The album approach to diversity in film

I’m of two minds about representation at the movies.

On the one hand, I’m a liberal and I absolutely believe that racial, sexual and gender minorities should be fully represented both in front of and behind the camera. It would be a great finger in the eye of Trump and his cronies if the new cinematic norm were that these minorities were present in plentiful numbers.

On the other hand, I have a steadfast belief that there is a time and a place for every type of movie you could make, that any type of person might want to see. I don’t want to enter into an era where certain movies just don’t get made because they happen to be about subjects or people that we’ve decided are historically overrepresented.

If only movies could be like albums.

“Photo albums, Vance?”

No, not photo albums, you nitwit. Musical albums. The kind made by musicians, usually containing 10-15 songs.

Most albums, the good ones anyway, feature a multiplicity of moods, speeds and tones. You start off with something hot to bring the crowd in, which builds to its peak moment of excitement. You keep it going in tracks two and three. But by track four it’s time to slow it down a bit and become contemplative for a track or two. Then a couple whimsical songs, another banger or two, and then close with a couple sorrowful or ethereal contemplations on existence and its impermanence.

The point is not how the album flows and is constructed, but that the same artist has made a dozen different songs potentially appealing to a dozen different audiences, appropriate for a dozen different moods. Or if they’re really good, appealing to everybody, because that’s just how masterfully the album has been composed. But definitely taking different approaches to the making of music in each song, and comprising them of dissimilar elements.

If only a filmmaker could make ten movies at once that were meant to be received by us as a set. If they could, it would relieve each movie of having to be everything to everyone.

You could have one film where a woman is the hero, and another where she has to get saved by a man. You could have one film where all the races play together nicely, and others where they’re each doing their own things that pertain just to them. You could have one movie full of sassy gay best friends and one that didn’t have any.

But films cannot be interpreted as part of a collection, at least not in the moment of their inception. Each one must stand on its own. Each one must try to pass the Bechdel Test. Each one must have minorities present in a fashion where they aren’t pernicious examples of tokenism. Each one must try to engage in race-blind casting even if it’s not historically accurate. Each one must be sure that the villain is not a member of some group that has been too historically vilified.

I realize a suggestion like this is dangerously close to the “separate but equal” logic that informed the segregationists. But I hope you know I don’t mean it that way. I mean it to allow movies like Glengarry Glen Ross to have a future.

Glengarry Glen Ross is among my top 30 films of all time. It could never be made in 2019. It is a movie made by and starring white guys. The cast is comprised exclusively of white men, it’s written by a white man and it’s directed by a white man. If Glengarry Glen Ross were made today, there would be a movement on Twitter to cancel it.

But if Glengarry Glen Ross were part of an “album of films” released at the same time, it would not prompt outrage. Its white male cast would be balanced out by movie #7, whose cast was comprised of Lebanese lesbians. I’m exaggerating a bit but I think you take my meaning. I think it’s a legitimate cinematic pursuit to want to make a movie where six white guys stab each other in the back in order to win a prize for selling the most real estate and to prevent the loss of their jobs. To that particular filmmaker, it may represent the exact mood, the exact tone, the exact historic or demographic moment they want to explore.

Oddly and perhaps counterintuitively, the end result of this movement toward heterogeneity in each film is a kind of homogeneity – not within each movie itself, but taken in comparison to one another. If all movies have a perfect balance of races, genders and sexual orientations involved in whatever mission the plot takes them on, with predictable results about who is allowed to have a dark side and who is not, the movies will begin losing the element that distinguishes them from one another. They’ll have a utopian quality that reflects the society I want to live in, but they may also stop seeming as true as they could be if they were more thorny, eccentric and specific. What is art if not thorny, eccentric and specific?

Me, I want a world with both Glengarry Glen Ross and the Lebanese lesbians, and without one having to answer to the other if they don’t want to.