The Mary Sue: As promised in my earlier piece, here’s a little breakdown of the Annenberg Inclusion Initiative’s study on 1,100 major films released between 2007 and 2017. In short: it’s not great. The percentage of female characters who speak in a film has barely risen over the course of the past ten years, and that’s without taking race, sexuality, or disability into account.
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This article represents the issues of contemporary society. Overall, as a society we discuss the issues that are behind the bright lights of our society but despite discussing these issues we do very little to address them. As stated in this article there is a lack of representation of women, ethnic diversity, age, and the LGBTQ community in theatre. Theatre is meant to be a platform to present contemporary issues to society in a format in which society can swallow it and because of the fact that we are simply acknowledging the issues rather than facing them and working to promote awareness and remedy them we are worse than the people who don't realize the reality of these issues. By refusing to address these issues not only as a society but even in the material that we produce for our own society we are shoving the issues that matter to many people to the back of our nation's mind as we quickly move on and pretend as though those issues do not exist.
Obviously, seeing these statistics laid out in indisputable numbers is saddening. Hollywood's general liberally big names have been talking about the need for better representation for years, but it seems just talking about these things doesn't work: they may actually need to invest in projects that feature minorities. However, I am hopeful for the coming years. This is not optimism, in fact, it's for a fairly cynical reason: making media has always been a numbers game and, as the author pointed out, with box-office hits like Black Panther and more recently Crazy Rich Asians, I don't think the major studios can literally afford to ignore diversity anymore. Moreover, the backlash for erasing the visibility of minorities is more vocal than ever. A few years ago Scarlett Johansson portrayed the lead character of Ghost in the Shell, a character which should have been portrayed by an Asian actor. More recently she withdrew from portraying a transgender man in Rub and Tug. From her comments, it did not seem that she has realised the damage of her taking these roles, but rather that she/her publicist realised that this time the damage to her image may be irreparable.
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