Tag Archives: character

Conversation: Girl With All The Gifts

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Below are three levels of conversation around Girl With All the Gifts. The first layer is the one I usually interact with – the subject matter/details of the work itself. That’s not a bad thing, just something I’ve noticed about myself and my consumption of media.

I’ve loved Mike Carey since my brief satanic stint in college. Not to say I went on one, I just got really fascinated by the media that came out of the devil worshiping scare in the eighties. From John Constantine to the Felix Castor novels to Lucifer, I consumed whatever that guy put out. And then he sort of fell off the radar. Or maybe I did.

Girl With All the Gifts was completely different from that whole comic book and gore aesthetic and I nearly passed it right by. Then I looked at the author name and thought, oh, what if… So I gave it a shot. It was good. It was the kind of book you read and then you go on to the next book you’ll read. So a movie came out with the same name and like any good nerd, I reread the book and went to watch the film.

Sometimes we understand a work immediately. The high notes are easy to grasp. Here we have a special child with a special destiny but – oooh, twist! – her special destiny is not what you think. Seriously, go read it.

Most of the PR I can remember about the film talked about how they made the main protagonist black, which was a great example of when changing the race of the protagonist adds to a work and makes it richer. Go read this review on Black Girl Nerd for a nuanced look at how changing the race of the protagonist added depth and a discussion of agency as the work translated between book and film.

When the movie came out, I was doubly excited to see that pivotal end scene, the one that took me two readings to understand. The one that, on the second reading, changed the way I saw the world and the shape of it.

When I saw the movie, I saw they also changed the race of a side character.

MASSIVE SPOILER

But you already read the book, so you know what I’m going to say next. Right?

In the book, we have a special child with a special destiny and a special teacher who, from the child’s perspective, is the best teacher in the whole world. She’s the most amazing adult the child has ever met, which is a very understandable perspective given the cruelty the kid faces every day of her life from absolutely everybody else. She protects her favorite teacher above all else, so that when the whole world ends, her favorite teacher is still right by her side. Because you read the book, you know the students are all zombies, the special child finds a way to turn all the remaining human survivors into zombies, and now the special students will be the leaders of the new world. And the basis of their new world is what they are taught by the best teacher from the old world.

In the book, the most pivotal scene to me, was of the students sitting at the feet of a black woman, ready for their first lesson in the world from the their favorite teacher. Through the film she watches the last vestiges of the world she knows be destroyed by her beloved special student and finally she stands before the children, the only grown-up found worthy. The last of humanity in her known world – and while it is a delightful horror movie ending, there was another layer. She prepares to shape the new world from her perspective, breaking a long history of white perspective for the first time in English speaking countries at least. Remember, the author was British, this writer is American, and most of my formally taught history was written by, or at the very least, filtered through the white, male perspective. That was never more apparent than when Sonia Sotomayor was confirmed to the Supreme Court. The last scene of the book, the promise of reverberation, was the kind of scene that nestled down into my brain and crept over me weeks and months later, a quiet what if –

In the movie the teacher was a white woman.

That’s the first layer of the conversation.

Here’s another layer. There is only one black character with a major speaking role (or major narrative role) in either the movie or the book*. Why do we need to accept only one? Why couldn’t we have had both in the movie? Or the book? Why, when the “major POC character” role was filled, were we trapped in a world where we still have to count non-white ethnicities? Why are there so few I can count them?

And there is yet another layer. The book was authored by a white English man. In the chain of creation, there will also be his agent, editor, and publisher. The director of the movie was a white Scottish man. In the chain of creation, there will also be the casting team, producers, etc.

Representation matters, at all levels.

*There are a couple of minor roles played by black actors who exist to get eaten, basically. To be really fair, everyone who isn’t the special teacher or the students are there to die. It is a zombie flick after all.

Voice: Hannibal S02E08

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Like many foodies, I gravitated to Hannibal the series both for the beautiful dinner parties and the people eating*. As a lifelong horror fan, it had everything I craved at the time, from the quiet, gorgeous framing, delightful costuming, and little things like growing mushrooms on people or a man who is turned into a beehive.

Every time we rewatch and reread a work, it becomes new in that we have space to notice new details, or to notice old details in a new way. During the intervening days and years between consumption we have taken in new works that create new spaces for these old works to slot newly into our minds, thus changing our worldview oh-so-slightly, wonderfully, in a way that creates a cascade effect to change the works we have taken in and will taken in – and on and on.

In season 2, episode 8, Jack and Will go ice fishing. At this point –

SPOILERS

Will has dealt with his encephalitis and subsequent minor jail sequence as the suspected copycat killer. Jack, in the surety of his leadership style, has not yet accepted Hannibal as a suspect, but is working to reintegrate a newly freed Will.

The entirety of their two personalities and the tug of interaction – Jack’s overconfidence, Will’s quick thinking, poorly executed communication style – is on full display in a single frame. Look at the footprints in the snow leading to the ice fishing hole.

Jack’s footprints are in a straight line with a brutally even stride. Will’s footprints are turned in and out, as though the character has carefully and quickly picked his way over the ice, even though of the two, he is the more experienced fisherman.

It’s a single instance of care for the characters, the setting, and the audience, that draws me back to the show again and again.

*Eating people? I feel like this is one of those accidental in-jokes, if you haven’t seen the show and don’t realize Hannibal doesn’t just rhyme with cannibal.

Conversation: Black Panther

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There’s a scene in Black Panther that made me laugh at the layers upon layers of conversation. Winston Duke, who should be in more things, plays M’Baku (this is not a spoiler. Everyone and their grandmother has seen this flick), a leader of the Jabari tribe and antagonist of the main character. He rules his people with care and sees a risk in the prince becoming king – you saw the movie. You know what happens next.


Duke creates a multi-layered character that says as much about his character’s role in the film as it does about his society – which we don’t see a lot of, actually. We get T’Challa and some little bits of the richly complex world of Wakanda, but we’re there for two hours of action and tragedy and triumph. In one scene, Martin Freeman as generic white guy, Everett Ross, keeps talking. Tale as old as time. But he stands before the leader of an entire tribe and interrupts much higher ranking women who already have leave to speak based on the societal hierarchy. That, and, he’s a guest. My man. Rude.


In an interview*, Duke said he invented the barking sound (also called a grunting sound) to make the point that Freeman’s character had no power in the throne room. He had no power in Wakanda. Had anyone else played Ross, like your basic Tom Cruise, or maybe a dozen interchangeable American white guys, it would still be a funny scene. But pick a white guy from a country with royalty and a famously complex cultural level of understanding of acceptable behavior, and it’s hilarious.


Just a shout out to world building: Pretend your character comes from a country with strict class delineations. Now pretend your character is running away with a character from a higher class. Do they speak like a peer? What rules will you have to break to make that okay?

*Empire Film Podcast #356, referenced by Webbed Media posted on March 26, 2019, “Winston Duke Improvised M’Baku Barking In Black Panther”.