TOTALITARIAN TOKENISM PT. 3

I suppose that this essay-series is a very roundabout way of approaching the subject I first raised in my review of Season One of the Netflix SANDMAN teleseries. In that review, I specified that I wanted to discuss the formal properties of the show, and deal with the "politically oriented alterations" elsewhere. But before doing so, I wanted to explore the background of said changes. In Part 1, I described the way that a given phenomenon could be viewed as either a "negative token" or a "positive token" according to one's presuppositions. In an intermediary essay, I analyzed the conditions of the early 20th's century's "Status Quo," in which positive tokenism had very limited potential, and in Part 2, I proceeded to specify the early inroads of this form of tokenism in the 1960s decade. I did not deny the possibility of negative tokenism. However, whereas many people have used the term to connote a superficial pretense to follow certain political principles, I've defined negative fictional tokens as those that shows no individuality, but are defined ONLY as sociopolitical indicators, whether for "Liberal" or "Conservative" purposes. While the showrunners showed a great deal of sensitivity in adapting the Neil Gaiman stories from the SANDMAN comic book, their efforts were compromised by the constant emphasis on virtue signaling through Netflix-approved DEI casting. Instead of making all the race-bending, gender-bending and kink-bending seem natural, the message of forced inclusivity serves as a constant reminder of a new-- and totalitarian-- Status Quo.                                                                                                                        So what were the various "bendings" of SANDMAN SEASON ONE?                                                                                                                  

"The Sleep of the Just"-- Alex Burgess, who has custody of Morpheus at the time that the dream-lord breaks free, is given a gay lover, played by an apparently-Black British actor. Lucienne, the librarian of The Dream-World, is depicted as a White male in the comic book, becomes a Black female in the TV show.                                     

"Imperfect Hosts"/"Dream a Little Dream of Me"-- the original Gaiman stories concern male John Constantine, who gives aid to Morpheus in exchange for help with his opposite-sex lover. In the Netflix narrative, John becomes Johanna, but her lover remains female. In the comics John Constantine was sometimes defined as bisexual, but I suspect Johanna swings only one approved way.                  

"A Hope in Hell"-- In the original Gaiman story, a male demon in Lucifer's domain acquires Morpheus' helmet, and the dream-lord enters Hell to challenge the demon, name of Choronzon, for custody of the prize. In the TV show the challenge proceeds largely as it does in the comic, except that Lucifer, now played by Gwendoline Christie, takes Choronzon's place in the contest, for no discernible reason but to give the actress playing Lucifer more lines than the actor playing Choronzon. In a subplot, the madman John Dee escapes an asylum and catches a lift from a female driver. In the comic the driver is a White woman, whom Dee kills when he's done with her. In the TV episode, the driver is a Black female, but Dee not only spares her. he gives her a protective charm for no plot-related reason.                                   

     "24/7"-- As in the original story, John Dee enters an all-night diner and uses his powers to manipulate the personnel and customers. The comic included a White "power couple." but here they become an Asian wife and a Black husband. The original story includes a young lesbian woman, who gets to stay the same. But that's not enough for the TV show: the Black husband is secretly gay, and so is the diner's cook, with whom waitress Bette thinks she has a romance of sorts. The cook not only reveals that he's gay, but that he's slept with Bette's younger brother. Somehow the writer manages to omit the question of anyone gay committing child sexual abuse.               

"The Sound of Her Wings"-- In the comic, Dream's sister Death is depicted as a Caucasian-looking Goth girl with skin as chalk-white as Dream's, so of course she must be played by a Black actress here. Hmm, since she's a conceptual being, couldn't she have also satisfied DEI had she been played by a dark-complected Hispanic or one of several different Asian types? But no, we have a hero who's White, so a Black "sister" is the necessary counterbalance. One or two minor characters go from White to Black as well.                                         

    "The Doll's House" and the next three episodes-- The characters Rose Walker, her brother Jed, and her great-grandmother Unity go from White to Black. Yet Jed, separated from his family when his Black father dies, lives with his Aunt Clarice, played by a White performer, as is her abusive husband Barnaby. Was Clarice's sister, mother to Rose and Jed, supposed to be White too? Maybe someone in the writers' room didn't think things through? Or they just thought it was OK for villains to remain White? Another conceptual entity, a nightmare named Gault, is played by a Black actress, but this time the two entities she substitutes for were generic monsters, not belonging to any racial type as such. Rose's friend Lyta Hall, a White character in the comics, is played by a Lebanese-British actress, but her late husband Hector? Starts with "B," ends with "k--" again.         

   "Dream of a Thousand Cats" and "Calliope"-- though there a few minor characters who are race-bent, there are no major changes here. But that may be because the main human characters-- a couple who drown some kittens for expedience, and Ric Madoc, a man who keeps a Greek muse in captivity-- are White People Doing Bad Things.                                                                                                                                                                                                                Yet "Calliope" displays the most interesting script-change in any episode. In the original story, Madoc is an immense hypocrite. Though he exploits his imprisoned, suffering Muse so that he becomes a celebrated author, Madoc describes himself to his adoring fans as a "feminist writer." This line is also in the episode's script. However, someone on staff added a rather revealing line. Madoc is on the phone, talking to what one assumes to be an agent about a TV-adaptation of one of his books, and he says, "I need [the producers] to guarantee at the outset that the cast and crew will be made up of at least 50%  women and people of color, and that we need to publicize it so they won't get out of it when it comes to hiring people."                                                                                                                                                                                             Now, what does it mean that someone-- be it the credited writer or one of the showrunners-- inserted that line? Was it meant to carry the same irony as the Gaiman line in which Madoc describes himself as a feminist writer? It's possible, but the line is weird, coming from a writer working for a company that insisted on the very pattern of virtue signaling that Madoc uses to make himself look virtuous. Did the writer of the line want to imply, however covertly, that virtue-signaling Netflix wasn't any more virtuous than Ric Madoc?                                                                                                                             That's one possibility. Another is that the writer of the line really did believe that it was both moral and necessary to make companies commit to DEI hires, because otherwise they would revert to the bad old days of "if you're White you're all right." I should point that, although SANDMAN Season One came out in 2022, as of this writing Netflix remains firmly committed to DEI, unlike a number of companies that have at least modified their more extreme positions.                                                                                                                                                                                                   To pursue my tokenism metaphor to the bitter end, usually the word is used for one character of a divergent race, gender or proclivity whose presence "proves" that an author, or the characters the author creates, is/are free of bigotry against the divergent type. But tokenism inheres just as much in mass quantities of virtue signaling. In the minds of the politically correct, they believe they're fighting the good fight. But how "inclusive" can their multi-ethnic, polysexual characters be if they exclude themselves from accepting any of the "badness" that belongs to the entire human race? Their demands to be in all ways sympathetic and/or heroic hold the ring of totalitarian propaganda-- particularly that of the totalitarian seeking to drum up a war against an enemy's alleged wrongdoings.                                                                                                                                                                                             

TOTALITARIAN TOKENISM PT. 2

 Berlanti follows the current trend of identity politics, assuming that as long as you keep showing "noble gays" to the public in great quantity, the public will embrace gay people in response to this fervent appeal to social equity. But I don't think that's the way it worked for the liberalization of 1960s attitudes toward Black Americans as fictional characters. White people may remember the presence of a Barney Collins or a Julia Baker (from the titular series JULIA), but mediocre characters don't change opinions. Whatever the real-life failings of Bill Cosby, his portrayal of Alexander Scott puts across a character who is enjoyable because he is rounded as well as being black. Similarly, even though Nichelle Nichols' Lieutenant Uhura appeared in far fewer scenes than did Diahann Carroll's Julia, the former made a more lasting impression because her character was better conceived, both as a character and as a black woman. -- EMANCIPATION VS. FREEDOM PT. 3.                                                                                       

In this essay I'm still no closer to specifying what type of tokenism is "totalitarian," though the above passage from my 2019 essay probably should supply some hints. And though I'll be focused here on productions stemming mostly from the 1960s, I thought it appropriate to lead with one of the 1950s harbingers of changing attitudes: a scene from 1950's NO WAY OUT, best remembered for the cinematic debut of Sidney Poitier. Apparently at some point in his career Poitier was labeled a "token" for not doing or saying whatever someone thought he ought to do or say. This would be a negative use of the word as exemplified by Malcolm X's screed in Part 1. But for me Poitier's career during his trailblazing years could only be as a "token" in a positive sense. To Liberals of the period, Poitier was like a subway token. You couldn't exchange the goodwill value of the object for an immediate monetary refund, but that sort of token would guarantee you many future rides and thus accumulated "progress."                                                             

 I've already mentioned a couple of reasonably successful "positive tokens" in my previous essay: Alexander Scott (also mentioned in the quote above) and Marvel's Black Panther. There were other works in the time period that weren't quite so successful, such as the Paramount release above. WALK LIKE A DRAGON, directed and co-written by James Clavell before his breakout success as a writer of bestsellers, was clearly an attempt to provide a "positive token" narrative for Asians. Set in the Old West, WALK was given a rather lubricious publicity campaign, but it's not really any racier than a TV drama of the era. The main plotline centers upon a romance between a Caucasian cowboy (Jack Lord) and a Chinese woman (Japanese-Canadian Nobu McCarthy) sold into slavery but rescued by said cowboy. There had been a fair number of Asian-Caucasian romance films in Old Hollywood, but Clavell's intent was somewhat more revolutionary, particularly when a male Asian character (James Shigeta) straps on six-shooters to battle prejudice.                                      

In my previous essay I noted how female characters assumed arguably greater agency of one kind or another in the early 20th century, whether as romantic interests or as combative figures, though only 1940s Wonder Woman gives strong evidence of providing a token of feminism-to-come. But feminism like race politics became a hot-button issue to average Americans in the 1960s, and so heroines of that period-- Modesty Blaise, Emma Peel, Honey West-- take on various intonations of virtuous feminism. But here, as with my examples of persuasive racial characters, the ones that appealed as individuals, rather than purely as symbols, had the greatest impact. This criterion puts Peel at the top of the heap, Blaise somewhere in the middle (and only for her comic strip, not for her unfortunate cinematic debut), and West cancelled in one season, *possibly* because there just wasn't anything very compelling about her character.                                                                                                   

Also in the previous essay I argued that there was practically no "emancipation narrative" for persons with unorthodox sexual proclivities in earlier decades. However, the sixties weren't called "swingin'" for nothing, and intimations of greater societal permissiveness gave rise to narratives with a positive-token message about tolerating the unorthodox. Many of these movies were just excuses to show a lot of female skin, but 1968's THERESE AND ISABELLE seeks to engage audiences to sympathize with the lesbian lovers-- though to be sure, their affair is told in flashback, so no one should expect a permanent liaison by film's end.                                                                                                                                    Next up: the totalitarian belief in mass quantities.       

SCRAPPY PRINCESSES AND ETHNIC ODDBALLS

 In the first part of TOTALITARIAN TOKENISM, I said that the essay-series would focus more on art than politics, though I had to set up some of the political background for the very idea of tokens. In that essay I concentrated only upon the political background for racial conflicts, but the series as a whole will address two other categories of conflict: those revolving around gender equality, which we usually label "feminism," and those revolving around sexual proclivities. The last of these three categories has no place in this essay, though, because sexual-proclivity conflicts essentially did not exist in the era I'm addressing: the era of 20th-century American art from roughly 1900 to 1960.                                                                                      

One might call this era "Before Tokenism," because there really wasn't an established practice of signaling one's virtue by appealing to marginalized groups. If the tendency did exist in politics, anything comparable in the fiction of the era seems nugatory, particularly in the new forms of media that blossomed during the 20th, principally movies, radio, comic strips, comic books and television. In that era as in eras previous, it was a given that creative authors wrote for the majority in most cases, and that meant that most American productions defaulted to the use of White characters, usually of Ango-Saxon extraction. This default in itself was not part of a dastardly scheme to keep "people of color" down, though there were specific narratives designed to promote racial disenfranchisement, as with Thomas Dixon's novel THE CLANSMAN. Dominantly the motive for authors to use White characters was that (a) Whites comprised the majority of the readership, and (b) White people in the real world had fewer restrictions on their behavior within many though not all possible story-settings. One may call this state of affairs a "status quo" but not entirely a conspiracy.                                                                                                                                       

 Nevertheless, White readers of the early 20th century were well aware that not all races or ethnicities dissolved into the melting pot of cultural assimilation. Though some ethnic characters outside the bounds of the Status Quo might be villainous, many were more on the level of "oddballs" who amused readers with their eccentricities. It's important to remember, though, that popular entertainment often targeted Caucasian characters as ethnic oddballs. In the BLACKHAWK cover above, the Chinese cook Chop-Chop-- whose status with the heroic pilots is ambivalent since he fought with them on the ground but did not fly a plane-- is clearly set up to look funnier than the other members. Yet some of the "straight" members evinced linguistic curiosities that was also used for humorous purposes, with Hendrickson the German expostulating "dunder" all the time or Andre the Frenchman making remarks about "mam'selles." Some racial and ethnic portraits were unquestionably as deprecating as those of Dixon's CLANSMAN novel, and Black characters in comics were drawn as almost non-human caricatures of actual Black people. But even if the majority of "ethnic oddballs" were not mean-spirited, the Status Quo probably discouraged a lot of authors from depicting ethnic types as anything but amusing curiosities. So in America there was hardly any movement against the Status Quo vis-a-vis ethnic depictions until the 1950s, though the larger wave of tokenism, good or bad, did not begin until the 1960s. We tend to remember the "good tokens" of the period, such as Alexander Scott of TV's I SPY, or The Black Panther as a member of Marvel's AVENGERS, because as I specified earlier, these "tokens" were unquestionable representations of the ideals professed by Classic Liberals. What the bad ones would be I leave open for speculation.                                                                                                                                 

Now the fictional emancipation of women followed more of a zigzag course. In the late 19th century there were a variety of prose fiction adventure-books so resolutely aimed at male readers that either women did not appear at all (Stevenson's TREASURE ISLAND, Verne's 20,000 LEAGUES UNDER THE SEA) or women only performed minor functions. Doyle's 1912 LOST WORLD exemplifies the latter pattern. Reporter Ned Malone only becomes involved in adventure because the woman he wants to marry claims he's not adventurous enough, and when Malone returns, covered in glory, the jezebel has married an entirely ordinary suitor. But reading prose was a single-person experience, and it seems that both films and comic strips sought to impress female patrons as much as male ones. Thus, when LOST WORLD was adapted to film in 1925, a female lead was imported into the story, making the movie more potentially popular with feminine patrons by the inclusion of a strong romance angle. I would not define any of these "princesses in need of rescue" to be tokens of belief in feminine equality. and even the more tomboyish heroines like Sheena and Nyoka don't necessarily represent any such belief. Only the William Marston Wonder Woman might be fairly seen as a pure token, since her character incarnates Marston's beliefs about female empowerment-- though I tend to doubt most of the comic book's readers engaged seriously with the author's theories.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                      I'm obviously skipping over many potentially pertinent examples in both of these categories, but this is only intended to be a sketch of the social realities of the Status Quo, which would begin to suffer its first real challenge in the decade of the 1960s.                                                                                                                 

TOTALITARIAN TOKENISM PT. 1

From the 17th to the early 19th century in the British Isles (and also elsewhere in the British Empire) and North America, tokens were commonly issued by merchants in times of acute shortage of coins of the state. These tokens were in effect a pledge redeemable in goods, but not necessarily for currency. These tokens never received official sanction from government but were accepted and circulated quite widely.-- "Token Coin," Wikipedia.                                                                                                                                                                                        "Tokenism is hypocrisy. One little student in the University of Mississippi, that's hypocrisy. A handful of students in Little Rock, Arkansas, is hypocrisy. A couple of students going to school in Georgia is hypocrisy. Integration in America is hypocrisy in the rawest form. And the whole world can see it. All this little tokenism that is dangled in front of the Negro and then he's told, 'See what we're doing for you, Tom.' Why the whole world can see that this is nothing but hypocrisy? All you do is make your image worse; you don't make it better."-- Malcolm X, quoted in article "Tokenism," Wikipedia.                                                                                                                                  

                                                                                                                                                                     Contrary to what Malcolm X wrote, the idea of the "token" did not start out with automatically negative connotations. As my first quote explains, one of the most common uses of tokens was economic, even though the idea probably predates the use of any standardized currency. A token coin is a marker that represents a certain value that's analogous to but not identical with regular money. Some tokens, like those used in casinos, can be redeemed for their equal value in currency, while subway tokens can only be redeemed for particular services.                                                                                    

Though this essay-series concerns art more than politics, one cannot avoid politics in discussing how the neutral value of "token" took on such negative political connotations. X's commentary is instructive though obviously inaccurate. After decades of segregated learning were struck down by the 1954 SCOTUS decision, the NAACP attempted to register Black students into all-White high schools and colleges, but the organization succeeded in only a few venues, such as Little Rock, arguably the most famous example of desegregation. X reviles unspecified members of the ruling class for their "hypocrisy" in minimizing the numbers of registered Black students, but the real motive would have been that of reactionary pushback. It's unlikely that most, if any, of the various school administrators really wanted to deal with integration because local citizens would and did oppose the measure with acts of spite and violence. With that in mind, it's unlikely that the school board had any thought of putting themselves in some Liberal spotlight of approval. The administrators probably complied only to avoid legal consequences, so while one might critique them for other sins, hypocritical tokenism would not be one of them. Only the NAACP and other supporters of integration would have vulnerable to the charge of tokenism, but this doesn't apply given the fact that the Little Rock Nine were the most that the forces of integration could muster under the volatile circumstances. Possibly there were non-Southern politicians who did say things like, "See what we're doing for you" in order to win Black votes, but I don't accept X's calumny that the entire project of gradual integration was just one big hoax to impress other Liberals.                                       

There certainly must have been real examples of negative tokenism regarding Black people in American culture during that period, though I can't think of any that were specifically political. But for most Liberals of the period, the Little Rock Nine would probably 
have been a signifier-- even a "token" in the positive sense-- of inevitable change that would, and did, eventually reverse the hegemony of racial prejudice. But there's no getting rid of an old hegemonic boss without a new one to take its place, and I'll eventually be dealing with that topic in future essays in this series.