McWhorter: How Hollywood’s Awards Season Could Change the World (a Little)

2025/01/20 Leave a comment

Always interesting takes:

Hollywood’s awards shows are always closely scrutinized for signs of who’s up and who’s down, what’s in and what’s out. Lately they have also offered a clue about a trend that has nothing to do with film production or red carpet gowns. It’s about grammar. Amid all the razzle-dazzle, you may have missed the fact that last year the Golden Globes went where the Screen Actors Guild had previously led: They lauded not actors and actresses (lead, supporting or otherwise) but rather “female actors” and “male actors.”

After so many years and so many ceremonies, that was a real change for the industry, but it emerged from a long history. At least as far back as the 1980s, I’d heard calls to eliminate the use of female-marked terms such as “heroine,” “goddess,” “waitress” and “chairwoman” — and, yes, “actress.” (I for some reason have never truly internalized “flight attendant” over “stewardess,” and still have to remind myself to make the substitution.)

Such terms can seem to imply that the women who occupy these roles are somehow essentially different from — and perhaps lesser than — the men who do. Appending a female suffix positions the male version as the default, and makes the female word a mere version or variation of it.

The call to use “actor,” “hero,” “god” and “chair” to refer to women as well as men emerges from a belief that the words we use can shape our thoughts. That view was put forth most influentially by the linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf in the 1930s. The idea is that de-gendering our terms is a powerful gesture, a political act that asserts women’s equality and retrains our cultural assumptions.

A similar impulse has guided efforts to popularize inclusive language about race and gender identity or any number of other sensitive subjects. As those efforts proliferated in recent years, the consensus on what was inclusive and what was outdated seemed to shift faster and faster. It sometimes felt as if the lexical earth was shifting under our feet almost by the week — and not always for clear purpose.

Lately the tide seems to be turning against those attempts to engineer how people speak. In general, I’m glad about that. But de-gendering terms is a worthwhile endeavor that deserves an exemption from our impatience.

The problem with replacing older terms with newer, allegedly more sensitive ones is that a replacement term inevitably takes on the same negative associations that the old term had accreted. The psychologist Steven Pinker calls it the euphemism treadmill. Think of the procession from “crippled” to “handicapped” to “disabled” to “differently abled,” changes undertaken to avoid stigmatizing the people the term refers to. The constant renewal suggests that the effort has only had fitful success.

The introduction of a new term may suggest new ways of thinking, at least for some, and for a spell. But covering a hole in the roof with construction paper keeps the wind out, too, or at least some of it, and for a spell. It’s not actually a solution. The fashion of late to refer to the “unhoused” rather than the “homeless” is a useful example. “Homeless” began as a well-intended replacement of words like “bum” and “bag lady.” However, over time, the same dismissive associations those old terms engendered shifted over to “homeless person.” You can be sure that if “unhoused” becomes the default, it will need replacement in a generation or so. Truly addressing the homelessness (houselessness?) epidemic would be a much more meaningful approach to the problem than changing what we call it, and I suspect the “unhoused” would say the same.

De-gendering, however, is a different case. Unlike creating euphemisms, folding two words into one does not present a new model subject to obsolescence. “She’s an actor” simply phases out “actress” and sends it on its way, along with Studebakers, Koogle peanut butter and Red Skelton. It creates no new word poised to inherit the potentially dismissive air that “actress” implied.

Of course, changing words will hardly eliminate sexist bias. And I can’t help chuckling to recall one person I knew who years ago earnestly insisted on calling a Walkman a “Walkperson.” But to the extent that this kind of language change really can play some part in changing habits of mind, let’s form the new habit and pass it on to our kids.

Source: How Hollywood’s Awards Season Could Change the World (a Little)

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Let Actors Act

2022/05/17 Leave a comment

Good commentary:

Adrian Lester, a British actor from Birmingham and the son of two immigrants from Jamaica, was nominated last week for a Tony Award for his performance in “The Lehman Trilogy” as Emanuel Lehman, one of the German-born Jewish founders of the fallen investment behemoth Lehman Brothers. Lester, like the other actors in the three-man play, takes on several parts, including female characters and at one point, a thumb-sucking toddler.

There has been no outcry about a British actor of African descent playing a German Jew, nor was there any fuss when he played Bobby, a character traditionally performed by white actors, in a London production of Stephen Sondheim’s “Company,” for which he won an Olivier.

And why should there have been? It’s called acting.

There was no protest either about Lester’s co-star Simon Russell Beale, born to British parents in what was then British Malaya and a former chorister at St. Paul’s Cathedral, playing a German Jew. Adam Godley, the third actor in the play, is Jewish in real life, but he’s also gay — not so in the play. Again, it’s called acting, and Beale and Godley were also nominated for Tony Awards last week.

And yet countless actors have been criticized for playing people they do not resemble in real life.

Earlier this year, Helen Mirren was lambasted for portraying Golda Meir, a former prime minister of Israel, in a forthcoming biopic even though she’s not Jewish — engaging in what is now called “Jewface.” In a recent interview defending Mirren, Ian McKellen (who incidentally has played everything from a wizard to a cat) asked, “Is the argument that a straight man cannot play a gay part, and if so, does that mean I can’t play straight parts?” He went on: “Surely not. We’re acting. We’re pretending.”

Daring to take on parts different from oneself didn’t always kick up a storm. Back in 1993 when Tom Hanks played a gay character in “Philadelphia,” he was hailed as brave for taking on homophobia and won an Oscar. Today, his performance no longer plays so well in some quarters. “Straight men playing gay — everyone wants to give them an award,” the performer Billy Porter complained in a 2019 actor’s round table. Yet many of our best gay, lesbian and bisexual actors — Jodie Foster, Alan Cumming, Kristen Stewart, Nathan Lane — have won awards for straight roles without even a murmur of complaint.

What we are effectively saying here — without ever, heaven forbid, saying it out loud — is that it’s OK for actors from groups considered to be marginalized — whether gay, Indigenous, Latino or any other number of identities — to play straight white characters. But it’s not OK for the reverse.

Such double standards may not trouble you. But if it’s a problem that a “miscast” actor — one who differs in identity from the character — takes a role away from a “properly cast” actor when there are already fewer roles for underrepresented or marginalized groups, then why not condemn Simon Russell Beale for taking a job from a Jewish actor? Why no outcry every time a 40-something actress bends biology to play the mothers of 25-year-old actresses, robbing older actresses who more plausibly fit the part?

If, however, the real problem is actors not being able to understand what it feels like to be part of a demographic group or to have a sexual orientation outside the confines of their own experience, then none of these actors should be able to play anyone unlike themselves. In other words, no one should ever be allowed to play a part.

Hollywood has wisely moved on from the offensive extremes of blackface and Shylock stereotypes, “queeny” stock gay characters and Mickey Rooney’s embarrassing turn as a Japanese landlord in “Breakfast at Tiffany’s.” There is plenty of room in the middle without ricocheting to the other undesirable extreme.

It’s not that strict typecasting should never happen; it can yield rewarding opportunities for both actors and audiences. Behold the deaf performers in the Oscar-winning “Coda.”

But deaf performers can also act movingly in a musical like the 2015 Deaf West revival of “Spring Awakening,” which featured them in roles that were originally performed as hearing characters and performed simply as characters, neither explicitly hearing nor deaf, but transcendently human in their expression.

Likewise, in a recent revival of “Oklahoma!” Ali Stroker, who uses a wheelchair, was able to fully embody Ado Annie, who spends much of her time in the movie and previous stage versions swishing away from her suitor, Will Parker, just as Daniel Day-Lewis once captured, with extraordinary sensitivity in “My Left Foot,” the wheelchair-bound writer and painter Christy Brown.

Good actors are able to find a way to portray people who are not like themselves, whether on the surface or well below, which is what differentiates them from those of us who could barely remember our lines in a fourth-grade production of “A Charlie Brown Christmas.” Acting is a feat of compassion and an act of generosity. Those capable of that kind of emotional ventriloquy enable audiences to find ourselves in the lives portrayed onscreen, no matter how little they may resemble our own.

Bravo to those actors who do that well. Bravo to the talented Adrian Lester, who makes you forget the color of his skin, his nationality and his religion — and gives himself over entirely to his performance. There is no reason for any actor to apologize for exercising and reveling in his craft.

Source: Let Actors Act

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Jews Don’t Count? Helen Mirren ‘Jewface’ Row Over Golda Meir Portrayal Divides U.K. Entertainment Industry

2022/01/17 Leave a comment

Of interest but must an actor always be of the same ethnicity or race as the character?

In upcoming biopic “Golda,” Helen Mirren plays former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir during the 1973 Yom Kippur war, when Israel was invaded by a coalition of Arab states on the holiest day in the Jewish calendar.

While Mirren is not Jewish, “Golda” is directed by Academy Award-winning filmmaker Guy Nattiv (“Skin”), who is both Jewish and Israeli, and written by British screenwriter Nicholas Martin (“Florence Foster Jenkins”), who has previously worked with the organization U.K. Jewish Film.

But in the U.K., where production wrapped last month, Mirren’s casting as one of history’s most heroic Jewish women has caused some disquiet. Actor Maureen Lipman (“The Pianist”) highlighted the discussion about what has been termed “Jewface” when she told a newspaper she “disagreed” with Mirren’s casting “because the Jewishness of the character is so integral. I’m sure she will be marvellous, but it would never be allowed for Ben Kingsley to play Nelson Mandela. You just couldn’t even go there.”

Asked by Variety to elaborate, Lipman said via email: “Helen will be great. Good actress, sexy and intelligent. Looks the part.”

“My opinion, and that’s what it is, a mere opinion, is that if the character’s race, creed or gender drives or defines the portrayal then the correct — for want of an umbrella [term] — ethnicity should be a priority. Which is not to say that ‘Pericles, Prince Of Tyre’ has to be [played by] a pure Tyresian thespian. It is complicated.”

(Mirren, Nattiv and Martin didn’t respond to Variety’s queries by publication time.)

Lipman is not the first to raise the issue of “Jewface.” Like blackface or yellowface, the term describes actors of non-Jewish descent playing Jewish characters. On her podcast, comedian Sarah Silverman points to a pattern of non-Jews playing characters whose Jewishness is not just incidental but “their whole being” while Variety’s own Malina Saval also touched on it in an article about Hollywood’s anti-Semitism problem.

Because, as well as Mirren playing Meir, in the last five years alone Kathryn Hahn has been cast as Joan Rivers, Felicity Jones as Ruth Bader Ginsberg, Gary Oldman as Herman J. Mankiewicz, Oscar Isaac in the recent HBO re-make “Scenes From a Marriage” (Isaac also previously played a Mossad agent in 2018 film “Operation Finale”), Rachel Brosnahan as Mrs. Maisel, Rachel McAdams in “Disobedience,” James Norton in “McMafia,” Tom Hardy in “Peaky Blinders,” Rachel Sennott in “Shiva Baby,” Tamsin Grieg in “Friday Night Dinner,” Kelly McDonald in “Giri/Haji,” Will Ferrell in “The Shrink Next Door” and, currently in production, Eddie Marsan and Emily Watson as Brian Epstein’s parents in the upcoming biopic “Midas Man.”

“As actors, we should be able to play anyone. That is our job and I’ve had a wide and varied career playing a multitude of parts,” says actor Tracy Ann Oberman, who has starred in “It’s a Sin” and “Friday Night Dinner.”

“However, we are living in a time of enormous sensitivity around the appropriation of characters played by people who aren’t from that background. I have seen little similar concern about Jewish characters where their Jewish religious and cultural identity is intrinsic to who they are being discussed with the same respect.”

Jonathan Shalit, chairman of InterTalent Rights Group, agrees. “Rightly there is uproar when white people play Black characters in a film,” he tells Variety via email. “Maureen Lipman is entirely right to say a Jewish actress should have played the role of Israel’s legendary prime minister and committed Zionist Golda Meir. It is deeply offensive and hypocritical by so many to suggest otherwise.”

Not everyone is affronted by the casting, however. Hagai Levi, the Israeli creator of “The Affair,” recently wrote and directed HBO’s adaptation of “Scenes From a Marriage,” in which Oscar Isaac plays Jonathan, a Jewish character loosely based on Levi himself, opposite Jessica Chastain. Levi tells Variety that “I would never even consider that issue [of whether an actor is Jewish or not] when I’m casting.”

“I didn’t have any doubt when casting Oscar,” he adds. “And I had other options in mind, and none of them were Jews […] If I would be limited to choose only Jewish actors, where would I end up, you know?”

Nathan Abrams, a professor in film at the University of Bangor in Wales and the author of “Hidden in Plain Sight: Jews and Jewishness in British Film, Television and Popular Culture,” also disputes the claim that only Jews should play Jewish characters. “How do we define what’s Jewish for the sake of playing a role?” Abrams asks, pointing out that one of the issues in “authentically” casting Jews is that Jewishness comes via a number of routes: religion, culture and ethnicity.

If anything, Abrams argues, portrayals such as Hardy’s Alfie Solomons in “Peaky Blinders” or Norton’s Alex Godman in “McMafia” — where the character’s ethnicity becomes almost incidental — redress what Abrams calls the usual “over-coding” of Jewishness on screen via stereotypical “shrugs and gestures and [an] old-world accent.”

But comedian and author David Baddiel, who explores “Jewface” in his book “Jews Don’t Count,” says the issue he, Silverman and Lipman are trying to highlight is not actually whether Mirren is entitled to play Meir but the lack of commotion her casting has caused compared to other “non-authentic” casting choices.

“The discrepancy is the point,” Baddiel tells Variety, citing as an example the backlash Johansson faced after it was announced she would play a trans man in the film “Rub and Tug,” which caused her to abandon the project entirely. “If these strictures apply for other minorities — [if] this is how we’re trying to make the world more right, more of a level playing field for minorities — then why are they not applied to Jews? What does that say about what people think about Jews?”

“We are really talking about lack of outcry,” Lipman explains in her email. “In a sense, I am a tiny outcry because every other creed, race or gender discussion with regard to casting [causes] tsunamis. Think Eddie Redmayne, Scarlett Johansson, Jake Gyllenhaal, Johnny Depp, Rooney Mara and, ridiculously, Javier Bardem in ‘Meet the Riccardos.’” (Bardem, who is Spanish, plays Cuban-American Desi Arnaz in the film).

Oberman recently illustrated a perceived double standard in a tweet comparing two Guardian headlines, one denouncing Middle East-born Gal Gadot’s intent to play Cleopatra as “a backwards step for Hollywood representation” and another accusing Lipman of “attacking” Mirren’s casting. Underpinning the disparity is the whisper of a suggestion that Jews don’t deserve the same compassion as other minorities because they are over-represented in entertainment.

“It is an antisemitic thing to say ‘Jews run showbiz’ or ‘Jews are everywhere in showbiz,’” Baddiel says unequivocally.

In Britain, in particular, it’s not even true: not in television (as evidenced by the Royal Television Society’s decision to hold their 2021 Cambridge convention on Yom Kippur, meaning observant Jews were unable to attend), nor in film where, as Baddiel points out, major film companies tend to be led by privately-educated “posh people.” (Generous estimates put the Jewish population of the U.K. at around 370,000, or 0.57% of the wider population, while British private schools educate around 620,000 pupils every year.)

The misconception is all the more objectionable given that Jewish actors, like those from other marginalized ethnicities, are under-represented where it counts: on screen. Film professor Abrams says “there seems to be a clear discrimination in casting Jewish people in lead roles,” regardless of what that role is, citing “unconscious bias” as the likely cause.

“I’ve had a few Jewish actresses tell me they noticed they don’t get cast generally because they’re told they’re too ‘exotic’-looking,” Baddiel concurs. “And then the same women have told me they’ve gone up for specifically Jewish heroine parts, like the central character part, and at that point suddenly [the filmmakers] want someone who’s a bit more blue-eyed or light skinned, a bit less curly-haired.”

As one source said of McAdams, who plays a Hasidic woman embarking on a lesbian affair in “Disobedience”: “[She’s] everybody’s fantasy version of a Jew.”

The fiscal reality of making movies, of course, means small, independent projects like “Disobedience” or “Golda” need someone with McAdams’ or Mirren’s box office draw to get financed. “If you’ve got a big name attached you are much more likely to get the film made,” acknowledges producer Jonathan Levi (“Broadmoor”), who says he has no issue with Mirren taking on the role of Meir. “So that makes perfect sense. An unknown actress just wouldn’t carry it.”

But the catch-22 is that if Jewish actors struggle to get cast in both Jewish and non-Jewish roles (except those actors who don’t look particularly Jewish), few will ever have the opportunity to reach the same professional heights as McAdams or Mirren.

“I would contextualize this [debate] by saying the job of an actor is to play any part that is given to them and that is the joy of acting,” says Oberman. “However, Jews have to be given the same respect, sensitivity and consideration as every other minority when it comes to casting their stories.”

Source: Jews Don’t Count? Helen Mirren ‘Jewface’ Row Over Golda Meir Portrayal Divides U.K. Entertainment Industry

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