07 Jan Has Diversity Led to OverRepresentation in Media?

Before we get into the data, I think it is important to recognize that representation is important.

For the vast majority of the history of cinema, most of the content produced has featured white, non-hispanic performers regardless of the demographic of audiences. While there have been pocket eras in which films starring Asian, Black, and Latin performers were produced for their corresponding audiences, the overwhelming norm since the inception of the American film industry has been that movies have been made by white people, and have mostly starred white people. As far back as the silent era, Hollywood studios recognized the profit potential in dedicating a portion of production to films aimed at racially segregated populations of Asians and Blacks, while White Hispanic performers were regularly featured in general releases. As pocket populations became more of a diaspora, Asians and Blacks were relegated to heavily stereotyped roles that we recognize now as racially insensitive at best. During the Civil Rights movement, the public call for better representation helped to integrate people of color, but it is only within the last twenty or so years that films made by American Blacks, Latinos and Asians have come to be seen as mainstream films.

We’ve definitely come a long way from Birth of a Nation to Black Panther, and from Fu Manchu to Crazy Rich Asians.

Aside from a few high-profile characters in period films, an occasional dance number, and the exploitation of race relations in the films of the 1950s and 60s, it was the Blaxploitation and Chop Socky films of the 1970s that truly established a new norm for strong, lead characters from disenfranchised communities. When films like Shaft, Billy Jack, and Enter the Dragon travelled from drive-ins and grind-houses to suburban multi-plex movie theaters, their success became proof of the public appetite for more diverse storytelling. Television would soon follow, and Americans became accustomed to seeing people of all colors and creeds with regularity.

While this all represents progress, there was still a preponderance of type-casting. Most of the characters portrayed by non-white actors in the 1970s and 80s were criminals or broad comic relief. By the late 1980s, the rise of hip-hop and anime instigated a new acceptance of non-white culture that fostered the wellspring of diversity that we now take for granted.

With any correction, there is risk of overcompensation. Entertainment conglomerates are always looking to establish new markets, and since the 1980s diversity programming has been a lucrative subset of the pop culture audience. But over the past six to eight years there has been a culture shift. As conservative Americans came to embrace cult-of-personality leaders who thrive on racially charged language, the grassroots opposition to diversity programming grew into a voting majority within certain political conventions. The observation among right-wing voters was that the liberal media was pushing an agenda that didn’t reflect the actual cultural and spiritual make-up of American society. The standpoint of the left-wing has been that all people regardless of race, religion or creed deserve representation in the media and more representation is always better. Whether you consider yourself conservative or an activist for social justice, this is the crux of the culture war.

In the last couple of years the main battlefield in the culture war has been the MCU.

The traditional business model for an entertainment conglomerate is to identify the largest demographic within their overall audience and invest in keeping them engaged. According to statistical analysis website Morningconsult.com, the primary demo for the MCU is millennials, who comprise 40% of the audience. 25% of the Marvel fanbase is a combination of baby boomers & Gen Xers, while Gen Zers account for just 9% of Marvel fans.

A marketing director worth their salt would study the political and social motivators of their largest pocket consumer, and bank on the importance of social issues to that one demographic –even if it is irksome to a rather vocal subset of Boomers & Gen Xers. So if we were to make a kind of political division and assume that half of the Boomers and Gen Xers are against the Diversity push, we are looking at 12% of the overall fanbase. No corporation makes decisions on behalf of that small of a dissenting opinion, and especially not if they truly believe it to be a minority viewpoint.

From a point of accurate representation, those who have a problem with the progressive stance on gender and special interest would do better to quiet the more bigoted voices among their ranks and stake their claim on data that corporations actually review. Because there is plenty of data that points to over-representation and they don’t need to (and shouldn’t) resort to racist or sexist rants. I say this as one-half of a biracial couple.

For instance, according to the Pew Research Center, roughly half (50%) of the United States’ population is male and half is female. About 0.5% of adults 18-24 identify as transgender, and 0.3% of adults 65 and older identify as transgender. That’s less than 1/2 of one percent of the US population. So fair representation on screen would be less than 1 transgender character per 200 non-trans characters.

That same 0.4% is included as part of the total percentage of Americans that identifies as lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender, which is 5.6%, but according to Gallup Polls, when asked what portion of the population is LGBT, most Americans overestimate that number to be 24%. So rather than one-in-seventeen characters on screen presented as LGBT, we are sometimes seeing one-in-four (or more).

In Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness we open on a wedding between a Caucasian Woman and an African-American Man. According to the US Census Bureau, 4.6% of married Black American women and 10.8% of married Black American men had a non-Black spouse. 8.5% of married Black men and 3.9% of married Black women had a White spouse. So that on-screen coupling is representative of less than 9% of marriages in the USA. The only other married couple to get any screen time in that film are America Chavez’ two moms. One in 10 LGBT Americans are married to a same-sex spouse. That’s 10% of 5.6% of the US population, or one in 178 Americans (which would be two of 356). Combined, those two on-screen relationships is incalculably misrepresentative of current American marriage statistics, since 100% of the marriages depicted are non-representative of the most common couplings in our society.

In Thor: Love and Thunder, there are four primary heroes: Thor, Jane, Valkyrie, Korg. One-half of them is presented as LGBT, which is more than double the perceived percentage –and nine times the actual LGBT population in the USA. That is a 900% over-representation.

Overcompensation is a common form of restitution. It is generally acceptable to initiate some kind of affirmative action in order to right a wrong, but when the scales tip too far in the other direction the cure becomes worse than the condition that required it and support for such programs diminishes; intentions of goodwill can breed resentment. While there is certainly bigotry in this country, it’s an over-simplification (and disingenuous) to assume bigotry as the primary opposition to diversity. I think the push-back is something of a referendum on fairness –actual and perceived, and framing the complaint in these terms is much more likely to lead to better representation overall.

STREAMING USER DEMOGRAPHICS BY RACE

Writ large, diversity makes things better, but that comes with a caveat or two. It certainly has great potential to broaden appeal, but diversity for the sake of diversity and without verisimilitude will ring false, be seen as disingenuous, and run the risk of offending the intended audience. Big, tent-pole films have a large target demographic and therefore more special interest groups therein to be catered to. Without considering the proportional make-up of the audience it’s easy to fail the core demographic while pandering to the few. Ironically, it usually comes down to story. As long as the story rings true, features likable heroes who inspire aspiration and well-written villains with clear motivations, audiences have proven that they are quite accepting of new ideas and expansive representation.

AND NOW… AN EDITORIAL

Woke-ism (for lack of clear definition) is not destroying the MCU or the DCEU or Star Wars.
Some of these films have an element of wokeness and some of those films aren’t good films, but it’s not the wokeness that makes them bad. It’s a fundamental misunderstanding of what these films are, and an insistence on fixing something that wasn’t broken. Phase One should have been a template for how to do things. But rather than build a parallel track aimed at an expanded audience while simultaneously continuing the existing story arc, a decision was made to abruptly change existing characters to fit a perceived audience that doesn’t really care about superhero films –at least not in significant-enough numbers to replace the audience this new direction had the potential to alienate.

If the same time and care that went into Phases 1, 2, and 3 (specifically 2 and 3) had been levied into building a completely different MCU reality, when the time came to merge it with the primary MCU, audiences would be hooked. And while you can’t please everyone, there would be a great opportunity to pick sides and make money from both.

I never quite understood all the hate thrown at Captain Marvel. I thought it was a good movie and Brie Larsen nailed the underestimated brashness of a godlike being. One could argue that it lacked a central villain, but it sets up the Kree-Skrull War of the forthcoming Secret Invasion and gave us a relatable, flawed, but never-say-die character that happens to be a woman, and was believably written as one. Similarly, Black Widow is among my top three favorite MCU films. There is a truth in the estranged family device that gave us a few great new characters while giving a fantastic send-off to the character and actress that was the glue of the Avengers. It turns out that her superpower was endurance and determination. If that’s not inspiring, I don’t know what is.

But I do understand the backlash that has greeted so much of the Phase Four projects. They are tonally very different films and series. They seem only tangentially connected to what we’ve already seen (by ham-fisted cameos and blatant set-up mechanics).

The perfect platform from which to launch a believable and authentic-to-the-comics sermon on wokeness would have been in a relaunch of the X-Men. If that universe was built separately and if phase 2 or 3 of THAT universe led to an Avengers vs X-men story, it would have allowed for the natural progression of the pre Phase 4 MCU until it came head-to-head with the diverse-by-birth Marvel Mutants, who were always stand-ins for minorities of all cultures, colors and creeds. As long as there is a deeper analogy than otherness, it could have (and could still) worked beautifully.

Data Sources:
Streaming service subscriber data from Nielsen.
MCU demographics from morningconsult.com.
LGBT/Trans data from Pew Research.
Interracial marriage stats from US Census Bureau
Additional polling data from Gallup