Throughline - Everyone Everywhere All At Once

Episode Date: March 23, 2023

This year's Oscars were one of the most diverse in history, in all kinds of ways. Everything Everywhere All At Once swept some of the biggest categories, notching incredible victories for Asian and Asian American actors, directors, and writers. At the same time, huge gaps persist – to take just one example, only seven women have ever been nominated for Best Director, and only three have won.What does it mean to be seen? Can you measure it in numbers? Does representation matter? And if so, how much?In this episode, we take a trip through film history to explore how these questions have played out over the last century, and where we might have yet to go — starting when the American film industry was incredibly diverse, and the most successful director in Hollywood was a woman.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Support for this podcast and the following message come from Autograph Collection Hotels, with over 300 independent hotels around the world, each exactly like nothing else. Autograph Collection is part of the Marriott Bonvoy portfolio of hotel brands. Find the unforgettable at AutographCollection.com. It's April 14th, 1969, Monday, in Los Angeles, California, and the 41st Academy Awards are just about to get underway. All the biggest stars of the day glamorously make their way down the red carpet. The nominees are a who's who of A-list Hollywood.

Peter O'Toole. Rosamund's been dead for seven years. Katherine Hepburn. I have a confession. I don't much like our children. Gene Wilder. Mr. Bialystock, I cannot finish near these conditions. You're making me extremely nervous.

Barbara Streisand. I'm a baker on a plate full of onion rolls. Nobody recognizes me, listen. And then, with millions of viewers tuning in at home, the ceremony begins. At first, it seems like any other year. The nominees for Best Performance by an Actor are... The next award is for the Best Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role. This year's nominees for the Best Achievement in Cinematography are...

But when it gets to the Best Director category... There's a group of five very prominent actresses from different generations who announce the award for Best Director. We are assembled here somewhat reluctantly to make the next award. Ingrid Bergman, Rosalind Russell, Diane Carroll, Jane Fonda, and Natalie Wood. This is film historian Shelley Stamp. They are set to announce the nominees for Best Director and then the winner, right? Instead, what they do is they say...

This year, the nominated directors have done their best to make female stars obsolete. These five films are directed by men. There are not significant female characters in these films, and this is a problem. It's 1969 at the Academy Awards ceremony, right? So that's how long, right, these questions have been raised. We've been talking about them for a long, long, long, long time.

1973. Hello, my name is Sashene Littlefeather. I'm Apache. I'm representing Marlon Brando this evening. And he has asked me to tell you that he very regretfully cannot accept this very generous award. And the reasons for this being are the treatment of American Indians today by the film industry and on television in movie reruns. 1990. We've got five great films here, but there is one film missing from this list that

deserves to be on it because, ironically, it might tell the biggest truth of all, and that's do the right thing. 2016. Well, I'm here at the Academy Awards, otherwise known as the

White People's Choice Awards. It's not that nothing has changed. 2019. Black Panther got a Best Picture nod as well. 2020. Nobody saw Parasite coming and the night they were about to have. 2021. Chloe Zhao winning Best Director for Nomadland.

2022. And the Oscar goes to... Encanto! And of course, 2023. And the Oscar goes to... Everything, Everyone. All of them. Honestly, in some ways, we've actually seen a lot of progress.

But how do we measure progress? And does progress always mean that it's also meaningful? It had been something I'd been toying with and trying to sort of grapple with since probably 2014, 2015. This is Kristen Warner, associate professor at Cornell University, whose work focuses on race, media and representation. And back when she started grappling with all of this, she wasn't just thinking about whether progress was being made. She wanted to grapple with what progress really means. I was just frustrated by folks not wanting to look at the whole picture of it. People like multicultural, multi-bodied, you know, products, projects.

But that doesn't fulfill the question of what representation is. Representation is both visual, but it's also audible. But that doesn't fulfill the question of what representation is. Representation is both visual, but it's also audible. It's also resonant. What it's not is simple. In my mind, it was like their salad only had lettuce and they just decided to add all these croutons. They were just like, well, just find them. Put the people on the screen.

Now, depending on how you look at it, croutons are either the best part of a salad, because, you know, carbs, or the most superfluous part of it, not really adding any nutrients. Okay, I'll stop with the metaphor now. Point is, representation can be read in different ways, especially when we see it on screen. Welcome back to the movies at AMC. Whether we're downing popcorn at the movie theater or in our living rooms, watching with headphones on or in surround sound, there's something almost magical about watching a film.

Three, two, everything. Letting ourselves be transported. It's just a random rearrangement of particles in a vibrating superposition. To a different time and place. The African kingdom of Dahomey is at a crossroads. Maybe we go to escape. Just breathe. Breathe. The African kingdom of Dahomey is at a crossroads. Maybe we go to escape. Just breathe. Breathe.

Maybe we go to be entertained. To experience wonder. Outcasts, that's all they see. Maybe we go to be seen. I see. But what does it mean to be seen? Can you measure it in numbers? Does it reflect reality or even shape it?

And does that add up to progress? In this episode, we're going to take a trip through film history to explore how these questions have played out over the last century and where we might have yet to go. Coming up, we travel back to a time when the American film industry was incredibly diverse and when the most successful director in Hollywood was a woman. This is Quincy from Kalamazoo, Michigan, and you're listening to ThruLine by NPR. Hey listeners, it's Ramtin. We know that sponsored messages can pull you right out of the listening experience. So now you can get rid of those sponsored messages while still supporting the show with ThruLine+. You can start by clicking the subscribe button on our show page in Apple Podcasts. in other currencies. Send, spend, or receive money internationally, and always get the real-time

mid-market exchange rate with no hidden fees. Download the Wise app today or visit wise.com. T's and C's apply. Part 1. The Loudest Voices of a Silent Era. A little over a hundred years ago, if you went to go see a silent film on a Friday night, this is the kind of thing you would have heard. No dialogue or booming sound system, but instead, live piano or organ music accompanying this new invention. Film. And these silent films were what got people like film historian Shelley Stamp to start looking into this history in the first place.

One of the first films I saw that really ignited this for me and that became a kind of through line through a lot of, many, many years of work is a 1913 film called Traffic and Souls. The Traffic and Souls is to be shown uptown at the Republic on West 42nd Street, a Belasco theater, upon the ending of the run of The Temperamental Journey in That House. Variety Magazine, December 5th, 1913. It's a film, it's shot on location in New York City in 1913. It was a film about the phenomenon that was then called white slavery, which is forced prostitution.

It is immigrant women and women from rural communities traveling to larger urban centers who are particularly in danger of being kidnapped and sold into prostitution. When a film has no audible dialogue, reading faces, deciphering gestures, and following lips is essential to following the storyline. What today we might see as overacting, borderline melodramatic, was necessary at a time when body language

was the way you told a story. Traffic in Souls is grainy black and white, just under 90 minutes, which might have felt like watching a Lord of the Rings movie, especially back then when films lasted around 30 minutes at most. And it was Universal's top moneymaker in 1913. It was incredibly popular, incredibly controversial because it was thought to be sexually explicit. You know, to our eye, it doesn't look explicit at all, but it has scenes that take place inside of brothels, for instance. This was a film that would make the equivalent of

10 plus million dollars today. And it wasn't just one of those crowd-pleasing Marvel type of films. It was a complex, controversial story that was exploring the anxieties that young white women's city transplants found themselves in. And on top of that, it had not one, but two leading actors who were women. And so naturally, it was really, really popular with young women. Remember, this was a film from 1913, not 2023. And some of you might be wondering, why is this the first time I'm hearing about this? In part, it's because the film industry was just starting out.

Power hasn't yet consolidated in the major studios. If you have some talent and ambition and drive and maybe a little bit of money, you can get your foot in the door. In 1913, the first Black-owned studio, the Foster Photo Play Company, also made the first film by a Black director with an entirely Black cast. This is a period of kind of extraordinary development of female filmmakers. Alice Guy-Blaché, who has her own company, Solax. Marion Wong, who sets up the Mandarin Film Company in Oakland, California. She writes and directs the first feature film with an all Asian American cast in 1915, right? All of the top screenwriters are women. Helen Holmes, who was a action adventure serial star, she starred in the Hazards of Helen series. She wrote and directed some of the episodes of that series. And she said,

if I want really thrilling action, I have to write it myself. She said, the men won't write it for me. If I want to do something really daring, they won't write it for me. I have to write it myself. And one of the most prominent film directors of that time was also a woman.

Lois Weber, who is Universal's top director in the mid-1910s. I'm not saying she's the top female director. She's the top director at Universal in the 1910s. Florence Lois Weber was born in 1879 in Pennsylvania. She was considered a child prodigy and toured the country as a concert pianist, starting when she was just 16. When she was 31, she acted in and directed her first silent film. After that, her career takes off. She moves to L.A. to be part of Universal City and then becomes Universal's top director in the mid-1910s. She makes a series of very high profile, very controversial feature films on really key social issues of the day.

Movies like The People vs. John Doe. Capital Punishment. Hop, The Devil's Brew. Drug Addiction. Shoes. Women's Wage Equity. Where Are My Children? Birth Control and Abortion.

She said something very simple and profound. She says, I see things that men don't see. Her films did very, very well at the box office. It really kind of makes a name for herself, right? And then in 1917, she leaves Universal to form her own production company. She's one of the first directors to do this, to form her own, goes out on her own, and strikes an incredibly lucrative distribution deal with Universal so that she becomes the highest paid director in the industry, man, woman, or child,

as one commentator said at the time. This magnificent production adds further laurels to the undisputed crown of Lois Weber and establishes a new standard of achievement in feature photo plays. Lois Weber has given the world a matchless series of photodramatic masterpieces. Motion Picture News, April 14, 1917. She's one of the top filmmakers in early Hollywood, period. Right alongside men like D.W. Griffith and Cecil B. DeMille. She's talked about, you know, alongside their names as kind of pioneering filmmakers in the field. She's not as well known now as they are.

They're called the fathers of American cinema. She's not usually included in that. With war ended in Europe, the American suffragettes resumed their own private war with the White House. But the opposition was crumbling. Lois Weber was making her films during a particularly turbulent time in the U.S. There was World War I, which sent nearly three million men into the U.S. Army, creating a vacuum in the labor force that women quickly stepped into, and from which they intensified their political activism. By the time the war ended in 1918 and the men started to return,

the women's rights movement had real momentum. Just two years later, women would gain the right to vote. After this period that I've described of incredible opportunity and incredible success for female filmmakers in particular, there is a real shift in the early 1920s. The change is really fast and really decisive. Hollywood. You're probably thinking about the Hollywood sign on the hill, the Walk of Fame, the sprawling studio spaces that take up whole blocks,

probably an equinox or two. But it wasn't anything like that in the early 1920s, until filmmakers realized what California offered. Varied landscapes, abundant sunshine, cheap land, and lax labor laws. Production companies start building facilities there, and it becomes, you know, within a few years, the industry is really centered. And as the industry grew, it consolidated. It becomes very difficult for independent production companies, black-owned production companies really struggled to survive in the early 1920s. You know them. MGM, Warner Brothers, Paramount. Starting in the 1920s, they began taking over the industry,

buying up theater chains so they'd have a lock on distribution. And in order to do that, they needed money. They have to borrow a lot of money from Wall Street. And in doing so, they buy into a kind of Wall Street corporate culture. Think Wolf of Wall Street. Hyper-masculine, chest-thumping. Now imagine that being injected into the film industry. By the 20s, the studios really were not interested in having women in positions of creative control

behind the scenes. In less than a decade, women went from leading the charge to sitting in the backseat, and Lois Weber was no exception. She's really struggling. Her production company has collapsed. She makes relatively few feature films in the 1920s. The kinds of films she's interested in making are less popular than they were in the 1910s. The last film she makes is in 1934.

It's her one and only sound film. So she continues to try to work, but is not really successful. She dies in 1939. It's an incredible loss, just an incredible loss, to have, you know, a whole generation of female filmmakers and female screenwriters, and I haven't even mentioned female star producers. The depth of female creative control in the 1910s in early Hollywood is really profound.

And the loss of my reading where two women are represented as friends. They are confidants, of course, in Racine and the Greek tragedies. They are now and then mothers and daughters, but almost without exception, they are shown in their relation to men. A Room of One's Own is this very long book-length essay that Virginia Woolf wrote about 100 years ago. It's very long, it's very dense, it's subtly hilarious, really funny.

The book is about women writers. There's a section about women as characters, like in fiction. It was strange to think that all the great women of fiction were, until Jane Austen's day, not only seen by the other sex, but seen only in relation to the other sex. And how small a part of a woman's life is that? When I read this essay, I feel this wonderful sense of resonance, of being seen across all this time. Coming up, a little test. Hello, this is Jose Rodriguez from Tampa, Florida, and you're listening to ThruLine on NPR.

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Must be 21 or older to purchase. It's the 1980s. Alison Bechdel is living in New York in a shoebox-sized apartment, drawing a comic strip and trying to get by. I used to study karate, and I hung out with all these women at my karate club. And one day, my friend Liz Wallace, who I did karate with, told us this funny story. She had a rule about movies. And the next day, my comic strip was due and I didn't have any ideas.

I was like, what am I going to write about? What am I going to write about? And I remembered Liz's funny thing. I turned it into a scene between these two women. Two dykey-looking women. A black woman and a white woman walking down the street together. Want to see a movie and get popcorn? As they talk, they're trying to decide what movie to go see. I don't know. I have this rule, see?

And one of them starts saying her rule. I only go to the movie if it satisfies three basic requirements. One, it has to have at least two women in it. Who? Two. Who talk to each other. About. Three. basic requirements. One, it has to have at least two women in it who, two, who talk to each other about three, something besides a man. And the punchline is

last movie I was able to see was Alien. The two women in it talk to each other about the monster. I guess I'm the sort of, I am the namesake. Let's put it that way. I am the namesake of the Bechdel test. The rules in that early comic became known as the Bechdel test, which is sort of funny to Allison because it wasn't a one-off. Her comic strip called Dykes to Watch Out For

ran for more than two decades. It's often cited as one of the earliest representations of lesbians in pop culture. And that part was intentional because it's not what Allison grew up with. My favorite show as a very small child was The Rifleman. This, like, cowboy movie about this guy and his gun. You know, I would never watch that now, but there was something very appealing about it to me as a kid. You know, about this guy who had so much power. The little man with the rifle was the best man with six guns.

My boy is. Oh, he was living in the nation, so he used to call him The Rifleman. He's the best man with six guns. My boy is. While he was living in the nations, they used to call him the Rifleman. He's the greatest shot in the world. Difficulties over segregation and discrimination exist in every city, in every state of the Union, producing in many cities a rising tide of discontent. What do we want? Equality!

When do we want it? Now! What do we want? Equality! When do we want it? I grew up in a small town in Pennsylvania in the 1960s, so my childhood is very aligned with that decade. And the thing I remember, a very powerful force in my life,

was just seeing all the rampant misogyny that was going on in the culture. It's become apparent in recent years that in order to bring about any change in women's rights, women must be convinced that in a male-oriented society, they deserve equality. You know, much later, I would learn about feminism and start to, you know, understand what was going on. But as a kid, it was just like this, you know, assault on women that I took kind of personally. What's your deal? Leave us alone. Allison's work started to feel more urgent in the 1980s during the AIDS epidemic. One thing that's really hard to convey to young people today is how really nasty people were to gay people.

History disease known as the gay plague has become an epidemic unprecedented in the history of American medicine. Mainstream news and politicians treated AIDS like a punishment gay people had coming to them, stoking panic and moralizing rather than trying to understand what was happening. Medical experts say the disease kills four out of every ten people it strikes and that it threatens to explode in the nation's city. Allison wanted herself and her queer friends to be seen. And to be seen as human. I was like, oh, if we can make ourselves visible to the world, which doesn't seem to recognize us or see us,

then how can they not help but like us? How can they not want to give us civil rights? That was the thinking, you know? We just have to make ourselves visible. That's the first step. It would turn out to be much more complicated, a much more complex dance, as I would learn over the ensuing decades. I learned something from reading about you. The Bechdel test. Mm-hmm. It's nuts.

But then I looked at the test and I thought, okay, it doesn't seem too unreasonable. And then I looked at my films and I realized not one of my films passed that test. The Bechdel test started to blow up in the early 2000s as feminist film students picked it up and started writing about it online and posting videos where they applied the test to the movies they were watching. It's quite extraordinary actually how many movies don't pass this test because it's not even a sign of whether it's a feminist movie or whether it's a good movie just that there's female presence in it and that they actually are engaging about things other than men. And by now, passing the Bechdel test actually seems like a pretty low bar to clear. Let's take a couple of this year's Best Picture

nominees for a spin. You saved my life. Thank you. Avatar, The Way of Water. You'll transform you avatar the way of water yep transform into a superhero elvis sorry nope enough with your tricks i know you're in there whoa everything everywhere all at once that passes with flying colors i can't go what do you mean you can't go test tomorrow i have to study top gun maverick surprisingly yes animals don't always flee this is how we want to teach our daughters to defend themselves? By fleeing? Not fleeing, but... Women Talking? Yeah, it's literally in the title. And this is all great news, right?

That finally, we can have multiple movies with at least two women talking to each other about something other than men. But is that all? Does it make you feel uncomfortable where it's like, it was this masterminded idea that has come to be the representation of representation? Yes. Well, yeah, you know, I was uncomfortable when this first started happening, and it took me a long time to sort it out and figure out why. But then I realized that was kind of the root of it. Do you remember, like, what were people saying as to why they were saying, this is not legitimate, this is not something that you can measure? They were saying quite rightly that it does not guarantee that the movie is, A, going to be any good, or B,

that it might not even be a feminist movie, you know? If you think about it, they're pretty superficial criteria. It would be easy to make a movie that fulfilled them in name, but kind of missed the point. There can be movies that completely fail the Bechdel test that are great feminist movies, or at least have a feminist perspective. You want to see some motherfucking silly? If I have to tell you to shut up one more time, I'm going to shut you up. I think of that Quentin Tarantino movie, Jackie Brown, about this flight attendant who gets caught up in this crazy,

some kind of illegal activity. I just came over here to talk to you. To talk? The way I see it, you and me got one motherfucking thing to talk about. One thing. And that's what you are willing to do for me. She's the only woman in the movie as far as I can remember, but you really get a sense of her subjectivity of her humanity. She's a fully fleshed character. But the movie doesn't pass the Bechdel test, you know? So there's all kinds of exceptions like that. Well, no offense to my girl Jane Austen, but not every single man

is looking for a wife. We're going to Fire Island. Fun for the whole gay family. Fire Island came out in the summer of 2022. It's a rom-com about a group of gay men who spend a week-long vacation on Fire Island, New York. The film's only major female character is their friend whose house they stay at. And it took some flack after a journalist tweeted about it. Quote, so Fire Island gets an F- on the Bechdel test in a whole new way. But Allison, the test's namesake, came to its defense. It did seem ridiculous that a movie about Asian gay men should be criticized for not passing the Bechdel test.

Because it did so many other wonderful things. You know, the men talked about women writers in the movie. The whole movie was based on a Jane Austen plot. So I thought it was pretty feminist in its way. The Bechdel test's three criteria are simple and straightforward, which means the test fails to capture the nuances, the complexities that characters and stories can hold. It may have moved the needle for some people,

but others are skeptical, like media professor Kristen Warner. I struggle with it for a host of reasons. It's just like, wouldn't it be nice or pleasant if women could talk about other things? And somehow the simplicity of that, because it's clear and clean, becomes a standard as opposed to a starting point. What if you're a feminist who also likes to talk about men? We can have all the conversations and talk about men if that is our interest and still be fully fledged, complicated, dimensional people. So that's part one of why I don't like it. The second part is that I think it is also very white. And I think particularly it speaks to the romance genre and the romance comedy genre, which is predominantly and has been historically white centered with white women and fleas.

And so I can understand if as white women, you're like, is that all we can talk about? But that's with white women as the center leads. What about women of color, Black women, BIPOC women who aren't leads as consistently? How can we be done with a conversation that we never really got to have? How can watching two black women talk about men when that is not actually a thing that happens consistently through mediated history? How can that be something we're tired of? We haven't seen it enough. Now that the table has been cleared for white women,

now that y'all have eaten, you know, like you're full, like clear the table and let's have another dish. Hey, wait, no, no, no, no, no. We we haven't gotten our food yet. Coming up, what it could look like if everyone got their dish. This is Margo Vanden Helder from San Francisco, California, and you're listening to ThruLine from NPR. Part 3. Plastic Representation. Bold 3. Detergent plus fabrics on. You two take care of labor. Call toll free. I grew up in the 80s and my parents were middle upper class black folks.

And in their minds, like what middle upper class meant was for everybody to have cable like cable was throughout the house whole project will collapse I had tv in my room and cable at five so I was heavily watching HBO and Showtime and Lifetime, you know, and all the stuff. Did I feel like I was missing something in not seeing enough of myself on screen? Not exactly. You got my stuff. Thank you. How much is this? I don't think this would fit you.

Well, I didn't ask if it would fit. I asked how much it was. For example, I was just thinking about this. I don't think this would fit you. Well, I didn't ask if it would fit. I asked how much it was. For example, I was just thinking about this. There is nothing in Pretty Woman that feels like representative of me at all. It's a movie starring Julia Roberts as a sex worker named Vivian and Richard Gere as a wealthy businessman who hires her to stay with him for a week. But there is something about the Vivian character, right? There's something about her friend Kit. We should get a pimp, you know. Carlos really digs here. And then he'll run our lives and take our money.

No, you're right. We say who, we say when, we say how much. I say who, I say when, I say how much. Like, there is something about when Kit says that in Pretty Woman that just, I say it to this day because it just, I understand exactly what she means. That gem of a line that brings you into the experience and that makes you find a way to be comfortable when there isn't anything in there technically for you. I mean, I think for a long time time that's how we all had to exist, be it if you were racially different or sexually different or in any way, right? We find

whatever gem, whatever thing that connects us, be it the emotionality, be it the soundtrack, be it the I say who, I say when, I say how much. That feeling of resonance stuck with her, and it would shape how she thinks about representation. There was always something else that I was fascinated with. There was always something else that would reel me in that didn't necessarily have to have that person that looked, had the same skin tone. So fast forward to the turn of the century. By now, Kristen was headed to college, and she noticed a shift was beginning to take place. There started to be more people who looked like her on TV.

I have five rules. Memorize them. Rule number one, don't bother sucking up. In romantic movies. What are you going to the dance with anyway? Spalding? Stupid. In action movies. Do you understand the words that are coming out of my mouth? Don't nobody understand the words that are coming out of your mouth, man.

In dramas. Ladies and gentlemen, presenting the dreams. Dreamettes, little girls. You're women now. I told you. Even Disney eventually hopped on board. I reckon you want a kiss? Kissing would be nice, yes. In 2009, they released The Princess and the Frog, featuring the first Black Disney princess.

I know exactly where I'm going. And that same year, I stand here today. the country inaugurated the first Black president. I never thought in my lifetime that it would happen. But it happened today. He represents change, hope, progress. There ain't nothing gonna stop me now cause I'm almost there.

There was so much, quote-unquote, post-race conversation. I think any talk of it being a post-racial America after my election was never realistic. I think it was... But there was a lot on that talk, though. Well, you know, I think, in fact, that talk was not only naive, but I think created some problems down the road. We didn't fully allow ourselves to imagine the next thing. We have lived with the repercussions of not doing the next thing. I often think about how Leslie Odom Jr., at the height of Hamilton's success and when he was on the Hollywood Reporter roundtable. Leslie Odom Jr. was one of the stars of the musical.

He played Aaron Burr, Hamilton's nemesis. He was like, I'm glad that I get to do this. I'm happy that I get to be in this show that is done so well. Imagine, if you would with me, if a white actor was having a similar situation as I'm having right now in this show, the kind of success of this show, there might be three or four offers a week for the next shows that you're going to do. There are no shows for me to do. I'm playing a blind cast character. I'm a black man playing a white character.

Colorblind casting is great, but you know what's better than colorblind casting? Roles that are actually written about you. While we are celebrating, we also have to ask the harder questions. We have to think harder about what it is we have accepted as audiences, as marginalized audiences. What is it that we have said, this is just fine, give us more of this. We won't ask for more. We lose ground when we do that, but because it's all we asked for, that's what we get. And we equate that with

progress. It is not dreary, but I think the plasticity of things makes it much more rosy than it probably is. Plasticity. That's a word Kristen uses a lot these days to sum up how she interprets a lot of this representation. Representation that feels artificial, like plastic. What the C-suites and the gatekeepers realized was folks aren't asking for a dimension. They're not asking for really thoughtful antiheroes. Like, they're not asking for Tony Sopranos that are of Middle Eastern descent. They're asking for bodies. We can give you as many bodies as you want. Like we can find them and put them in front

of you and you can count them. And because that counting is what we have defined as progress, we will get good grades. It's quantity over quality. And again, it's not that that's incorrect. It's just that it's incomplete. Kristen was honing in on this idea of plastic representation towards the end of Obama's presidency. Around the time hashtag representation matters and hashtag Oscars so white were bubbling up in the Twitterverse.

Around the time the Bechdel test was fully taking on a life of its own, becoming a representation litmus test, not just for women, but for other groups too. People of color, LGBTQ people. After all, it made progress seem so simple. And it was around the time, I think, the first trailers for Star Wars The Force Awakens started. Who are you? Combined with the actual then release of it and then the teaser trailers for Black Panther. Don't freeze.

I never freeze. The revolution will not be televised. As a fan, as an audience member, I sit in the theater. I experience seeing this character. This character brings me joy. I take joy. I have pleasure from it. I walk out and feel empowered. That's fine. This is not about saying that whatever you feel with the characters is not important. That's not it at all. What I want to differentiate is the joy that you feel is separate from the question of progress that is being had. By the way, how bad were the Academy Awards this year? Star Wars The Force Awakens has faced racial backlash. And the winner is a movie from South Korea. What the hell

was that? This was a white lash. Black Panther has become politicized in some negative ways. Against a changing country, against a black president. Hundreds of books, mostly focused on LGBTQ themes or racial issues, have now been forbidden across the country. It's tricky to

know what progress means. And it's also hard to know what to make of a backlash. HBO's House of the Dragon, it's one of the new shows that's creating a firestorm over the role of diversity in fantasy and sci-fi series. Does a backlash mean that pushing for more representation is counterproductive? The Little Mermaid is getting a live-action remake with Halle Bailey, a Black woman, as the lead, Ariel. Critics have accused Disney of being too woke. Or is it a sign that things really are changing?

That the status quo is shifting? Or at least being challenged? Someday I'll be part of your life. I see it as an incredibly complicated dance. When I was young, I thought it was simple. The more visibility, the more rights. Boom. This is Alison Bechdel again. But what I've seen over the course of my career,

40 years or so now, is that representation is a two-way street. Once you see yourself represented in a movie, in a television show, you're being co-opted, in a sense, you know? Even if it's a genuine, maybe especially if it's an authentic representation, you're being chewed up in this capitalist cultural machine and turned into a product.

Capitalism has this amazing self-defense mechanism. Whenever it finds something that threatens it, like women's liberation, like threatens it, like women's liberation, like gay liberation, like rap music, something that's alive and rebellious, it will take that thing and neutralize it by finding a way to sell it back to the very people who are originating it. You give people, throw them a few bones, and they'll stop pushing so hard for change or for wholesale revolution. The novelist Kurt Vonnegut wrote that a step backwards after making a wrong turn

is a step in the right direction. But in the long run, is that the path to progress? These are messy questions. And while we might wish there was a formula to measure meaningful representation, no test can really tell you whether something is deep enough or nuanced enough, multidimensional enough to shed its plastic, or whether that representation will matter out in the world. It's instinctive. That feeling of resonance Kristen had watching Pretty Woman. Maybe you feel it watching Judas and the Black Messiah, or Moonlight. Mad Max, Women Talking, or Minari. Or maybe you find it in unexpected places.

I have lots of favorite movies, but when I think of my favorite movie, it is Groundhog Day. I'm a god. You're a god. I'm a god. I'm not the god. I don't think. Yes, a movie that doesn't quite fail the letter of the Bechdel test, but totally fails it in spirit. There's, you know, there's one woman and she's just a cardboard cutout. But I like that movie. What am I going to, what am I going to do? When Chekhov saw the long winter, he saw a winter bleak and dark and bereft of hope. Yet we know that winter is just another step in the cycle of life. I love its message of transformation, of self-improvement, learning to become less narcissistic. It's just beautiful. I love it. I think the real question is, how do we make stories that are as complicated as real people

and that don't oversimplify what it means to be human, what it means to be alive? Are there limits? I don't know. I hope I live to see a world in which we get proportionate representation and then we can talk about what's wrong with that and what the limits are we have not had the the time the imagination time to be able to really produce what that possibility can be because we've been fighting for our lives catching hell right like so there's not a whole lot of time to to spend imagining what is possible and so I on one level understand completely why we have representations we have and why we celebrate the ones we do and at the same time wish that we had the ability to imagine something different. That's it for this week's show.

I'm Randa Abdel-Fattah. I'm Ramteen Adablui. And you've been listening to ThruLine from NPR. This episode was produced by me. And me. And. Lawrence Wu. Julie Kane.

Anya Steinberg. Yolanda Sanguin. Casey Miner. Christina Kim. Devin Katayama. Yordanos Tisfazion. Fact-checking for this episode was done by Kevin Voc vocal thank you to sarina divina gracia and alex curly for their voiceover work thanks also to micah ratner rachel seller taylor ash

tamar charney and anya grunman this episode was mixed by robert rodriguez music for this episode was composed by romteen and his band drop electric Electric, which includes... Anya Mizani. Naveed Marvi. Sho Fujiwara. And finally, if you have an idea or like something you heard on the show, please write us at ThruLine at NPR.org or hit us up on Twitter at ThruLine NPR. Thanks for listening. This message comes from NPR sponsor Grammarly. Thanks for listening. Grammarly is a secure AI writing partner that understands your business and can transform it through better communication.

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