Representation matters

The success of the recent movie “Black Panther” is hard to overstate. It keeps breaking records. The first film to be at the number one spot for five consecutive weeks since “Avatar” in 2009. Easily the top grossing superhero movie of all time. As I write this, “Black Panther” is the 11th highest grossing film of all time, though because it’s still playing, it will likely jump past “Frozen” into the top 10 before the column appears.

It should be said that the main reason the film has done so well is that it was made so well. It isn’t just the best grossing superhero one, it’s the best made one I’ve seen. From the writing to the action to the messages, “Black Panther” hits them all. And it allows for enough ambiguity that there is ongoing debate about its meaning and impact from pop culture analysts to academics. But obviously, one reason people are excited about the film doing so well is its cast and crew. The director is African-american and the cast was almost all black, from all over the globe.

Of course, there was some mild pushback from fringe whites who claimed to feel left out. Where’s the diversity, they complained with crocodile tears.

Diversity in film is important, but it isn’t measured one film at a time. If you’re making a film set in 1920s Iowa, your cast would likely be mostly white. Similarly, if you set a movie largely in a mythological African country, the cast should reflect that.

And, measuring the film industry as a whole shows that we still have a long way to go. Africanamericans are reasonably well represented as actors in movies, with a proportion of roles roughly equal to their proportion in the population. But that is less true of lead roles, and especially of directors, where African-americans represent fewer than 6 percent of those at the top, compared to more than 13 percent of the population.

The difference is more stark for women. Of the 900 films studied by the Media, Diversity and Social Change Initiative at USC, only 31 percent of roles were filled by women. Just 12 percent of those films had a balanced cast and of the top 100 grossing films of 2016, only 34 had a female lead or co-lead.

This is why women identified so strongly with one of last year’s top films, “Wonder Woman.” It also did well with both audiences and critics, but it was the unapologetic strength of the lead character that had women crying for joy in their seats.

Representation at every level is critical and “Wonder Woman” provides a great example. The Amazon Warrior costumes in the film, designed by a woman, were warrior like, highly functional for their purpose. When the “Justice League” movie came out later, directed by a man, the costumes, designed by a man, had become revealing and sexualized.

The oversexualization of women in film is another problem measured by the Media Initiative. Of the 2016 films they studied, more than a quarter of the women were dressed in sexy attire and more than a quarter showed some nudity, far more than their male counterparts. And women in film were more than three times as likely to be described as attractive than men.

Another group worth considering is Hispanics who are for more underrepresented. Of top 2016 films, only 3.1 percent of roles went to Hispanic actors and more than half have no Hispanic speaking characters. Released last year to coincide with the Mexican holiday, Day of the Dead, which provides the theme for the film, “Coco” was directed by and many of its stars were Latino. The film was well-reviewed by critics and audiences alike.

Latinos responded so favorably to “Coco” that in some communities, like Porterville, with large Latino populations, it continued to play in theatres even after being released on DVD.

For most of us, we’d like to just see good films, ones that resonate with some part of our experience. These movies have done well mostly because their good; in the examples I have listed, very good.

But it is important, critical even, that audiences have the opportunity to see people who look like themselves and have experiences like theirs on the screen and in other forms of popular culture. Hopefully, Hollywood will see these examples of success as an incentive to improve diversity in casting, and especially, in leadership.

Michael Carley is a resident of Porterville. He can be reached at mcarley@gmail.com.