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By Paul Costa
Disclaimer: I wrote this article quite a few months before posting it. I received notes that took me a while to implement. I also felt the need to ponder the question more, and in all honesty there was a heavy element of procrastination involved.
Earlier this year, I attended DragonCon, which is the largest comic convention that takes place in Atlanta, GA. There were over 52,000 in attendance. There were incredible cosplays, passionate fans, and enough panel discussions and events to keep anyone occupied for all four days. I even got to be in a Muppet commercial! It was me and 200 other people, but it was still a cool experience. While there, I attended a panel on racial and gender equality in comics, which led me to ponder a complex question: as a filmmaker, what stories should I try to tell?
I would like to talk about some of the specific points brought up at this panel, before moving on to my question. The main discussion that interested me was about how the stories being told in comics today are changing, because the diversity of the creators behind comics are changing. The best example I can think of currently is the new Miss Marvel, who is a character by the name of Kamala Khan. She is a Muslim, Pakistani-American teenager from New Jersey. And I’m not sure how many comics you have read, but that hasn’t exactly been the norm for the past 60 years. Having a character like this affords so many opportunities to tell new stories from a perspective that we as an audience have never seen before, which is decidedly a great thing.
About the people behind Miss Marvel: one of the co-creators is Sana Amanat, a Muslim woman who is also the Director of character development and content creation at Marvel comics. The writer is a woman named G. Willow Wilson, who is also Muslim. It is the perspectives and experiences of these women that bring the character of Kamala Khan to life, and I think it is fantastic that we are living in a time where we get to hear new voices in the stories we are being told.
Now on to my initial question, of what stories should I try to tell as a filmmaker? What I mean by that question is should I, as a straight cisgender white guy from a middle class family, ever attempt to tell a story that deals with issues outside of my personal experiences. Should I ever try to tell the story of a Pakistani-American teenager? Or the story of an inner city black kid from Philadelphia? Or the story of a 30 year old man who is making the physical transition to being a woman? These are all experiences that I know nothing about personally. I have Pakistani, black, and transgender friends; but that doesn’t mean that I know their experiences, or that I understand intimately what they have been through.
There is a saying that we are all probably very familiar with when it comes to writing: Write what you know. And in my opinion, this phrase is often misunderstood. If you are a writer — whether it is for novels, film, television, or plays — you do not have to limit yourself strictly to the experiences that you yourself have gone through. If you want to write a movie about astronauts, you don’t have to actually get on a shuttle and go to the international space station. For a specific example, Jonathan and Christopher Nolan didn’t travel to the 5th dimension to make “Interstellar”. What they did do, is research. From what I understand, they did a painful and grueling amount of research. They did so much research, in fact, that they unintentionally made new scientific discoveries about how a black hole behaves while creating the effects for the film (for more on that, read here).
Now if Christopher Nolan and his team put that much time and dedication into creating the most realistic black hole possible, all in service of telling the most accurate story — then why do any of us think we should do any less? Why are the opinions, beliefs, and experiences of a character, the things that make up who they are, considered any less complex then the physics behind a black hole? The only real difference in the approach to figuring out these two very different things, should be where and how you are doing your research.
A quote from the panel, said to a white male wanting to create comics: “If you want to write a black character, then you are absolutely able to do so. But you have to do research. A lot of it. You have to put as much effort as you possibly can into telling someone else’s story that you don’t personally know, and you have to make the effort to tell it right.” - Daniel Amrhein, Independent Scholar
I think there is a lot of truth in the above statement. When you are creating a character, and there is something about them you do not truly understand, it is your job, and I would argue your responsibility, to do everything you can to understand that part of them. Whether they grew up in a different economic situation then you did, whether they are a different race or a different sexual orientation, you should try to find out how it effects them, and how it would influence their actions.
So once again, how should this be done? How can anyone find out about experiences outside of their own? Well I think a good first step would be to talk to people who can relate to those experiences. There are over 7 billion people in the world. If you live here in America, there are about 319 million in your own country. The odds are in your favor that someone will take the time to talk to you. There are also authors that write great books that speak on pretty much any subject you can think of — so reading some of those might be good too. Gathering the information on any subject is doable, it’s applying that research to your writing that is hard. Unfortunately I can’t answer how to do that, because I am still trying to figure that out myself.
There is another quote from the panel I would like to share to compliment this:
“If you are going to write a black character, don’t just write them black. As people, we are all at an intersection of a million different thoughts and ideals that make us who we are. Don’t just chose one.”- Johnathan Flowers, SIU Carbondale
And this is something that is incredibly important. When we talk about needing more representation in entertainment, particularly in film and television, it is not enough to just make more characters black, or hispanic, or asian, or gay — we need to make more complex characters that are black, or hispanic, or asian, or gay. If you’re thinking about a show, and the most you can think about someone is “Oh he’s the black guy. He does black guy things”, then the writers are doing something wrong. The thing that makes a character good for representation should not be their defining characteristic. It should be a relevant part of their character — because though it should seem obvious, growing up as a black man in America definitely gives someone a different perspective then growing up as a white man. But it shouldn’t be the only thing you remember.
Obviously, we are talking about fictional characters here. So why should it matter if a creator goes into intense detail figuring out their background, how they grew up, what they went through, and what they think and feel now, if it’s only fiction? Especially if we as an audience will never see the back story of all of these characters? Well, my answer would be that it is what can make the difference between good and bad writing. I think that when a writer really gets to the core of a character, and really knows how they would act, it comes through in the writing. This in turn comes through in the direction given, and the performance of the actors. When all these things come together, the audience can tell. They might not say, “oh wow the writer really did their research on the struggles of this segment of society in America”. But they will say, “I get that”. They will say, “I never saw it that way before”. When something is authentic, it shows through. It connects with people that are watching on a different level. It’s why film and television are so powerful. It can make you think about current issues in a way that you hadn’t before. It can start a conversation that needed to be started. It can reaffirm to you that something is definitely wrong with what is happening in the real world, all under the guise of simple entertainment.
To expand on my initial question: What stories should we as storytellers try to tell? Regardless of your medium, what narratives should you attempt or not attempt to create? I think my answer would be, that you can create anything you want. You can write anything you can imagine. But it is your responsibility to research what you don’t know. If you’re not a scientist, do research if you’re going to write about space travel. If you grew up as a white male in Beverly Hills, do research if you are writing about a young hispanic woman that grew up in the Barrio. Don’t just assume you know what you don’t have experience with.
Odds are, you probably don’t.
Written Oct. 20th, 2015
Revised/deleted numerous times due to author’s uncertainty about writing on this topic.
Final revision on Jan. 21st, 2016
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