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Le Guin Peeved About Earthsea Miniseries
Several readers have written in with unhappy opinions on the Legend of Earthsea miniseries just aired on the Sci-Fi channel. Ursula Le Guin has also chimed in, with a short but highly critical blurb on her website, and now this dissection on Slate.com.
"No."No. Because they aren't interested in Science Fiction. They want the tech-fantasy crap.
The stuff that will be guaranteed to appeal to the 12 - 24 year old male audience.
This isn't even about "low budget". Look at Red Dwarf's first few seasons. They had no budget, yet they had great characters and amusing plots.
They haven't realized that going with the status quo will always result in mediocrity.
In order to produce something memorable, they have to push the envelope.
Watching their crap, I get the feeling that the actor's salaries, the FX, everything is calculated to the exact penny and matched against the ad revenues. They know exactly how many people will watch another rendition of the same-old same-old and they're not going to break a profitable formula.
We first had this discussion in an English class when reading Huck Finn (if you recall, Mark Twain says in the introduction specifically that you shouldn't read any meaning into the story, blah, blah).
So of course we all said that we shouldn't be reading into the story, the author specifically said not to!
Years later, as an artist, I can honestly say that yes, 85% of the stuff people "read into" my work is totally random and stupid (or optimistic on their part). But the other 15% is either outright correct or something that rings very true even though I hadn't intended it.
So much of the creative process is subconscious that I have to grudgingly agree with my old English teacher that the author doesn't always realize (or even recognize!) all of the things they put into a work.
So even when an author says "I didn't mean to represent X as Y", it doesn't make it any less true that X is represented as Y, or that it tells us something about the story, the author, or the characters. it just means the author didn't intend it consciously (or wants to disavow it after the fact).
But of course, 85% of the theories are still utter crap.
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
Le Guin wrote a sci-fi series that was intended to complexify and breakdown the super-whiteness of sci-fi and fantasy, i.e. LOTRs, Vampires, etc. Look, I liked LOTRs but it got a little creepy how white everyone was, and how the only slightly non-white, Arab/African looking guys are bad guys. Le Guin knows she achieved her intended effect because people write to her telling her it did.
So big media wants to turn this written work into a widely viewed video work. Because they believe in the racism of the general public, they commit a racist act themselves (of course they may claim so only to deflect the accusations of racism to others). The theoretical discussion about authorial intent versus thematics is interesting but besides the point--what "unrealized" or "unintended" insights were brought into the film by white-washing it? That's the point.
Danny Glover had a central part not just a supporting role.
In terms of screen time, he had a more minor role than the characters whose race was changed.
I don't think it was at all "racist". I think it had more to do with popular actors and "looks".
If anything, it seems like it went the other way. The most prominent actors that they managed to recruit were Danny Glover and Kristin Kreuk. Is it coincidence that they are also the only characters permitted to deviate from the otherwise lily-white color scheme?
Race was obviously important to the author. But I don't think the suits even read her novels, they just went with what they thought they could package and sell to a predominately white audience (US & Canadian SciFi channel viewers). People use the racist label too easily.
It seems to me that eliminating mixed race characters in hopes of appealing to a "predominately white audience" is inherently a racist decision, even if the racism is driven by economics rather than bigotry. There is also a disturbing circularity in justifying such a decision based on the fact that the viewership is predominately white, when the systematic elimination of people of color from major roles helps to drive off nonwhite viewers.