by Jeva Lange

If the trailers in theaters now are any sorts of indicator, 2014 isn’t going to do much for Hollywood’s endless race problem. The newsflash here is that while we’ll be watching Indian and Middle Eastern characters on screen, it will be 2015 (2016? 2017? 2064?) before they’re actually, like, people, in addition to just being “diverse.”

I’m thinking of three forthcoming films in particular that seem to play dangerously into the trope of white male leads possessing “ethnic” boy sidekicks: Million Dollar Arm, about a (white) agent’s search for an Indian baseball player; Bad Words, about a (white) 40-year-old spelling bee champ with a nonwhite frenemy, and Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel, in which a white male lead and his (surprise!) nonwhite sidekick battle for an enormous family fortune.

Back in 2007, the UCLA School of Law and UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center reported an unsurprising fact: Latino, African American, Asian American and Native American actors were blocked from many potential jobs due to their appearance. The UCLA study suggested that 69 percent of all acting roles were reserved for specifically white actors, with around 8.5 percent of roles available to actors of any race. Depending on their specific racial background, nonwhite actors could be limited to a mere 0.5 to 8 percent of roles. Noah, as an upcoming example (the trailer for which premiered during the Super Bowl), features an almost-exclusively white cast — despite being based on the Biblical story, in which the participants would have most certainly possessed skin a few shades darker than peach.

And as for lead roles in non-Biblical films? There’s hardly a chance at all.

It’s been this way for a century. In her book, Yellow Future: Oriental Style in Hollywood Cinema, Jane Chi Hyun Park observes that

Stories about friendships between white protagonists and their nonwhite sidekicks permeate U.S. popular culture. Well-known examples include Huck Finn and Jim, the Lone Ranger and Tonto, the Green Hornet and Cato. In the postwar period, as the United States was trying to project a more liberal and harmonious image of national race relations, a handful of films and television shows, such as The Defiant Ones (1958), The Crimson Kimono (1959), I Spy (1965–68) and Brian’s Song (1971) featured nonwhite characters in primary roles alongside white protagonists.

The list goes on — think Pedro in Napoleon Dynamite. The most obvious example, however, is of the “black buddy,” who rides alongside the white male protagonist and will classically take the first bullet, when push comes to shove.

And while there are undeniable problems with black representation in contemporary cinema, it is harder to talk about the representational issues with South Asian or Middle Eastern characters — because there are so fewer instances. Middle Eastern and Southeast Asian characters were long peoples of exotic interest, placed on screen more for intrigue and setting than for plot and development. But exoticism doesn’t seem to be the motivation for the characters in Million Dollar Arm, Bad Words or The Grand Budapest Hotel — rather, there’s the feeling of Hollywood attempting diversity while failing to make outright changes to its extensive fair-skinned traditions. Instead of telling Million Dollar Arm from one of the Indian baseball player’s perspectives, it instead is about the struggles of the American agent. Bad Words leans heavily on stereotypes for its humor (“If you don’t point that curry-hole that way, and sit your fucking ass down on the seat, I’m going to tell the captain that your bag’s ticking”), though it’s indicated that things get warmer and fuzzier as the movie goes along. Wes Anderson’s Grand Budapest Hotel fares significantly better, with actor Tony Revolori filling a stronger and more prominent supporting role. (It is Anderson’s first non-white main character.)

In “Yellow Future,” Park adds that, “Unlike… other men of color, Asiatic men rarely appear at all on the big screen as humanized characters, that is, in dramatic rather than physical (action) and comedic roles.” This also appears to be the case with the roles of the Indian men in Million Dollar Arm, whose wide-eyed entry into Western culture is the source of laughs in the trailer. Additionally, Rohan Chand, an Indian-origin American actor playing the boy in Bad Words, provides a character for Jason Bateman to bounce his jokes off of and seemingly not a whole lot more.

In Grand Budapest Hotel, the nonwhite sidekick, Zero Mustafa (whose origins aren’t available from the trailer, but his name is Arabic) seems to be a more rounded character. Zero’s love interest is white, busting up the same-race relationship predominance in mainstream cinema. (When there is a mixed-race relationship on screen, the woman is usually the “exotic” character to the white male lead.)

Refreshingly, Zero is also not a terrorist.

Misrepresentation and sidelining of nonwhite people in films like Million Dollar Arm or Bad Words does a whole lot more than just keep nonwhite actors out of lead roles. According to Negar Mottahedeh, “Other cultures, ‘much like representations of women in classical cinema’ (Chow 1998), become both the produced and the fetishized objects of a masculinist Western gaze…. This implicates the invention of cinema in the power dynamics that have sustained the colonial enterprise and imperialism itself.” Yikes.

These roles also give an illusion of progress. These trailers had me excited for the refreshing alternative to white guys on screen. With just a few characters as “progressive” as Zero Mustafa appears to be, it’s tempting to relax demand for color without having the demand fully fulfilled. If 2014 isn’t going to be the year for change, then hope 2015 will be.

Have you ever been in a strange city for, say, just one day, but you decide you’re going to make the most of it and see all of that city’s Things To See? So you get a map and you rush from museum to public art installation to famous park to site of historical event to tallest skyscraper to point of high elevation where you can see all those other things. By the end of the day you’ve torn your map and are exhausted and thirsty and disillusioned because the Empire State Building is basically a medium-ugly art deco office building.

Do that on skis, on the side of a mountain, and you have ski orienteering, which was rejected as an Olympic sport for this year’s Games in Sochi.

Ski orienteering is a race, conducted on cross-country skis but with the added confusion of not knowing where you’re supposed to go. Ski orienteers are given a map, which protrudes out from their chest on a small stand in the manner of a beer vendor’s tray at a baseball game, along with, usually, a compass. But the map is garbage! The point of the sport is that the competitors have to figure out their own routes to the checkpoints, and may end up mired in slush or falling off the side of a mountain. The competitors are given “clues” on the map about the quality of the various paths, and have to make up their own minds whether it’s faster to take a direct route through the forest or a roundabout route on a nice packed path.

Ski orienteers have to tag a series of “control sites,” which is ski-orienteering for “checkpoints,” in a specific order. The control sites might be a boulder, or a statue, or a clearing, or any of a dozen other natural or manmade landmarks. They used to have to punch a card to verify that they’d actually been to the site, but now they use what looks like a house-arrest anklet that automatically tags these objects.

Oh, were you interested in the history of this sport? It was designed by the Swedish military as a training exercise, obviously.

Anyway the International Orienteering Federation says they will keep applying until their weird forest-tourist sport is held at the Olympics, where literally nobody will understand what’s going on.

Photo by Puco at Wikimedia Commons

by Bobby Finger

A work in progress. pic.twitter.com/0KCnUGcPRs

— Susan Orlean (@susanorlean) December 6, 2013

“I spend a lot of time on Twitter,” Susan Orlean wrote today in the New Yorker

, in her story on Horse_ebooks. But how? Recently, I asked her quite a bit about her relationship with her phone.

Has there been some kind of astonishing addition to your home screen recently?

Oh, I wish. Nothing astonishing.

I saw you recently took Settings off your homepage and replaced it with Messages.

Well, with the new software, you can flip up from the bottom for the most typical settings stuff. It’s almost like, you know, with a car you’re more interested in having the radio close by than the engine.

I saw that you have three mail apps on your home screen. Do you use Mailbox? I found I got irritated by it pretty quickly.

I have mixed feelings about it, but I do love rescheduling emails. I reschedule the boring stuff that I will otherwise forget. But I’m promiscuous when it comes to apps! I’m always flirting with new ones. Like calendar apps. I have millions of calendar apps. So I’m always looking at new ones and threatening to discard ones I’ve been using.

What’s the current calendar app you’re using?

I use Tempo. It still could be improved, but I actually do like it.

Where do you charge your phone at night?

It’s within striking distance — on my nightstand. It couldn’t be closer without threatening my marriage.

Do you use it as your alarm clock?

I use it as my alarm when I use an alarm. I’m one of those people who tends to wake up on my own, but I do use it when I’m traveling. And if I just happen to need one. I’m not even sure I have an alarm anymore.

Is the phone the first thing you reach for in the morning?

It is. I will give you an excuse for my sad dependence on it, which is now that I’m living in California, by the time I wake up many of the people I work with and know have been up for several hours. So there is actually often stuff that I do want to see. And a lot of times if I wake up early, I read the paper on my phone. It’s my best friend. We’re very close.

My editor is in NY. When I moved to LA, no one warned me that I would automatically be half a day behind with all my work. #grrrr

— Susan Orlean (@susanorlean) January 23, 2014

Do you keep your best friend in a case?

Well as further evidence of how much I use my phone, I ended up getting one of those cases that gives it a whole extra day of charge — which I began to feel I really needed because I was charging my phone during the day. And it was starting to become a problem where, mid-afternoon I’d be eyeballing outlets wherever I was. The problem is, now it’s no longer this sleek, slim little thing because of this bigger case.

Do you keep your phone on vibrate most of the day or do you use the tones?

Well I don’t keep it on silent. I almost never do — which is probably a bad habit. I leave it on. I actually realized the other day that I’ve got to change my ringtone because it’s too common, and the trouble is that you’re used to yours. It really is Pavlovian, and it takes a long time to retrain yourself.

Did you switch tones after the new ones were released with iOS 7?

Some of the new ones I thought were kind of nice. I’m not really into having a weird ringtone, or some song. I just want a ring that I can identify as mine. But I have one that is very popular. Marimba? I’m very often in a store, hear a phone ring, then I’m scrambling to find my phone and see someone next to me is actually answering the call. So. I’ve got to switch, but I’m not somebody who’s gonna go to the point of having a different ringtone for different people. You know, if I can’t look at my phone to see who’s calling, then something’s very sad in my life. No one calls anyone anymore, so tones have become far less meaningful.

Are you one of those people who, when you go somewhere — whether it’s dinner or work — you set your phone on the table in front of you?

I do it when I’m here or at the office. I put it on my desk because I want to be able to see if someone’s calling. Who it is. If I’m out to dinner, I definitely don’t do that. If I’m out to lunch in the middle of the day and things are still happening, maybe I do. But I think it’s slightly cheesy. If I can’t take 45 minutes to have lunch with a friend and not have a phone sitting out, there’s something very wrong.

I did just make the change where I have my messages come to my computer.

Is that working for you? It’s been a little wonky for me.

It’s sort of a weird thing! They come up on my computer faster than on my phone. There’s something weird about the way it syncs up, but I find it much more convenient to have it pop up on the screen so I can just quickly answer them rather than having to get my phone. Also, I work at a treadmill desk, so I don’t want to be reaching around a whole lot. I’m less likely to fall off the treadmill while I’m reaching for my phone.

“I’m quite active on Twitter” — statement I just made and then immediately tweeted. #ourosboros

— Susan Orlean (@susanorlean) December 13, 2013

Where do you keep it in your car?

I put it in the cup holder usually. My new car doesn’t have GPS, so there are a lot of times when I’m using my phone for guidance. And I have it hooked up on my Bluetooth so if someone’s calling me I can see who it is by looking at the stereo system. I keep it out because I don’t want to be reaching back to get my handbag to get my phone and then drive into a telephone pole.

Do you use it for music in the car, or do you still use the radio?

In one of my cars I can stream directly via Bluetooth from the phone to the stereo and use stuff like Spotify, but the car I drive the most — first of all, I have Sirius XM, so it’s easier to let that do its magic — but to play the music from my phone I have to physically plug it into the connector. And sometimes I don’t feel like bothering with that, so actually what I did was I put an old iPod that I’ve had for 1,000 years in the car, put all my old music on it, and now I can play all my music without needing the phone. But normal day to day, driving to the grocery store, frankly I just listen to the radio.

Do you play any games on it?

Not really! I have one game that is, what is it called? I haven’t played it in a while and it’s totally mindless, but it was the one game that I would occasionally play. Bejeweled! Which I would do sometimes when I was bored. It’s fun and kind of addictive and silly. But I have six or seven other games that my son plays. So when I’m somewhere and he’s bored and giving me grief, I say, “Honey! Want to play on my phone a little bit?” So I have these emergency games.

Do you do much reading on your phone? Not just books, but newspapers and magazines?

Not magazines, but I have a number of news apps. And I have a Kindle app — I’ve definitely read books on it. I have the Barnes and Noble app. Zola books, which is a new ebook company. I’ve read far more on my iPad, but before iPads existed I was reading a bunch on my phone. I remember the first ebook I read, I read on my phone. Madame Bovary. I thought, “This is a trip!” And I don’t mind reading on my phone. You have to flip more, but it didn’t bother me. And I certainly read all the time on my iPad mini, which is not that much different from a phone. I mean, the fact is you can make the font as comfortable as you need or want it to be, then it’s sort of all the same.

Thanks for chatting with me.

Oh my god! I just opened my new favorite app, which is the panda cam at the Washington Zoo. And the panda is out eating bamboo. And he’s super cute. Oh my god!

Well now I have to download that.

You’ll die. It’s really cool.

Bobby Finger loves a phone too.

Do you have thoughts about Paper? If they are anything other than “I don’t know what that is,” or “I wish everyone would shut the fuck up about Paper,” I would like you to go outside and stand in the snow for a bit and maybe develop those thoughts a little more fully so that you can articulate them in the best possible form. We’re all really interested in your ideas, and presentation is important, so just take some time out there to firm things up. No, no, just keep waiting, I’ll come get you in a few moments. There will come a point where it seems like I’m actually not coming for you at all, but that is just your super-creative mind working overtime the way it does because you are so brilliant and have so many valuable things to offer. Seriously, don’t worry, I’ll be there eventually. Just stand there in the snow and think. We’re dying to hear what you have to say!

“The controversial French comedian Dieudonné M’bala M’bala has been banned from the UK after one of his shows was barred in France following his branding by the government as anti-Semitic.

Mr Dieudonné had said he wanted to visit Britain to support Nicolas Anelka, a compatriot and West Bromwich Albion football player who has been charged for using the “quenelle”, a gesture created by the comedian that resembles an inverted Nazi salute and is allegedly anti-Semitic.”

— Dieudonné, a spectacularly terrible comedian (here is one of his videos, in which he performs a song called “Holocaust Pineapple” to the tune of a famous children’s song. The lyrics are basically the title of the song and a couple lines about Jews being merchants making money off the Holocaust, though at one point he does yell “Let’s go, shake your butts!”), has already been widely condemned by the French government and most people who have heard of him. Now he’s banned from England. This is a nice primer on Dieudonné, but be warned that it is very easy to fall down an internet rabbit hole and come out dripping in rage and scorn for all things French.

by The Awl

We have outgrown our current workspace, and our wonderful landlord has outgrown us at the same time as well! Everything comes together for a reason or whatever. So we are on the hunt for an office. If you see something, won’t you say something? Hit us at notes@theawl.com.

WHAT
Let’s say more than 700 (real) square feet, fewer probably than 1500 square feet. (I mean sure we’ll do bigger, but it starts to get beyond what we want to spend generally.) We’re open to “unconventional” or “non-traditional” or even “ugly” spaces. We’re not really interested in shared open spaces: we need to be able to talk to each other and make phone calls and have guests and things. But apart from that, we just want somewhere cozy where we can be on the Internet and talk about our feelings and maybe have a couch or two. You know, simple dreams.

WHERE
We are currently situated in glamorous Herald Square, aka Penn Station Village. We are looking in that central strip of Manhattan south of 32nd street, between the A train and the 6 train — so, from Herald Square down through Madison Park and Flatiron into NoHo and SoHo and points south. We are also amenable to downtown Brooklyn. We’re open to other locations but since we all live on separate train lines it gets a little complicated.

WHEN
We would say “before winter ends,” but that is apparently never going to happen, so let’s just go with “soon.”

HOW
We’re willing to take over leases or sublet. We’re willing to sign leases. We’re nice and thoughtful and well-groomed and just amazingly terrific to be around and we pay our rent on time. Also we no longer have an office cat so we’re perfect tenants.

Ideas? Thoughts? Drop us a line.

Accurate artists’ rendering of our office by “bikeriderlondon” from the always amazing Shutterstock.

“Among experts, a furor continues to swirl over whether gentrification and displacement are conjoined. What qualifies as displacement, anyway? Forcible eviction by a rapacious landlord, obviously, but what about a rent that creeps up while a household’s income doesn’t? How about the intangible, dispiriting feeling of being out of place, or a young person’s knowledge that leaving the family home means living in another borough? Or the dislocation that comes when an industry flees, taking its jobs along? These pressures can affect investment bankers and nurses, as well as busboys and the unemployed, and it’s not always easy to distinguish coerced departure from a fresh opportunity, or gentrifiers from the displaced.”

by Awl Sponsors

Report: Everything Merges And Blends Until What Is Left Is A Nebulous Impermanence That Ends Only With Death

“Suddenly we find ourselves living in an online realm where the old is just as easy to consume as the new. We’re approaching an odd sort of asymptote, as our past gets closer and closer to the present and the line separating our now from our then dissolves.”

“A graphic last Sunday about adulterated olive oil sold as ‘extra virgin’ contained several errors. Olives that are used in substandard oil are typically milled days, weeks or even months after being picked — not ‘within hours.’ The graphic conflated two dubious practices that can be found in parts of the olive oil industry. Some unscrupulous producers mix olive oil with soybean or other cheap oils, while others mix vegetable oils with beta carotene and chlorophyll to produce fake olive oil; the two practices are not always combined. Olive oil bottled in Italy and sold in the United States may be labeled ‘packed in Italy’ or ‘imported from Italy’ — not ‘produced in Italy’ — even if the oil does not come from Italy. (However, the source countries are supposed to be listed on the label.) A 2010 study by researchers at the Olive Center at the University of California, Davis, found that 69 percent of imported olive oil labeled ‘extra virgin’ did not meet, in an expert taste and smell test, the standard for that label. The study suggested that the substandard samples had been oxidized; had been adulterated with cheaper refined olive oil; or were of poor quality because they were made from damaged or overripe olives, or olives that had been improperly stored or processed — or some combination of these flaws. It did not conclude that 69 percent of olive oil for sale in the United States was doctored. Finally, the graphic incorrectly cited Tom Mueller, who runs the blog Truth in Olive Oil, as the source of the information. While Mr. Mueller’s blog and other writings were consulted in preparation of the graphic, several of his findings were misinterpreted.”