Comment by beckyb | Hacker News Reader

Comment by beckyb | Hacker News Reader

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disclaimer - I am trans.

With that said, a lot of the problem stems from the fact that a popular author from the "outside" culture is going to have a lot more influence on what others in the outside culture believe/understand about the "inside" culture.

As an example from my community, just about every movie written about transgender people by a cisgender person spends a lot of time showing the subject putting on makeup or wearing heels, implying that the essence of what it means to be a trans woman is wearing makeup or high heeled shoes... But it isn't the case.

That would almost be ok, but the popular movie is going to get a lot more airtime than an indie movie made by a trans person which shows what our real lives are like. In fact, that movie may not get made at all.

So it's worse having the popular movie out there, making money off of our lives, but misrepresenting them at the same time. (And this is all assuming that no harm was intended... it's still harmful, and it happens all the time.)

Popular movies are popular because they have been optimized for popularity. It's easier to optimize for popularity if one isn't constrained by the burden of being accurate.

Interestingly, this suggests that accurate portrayals of marginalized group X probably do exist, for most values of X. But their accuracy prevents them from becoming popular, so most people in the complement of X are either unaware these portrayals exist, or aren't interested in them. Popularity partly involves pandering to confirmation bias, so portrayals of X that land too far outside X[complement]'s biases are in danger of being dead on arrival in terms of popularity.

There also seems to be some evidence we can overcome this in the long run through a kind of successive approximation. Portrayals of (for example) homosexuality are more accurate today than they were two generations ago, partly because each successive popular portrayal built on the increasing accuracy of the previous one.

In time, we may see the same thing happen here, though that may come as small comfort to the folks who are living through the transition.

Hollywood/mainstream scripts very rarely survive the gauntlet of director, producers, funders, product placement "partners", and studio executives entirely unchanged. All it takes is one person in the chain saying "this doesn't seem relatable to the American public" to force in stereotypes. The bigger problem is most of those aforementioned individuals are from a rather homogenous group so their "horizons" aren't exactly very broad and they are the ones who control the purse strings.

An indie film about transgender people is far more likely to be representative of reality regardless of who writes the script because those films often self select for funding that doesn't come with the same kind of strings attached.

product placement: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KjB6r-HDDI0

(somewhere I once ran across a discussion of "Starship Troopers" the book vs. "Starship Troopers" the movie, complete with a matrix of reactions depending upon how ironically one thought the ideas presented in each should be taken)

All films' portrayal of anything is crap when it's something familiar to you. (Or crucially, I suppose, more familiar to you the viewer than to those responsible.)

I occasionally fantasize about making a film with a very unrealistic portrayal of writers.

Well put.

Though I think it should bear an asterisk: the stakes are higher for some people. Based on my experience, I think movies about musicians are often pretty stilted, but that kind of thing can be brushed off a little easier for me than misrepresenting a person's innate identity can be for them (as in the parent comment's position). And then—enter the always waiting host of philosophical questions.

edit: Felt like adding a little to my comment. I've always figured art was as much an exploration as an expression. I'm not sure anyone should be judged for a single work in that case—but there are abundant nuances to that kind of statement so don't hold it against me.s

I get this sentiment.

I also think that the problem is misrepresentation then, and not authorship.

We live in the age of YouTube and almost unlimited access.

Any group can get together, make a film, put it up on YouTube, etc.

The thing is, membership in a group is no longer sacrosanct. Ask all the women who opposed men entering their space by being trans. Further, freedom of speech guarantees you can never have a monopoly or even majority of the portrayal of anything.

You do have some options though. Someone says “oh, I saw X movie, I know all about you”. Better than saying “that movie sucks” is “you really should check out Y. They really went out of their way to get it right”.

Black, Hispanic, etc portrayals have all gone through “lazy, stupid, subservient, gangster, normal guy in sweater with honest job, formerly criminal, now reformed older wiser person” till finally successfull, intelligent maybe lawyer, doctor, whatever person who is X first, ethnic second.

Having a few films at the ready is the best but most expensive solution I suspect.

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