Boy, this racial stuff gives me gas. Entertainment Weekly this week has a story on Ben Stiller’s upcoming Tropic Thunder, a comedy about clueless actors making a war movie. For some reason, they hold that this is “controversial.” But if that entire wacky premise is “Not controversial enough?”, they note, “Wait until you hear who’s playing a black man.”
It’s a white guy…only it’s not. No real life white actor actually plays a black character in the film. Instead, Robert Downey Jr. plays a method actor who is hired to play a role originally written as black, and decides to play it that way. In other words, the comedy idea is that he’s so clueless that he adopts blackface to play a black character. Only not in real life — in the movie in the movie. Again, how is that controversial? “Stiller says he and Downey always stayed on focused on the fact that they were skewering insufferable actors, not African-Americans.” Well…duh. Obviously. Why does that even have to be said?
This reminds me of the recent ‘controversy’ about SNL using Fred Armisen to do Barak Obama on their skits. Several ‘news’ stories have noted with discomfort that Armisen is…gasp…not himself black. Oh, no! Although one writer at the Chicago Tribune seemed to give Armisen partial credit for being, as they are at pains to note, “Hispanic and Asian.”
Seriously, who the fuck cares? (Not actual people. 70% of poll respondents rightly said it “didn’t matter” if a black guy played Obama on the show. And why would it? Didn’t David Chappel play Bush on his show? I sure was offended by that, let me tell you!) Armisen looks like Obama–at least in the make-up–and his impression is funny. Shouldn’t that be the sole criteria?
Martin Luther King Jr. got the vast majority of this country to sign on to that whole “not on the color of his skin, but on the content of his character” train. We didn’t sign up for decades and decades and decades on increasingly retarded racial bean counting. Race matters less and less and less in this country, but sadly there’s an entire tier of race hustlers out there desperate to keep it ‘relevant’ because that’s how they make their buck, and because it makes them feel morally superior to non race-obsessed people.
Luckily the younger generations increasingly really don’t care about this stuff, so maybe a day will come when I won’t have to kick the census people out of my house because they keep asking questions about race. (Which I actually did last time.) Still, it annoys the hell out of me that apparently I’ll never live long enough to see this sort of thing not even be an issue.
