If you have friends who are female and/or people of color and/or gay you know
how freakin' cool and inspiring it is for them to see people on the screen who look like them.
I'm the whitest straightest guy ever, but I've always had a pretty diverse cast of characters as my friends. I'm psyched for them.
Conspicuous displays of a character's sexuality is not the same thing as character development. It is what author John Semley calls "
wokeness as preformative", alleging that it is pretentious, didactic and even insulting. This is what woke Hollywood gets wrong, instead of subverting our biases to communicate human truths about diverse characters, it commoditizes their diversity.
You've cited a lot of genre works: superhero shows, superhero movies, horror movies, etc. Are many of the examples you cited artistically lacking in exactly the ways you described? Sure.
But it's not like the exclusively male and heterosexual versions of these same works tended to be artistic masterpieces either. It's not like pre-"woke" versions of Batman, Batwoman, etc were masterpieces. An entire generation of action movie stars (Schwartzeneggar, Stallone, etc.) made decades of movies starring white dudes who didn't do much more than sweat, grunt, blow things up, and spout one-liners. These characters did not exhibit character development, or insightful examinations of what it means to be
white or
male.
More recently, the Harry Potter franchise is one that managed to devote several thousand pages and close to ten hours of screen time towards a cast of white, hetereosexual (at least in the text, not counting metatext such as JK's tweets) characters who (with one possible exception) did not evolve in any meaningful way, and certainly did not examine their whiteness or anything else besides how to solve the next puzzle.
So why hold these newer and more diversely-cast movies to a different standard?
Many viewers have been alarmed by the implied hostility toward the new hero’s namesake, a consequence of the need to feed from an established brand instead of telling a new story. Based on the trailer, the new Batwoman seems to assume that crime-fighting is a zero-sum game, as if there isn’t room in Gotham for multiple bat-themed costumed crime fighters.
Superheroes have always bickered amongst each other. Next to fighting baddies, it's one of their primary pursuits. Half of the Avengers can't stand Tony Stark half of the time. Ever read a single page of X-Men? It's a soap opera up in Prof. X's mansion. Everybody hates Scott Summers because he's a high-strung alpha male with thin skin! It's high school with spandex and superpowers. Everybody hates and/or is scared of Hulk and Wolverine, at least initially. And so on, and so on. Is any of that "self-brand-hostile?"
Oh, but when Batwoman (who just happens to be female, and black) has a bone to pick with Batman now we're worried about (checks notes) ....uh, this corporation's brand integrity?
Seriously?
Something tells me you didn't have this same level of concern when
Batman vs. Superman was released. An entire movie about a superpowered white guy's opposition to Batman. Or at least you didn't feel moved to write an article about it.
it appears Batwoman will be indulging grossly simplistic stereotypes dressed in a costume of edgy social commentary.
That's a *lot* to read into a very short trailer. Can you name any works that would pass this sort of test on their trailers alone?
More importantly, don't listen to me. I'm white and male and straight. My perspective matters, but there are a lot of other perspectives on these works that matter more. For example maybe start by looking into how much the
Black Panther movie (to pick a more or less universally-liked example) meant to many in the black community, and why. For a hundred years Hollywood turned out entertainment created almost exclusively from a white, male, heterosexual perspective. Simply getting different faces onscreen in leading roles (and behind the camera, as well) is a
very big step. It is not the ultimate step, but it's a necessary one.
