The idea of filmmakers of a specific ethnicity getting to tell their tales isn’t entirely revolutionary: Try to imagine The Godfather or Goodfellas from directors without the intimate knowledge of Italian family dynamics that Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese brought to bear. Or Schindler’s List in the hands of a filmmaker who didn’t feel the tonnage of history the way Steven Spielberg did.
No, the reason we’re in the midst of a halcyon age of representational storytelling that’s resonating on a historic scale is that a far more diverse pool of storytellers — black filmmakers, female filmmakers, Asian filmmakers — are getting empowered to tell their stories their way with all the resources usually reserved for white, male creatives. Black Panther isn’t just the story of a handsome prince taking the throne of a fictional, advanced African nation, it’s also the story of a filmmaker reckoning with the disconnect that lives in the hyphen between “African” and “American.” It’s about a man who grew up around women of strength and grace and power who didn’t think twice about populating both his art and his set with those same kinds of women. It’s about a kid from Oakland dreaming dreams that the world told him he couldn’t.
Similarly, Thor: Ragnarok would never have been both a balls-out buddy comedy with a perfectly timed anus joke and a trenchant examination of the paved-over sins of colonial expansion without the half-Maori New Zealander Taika Waititi at the helm. And we have proof positive of how Jenkins’ centering of Diana in Wonder Woman is different from Zack Snyder’s treatment of the same character in Justice League: More openness, innocence and resolve … fewer gratuitous shots of Gal Gadot’s ass.
And there’s no one who could’ve conceived of Get Out but Peele, who spent years exploring the ways race and genre collide on TV’s Key & Peele, is a student of horror and has definitely found himself navigating the frothy waters of meeting a white girlfriend’s parents for the first time.
The way forward isn’t simply to decide to greenlight stories about diverse people. It’s to cultivate a generation of writers, directors and producers who see the world through their own unique lens and then bring that perspective to bear. If Marvel didn’t have someone like Nate Moore in its producer ranks, someone who knew who T’Challa was and what he could mean, you’d never get a Black Panther. If Pixar didn’t elevate story artist Adrian Molina to co-director and co-writer, Coco might’ve seemed more like a Day of the Dead theme park ride than a haunting, heartbreaking exaltation of Dia de los Muertos.
What audiences are responding to, in every movie that’s popped in the past year, is a sense of truth. Just as we can tell, somehow, when CG is spackled on a little too heavily, we can sense when something feels inauthentic. We can tell the difference between 12 Years a Slave and Amistad, between The Joy Luck Club and The Last Samurai, between Selma and Mississippi Burning. One of them feels true — and truth, ultimately, is what makes something universal.
Marc Bernardin is a television writer and former THR editor who co-hosts the Fatman on Batman podcast with Kevin Smith.
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