interbreeding of numerous races and ethnicities from the region around Egypt. Referring to Ghost, L.A. Times film reporter Jen Yamato wrote scathingly that Johansson's casting was nothing less than “the cultural erasure of of nonwhite identity.” Yet this sort of thing can work in reverse as well. In an attempt to – for lack of a better word – “colorize” films which would be otherwise exclusively white in racial makeup, producers have taken to using actors of color for roles which were originally intended to be white. Thus we have Samuel L. Jackson playing Nick Fury in the Marvel films, Michael Clarke Duncan as The Kingpin in Daredevil, Ken Lueng as Lloyd Bowman in Red Dragon, et cetera and so on. In some instances this is harmless and in others beneficial, but only when the character itself is not altered out of recognition by the change. While casting Michael B. Jordan as Johnny Storm in Fantastic Four was merely pointless, hiring Idris Elba to portray Heimdall in Thor was an utter absurdity, a case of “cultural erasure” which is not less egregious because it was committed against the dominant (i.e. white) culture. These were cases where the act was not so much wrong as the feeling of artifice, of contrivance, they produced. And it is a variation of this sin which plagues Resurgence. Either the writer, the casting directors, the producers, the studio suits – someone, or group of someones, did not allow the characters of this film to grow organically, but instead mandated two of the most fundamental aspects of modern identity – sex and race – to conform with some pre-existing agenda. One can almost hear the studio suit saying around his cigar: “We need X number of Asians and X number of blacks and X number of women....”

Good casting, in my mind, is bound up with two factors, and the first of these, obviously, is how the actor fits into the role. The second, less understood, is the how the role fits the actor – what level of integrity the role itself inherently possesses, and how its shape in turn shapes the actor who portrays it. Bad casting can ruin a film, but bad character generation can ruin it just as swiftly. On the opposing hand, good writing makes the jobs of both casting director and actor much easier. In The Matrix series, there are many important characters of color, and the starring role of Neo, which ultimately went to Keanu Reeves (himself of one quarter nonwhite descent), was in fact originally offered to the afformentioned Will Smith. The Wiechowski brothers clearly had an agenda to racially diversify the universe they were creating, and acted on that agenda. But none of the nonwhite characters – not Morpheus, not the Oracle, not Tank, Dozer, Mifune, Naobi, Link, Seraph, etc. – feel as if they were written simply to fill a racial-ethnic quota. Rather, the world of The Matrix simply reflects that in a war to the death between machines and humanity, the differences in physical appearance between humans are no longer relevant, and never should have been in the first place.

When I write characters, I am often astonished by the degree to which they create themselves in such minute detail, down to the way they play cards, chew food or brood about past wrongs. Often it is a frustrating process, for while it can be directed to a degree, it cannot be controlled without destroying the character's identity. If you plant an acorn, an apple seed and peach pit, you may, by utilizing certain fertilizers or pruning techniques, control the size or to some extent the shape of the trees which spring forth; but you will not produce among them a rosebush, date palm or tomato plant. An acorn can produce an oak and nothing else, and if by some perversion of science you attempted to get a coconut tree instead, you would not only fail but end up producing neither, or worse yet, some mutant abomination which is neither one nor the other. So it is with characters. When I wrote Cage Life, and needed someone to “play” the role of the protagonist's mixed martial arts coach, I did not sit down and say, “There are too many white people in this story. I'd better create a black character.” Instead I simply stood aside and let the character come into being, whereupon I shaped the story to fit him. And this is true of nearly all the best characters in books, television shows and films. They are not bolted together from blueprints, but grow naturally, just as actual human beings do.

Hollywood, like any empire of antiquity, is slow to accept change, and tends to do so grudgingly and only for the sake of outward appearances. For generations it dealt with minorities via the simple expedient of pretending they didn't exist, and on those occasions it was forced to admit their existence it did so in the most condescending ways possible, through characters like Charlie Chan, who was not even portrayed by Asian actor but by a white man in “yellowface” – an appalling trend which continued until fairly recently (see 1985s Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins, in which white actor Joel Gray was cast as a Korean martial arts master). In recent years this has become impossible, and a great deal of lip service and even some sincere effort has gone into opening up film and television to nonwhites and, more recently, to gays. Yet as I stated earlier, Hollywood's core attitude toward casting is unchanged, which is why the half-assed expedient of “colorizing” white characters not only continues, but is on the upgrade: Idris Elba is in serious consideration to play the next James Bond, a move which, if it happens, will undoubtedly be hailed by liberals and some minorities as a huge breakthrough. I cannot greet such a move with anything but dismay, because, as a writer, I know one cannot change the race of that character without fundamentally changing his identity, and as a human being, because I know to give the Bond franchise to a black actor without addressing the underlying issues which prevent the creation of a black secret agent with his own identity solves absolutely nothing. In Malcom X, apropos of Jackie Robinson being allowed to play baseball in the “white” league, Baines tells Malcom, “The white man throws you a bone and you're supposed to forget 400 years of oppression.” As far as I'm concerned, the casting of Elba as Bond, should it happen, would amount to little more than bone-throwing from a group which has demonstrated itself unwilling to look at the calendar and acknowledge that it is 2017 and not 1977 – or 1947, for that matter.

The brutal truth is that what is needed in Hollywood is not the colorization of existing white characters, nor scripts which call for “so many blacks, so many Asians” in hopes of satisfying the critics, but entirely new narratives – superheroes, secret agents, and ordinary joes who are “of color” and whose racial-ethnic-sexual identities are not tacked-on but intrinsic to who they are, thus making them seem real. The crucial thing here is to avoid the “CGI effect” that I referred to earlier, the feeling that we are looking not at contrivances designed to satisfy the demands of quota system. And the way this can be done is by getting the population of writers and producers in Hollywood to reflect, to at least a rough extent, the actual racial demographics of the country. Idris Elba does not have to be someone else's 007 when, with skillful writing, he could be his own 003 or 008.

As it stands now, things are changing in Hollywood, but the changes remind me of what a dermatologist once told me about how people tended to deal with skin problems. The first stage was to cover them up with cosmetics, the second to treat the symptoms themselves, and the last to treat the actual cause of the symptoms in hopes of effecting a cure. Most people, he said, were content to do the first, or at most, the second; the really effective method, curing the actual condition, was also the least popular. So it is with this town. The changes we have made are, at this point, are doing nothing to treat the disease. The issue of casting is a surface expression of a much deeper problem in this town, which is that the industry's power players all look like each other and do not reflect, even grossly, the actual demographics of our population. And this is not a question of realization. The people that run Hollywood already know their position is unjustly maintained. Until recently they have simply been able to ignore the knowledge, secure in the fact that they were both anonymous and protected by their own power from any real criticism or change. They are only acting now, disingenuously and through half-measures, because, for the first time in their long history, they are feeling, through layers of protective insulation, the heat of public discontent which threatens their phony but heartfelt self-image as old-time liberals. But it is just possible that, in their haste to preserve this self-image, they will finally manage, if only by accident, to do the right thing. And that, folks, if I may come full circle to the quote with which I opened this blog, is as likely a scenario as any as to how positive change might come about here in La La Land.