genocide – Bitch Flicks

Call For Writers: Unpopular Opinions of Film and Television

Feminists know a good deal about having and voicing unpopular opinions about films and television. There are often uncomfortable truths about well-loved movies or series. While many people prefer to either ignore those uncomfortable truths or deride those attempting to expose them, it is imperative that we remain active participants in the consumption of media.

Our theme week for November 2016 will be Unpopular Opinions of Film/Television.

Feminists know a good deal about having and voicing unpopular opinions about films and television. There are often uncomfortable truths about well-loved movies or series. For example, Game of Thrones is one of the most popular TV shows of all time and features many complex female characters, but it engages in rape culture, demonizes and discards women of color, punishes sex workers, and is therefore misogynistic. Avatar is ostensibly a beautifully animated film that has an environmental agenda, critiquing resource extractive economies as well as the practice of stealing from and genociding Indigenous people. However, the lead character is a white man masquerading as an Indigenous man, which is a classic instance of the White Savior trope, and the fact that he can only be a hero if he ceases to inhabit a wheelchair is ableist rhetoric. Buffy the Vampire Slayer is a groundbreaking feminist series that has become a cult classic; however, the show engages in bisexual erasure and, until late in its final seventh season, the show espouses a purely White Feminism (non-intersectional feminism that focuses primarily on the struggles of white women).

While many people prefer to either ignore those uncomfortable truths or deride those attempting to expose them, it is imperative that we remain active participants in the consumption of media. We must turn a critical eye on even our best loved pieces of art, questioning why we love them, how they are successful, and what inherent stereotypes or potentially damaging tropes they are advancing. It is only through exposing the ways in which film and television fail to accurately represent or include marginalized peoples that we can call for a higher standard and begin creating more intersectional, meaningful, and visionary work.

We want to read your most unpopular opinions about film and television. Tell us how and why a movie or series has failed its audience. You may also have an unpopular reading of a film or show that is inclusive and intersectional, but people are not open to your interpretation. We want to read those, too!

We’d like to avoid as much overlap as possible for this theme, so please get your proposals in early if you know which topic you would like to write about. We accept both original pieces and cross-posts.

Most of our pieces are between 1,000 and 2,000 words, and include links and images. Please send your piece as a Microsoft Word document to btchflcks[at]gmail[dot]com, including links to all images, and include a 2- to 3-sentence bio.

If you have written for us before, please indicate that in your proposal, and if not, send a writing sample if possible.

Please be familiar with our publication and look over recent and popular posts to get an idea of Bitch Flicks’ style and purpose. We encourage writers to use our search function to see if your topic has been written about before, and link when appropriate (hyperlinks to sources are welcome, as well).

The final due date for these submissions is Monday, November 28, 2016 by midnight Eastern Time.

Here are some possible topic ideas:

Game of Thrones

Avatar

Star Wars

Apocalypse Now

Girls

The Help

Star Trek

The Last Samurai

Revenge of the Nerds

The Mindy Project

Dances with Wolves

Downton Abbey

Transparent

High Fidelity

The 100

Dallas Buyers Club

Jessica Jones

Frozen

Dangerous Minds

The Amy Schumer Show

Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Harry Potter

Modern Family

Sixteen Candles

Tanya Tagaq Voices Inuit Womanhood in ‘Nanook of the North’

Director Robert Flaherty not only framed Inuit womanhood according to his fantasies of casual sensuality, but according to Euro-American patriarchal fantasy. His portrait of Inuit life is neatly divided between the woman’s role, limited to cleaning igloos and nursing infants, apparently immune to the frustrations of Euro-American women in that role, and the man’s role, leading the band, educating older children, and hunting.

This post written by staff writer Brigit McCone originally appeared at Bitch Flicks and is reposted here as part of our theme week on Indigenous Women.

Nanook of the North is an iconic 1922 drama that recreates traditional Inuit lifeways through the representative struggles of Nanook (“Polar Bear,” played by Allakariallak), his wife Nyla (“The Smiling One,” played by Maggie Nujarluktuk), another woman identified only as “Cunayou,” Nanook’s young son “Allee,” and baby “Rainbow.” However, we are shown older boys, described as “some of Nanook’s children,” eating sea-biscuits and lard at the trading post, adding to the film’s casual, hand-waving vagueness about Nanook’s family relationships. Male helpers pop up for group hunts, as though from nowhere, but Nanook’s family is never placed in a wider community context. Despite describing Nanook as band leader, he is never depicted leading, and is frequently infantilized by director Robert Flaherty. By framing his drama as “documentary,” Flaherty converts Allakariallak and Nujarluktuk from active collaborators into passive subjects.

Flaherty erased the fact that both Maggie Nujarluktuk and, reportedly, the woman playing Cunayou, were his own wives (or “mistresses,” from Flaherty’s cultural perspective). The “morning” scene, in which Nanook, his two women and his son awake naked inside the igloo, therefore closely resembles Flaherty’s own polyamorous living arrangement, exoticized into a symptom of Nanook’s cultural Otherness. The domestic warmth that Flaherty captured in Nanook of the North, through his access to both women, is key to his “documentary’s” charm, but his pretended objectivity converts this intensely personal intimacy into an image of the women’s indiscriminate availability to outsiders. Maggie Nujarluktuk smiles self-consciously and playfully flirts with the camera, because the camera is being operated by her husband, but that husband disowns her smiles and essentializes them as a permanent characteristic of “Nyla the smiling one.”

In her thesis, “Neither Indian Princesses Nor Squaw Drudges,” Janice Acoose examines the pervasive stereotype of the “loose squaw” in literature about Indigenous women, which constructs the Indigenous woman as a disposable sexual convenience. Flaherty’s own concept of Inuit disposability was demonstrated when he abandoned Nujarluktuk after filming, who then bore him a son, Josephie, that he never saw, acknowledged, or materially supported. This adds sinister resonance to Nanook of the North‘s description of Nyla’s baby Rainbow as “her young husky,” jokingly implying that Inuit women view their own children as equivalent to animals. In Acoose’s view, “loose squaw” images “foster cultural attitudes that legitimize rape and other similar kinds of violence against Indigenous women,” whose disappearances often go uninvestigated in Canada, particularly if they are also sex workers.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dCEzGouiy2Q”]

Josephie Flaherty’s family was caught up in the “High Arctic Relocation,” the forced transfer of a community of Inuit to the High Arctic, as “human flagpoles” to support Canada’s territorial claim to the Northwest Passage. It was masterminded by the Department of Northern Affairs, who wished to remove the Inuit from white civilization to free them from “a toxic culture of dependence.” In other words, like Nanook of the North, the “High Arctic Relocation” was an artificially staged, Euro-American vision of uncorrupted Inuit innocence. It is impossible to draw a neat line between Flaherty’s fictional vision and the Department of Northern Affairs’ imposed reality; each was inspired by a toxic culture, not of dependence but of colonial entitlement and the romanticizing of “noble savages”; the Department’s resident romantics may even have been directly inspired by Nanook of the North. The High Arctic Exiles were denied material support from the Canadian government, though that same government intervened to prevent them from hunting on its designated “wildlife preserve.” The Inuit, identified by numbered tags, were taken from a community with a school and nursing station, and transported on a boat with infectious tuberculosis patients. Tuberculosis was also the disease that had previously claimed the life of Flaherty’s star, Allakariallak, a fact that Flaherty covered up by telling audiences that “Nanook” had “starved to death” while hunting deer, yet again erasing Euro-American influence. Several of the High Arctic Exiles’ children were taken from their parents for medical treatment and “misplaced for several years” by bureaucrats, a chilling indifference that echoes Flaherty’s casual attitude to Nanook’s fluctuating number of “young huskies.” For his monument symbolizing victims of the “Relocation,” Inuk sculptor Looty Pijamini chose a life-size Inuk woman and child, carved from a block of granite tinted red like blood.

Her international recording career has made “Inuk punk” Tanya Tagaq into one of the most recognizable cultural ambassadors of the Inuit people. Tagaq’s own mother hailed from Nanook of the North‘s Quebec location before falling victim to the High Arctic “relocation,” informing Tagaq’s complex response to the film’s mixture of colonial ideology and preserved history. In 2012, the Toronto International Film Festival commissioned Tagaq to provide an original soundtrack to the film, drawing from the Inuit art of throat-singing, katajjaq. Discussing the film, Tagaq spotlights Flaherty’s staged scene of Nanook biting a gramophone record, as though unaware of what it is. “Inuit are running the cameras a lot of the time,” Tagaq laughs. Watching this scene closely is revealing. As the gramophone starts up, neither Nanook nor Nyla appears surprised by it, while Nyla rocks her baby to the music. There is an awkward jump cut, Nyla has been removed from the shot, and Nanook is laughing and biting the record. In such scenes, Allakariallak demonstrates the comic ability which gives the film its charm, but is harnessed to create a demeaning image of Inuit childishness, which Flaherty frames as generally representative of “the fearless, lovable, happy-go-lucky Eskimo,” rather than individually representative of the talented comedian, Allakariallak. However, Tanya Tagaq’s soundtrack rejects Flaherty’s impulse to isolate, essentialize, and fossilize Inuit culture into artificial purity. As a confident inheritor of her own culture, she engages with the musical traditions of other nations, harnessing non-Native technology and instruments to enrich her evolving practice of katajjaq.

When the show came to the 2014 Dublin Fringe Festival, I eagerly checked it out, having experienced the masculine tradition of Tuvan khöömei throat-singing in Siberia. Unlike khöömei, katajjaq evolved as a female tradition. Two women, facing each other, would improvise rhythmic motifs, the loser being the first to laugh or run out of breath. These throat-singing games tended to last between one and three minutes. Tagaq’s live performance to Nanook of the North lasts over an hour, an extraordinarily demanding tour-de-force of physical strength and passion.

Katajjaq blends mood, rhythm and the imitation of natural sounds, from wind to howling dogs to crying birds, weaving them into a spiritual whole. By blending the sounds of the natural world with the mind’s vibrations, katajjaq reflects the worldview of animism, the traditional Inuit conception that all objects and beings are endowed with spirit. From the 1930s to the 1960s, Christian missionaries banned throat-singing as a demonic and sexual act. Certainly, Tagaq’s version of katajjaq is strikingly sexual. Her hyperventilations build in intensity and peak with shrieking cries, inducing ecstatic trance. Where “Nyla the smiling one” was crafted as a submissive image of availability, the throat-singer powerfully (perhaps threateningly) voices her own desire. Nina Segalowitz, a survivor of coerced adoption and forced assimilation, found katajjaq an empowering tool for reconnecting to her heritage. Her story recalls the Australian Aboriginal experience of forced assimilation portrayed in Rabbit Proof Fence: “My father thought he was signing hospital admission forms. The next day, he came to take me back, but I was gone. They told him that he had signed release papers and couldn’t get me back.” Evie Mark, raised Inuk but with a white father, also describes the craving for something that will make your identity stronger as a major motivator for katajjaq revival, indicating its importance to national self-esteem. Placed against the imagery of Nanook of the North, katajjaq collapses the distance between spectator and subject, dismantling the subject’s perceived quaintness and giving voice to Inuit experience and perception, from the shrieking killing of a walrus to the grunting effort of igloo construction.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iV-YQSQ1_FE”]

Tanya Tagaq’s reclaiming of Nanook of the North, with music that fuses tradition and modernity, may be compared with the work of A Tribe Called Red, a collective of First Nations DJs who have collaborated with Tagaq, that remix traditional chanting and drumming with electronica, dubstep, and spoken word, rejecting the impulse to isolate, essentialize, and fossilize. A Tribe Called Red’s visuals (start two minutes in) remix stereotypes of “Red Indians” from pop culture, with witty juxtapositions that subvert their original associations and assert A Tribe Called Red’s authorship. Genocidal policies of forced assimilation, from prohibitions by Christian missionaries to coerced adoptions and residential schools (whose painful legacy is depicted in Cree director Georgina Lightning’s Older Than America, among other Indigenous filmmakers), interrupt the line of cultural transmission in oral cultures, so that the imperial culture’s anthropological records can become the only source of preserved heritage. In reframing a colonial record of Inuit life into an expression of Inuit experience, Tagaq’s voicing of Nanook of the North can be compared to the art of Jane Ash Poitras (Cree), which reframes anthropological photographs by symbolically visualizing the subject’s own perspective. One of her Inuit artworks, “In My Parka You Will Find My Spirit,” offers multiple symbolic frames for her young Inuk subject. First, he is surrounded with the syllabic writing of his own language, inuktitut, whose flowing edges are contained by a rigid frame bearing the imposed Euro-American label “Copper Eskimo.” The outer frame is looped with blood, suggesting interior flesh, while the Arctic exterior, with ghostly inukshuk, is placed inside this flesh, the body experiencing the environment rather than the environment defining the body. On the lower left, an elder represents connection to cultural tradition through role models, an experience stolen from the victims (and survivors) of Canada’s policy of coerced adoption, as recently as the 1960s and 1970s.

Nanook of the North established the Inuk man as the sole icon of Inuit life. It was followed by 1934’s Wedding of Palo, a portrait of Greenland Inuit by Danish filmmakers, in which the Inuk woman is a love object fought over by two rivals. Though brilliantly filmed, and preserving authentic Inuit traditions, the film reinforces perceptions of Indigenous women as natural spoils of war, submissively accepting their role as the victor’s rightful property. The Inuit-made Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner (2001) does portray the frustration of its heroine, Atuat, at being promised to villain Oki rather than her beloved Atanarjuat. Nevertheless, the story centers Atanarjuat’s experiences, and it is he must find a way to marry the heroine. The short film Kajutaijuq, co-written and produced by Nyla Innuksuk, also centers a male hunter but, hopefully, the rise of promising female filmmakers like Innuksuk will lead to more representations of Inuit women’s perspectives in future. In the meantime, Tanya Tagaq’s voicing of Nanook of the North is a powerful start.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m4kOIzMqso0″]

Brigit McCone is still decolonizing her mind. She writes and directs short films, radio dramas, and “The Erotic Adventures of Vivica” (as Voluptua von Temptitillatrix). Her hobbies include doodling and telling people to check out the carvings of Susan Point.

Tanya Tagaq Voices Inuit Womanhood In ‘Nanook of the North’

Maggie Nujarluktuk as "Nyla the Smiling One" with "Rainbow" — Maggie Nujarluktuk as “Nyla the Smiling One” with “Rainbow”

Written by Brigit McCone.

Nanook of the North is an iconic 1922 drama that recreates traditional Inuit lifeways through the representative struggles of Nanook (“Polar Bear,” played by Allakariallak), his wife Nyla (“the Smiling One,” played by Maggie Nujarluktuk), another woman identified only as “Cunayou,” Nanook’s young son “Allee,” and baby “Rainbow.” However, we are shown older boys, described as “some of Nanook’s children,” eating sea-biscuits and lard at the trading post, adding to the film’s casual, hand-waving vagueness about Nanook’s family relationships. Male helpers pop up for group hunts, as though from nowhere, but Nanook’s family is never placed in a wider community context. Despite describing Nanook as band leader, he is never depicted leading, and is frequently infantilized by director Robert Flaherty. By framing his drama as “documentary,” Flaherty converts Allakariallak and Nujarluktuk from active collaborators into passive subjects.

In her thesis, Neither Indian Princesses Nor Squaw Drudges, Janice Acoose examines the pervasive stereotype of the “loose squaw” in literature about Indigenous women, which constructs the Indigenous woman as a disposable sexual convenience. Flaherty’s own concept of Inuit disposability was demonstrated when he abandoned Nujarluktuk after filming, who then bore him a son, Josephie, that he never saw, acknowledged or materially supported. This adds sinister resonance to Nanook of the North‘s description of Nyla’s baby Rainbow as “her young husky,” jokingly implying that Inuit women view their own children as equivalent to animals. In Acoose’s view, “loose squaw” images “foster cultural attitudes that legitimize rape and other similar kinds of violence against Indigenous women,” whose disappearances often go uninvestigated in Canada, particularly if they are also sex workers.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dCEzGouiy2Q”]

“I stuck with the seals” – Tanya Tagaq

Josephie Flaherty’s family was caught up in the “High Arctic Relocation,” the forced transfer of a community of Inuit to the High Arctic, as “human flagpoles” to support Canada’s territorial claim to the Northwest Passage. It was masterminded by the Department of Northern Affairs, who wished to remove the Inuit from white civilization to free them from “a toxic culture of dependence.” In other words, like Nanook of the North, the “High Arctic Relocation” was an artificially staged, Euro-American vision of uncorrupted Inuit innocence. It is impossible to draw a neat line between Flaherty’s fictional vision and the Department of Northern Affairs’ imposed reality; each was inspired by a toxic culture, not of dependence but of colonial entitlement and the romanticizing of “noble savages”; the Department’s resident romantics may even have been directly inspired by Nanook of the North. The High Arctic Exiles were denied material support from the Canadian government, though that same government intervened to prevent them from hunting on its designated “wildlife preserve.” The Inuit, identified by numbered tags, were taken from a community with a school and nursing station, and transported on a boat with infectious tuberculosis patients. Tuberculosis was also the disease that had previously claimed the life of Flaherty’s star, Allakariallak, a fact that Flaherty covered up by telling audiences that “Nanook” had “starved to death” while hunting deer, yet again erasing Euro-American influence. Several of the High Arctic Exiles’ children were taken from their parents for medical treatment and “misplaced for several years” by bureaucrats, a chilling indifference that echoes Flaherty’s casual attitude to Nanook’s fluctuating number of “young huskies.” For his monument symbolizing victims of the “Relocation,” Inuk sculptor Looty Pijamini chose a life-size Inuk woman and child, carved from a block of granite tinted red like blood.

Looty Pijamini's monument to the "relocation" — Looty Pijamini’s monument to the “relocation”

Her international recording career has made “Inuk punk” Tanya Tagaq into one of the most recognizable cultural ambassadors of the Inuit people. Tagaq’s own mother hailed from Nanook of the North‘s Quebec location before falling victim to the High Arctic “relocation,” informing Tagaq’s complex response to the film’s mixture of colonial ideology and preserved history. In 2012, the Toronto International Film Festival commissioned Tagaq to provide an original soundtrack to the film, drawing from the Inuit art of throat-singing, katajjaq. Discussing the film, Tagaq spotlights Flaherty’s staged scene of Nanook biting a gramophone record, as though unaware of what it is. “Inuit are running the cameras a lot of the time,” Tagaq laughs. Watching this scene closely is revealing. As the gramophone starts up, neither Nanook nor Nyla appears surprised by it, while Nyla rocks her baby to the music. There is an awkward jump cut, Nyla has been removed from the shot, and Nanook is laughing and biting the record. In such scenes, Allakariallak demonstrates the comic ability which gives the film its charm, but is harnessed to create a demeaning image of Inuit childishness, which Flaherty frames as generally representative of “the fearless, lovable, happy-go-lucky Eskimo,” rather than individually representative of the talented comedian, Allakariallak. However, Tanya Tagaq’s soundtrack rejects Flaherty’s impulse to isolate, essentialize and fossilize Inuit culture into artificial purity. As a confident inheritor of her own culture, she engages with the musical traditions of other nations, harnessing non-native technology and instruments to enrich her evolving practice of katajjaq. When the show came to the 2014 Dublin Fringe Festival, I eagerly checked it out, having experienced the masculine tradition of Tuvan khöömei throat-singing in Siberia. Unlike khöömei, katajjaq evolved as a female tradition. Two women, facing each other, would improvise rhythmic motifs, the loser being the first to laugh or run out of breath. These throat-singing games tended to last between one and three minutes. Tagaq’s live performance to Nanook of the North lasts over an hour, an extraordinarily demanding tour-de-force of physical strength and passion.

Indigenous Siberian artist Konstantin Pankov blends nature with rhythmic vibrations

Katajjaq blends mood, rhythm and the imitation of natural sounds, from wind to howling dogs to crying birds, weaving them into a spiritual whole. By blending the sounds of the natural world with the mind’s vibrations, katajjaq reflects the worldview of animism, the traditional Inuit conception that all objects and beings are endowed with spirit. From the 1930s to the 1960s, Christian missionaries banned throat-singing as a demonic and sexual act. Certainly, Tagaq’s version of katajjaq is strikingly sexual. Her hyperventilations build in intensity and peak with shrieking cries, inducing ecstatic trance. Where “Nyla the smiling one” was crafted as a submissive image of availability, the throat-singer powerfully (perhaps threateningly) voices her own desire. Nina Segalowitz, a survivor of coerced adoption and forced assimilation, found katajjaq an empowering tool for reconnecting to her heritage. Her story recalls the Australian Aboriginal experience of forced assimilation portrayed in Rabbit Proof Fence: “my father thought he was signing hospital admission forms. The next day, he came to take me back, but I was gone. They told him that he had signed release papers and couldn’t get me back.” Evie Mark, raised Inuk but with a white father, also describes the craving for something that will make your identity stronger as a major motivator for katajjaq revival, indicating its importance to national self-esteem. Placed against the imagery of Nanook of the North, katajjaq collapses the distance between spectator and subject, dismantling the subject’s perceived quaintness and giving voice to Inuit experience and perception, from the shrieking killing of a walrus to the grunting effort of igloo construction.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iV-YQSQ1_FE”]

Tagaq in concert with Nanook of the North (sample)

Tanya Tagaq’s reclaiming of Nanook of the North, with music that fuses tradition and modernity, may be compared with the work of A Tribe Called Red, a collective of First Nations DJs who have collaborated with Tagaq, that remix traditional chanting and drumming with electronica, dubstep and spoken word, rejecting the impulse to isolate, essentialize and fossilize. A Tribe Called Red‘s visuals (start two minutes in) remix stereotypes of “Red Indians” from pop culture, with witty juxtapositions that subvert their original associations and assert A Tribe Called Red‘s authorship. Genocidal policies of forced assimilation, from prohibitions by Christian missionaries to coerced adoptions and residential schools (whose painful legacy is depicted in Cree director Georgina Lightning’s Older Than America, among other Indigenous filmmakers), interrupt the line of cultural transmission in oral cultures, so that the imperial culture’s anthropological records can become the only source of preserved heritage. In reframing a colonial record of Inuit life into an expression of Inuit experience, Tagaq’s voicing of Nanook of the North can be compared to the art of Jane Ash Poitras (Cree), which reframes anthropological photographs by symbolically visualizing the subject’s own perspective. One of her Inuit artworks, “In My Parka You Will Find My Spirit,” offers multiple symbolic frames for her young Inuk subject. First, he is surrounded with the syllabic writing of his own language, inuktitut, whose flowing edges are contained by a rigid frame bearing the imposed Euro-American label “Copper Eskimo.” The outer frame is looped with blood, suggesting interior flesh, while the Arctic exterior, with ghostly inukshuk, is placed inside this flesh, the body experiencing the environment rather than the environment defining the body. On the lower left, an elder represents connection to cultural tradition through role models, an experience stolen from the victims (and survivors) of Canada’s policy of coerced adoption, as recently as the 1960s and 1970s.

Jane Ash Poitras' "In My Parka You Will Find My Spirit" — Jane Ash Poitras’ “In My Parka You Will Find My Spirit”

Robert Flaherty not only framed Inuit womanhood according to his fantasies of casual sensuality, but according to Euro-American patriarchal fantasy. His portrait of Inuit life is neatly divided between the woman’s role, limited to cleaning igloos and nursing infants, apparently immune to the frustrations of Euro-American women in that role, and the man’s role, leading the band, educating older children, and hunting. In reality, Inuit women were hunters, including polar bear hunters, and played strong roles as educators and storytellers, while today’s Inuit women are also lawyers, government ministers, and activists. Nanook of the North established the Inuk man as the sole icon of Inuit life. It was followed by 1934’s Wedding of Palo, a portrait of Greenland Inuit by Danish filmmakers, in which the Inuk woman is a love object fought over by two rivals. Though brilliantly filmed, and preserving authentic Inuit traditions, the film reinforces perceptions of Indigenous women as natural spoils of war, submissively accepting their role as the victor’s rightful property. The Inuit-made Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner (2001) does portray the frustration of its heroine, Atuat, at being promised to villain Oki rather than her beloved Atanarjuat. Nevertheless, the story centers Atanarjuat’s experiences, and it is he must find a way to marry the heroine. The short film Kajutaijuq, co-written and produced by Nyla Innuksuk, also centers a male hunter but, hopefully, the rise of promising female filmmakers like Innuksuk will lead to more representations of Inuit women’s perspectives in future. In the meantime, Tanya Tagaq’s voicing of Nanook of the North is a powerful start.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m4kOIzMqso0″]

Mute the sentimental soundtrack and slap this on for a flavor.

Brigit McCone is still decolonizing her mind. She writes and directs short films and radio dramas. Her hobbies include doodling and telling people to check out the carvings of Susan Point.

Esmeralda in Disney’s ‘The Hunchback of Notre Dame’

Esmeralda is a multi-faceted female character who deserves more attention, especially as she has been denied Disney Princess status. There has been little news about it since 2013, and like the stage musical, it seems to have been shelved, or at least is still being worked, and reworked, upon. Certainly, before they can premiere or re-premiere, these pieces need work in regard to racial sensitivity. As someone who has followed the progress of Disney’s stage musical, I know that small steps have been taken, such as the inclusion of the word “Roma,” in the stage musical, though the word “Gypsy” is still offensively used much more frequently.

Written by Jackson Adler.

As announced yesterday, April 6, Paper Mill Playhouse’s production of Disney’s stage musical The Hunchback of Notre Dame will not be transferred to Broadway. This news has come only two days before the International Day of the Roma on April 8. “Roma” describes many different groups of people of similar ethnic and cultural origin, specifically who immigrated under persecution from Northern India into Europe, and who have pejoratively been called “Gypsies,” due to the inaccurate belief that they originated in Egypt. Roma play a large part in Victor Hugo’s novel and in Disney’s film and stage musical.

The stage musical is a loose adaptation of Disney’s animated movie musical, which in turn is a very loose adaptation of Victor Hugo’s novel, Notre Dame De Paris. The stage musical was workshopped in New York, made into a full production in Germany, recently re-imagined and put up at La Jolla Playhouse in California, and then transferred to and altered at Paper Mill Playhouse. The animated film “The Hunchback of Notre Dame” is more explicit in adult themes than many of Disney’s other films. Among its adult themes, it addresses race, racial discrimination, and even the subject of genocide, all in regard to Roma. As Roma and their history often face erasure, especially in the regard to the genocide of Roma both during and prior to World War II and The Holocaust, it is important that Roma be positively, respectfully, and more often depicted in the media, and for racism against them to be thoroughly and accurately addressed.

Esmeralda in Disney's animated film The Hunchback of Notre Dame — Esmeralda in Disney’s animated film *The Hunchback of Notre Dame*

Unlike Hugo’s novel, which villainizes Roma, Disney attempts to dispel some of the negative stereotypes surrounding Roma, and is definitely against physical violence in regard to them. However, Disney’s attempts at an anti-racist message are undermined by various aspects of its own film, including, but certainly not limited to, its use of the racial slur “Gypsy” throughout the film by both villains and protagonists, and by the overt sexualization of Esmeralda, the musical’s leading lady. Unlike in Hugo’s novel, Disney’s Esmeralda was not just raised by but is ethnically Roma, and is also an independent and multi-faceted female character. Though vocal about the rights of her people and the rights of others, Esmeralda does not, nor does any other character, point out to the villains and the audience that “Gypsy” is a racial slur, and nor, have I found in the film, are the words “Roma” or “Romani” ever used. Though a woman having sexual autonomy is a positive message, Disney has historically sexualized Women of Color, especially in the 1990s, and in ways that it has not sexualized its White female characters. This reinforces rape culture with the harmful message that White women need to remain “pure” and Women of Color can be lusted after and pursued sexually, specifically by White men, without constraint.

Though the villain Frollo’s sexual harassment of Esmeralda is depicted as wrong, White Captain of the Guard Phoebus also lusts after her. In their first scene together, Phoebus walks a fine line between sexual harassment and flirtation in his comments to Esmeralda. In the scene, she feels threatened by him, afraid he will arrest or hurt her. When it becomes clear that Phoebus came to talk to Esmeralda due to romantic and sexual interest, she oddly sees this as nonthreatening and becomes less defensive, despite her people’s history of being sexually assaulted, enslaved, fetishized, and marginalized by White men. Eventually, Esmeralda and Phoebus become a romantic couple. In the original novel, Phoebus uses Esmeralda as a sexual conquest and later oversees her unjust execution, with the “real” tragedy being that she turns out to not be ethnically Roma after all, and not that such violence and racism is inherently wrong. The Disney film and the stage musical end Phoebus’ character arc with him standing up for Esmeralda and her people in the face of violence, persecution, and genocide. For being anti-genocide, Phoebus is problematically rewarded with a relationship with Esmeralda. The fact that Disney’s stance of being anti-rape and anti-genocide of People of Color was considered progressive in the 1990s, and even considered progressive today, is incredibly sad. Erasure, micro-aggressions, and fetishization are also acts of violence, and set the stage for more overt forms of violence to be carried out and tolerated in the first place.

Esmeralda and Phoebus at the end of the film.

Though leading man Quasimodo is also Roma, he is problematically drawn as White-passing, looking little like his parents, who are depicted at the beginning of the film. Quasimodo has a hunched back and other rare physical features, and through his character the film emphasizes that a person’s character is more important than their physical appearance. In light of this message, there are continued arguments in Disney fandom about how Quasimodo “deserved” Esmeralda more than Phoebus, which often unintentionally objectifies Esmeralda even further as a “reward.” It is also problematic that the “looks don’t matter” message is written beside a message of racial tolerance, as this encourages the audience to “not see race” or “look past race,” as if non-White ethnicities are flaws to be “looked past,” or ignored and left unseen. If a White person adopts the label of being “colorblind,” it often silences any argument in opposition to when they say or do something racist, such as sexualizing and fetishizing People of Color, as Disney and its character Phoebus do in regard to Esmeralda.

It was announced in 2013 that Disney was in “talks” to make a TV show/miniseries of the story of The Hunchback of Notre Dame from Esmeralda’s point of view. More media from the perspective of Women of Color certainly need to be made, and positive representation of Roma is definitely lacking. Esmeralda is a multi-faceted female character who deserves more attention, especially as she has been denied Disney Princess status. There has been little news about it since 2013, and like the stage musical, it seems to have been shelved, or at least is still being worked, and reworked, upon. Certainly, before they can premiere or re-premiere, these pieces need work in regard to racial sensitivity. As someone who has followed the progress of Disney’s stage musical, I know that small steps have been taken, such as the inclusion of the word “Roma,” in the stage musical, though the word “Gypsy” is still offensively used much more frequently.

Ciara Renée as Esmeralda in Disney's stage musical The Hunchback of Notre Dame — Ciara Renée as Esmeralda in Disney’s stage musical *The Hunchback of Notre Dame*

After casting notices stating that Disney was looking for someone “exotic” (fetishization much?) to play Esmeralda were released, talented mixed-race Black actress Ciara Renée was cast as Esmeralda, and played her both at La Jolla Playhouse and Paper Mill Playhouse. Seeing a Black woman sing “God Help The Outcasts” and “Someday” during the #blacklivesmatter movement certainly makes the subject of race more tangible to a contemporary American audience, and yet racial minorities and marginalized groups, dubbed “outcasts” by the White male team behind Disney’s musical, are not interchangeable, nor does each group face the same kind of struggles and discrimination as another. Disney Theatrical Productions has a history of seeing non-White races as interchangeable, as seen in its ethnically diverse casting of Aladdin, which problematically was completely devoid of Arab and Arab-American performers. Though the argument can be made that casting a Person of Color of a different ethnicity than the Character of Color they are to portray, whether in the case of Esmeralda or Aladdin and Jasmine, is arguably better than White-washing the character, especially as there are so few theatrical roles written for People of Color, especially Women of Color, Disney certainly needs to learn the specific histories and challenges faced by the ethnic groups it attempts to depict if it is going to thoroughly, accurately, and respectfully address race and racism.

The music of Disney’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame is beautiful, and the actors who have been cast in its various incarnations have all been extremely talented. The subjects the story addresses need to be addressed, both for child and adult audience members. It is for these reasons that it is sad that Disney’s stage musical is being denied a chance on Broadway yet again, and that the Esmeralda-centric TV series has apparently been shelved. However, Disney still has a lot to learn in regard to how to address matters of race, and a lot of alterations still left to make in its adaptations and its approach to storytelling.