Movie Shaves Off 18 Minutes By Piling All Diversity Onto Single Side Character
LOS ANGELES, CA—Crazy Rich Asians, Black Panther, that Hamilton guy’s new thing he probably inserted himself into for no real reason. Today more than ever, movies are discovering a truth that was previously only understood by Spike Lee: multiple people of color can exist within the same shot without the camera exploding. Who knew? Not us!
We’re even getting representation for the gays! Three cheers! (Or should it be “three queers?” John, write that down) Remember Call Me By Your Name? The queer indie played by two white and somehow straight actors? What about The Favourite? The lesbian drama played by two white and disappointingly straight actors? Or Love, Simon, the gay coming-of-age story played by a white and impossibly straight actor? Hallelujah, the rainbow is shining bright tonight.
Unfortunately, this flawless representation is often sold as a separate venture from mainstream media, as an experiment that does not translate to everyday action movies, rom-coms, and whatever the hell Netflix is doing to those kids’ shows. But studio execs know that it’s time for a change. And that change begins elsewhere and eventually trickles into the pop culture, sort of forcing its way through cracks in an antiquated system until it's more expensive not to include diversity so we might as well throw in a subtle allusion to the fact that non-white people exist. At least until we can CGI Ryan Gosling into a Native American without anyone noticing.
Meet the Side Character. They are our saving grace. That’s right, we said “they.” We understand gender. It will probably be a guy, though, or else we’ll have to get her a love interest for emotional fulfillment and that seems too complicated.
The Side Character is everything we need to make our movie a paragon of progress. All the minority features are here: Black, queer, painted nails, and you-can’t-prove-we-didn’t-make-them-trans.
Their hairstyle will be simple because we refuse to hire someone that can do Black hair. Their clothes will be bright so that you don’t miss them in the thirty seconds they are on screen. Their lines will be written by straight, white Harvard dudes but will make constant references to race, sexuality, and the Israeli-Palestinean conflict. Will the Side Character have an accent? Hell no! They still have to be super American, you bozo. But will they do an accent at some point—probably to mock their immigrant parents or to get our main character out of a sticky situation? You bet your sweet ass, bozo.
We could give them one of those fancy new-wave sexualities, but you have to look it up, not me. Work banned me from googling “lesbian” for reasons we don’t need to get into.
Hey, it might even be an Asian person! Just don’t ask us which kind. ‘Cause that makes you the racist. Take that!
And before you ask “Why-,” let us just say that this: gay people of color do exist, okay (at least I think so)? So maybe think about that next time, Karen (did we do that right?). And before you finish your question to say “-does every historically marginalized aspect of identity have to people assigned to one person who then spends a total of four minutes on screen discussing exclusively the main character’s love arc?” let us just say that we see you, we hear you, and we’re definitely not going to do anything about that. I will make damn sure the Side Character says, “You go, gurl,” at every available opportunity.
