The United States of inclusivity

[Belacqua]

I think it’s takes away from reality itself—the best course, what I have learned from classical liberalism, is always to reflect on reality and learn from it.

One thing maybe to keep in mind: no TV or movie from Hollywood is historically accurate in the least. I think it might be better to go completely Brechtian, and overemphasize the anachronisms and artificialities, in order to make it clear that it's not really about the past. 

This is clear if you look at older movies. In a Western from 1958 which is supposedly set in 1858, the clothes and the hairstyles and the lighting in the rooms is all completely 1950s. Science fiction set in 2160 but made in 1960 looks exactly like 1960. 

Any movie made today is about today's issues. It might be set in a different time, but it won't be historical. 

I mean, it would be interesting to try for accuracy, but it wouldn't get made by a major studio. 

so when we show a person of color or homosexual doing normal things like white straight people do, we normalize them as just people like anyone else—not to be discriminated or resented but accepted and embraced.

There was a recent TV series about Catherine the Great that had a very diverse cast. Russia has lots of ethnic minorities, of course, but this looked more like modern California. 

I agree that representation is good, and it's valuable for all kinds of people to see their own kind of face in a show like that. But it's done to teach a social message, which we would call propaganda if we didn't like it. 

Again, historical accuracy is not an important value for them. The main goal of any show in the mainstream media is profit.

Edited to add:

For directors and designers, you kind of have to choose between accuracy or equivalency.

So for example, in the Tale of Genji, Genji is supposed to be irresistibly handsome. But from what we know of the fashion of the times, he would look a lot like Kim Jong Un. So if you made a movie today in which modern audiences found him convincingly attractive, you'd have to get someone who looked completely unlike the real [model for] Genji. Otherwise it would just look weird and unbelievable that any of the girls liked such a gargoyle. And the same is true of the women, who plucked out their eyebrows and painted them high up on their foreheads.

So I guess that if a Hollywood director wants to make an emotionally convincing presentation of a lively New York, it has to look more like modern New York than like the real 19th century version.