A bulletproof black man is making White Twitter crap its pants.
Netflix dropped Marvel’s “Luke Cage” last Friday, and it’s the streaming platform’s only superhero feature to date that stars a nonwhite lead. Luke Cage (played by Mike Colter) is a man gifted with extraordinary super strength, which gives him the ability to pick up a washing machine or withstand a round of bullets.
Created by Cheo Hodari Coker (“Ray Donovan”), the show is based on the classic Marvel series, and the first of the current Marvel Cinematic Universe shows to feature a black man at the center. The comic books first hit stores in 1972 under the name “Luke Cage, Hero for Hire.” It would later be amended to “Luke Cage, Power Man,” intended to cash in on the success of blaxploitation films like “Black Caesar” and “Coffy.” In “Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song,” Melvin Van Peebles played Sweetback, another indestructible man of color.
Although the show has received mostly positive reviews from critics, there’s one demographic that’s less jazzed about Marvel’s ode to black strength and resilience: white people. On Twitter, some viewers of the Caucasian persuasion took “Luke Cage” to task for its portrayal of white people — namely because the show doesn’t portray them at all. Featuring a deep bench of talented actors — including Alfre Woodard (“12 Years a Slave”), Rosario Dawson (“Grindhouse”) and Mahershala Ali (“Moonlight”) — only two white characters recur often enough to appear in six or more episodes of the freshman season.
Angered by the show’s predominantly black cast, some white viewers took to Twitter to label it “racist.” Here’s a sample:
Lack of white people in Luke Cage makes me uncomfortable. This show is racist, how is this on Netflix???
— ᴇʟᴇᴄᴛʀɪᴄ★ʟᴏᴠᴇʟʏʟᴀɴᴅ (@CommanderLovely) October 2, 2016
im not racist but :/ why is luke cage so political :/ why do they talk about being black all the time :/ where are the white characters :/
— MINE'S CHOCOLATE (@apronikas) October 3, 2016
Is it me or the new Netflix. Luke Cage a little racist. Notice it's mostly black where is the diversity. @LIVE_COVERAGE
— LiberalsUnited (@RockerThompson) September 28, 2016
Even a “woke” white viewer had to confront her own initial discomfort with the show, which she then shared on Twitter:
Watching #LukeCage I was shocked to find racism in myself I didn't know was there. This is my confession & an invitation to watch @LukeCage. http://pic.twitter.com/vMuduSdu1i
— April Del Rario (@AprilDelRario) October 4, 2016
The very thing that makes “Luke Cage” distinctive is precisely what upsets these viewers: It’s unapologetically black. Coker, who previously wrote the screenplay for the Biggie Smalls biopic “Notorious,” fills nearly every inch of his frame with black faces — particularly in scenes of the crowded Harlem nightclub where Cage works. Its commitment to blackness astutely flips the script on the racial status quo in Hollywood, where people of color are forced to the margins of the screen or rendered invisible. To watch “Luke Cage” is to be reminded that a great many films, even in 2016, don’t contain a single black character, let alone one as fully fleshed out as Cage.
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The unbearable whiteness of the industry reared its ugly head recently during an interview with Tim Burton, in which the director appeared to be having what Twitter was having. Burton, responding to the lack of diversity in his new film “Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children,” threw up his hands at the need to cast people of color. “I remember back when I was a child watching ‘The Brady Bunch’ and they started to get all politically correct,” the goth auteur said. “Like, OK, let’s have an Asian child and a black.”
The movie, starring Eva Green (“Penny Dreadful”) as an avian headmistress who watches over a group of children gifted with unusual abilities, finds Burton up to his usual twee, Hot Topic-styled antics. “Miss Peregrine,” however, is notable for one unfortunate piece of trivia: It’s the first film in the director’s 30-year career to feature a person of color in a lead role and the character is a cannibalistic villain. Samuel L. Jackson (“Pulp Fiction”) plays Barron, who eats the eyes of children in a quest to achieve eternal life. Jackson appeared in a similar role last year in Matthew Vaughn’s surprise hit “Kingsman: The Secret Service.” His billionaire megalomaniac in “Kingsman,” though, had a taste for McDonald’s, not Justin Bieber fans.
While it’s easy to single out Burton, whose movies are whiter than a three-day-old corpse, he’s one of many directors who almost never casts people of color. Woody Allen hasn’t featured a black man in a consequential part since Chiwetel Ejiofor in “Melinda and Melinda,” which was released in 2004. He’s directed 12 films since then. Filmmakers ranging from the Coen brothers to Wes Anderson have been called out for the lack of black faces in their expansive ensembles. A Funny or Die video spotlighted the Coens’ “No Country for Old Men,” “The Big Lebowski,” “Fargo,” “The Man Who Wasn’t There,” and “A Serious Man” for featuring “almost no black people.”
A popular video series from Dylan Marron (“Welcome to Night Vale”) made a similar point: If you counted up all the lines spoken by people of color in a major motion picture — examples range from “American Hustle” and “The Lord of the Rings” to the “Harry Potter” movies — the total usually adds up to less than a minute. In Nicole Holofcener’s “Enough Said,” the only nonwhite character with lines is a maid. Films like “(500) Days of Summer” and “Her” cast people of color as waiters, bus drivers and nameless co-workers, all of whom appear for the briefest of moments.
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