Hollywood finally entering 21st century

Her Jane (Margot Robbie) and him Tarzan (Alexander Skarsgard) star in the anticolonialist jungle adventure The Legend of Tarzan.
Her Jane (Margot Robbie) and him Tarzan (Alexander Skarsgard) star in the anticolonialist jungle adventure The Legend of Tarzan.

"Future shock is the shattering stress and disorientation that we induce in individuals by subjecting them to too much change in too short a time."

Those are the words of the author and futurist Alvin Toffler, who died June 27 at 87. They come from his most famous work, the book Future Shock, which was published in 1970, but whose core tenets feel utterly of the moment, at least in Hollywood. Just two days after Toffler's death, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced that it would invite 683 filmmakers and professionals to join, a healthy number of them women and minorities.

Clearly stung by criticism that it's nonrepresentative and exclusionary -- summed up by the #OscarsSoWhite social media hashtag -- the still mostly white, male organization sought to diversify its ranks not only on the basis of ethnicity and sex, but also age and nationality: The list of new invitees skews decidedly younger than the academy's mostly over-50 membership; about two dozen prospective members are from countries outside the United States.

As welcome as fresh perspectives are within a body whose tastes and choices often feel hopelessly hidebound, the academy's slightly-more-open-door policy makes business sense as well: According to recent Census Bureau estimates, "minority" babies now account for the majority of births in the United States, with just over 50 percent of infants under 1 year old belonging to ethnic groups other than white. Observers might see the academy's more inclusive policies as an inoculation against another damning hashtag, but they also mark the attempts of an entertainment industry desperately scrambling to get out in front of a changing audience and commensurately shifting expectations.

The academy is just one bellwether of how Hollywood is responding to those challenges, however awkwardly: You can see the fits and starts toward evolution in the movies themselves. Free State of Jones, a high-minded Civil War-era drama starring Matthew McConaughey as Newton Knight, who fought the Confederacy from within, took pains to present its version of history accurately, with director Gary Ross even creating an annotated website to go deeper into the events that inspired the film. Working with an impressive team of historians, Ross set out to avoid the common cliches of a "white savior" movie, creating a black ally to fight alongside Knight, and casting Gugu Mbatha-Raw as Rachel, the enslaved house servant who became Knight's common-law wife.

But Free State of Jones couldn't help being exactly the kind of movie Ross wanted to avoid, if only because, as a star vehicle for McConaughey, it could only have one valorized, key-lit hero; Ross didn't help his case by conveniently leaving out some less-than-flattering truths, such as the fact that Rachel had once been the property of Knight's father. There are many reasons why Free State of Jones performed poorly at the box office recently, including poor timing (it's more of a fall movie) and its own unwieldy running time and structure. But the film's tricky racial politics surely came into play at a time -- with memories fresh from 12 Years a Slave and appetites whetted for Nate Parker's forthcoming The Birth of a Nation -- when stories in which women and black people are passive, marginal, decorative or reflexively maligned are increasingly running afoul of viewers' expectations.

That new reality is acknowledged, albeit ridiculously, in The Legend of Tarzan, wherein the filmmakers try valiantly to navigate the colonialist optics of a white man of British parentage swooping (literally!) into the Congo to rescue its oppressed natives. In an amusingly earnest pastiche resembling a vintage comic book, writers Craig Brewer and Adam Cozad inserted a real-life character to accompany Tarzan on his adventures: George Washington Williams, the son of former slaves who in 1889 visited the Congo at the invitation of Belgium's King Leopold II and, upon his return, penned an open letter to the monarch excoriating his brutal policies toward the Congolese people.

A demented mashup of history, fantasy, escapist idiocy and thwarted good intentions, The Legend of Tarzan features Samuel L. Jackson as Williams, lending it the same air of pulp-progressive revisionism as, say, Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter or Django Unchained. But, despite the writers' strained efforts, Tarzan, like the recent, regrettable Lone Ranger, is one of those antique studio properties whose retrograde values are so thoroughly entrenched that no amount of enlightened massaging can make it acceptable to 21st-century perceptions.

In Free State of Jones and The Legend of Tarzan, it's possible to witness in real time the titans of pop culture coming to the reluctant realization that the collective gaze they've been catering to for the past century -- the white, male perspective most industry executives themselves share -- not only doesn't guarantee success but might, if left unexamined, spell certain doom.

The academy's newest members won't necessarily change studio politics, but they could give them a nudge: They're likely to recognize movies that the studios have a history of ignoring and discounting, giving them extra visibility, marketing oomph and, just maybe, impressive profits.

And savvy studio leaders will take heed, realizing that the more inclusive they are in their corporate and creative ranks, the more likely they are to succeed with diverse, culturally literate audiences -- in other words, all those new-majority babies who will soon be demanding to see themselves fully reflected on the screen. As Toffler said, "The illiterate of the future will not be the person who cannot read. It will be the person who does not know how to learn."

MovieStyle on 07/15/2016

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