A fast thought: Identifying with characters in the media
I have a question. As a white male, why is it presumed that I can’t identify with non-white, non-male characters?
As a kid, I was supposed to be able to identify with Batman in the comics that were bought for me by my parents. I was supposed to be able to identify with an alien son of a deceased race who discovers later that he has a cousin as a fellow survivor?*
In order for me, the powerless non-superheroic reader of comics to identify with the character in the comic book, I have to use my imagination. Funnily enough, I also have to do that to identify with any character on a movie screen, tv set, comic book page or book. None of us are Harry “My Parents Impersonation of Batman’s Parents Went Too Far” Potter. Yet apparently, markets have no problem identifying with an scarred up orphan with a wand, but put a non-white, non-male character in his place, and you’ll hear the cry of “But the focus groups didn’t identify with the lead” or “How can we expect that audience to identify with a person of colour?”
I don’t know.
Maybe we could use the same techniques we use to self identify with a bloody great mechanical truck that talks?
Or a giant green ogre?
Or a cat with a hat and rapier?
See, I get the self identification with Bumblebee, Wheeljack and Prime and my hands aren’t even made of metal. How come I’m presumed to be capable of self-identifying with a shapeshifting VW with little yellow viking horns yet suffer total and irrepairable epic fail when trying to self-id with Martha or Mickey?
I’m not a yellow sports car, but I can mesh with the paper mirror reflection of Bumblebee’s characteristics, actions and role in the movies and TV series. Is there some magic barrier when they’re made of flesh, not steel? Or did I cut another class in Introduction to WhiteGuy and miss the training day on non-identification?
Clue me in here.
*Martian Manhunter. To be Superman, throw in a dog, a flying horse, flying cat, a cousin and/or cousin impersonators and slew of surviving Kryptons who were stuck in the Phantom Zone. (and yes, I will always bring up the dog whenever we get into these conversations). Just saying, the only things to survive Krypton were Clark and a dog…
In case you’re not asking rhetorically:
First, I don’t think “identification” always works the way you think it does, or, I think I get two distinct ideas from the ways you use the word. I don’t believe that I do “identify” with Buffy when I watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer, except in the very limited narrative sense, but I still love and care about her adventures. I sure as heck don’t identify with Jack Bauer, but I dig 24’s craziness. I occasionally identify with motivations (mostly fear and the thirst for vengeance), emotions which I tend not to experience often in my daily life.
Second, you (like me) aren’t expected to identify with characters who aren’t white/males because we haven’t been trained our entire lives to do so, for lack of an alternative.
I have been trained to identify with Americans even though I’m not, and that still rankles a little.
So, if you and I are members of the widest group that the maker or advertiser wants to reach, then in order to maximize shareholder value (arguably their only responsibility) they’ll always greenlight the project that reaches the broadest base with the fewest impediments, unless they see a profitable niche market, especially one with crossover potential.
Which is why the vast majority of popular culture is, at face value, bland and lame.
Also, for your straight, generally masculine white guy, pretending to be an ogre, talking cat or robot is a pretty safe choice. Large sections of the public are not particularly interested in picking on (or worse) ogres, talking cats and transforming robots,
The above is offered as a set of possible explantions, so that we can figure out how to change things, and not as an excuse.
Comment by Eric Grant — July 3, 2007 @ 2:18 am
If I can identify with a nasty mid-30 y.o guy with bad hair, sallow skin and the ability to do magic whose name isn’t in the title with no trouble at all, damn right other people can identify with people who aren’t exactly like them. D:
Comment by Minna — July 4, 2007 @ 8:51 pm
Maybe it’s an empathy thing? I don’t know.
(also HOW AWESOME WAS TRANSFORMERS SRSLY).
ps. THIS FELL OFF MY COMMENT WOE.
Comment by Minna — July 4, 2007 @ 8:52 pm
Small point: Often, readers _don’t_ identify with heroes or characters that are of another species, like a cat, or an ogre, or a pile of scrap metal, or a talking moose, or a demon fox. I suppose I’ve betrayed myself on that last one, but the point remains: Even Masashi Kishimoto changed his character from _being_ a fox to being possessed by one, so his readers could identify.
Comment by Karen — July 7, 2007 @ 8:21 am
Around the seventies and eighties there was indeed an assumption that you couldn’t identify with trucks and monsters, which was why a lot of stories (particularly TV animation) featured entirely superfluous (and usually non-powered) children hanging out with the heroes.
Of course that was before Pixar proved you could get people to identify with a table lamp. And since they’ve also managed to get us to identify with insects, racing cars, rats, toys, superheroes, fish, and even nightmares, it’s entirely possible that they might just be able to meet their greatest challenge and enable us to identify with people whose skin is a slightly different colour.
Comment by Marionette — July 9, 2007 @ 11:56 pm
I’m so glad Marionette mentioned the table lamp. I often think about the winsome table lamp. I’d have thought that, by now, the table lamp and all the insects, racing cars, and fish since then would have broken down some barriers, but instead I fear they have reinforced them.
It amazes me most when the purveyors of science fiction and fantasy use the “can’t identify with” argument in their marketing strategies–people who regularly sell non-human beasties, robots, and apparitions to their viewers or readers. Plus, I’m tired of being represented by a metaphor; that got stale decades ago (”He’s black on the left side and white on the right! I’m white on the right side!” …to paraphrase, as I can’t google up the exact quote).
Comment by Klio — July 12, 2007 @ 5:42 am
>> I have a question. As a white male, why is it presumed that I can’t identify with non-white, non-male characters?
As a white female, why is it presumed that I can’t identify with non-female characters?
In your past posts, you assume that people who aren’t straight white middle-class males need characters in the “paper mirror” who are like them. In the media, as well as in a large part of feminism, people assume that women desperately -need- a character to be female in order to identify with her. So why should it be any different for white males?
The “I can identify with giant robots, too” argument isn’t too convinving. Identification isn’t about physical appearance: The non-human characters you mention either explicitly do come from a “white middle-class”-esque background, or their background is undefined, leaving people to fill it in with the default: white middle-class male.
Some cultural differences between white and non-white people do exist. It definitely would be challenging to identify with a character who, say, values his family’s honour more than his own life and who thinks kissing in public is disgusting.
I’m not saying there shouldn’t be any non-white main characters, of course. It’s just that the argumentation you critize in your post is not as absurd as you seem to think. Unlike with non-human characters, in order to have a non-white character you can’t just take a white male and change his outward appearance. And getting white viewers to identify with a character whose values and ideas aren’t completely like the white middle-class ideas they are familiar with is, sadly, more than most publishers seem prepared to do.
Disclaimer: Sadly, I’m not very familiar with black American culture. It’s entirely possible that non-white Americans live, think, feel and experience exactly the same things white Americans do. If so, I apologize for my ignorance.
Comment by irden — July 13, 2007 @ 10:56 pm
irden - If it was presumed you can’t identify with non-female characters, there’d be a bucketload more decent female characters in media. This is the point. Characters are predominantly white middle-class men because it’s presumed that everyone can identify with white middle-class men. Thus, it’s presumed in media that everyone can identify with someone not like them, except white middle-class men. Which is why DS is cranky.
Next question.
Comment by arielladrake — July 14, 2007 @ 9:36 pm
ariella, please try reading more than the first sentence of my post. I’ll try to clarify:
I think I’m seeing a different question than you do. Many products are marketed mainly to white males, because that group is still in charge in most of society. Superhero comics definitely are one of those products. That may be a problem in and of itself, but that’s not what I was talking about.
Suggesting that a product marketed to a specific group should have main characters who are not a member of that group is a good idea, but might not be an obvious strategy from the marketing perspective. That’s what I was trying to say.
Also, a post reading “I can identify with anyone!” in the context of many posts that go “people need characters who are like them to identify with” just irks me. I understand that it’s a different thing because white males are catered to all the time, while other groups are often ignored. But comparing non-white, non-male characters to what is essentially a white male character in disguise seems like a bad analogy to me.
Comment by irden — July 15, 2007 @ 8:47 pm
@Irden: I think you might not have seen the message. I have paper mirror reflections in white characters, robots, and a whole sweep of different areas. I’m frequently told by publishers, producers and other media controllers that I am not actually capable of seeing myself reflected in non-white leads, yet, I am also shown that the rest of the non-white male market has to make do with the white/coded white leads.
Since I can id up with a yellow bot with horns, and have done so (and in the company of other white boys), what I am annoyed about is being told that my white male nature is a barrier to my identification with non-white.
Or in short, if I was believed to be able to cope, nobody would want Anansi Boys adapted “without the blackness”. I’d be assumed to be able to deal with a fantasy story of black characters. Instead, the producers had concerns that the fantasy market couldn’t deal with non-white lead characters. Because apparently, once it’s real people with different skin tones, they’re good for deaths, magical intervention and not being the lead.
I’m extra annoyed since I watched Stealth tonight and they played the cards out so predictably with the black pilot dying, and the white pilot saving the girl and the day and the robot died in self sacrifice to save the white pilots from the Koreans and OHHAI MAGIC RESET BUTTON.
Also, could you clarify “white male character in disguise” for me?
Comment by Stephen Dann — July 15, 2007 @ 10:18 pm
>>Also, could you clarify “white male character in disguise” for me?
I’m sorry, I was a bit incoherent in my last paragraph there.
I was referring to a section of my last post:
>>The “I can identify with giant robots, too” argument isn’t too convinving. Identification isn’t about physical appearance: The non-human characters you mention either explicitly do come from a “white middle-class”-esque background, or their background is undefined, leaving people to fill it in with the default: white middle-class male.
Comment by irden — July 16, 2007 @ 7:26 pm
I’m horribly sorry for cluttering up your space, but I really want the second half of my post to appear, too:
That said, if people have seriously considered adapting “Anansi boys” to have white main characters, that’s pretty sick. I mean, it’s a book about african myth - why would the characters ever be white?
I completely agree with you that it would be awesome if more characters could reflect some of the human variety on our planet other than “white male”. I just disagree with the phrasing, which implies that white males (or you personally) can identify with any character from any background, while other people need to see “someone like themselves”.
Comment by irden — July 16, 2007 @ 7:29 pm
There have been a few studies done where boys have a harder time identifying with a female character, while the females seem to have no problem identifying with a boy character in a story. This is the excuse they use to do shows with boy characters (human or not) vs girl characters. I don’t know if the fact that kids have had to put up with mostly boy main characters has any effect on those studies, or if it’s something that boys grow out of at a later stage. I don’t know if it’s cultural or not. I do know that no matter what we need to change things. I want my daughter to have female characters to look up to after she grows out of Dora. BTW she is Mongolian and I am dreading the day she sees Mulan (one of the few if only female Asian Disney characters) and explaining why they drew the Mongolians with such scary eyes.
Comment by Vail — July 18, 2007 @ 4:56 am
idren:
I don’t think it’s so much that white men have a special ability that others don’t, and I don’t get that implication from DS. Honestly, I think everyone needs to see someone like themselves every once in a while, or at least have the option to do so. That’s not all they need, though. White men are getting a steady diet of ’someone like themselves’ to identify with, non-white men and women, and white women (arguably to a somewhat lesser extent) tend to get a steady diet of being able to identify with characters from a different (read:white male) background, because that’s often all they get (whether because there are no characters of colour/white female characters, or because the white male characters are largely the only ones with any kind of depth of characterisation). So yes, there’s two levels of argument going on; one about the paper mirror, and the other about white men needing characters that *aren’t* like them to identify with. And it’s not so much that being able to identify with giant robots totally means that you can identify with characters of colour, it’s that ‘hey, if I can make the leap from white human male to non-human male/androgyne-that-I-deem-male, maybe I should think about making the leap from white human male to non-white human male/non-white human female/white human female’. Both arguments have their validity and work on different levels. That’s how I see it, anyway.
Comment by arielladrake — July 18, 2007 @ 10:53 am
I can completely agree with that.
Still, I think it’s actually easier for non-white and/or non-male people to identify with white males than the other way around. Even if it’s probably just due to practice.
Conclusion: I’m fine with the sentiment, but got a bit irritated by the phrasing. I’m happy now, though.
Comment by irden — July 20, 2007 @ 8:42 am
I think the reason why some boys have such a hard time identify female characters in general is because when ever you see a lead female character in action movies or comics they are often shown as the love interest.
Comment by Nikkie — September 30, 2007 @ 1:27 pm