The Little Mermaid casting backlash is shameful, ridiculous—and all too predictable
How should Hollywood respond to the latest racist firestorm? By casting even more stars of color
If you’re icked by this week’s icky internet response to a Black actor playing Ariel in The Little Mermaid, you’re not alone. You may have even felt a distinct déjà vu given the recent response to Lord Of The Rings: The Rings Of Power (which feels like déjà vu from reactions to Obi-Wan Kenobi, which feels like déjà vu from feedback to The Last Jedi, and so on).
Of course, it’s absurd to dictate how fantasy characters should look—this just in, mermaids are not real—yet the latest Little Mermaid footage from last weekend’s D23 event, featuring Halle Bailey and her majestic voice, sparked such intense ire that the clip reportedly generated 1.5 million dislikes before YouTube disabled the counter. And in what is starting to feel like a very rote cultural conflict, it’s likely that more toxic responses lie ahead from the anti-woke crowd. From casting announcements for Disney’s Percy Jackson And The Olympians to Marvel’s reimagining of The Fantastic Four on the distant horizon, the trolls are already sharpening their blades (or maybe they’ll just copy-paste their racist responses to the last Fantastic Four adaptation).
Ironically, many of the same people harrumphing about everything becoming political are the ones dragging their Fox News-fueled views into a debate about a mermaid’s hair and skin color. A, you know, fictional and fantastical character in a kid’s movie.
You know she’s a mermaid, right?
Let’s really put a fine point on this: These characters are fictional! They live in worlds that aren’t our own! There’s this magical thing called the suspension of disbelief: we do it whenever we sit down to watch a movie or TV series or stage show about shit that’s made up. And The Little Mermaid is suspending disbelief of the highest order. Not only is she half-fish, she’s animated. Despite Disney continuing its “live-action” remakes by rendering the 2023 Little Mermaid with apparently realistic underwater lighting, are people really hoping for a documentarian approach?
Some of the resistance seems to come from the idea that source material, like the 1989 animated original version of The Little Mermaid, can’t be updated or reimagined. When Amazon’s gajillion-dollar Lord Of The Rings project was first announced, my first assumption was they’d want every opportunity to distinguish themselves from Peter Jackson’s seminal, Oscar-winning trilogy. The jury’s still out on how well the series is finding that sweet spot between familiar and new, but populating this Middle-earth with nonwhite actors was one no-brainer move.
I’m reminded of producer Dylan Marron’s brilliant video series, called Every Single Word, which highlighted the lack of diversity in Jackson’s (and many other) films and added fuel to the Representation Matters movement’s growing fire. (See here how many lines are spoken by actors of color in The Return Of The King below, and try not to blink.)
It’s worth noting that Rings author J.R.R. Tolkien himself, both inspired by Western mythology and a vocal opponent of Nazism, grappled with race and culture in his work; even someone with a cursory knowledge of his world-building knows dwarves and elves, two different races of beings, have a tense history of mutual discrimination. To ignore real-world influences and pretend an author creates fiction in a vacuum is, as a Tolkien character might call it, folly. And even if fantasy fiction were indeed somehow not a product of its time, assuming every character in that vacuum to be white is, as we might call it, chud behavior.
Besides, this is an adaptation. As Richard Newby has suggested, there is no obligation to adhere to an original artist’s intent, imagined or otherwise. Think of how refreshingly Matt Ruff’s novel and Misha Green’s TV adaptation Lovecraft Country flipped the script and approached the racism of its source of inspiration, H.P. Lovecraft, head-on. Values change, stories seek to reflect their time, and audiences evolve—or at least some do, anyway.
Fans, and artists, respond
While D23’s recent first glimpse of this live-action Mermaid reignited the so-called debate about the title character’s ethnicity, the internet has also been flooded with much-needed reminders that onscreen representation can significantly impact audiences, particularly young ones. Here’s how Bailey responded—make sure you have tissues at the ready: