Culture
8 FEBRUARY 2021
Bridgerton’s Race Problem Sabrine Mahmoud, BA History Bridgerton, Netflix’s new show which has reportedly hooked 63 million viewers, is a period-drama set in the Regency era in England. We watch the London elite as they prepare their young for “the season” – a time in which courtships would occur in the hunt for a suitable marriage. It shows people of colour as British aristocrats; a unique take on the presentation and casting of race. At first glance, Bridgerton seems racially inclusive, with Black characters occupying positions at all levels of society, from aristocrats to boxers. This is a new take on period-dramas which are almost exclusively white-casted for historical accuracy. However, if you take a closer look, you’ll notice that the majority of people of colour in a leading role were light-skinned, thus denying the much-needed space for darker-skin characters and representation. Even more troubling is that many of the black characters
were problematic in some way, coming in the forms of abusive characters, selfish ones or merely just outright cruel. It is also somewhat unsettling to see people of colour socialising with those who would have been their oppressors when the show is set in the early 1800’s. This was a time in which the characters would be living off the profits of the Atlantic slave trade, as well as a time in which people of colour were primarily seen in domestic work, in sharp contrast to the higher social stratus they take up in Bridgerton. The show is initially marketed as colourblind casting, however half-way Lady Danbury, a Black woman, explains that society was racially split before the black Queen Charlotte married a white King: ‘We were two separate societies divided by colour until a King fell in love with one of us.’ The issue with Bridgerton is the false idea it presents of a post-racial society. It oversimplifies racism, suggesting one interracial royal marriage would be enough to solve the discrimination
Bridgerton’s Lady Danbury. (Credit: Netflix)
at the time. Representation doesn’t solve racism on its own – albeit important, race must be addressed with care, which Bridgerton fails to adequately do. Race is not referred to in any other meaningful way, and the storyline glosses over the extremely complex nature of race relations in society at
the time. ‘Love, your Grace, conquers all’ - Lady Danbury’s words sum up the portrayal the show gives of the solution to race. If only love could indeed conquer all.
Somewhere over the rainbow: gay cinema’s stylistic decline Ella Dorn, BA Chinese and Linguistics What do you think of when you hear the words ‘film history’? Only one year after the first ‘talkie’ is made in Berlin, two women, their shadows blown up beyond proportion, are shown kissing on a cinema screen. They are accompanied by a swell of triumphant music. This is 1931 Mädchen in Uniform, and although the film is swiftly pulled from circulation when Hitler comes to power, it ends up inspiring a stream of remakes and imitators from Mexico to Japan. Across the Atlantic, Greta Garbo, already an established star, pulls off a homoerotic portrayal of Queen Christina of Sweden, Marlene Dietrich plays an androgynous cabaret singer in Morocco, and a Dracula sequel made at Universal Pictures (no doubt influenced by the silent classic Nosferatu, which was directed by a gay man) is loaded with lesbian subtext. The Hays Code, a set of strict censorship guidelines, finally came into place in 1934, but the visual language established in these films endured for decades. In the modern-day logic of representation politics, and of Netflix originals with purpose-built LGBT characters, it seems confusing that many gay and lesbian aficionados adore an era of cinema when the overt depiction of homosexuality was effectively banned. But any research on the topic will set observers straight. The star system of classic Hollywood inspired fervent cults of personality, creating icons - Judy Garland, Joan Crawford, Elizabeth Taylor, Rock Hudson, Tab Hunter, Garbo, Dietrich - with whom these fans could, and still can, identify with. Only some of these actors portrayed gay people on
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screen: the great draw was that whatever stories they told existed shamelessly in sensuous, exaggerated worlds of cinematic camp. In their films, which were not relegated to any special-interest category, every emotion was blown up tenfold. Sets and costumes were lavish, scripts scattered with Wildean flourishes and snarky asides. Campiness could subvert social mores about age, giving lead roles to actresses who had ‘passed their prime’ (see the eternal 1950 classic All About Eve); it could overturn norms of gender in genre film, as in 1954’s Johnny Guitar. These productions brought gay audiences to the forefront of mainstream
culture, both as spectators (queued up to laugh at colourful parodies of heterosexual life), as avid fans of actors and actresses (who often slipped into androgyny), and as active creators. Even the public reputations and private lives of performers, which were composed in equal measure of fairy-tale press release and sordid rumour, became camp objects of high ridiculosity. The German director Max Ophüls had pioneered a monochrome but decadent visual language, that of swooping cameras and mirrored walls, which other artists would reuse in later years to give homosexual credence to stories that were heterosexual at
Gregory Peck and Lauren Bacall in Designing Woman (1957), a film where everything is thoroughly homosexual - apart from the characters and plot. (Credit: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer)
face value. Lauren Bacall, playing a bisexual woman in Young Man with a Horn (1950) collects nude Greek statues and is reflected, manifold, into gilt-edged mirrors, suggesting an ‘inversion’ beyond the camera; the same visual pun is used in Olivia (1951), a French pseudo-remake of Mädchen in Uniform. Both men and women could occupy the visual arena with smooth androgyny, appealing to gay and lesbian fans alike. It is too easy to conclude today that this glossy style of filmmaking, in the era of frequent jumpcuts and near-mandatory colour, has all but left us. The naturalistic, expository, and understated style of acclaimed LGBT films from the past decade - Blue is the Warmest Colour, Call Me By Your Name, The Miseducation of Cameron Post, even the 50s period piece Carol - betrays a break in a long artistic tradition. The actors themselves decamp, ditching their unbelievable press releases and preaching ‘authenticity’ over social media instead. Listen to classic film enthusiasts when we tell you: this is not a good thing. Against a backdrop of social acceptance and civil rights, gay people are losing an established cinematic identity. A canon of early role models, of aesthetic delight, of social critique, and of quotable snark sits and gathers dust. It is not enough to list films that simply feature LGBT characters but make no attempt to woo their viewers stylistically: modern-day critics should readily acknowledge the gay culture inherent in classic cinema beyond narrative level, and question the factors behind the stylistic decline of the last four decades, not least the potential loss of film industry creatives resulting from the coinciding HIV/AIDS crisis. Don’t let the Netflix listings deceive you: representation is not everything, and all the rest lies with style.
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