From “Wonka” to “Bridgerton”: a Hollywood fantasy of a magical, color-blind past

Not long ago, at the movies, I found myself trying to focus on Timothée Chalamet’s charming portrayal of a young Willy Wonka, who arrives penniless in a new city. What caught my attention instead were the residents he met there. The first to greet him was a beaming British Indian. We soon meet the orphan’s gentle sidekick, played by a black American actor, and the police chief, played by a biracial American. The vaguely central European city to which Wonka came—the Viennese shops, the Italian architecture, the English language—was a happy melting pot: all races seemed to coexist without race meaning anything. The story is set in a fictional past, but its cast felt like a 21st-century London utopia, with actors from British, Caribbean and Asian backgrounds coming together. Hugh Grant played the Oompa-Loompas, described by Roald Dahl as a dwarf people found “in the deepest, darkest part of the African jungle where no white man has ever been before.”

Through the arts, we now see many worlds that did not exist before. David Copperfield plays Dev Patel. Marvel’s Norse pantheon includes a black god. Netflix’s hit series “Bridgerton” depicts a version of the Regency in England ruled by a black queen and an anachronistically multiracial royal court.

When you see these examples combined, they’re often followed by some complaints from a world crazy about inclusion. In Britain, for example, there was some outrage when the hero of Agatha Christie’s faithful novel was modified to become a Nigerian immigrant. But the problem for viewers is not vigilance; It is the incoherence of the world we see. We see an African man solving crimes in an English country village in the 1950s, as the sun sets on the empire – yet his race is barely mentioned or considered, and it makes no material difference to his experience.

You could defiantly call this kind of ahistorical setting the multiracial magical past. The bones of the world are familiar. There is only one change: every race exists, cheerfully and seemingly equal, in the same place at the same time. History becomes an emoji, its flesh changing color as needed.

And yet there is something on, which makes these stories impossible to get lost in. You can never fully envision a multiracial magical past without having to mentally dismantle the entire scaffolding of world history. “Bridgerton” is set before Britain abolished slavery, an institution that apparently existed, but was largely unmentioned, in the world of the series. What exactly are the rules of a world in which a black queen rules over the British Empire that permits the enslavement of black people?

Included, but erased

The motivation behind such choices certainly comes from a good place. Storytellers struggle with how to deal with a historically white canon and a range of well-worn genres (such as the costume dramas of the period) whose characters will, in fact, be almost exclusively white. They worry that all other races that are part of the modern, multiracial West are being omitted, either as actors or perhaps as spectators. They also don’t want to tell stories in which people of color must always appear as servants, victims, or causes.

The multiracial magical past is one optimistic solution to this dilemma. We want to engage everyone in storytelling, but we’re not always willing to change the types of stories we tell. So we simply suspend disbelief; We imagine that everyone who is currently part of our English-speaking culture has been there, a valuable and equal participant, all along.

And so we were all reconnected, from all over the world, to the history of the West. Now we can watch ourselves speaking languages ​​we never spoke in rooms where we were unlikely to be welcomed. We are included, but we have actual History has been cleared. We rarely see the stories of non-white people who, like my ancestors, lived on their native land, or the complex stories of non-white people in the West in centuries past. World history is reduced from many to one.

Some feel that this kind of wishful thinking could help set a model for how a multiethnic society should function. But who exactly benefits from it? It’s a relief that the magical, multiracial past allows white viewers to watch white heroes move through history without anyone having to think uncomfortable thoughts; In fact, people in the multiracial magical past got along better than we do nowadays. I don’t think this is primarily to the benefit of those of us who are not white. I think instead of James Baldwin’s phrase: “A great deal of a man’s energy,” he once wrote, “is expended in assuring white Americans that they do not see what they see.”

And maybe that’s why, while I struggle to deal with this revisionist past intellectually, I also think they tend to fail emotionally, deep down in the places a good story is supposed to go. The stories are often boring, well-intentioned, and uncomfortable truths avoided.

Canon Fresh vision

There are alternatives To this fantasy. One obvious option is that instead of trying to incorporate the modern world into law, we could expand the law itself. It’s not difficult to tell stories from many parts of the world. In literature, writer Marlon James worked to ensure that the “Dark Star” trilogy, inspired by ancient African folklore, avoids becoming “a European fantasy novel with a brown face.” Children’s entertainment features stories such as Disney’s “Moana”, which is immersed in Polynesian culture, and “Iwaju”, which is set in the futuristic city of Lagos. All types of films find ways to acknowledge people of color in Western history or depict their histories elsewhere.

Or we can see Sharia law again. You can keep the cowboy but tear him apart, as Mel Brooks did with the black sheriff in “Blazing Saddles.” Or you can rebuild it, as Quentin Tarantino did in Django Unchained, by making the hero a former slave. (Tarantino described the cruel slave owners in his film as “a grotesque parody of European aristocracy,” which is a more interesting take on the concept of property, in my view, than pretending to be one myself.) There is also a sense of humor here. There’s a good joke in “Hot Tub Time Machine 2” that’s rooted in an unacknowledged truth of time travel stories: It’s mostly people who look like Marty McFly who want to go that far in American history.

There’s nothing wrong with dreaming about things that never happened, but we shouldn’t use that power to pretend that bad things never happened. Personally, I’m drawn to a good counterfactual. I find myself thinking a lot about the 1995 film “The White Man’s Burden.” Written and directed by Desmond Nakano, a third-generation Japanese American, the film places John Travolta in an alternative America where blacks have all the power and whites live in drug-ridden slums. The film opens with a lavish black dinner party, where the head of the table ponders whether whites, as a race, are beyond saving—a reflection heightened by the fact that this bad guy is played, with immense charisma, by civil rights icon Harry Belafonte.

Art should explore our shared history and try to understand it. Consider the recent uproar over Google’s AI model, which has been trained to produce images that are so “color-blind” that it might expose us to ridicule: Founding Fathers as Native American men, and racially diverse Nazis. Google’s trillion-dollar team of scientists tried to solve the problems of racism by ignoring it, and thus found their own way into the magical, multiracial past. It’s amazing to think that humans who work in the arts make the same choices. The past is messy, and its depiction can be unsettling. But understanding this is what separates us from robots.

Big shipper New York-based writer and filmmaker. He last wrote for the magazine about the prophetic power of “Demolition Man.”