Colour blind casting should mean that anyone can play Cleopatra.
However if Plunkett Smith had wanted to make something about a sub-Saharan African queen -- there are several who would do nicely including the Queen of Sheba who apparently came from Ethiopia.
I believe from the coinage of the time -- Cleo was most likely blonde and fairly dumpy. She was of Macedonian heritage as the Ptolemy dynasty comes from Alexander's generals. But the historical Cleo and what she actually looked, sounded like and her true personality has been lost in the sands of time.
Thus it is acting and a fictionalized account. As long they are not claiming to be the definitive version, then there is not a problem. What the series does is to hold a dark mirror up to today's society and serving as a vehicle to state some truths about today's society. So this Cleopatra will speak to today's concerns of being a powerful woman who plays politics and seeks to avoid becoming a pawn. She plays the game well until she doesn't.
Omar Sharif was an Egyptian actor who did rather well for himself. I am sure there are some other female Egyptian movie stars from that time period but my mind has gone blank.
Loved Omar Sharif. I meant a living star of Egyptian extraction who might have played the titular Queen. :-) Your point about how this story has been revived again and again and interpreted through the lens of the era in which the revival happens is absolutely dead on. This is the ESSENCE of interpretive art, and it is the point of legends like Cleopatra. Shakespeare knew this. All great artists have known this.
It is interesting that Cleo holds such a grip whereas the Queen of Sheba, or Zenobia do not. Much blame (or credit) can be laid at the feet of Shakespeare who managed to create works which transcend time and speak directly to the human experience. Societies alter but human emotion remains universal.
It is also why when you are reading a historical, say Sir Walter Scott Ivanhoe -- you have to understand it was written through the lens of a man who lived during the Georgian period. He is using a dark mirror to cast shadows. Someone from the Middle Ages who read it would have seen the inaccuracies. Georgette Heyer's Regency romances have a different Edwardian focus as opposed to Jane Austen who is writing in the eternal present and is a contemporary author. To put it bluntly Jane Austen did not know how Britain would develop after Waterloo, Heyer did.
Solomon and Sheba were the subject of a couple films in the 50s, including a Hollywood costume drama starring Yul Brynner and Gina Lollobrigida. A recent film, "Three Thousand Years of Longing" features a Ugandan actress as Sheba. A representation of an historical figure or event will always be flavored by the artist's interpretation, colored by the time in which they live and the aspects of the story that inspire them. I often point to the many films about someone like Princess Diana or Marilyn Monroe, each drawing on the same available historical material, interpreted through the particular lens of the filmmakers. I agree with you about Jane Austen, and many other novelists who were writing about their own times, giving us a window into the worlds they inhabited. I also love films adapted from the diaries of historical figures--it's thrilling to peer into those private thoughts and experiences, and get a perhaps more frank and realistic view of history. I loved the recent series "Gentleman Jack" for this reason--how fortunate we are that such a courageous and unusual woman as Anne Lister left us this record of her life, and that it survived!
Sally Wainwright who did the screenplay is possibly the best screenwriter operating in the UK today -- also responsible for Happy Valley, Last Tango in Halifax etc. She is a v Yorkshire based writer.
I love nearly forgotten history. And there is a lot of it about because people are not statistics and sometimes the unconventional gets rapidly forgotten. It serves certain people to pretend gates were always shut. Those people just don't fit the narrative -- whatever the current narrative happens to be being pushed.
I do think Solomon and Sheba would be really interesting if interpreted through a modern lens, not a 1950s one. I shall have to look for 'Three Thousand Years of Longing'. I'd also love see the Mary Anne Buckley/James Barrie story done as a tv series -- Buckley became Barrie in order to study medicine and managed to pull off the deception to nearly everyone -- only caught by the woman who washed the body after Barrie's death because of the pregnancy scars. Barrie was the first doctor to successfully perform a C-section where both mother and baby lived as well as serving a British naval officer. Given when Barrie lived, Barrie obviously never took testosterone so it makes the feat all the more interesting. Perhaps one of your non binary mentees could work up a one person play based on Barrie's life.
Very interesting. I've been working on an idea for a stage piece based on Portrait of a Marriage, about the fascinating couple Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicholson, both gay, and love affair Vita had with Violet Trefusis. The two women ran away together, with Vita passing successfully as a man. Janet McTeer did the movie.
Harold and Vita are interesting. Sissinghurst -- the garden they created remains one of the great English gardens. I think the garden in many ways was the true love of both their lives.
The 1920s saw a fashion for androgyny for the Bright Young Things women including breast binding (and some going for the extreme to get the silhouette) -- there are reasons why they know improper breast binding can cause health problems later in life.
Lady Caroline Lamb (of the mad, bad and dangerous to know fame) also enjoyed dressing up as a boy.
And of course, Lucy Brewer served aboard the USS Constitution as George Baker during the war of 1812. US Marine Corp recognises her as the woman marine. Emma Emmonds served as Frank Turnball during the American Civil War. She wrote Nurse and Soldier about her adventures and it was later confirmed through army records. (Back in 2004, I wrote a historical romance with a friend under the pen name Jennifer Lindsay -- The Lady Soldier and to get it published, we had to prove that these women actually existed and could have served successfully)
Thanks for another well-written article in which you reach deep into contemporary hysteria and insanity and pull out something bright and sensible and funny. I binged the Cleopatra series the other night; I thought it was great. I would only quibble with some of the conclusions drawn at the end - the Pharaonic dynasties took some hard hits with the dominance of the Medio-Persians, then the Greeks; I'm not so sure that Cleo was the last of the line going back to the first dynasties B.C. as proclaimed. She gave it her best but I'm not sure that her legacy of female power lives on forever; as the director declared; Rome pretty much chewed up everything in its path, no matter how lovely its poetry and engineering ... anyway, quibbles from an amateur historian.
The world is being treated to another wild American trope: this time, The One Drop Rule. Tell your Egyptian/Newyorican pal to chill; by American standards the whole world is black except for that northern corridor that runs from northern France eastward to North Korea with Siberia in-between. I am part of a large complicated Black American family which has (among many types) fraternal twins by a Black father and White mother; one is tall and well-built with a rich pink skin color (not white but pink) with wide West African features; the brother is shorter with straight hair, brown skin, straightish facial features and - at the risk of offending your pal - he looks Egyptian! Or Middle Eastern! Sorry guys ... dark comes from Africa .... certain culture forms too. How about Latin Americans? Having lived in Latin America for years as a young man and returning to Seattle where there was zero Latin American presence (very small), I started befriending Blacks to get my dose of whatever - Black culture that I picked up in Latin America. White Latin Americans may look white but their hips are Black; the tensions generated between Latinos and Black Americans never made a whit of sense to me ... I'm veering off topic but Americans and Egyptians are looking in mirrors and laughing (and getting mad at) each other because we live in different racial zones ...
You're a comedian, Senor Saucy ... (among your many talents...) ... I really do sympathize with your Egyptian/Americano friend ... just remind him that part of being American is to be crazy when it comes to race and that we are going through a particularly crazy time just now ... speaking of DNA samples ... the other day I caught up with a college pal - super blond, Child of Corn, pure Aryan , you-know-who Youth looking dude - got his DNA swab back; "I'm ten percent Jewish!" he said happily, proudly - yeah!
You've got a great attitude and I love your perspectives, thank you!! I think my friend Yousef was less angered by the appropriation of things Egyptian (his parents are immigrants); he's annoyed that the draconian standards imposed on us regarding racial sensitivity and the rules about precise racial representation in the culture are being selectively applied. It's not about skin tone. Yousef's Mom makes him the food of his culture; he was raised with the values and sense of ethnic identity that his Egyptian parents instilled in him. I think his ire was more about how it seems okay to just grab something from his ancestry and culture but in reverse there'd be a sh*t storm of outrage. It's the double standard. British bad boy Laurence Fox had something spicy to say recently relating to the point you make re: racial purity. "All of us 'oppressors,' all we need to do is lob a sample of our DNA to one of the ancestry websites, cross your fingers, wait for the results--and there's every chance you'll be at least 3% Ugandan."
Rami Malek is an a-lister and of Egyptian decent. He is American, but Hollywood would be willing to call him “Egyptian” even if people in Egypt wouldn’t necessarily say that. It is one of the idiosyncrasies of the US that we will use a country as a descriptor of a person’s identity even if the person wasn’t born there.
Thank you! I enjoyed Mr. Malek's performance as Freddie Mercury. I didn't know he was of Egyptian extraction. Of course, his Cleopatra would be a very different interpretation... ;-)
This is the best thing I’ve seen on this particular topic.
I’ve found myself, several times, thinking: ok, as a straight white man, when Black people and Asian people have a beef, whose side am I supposed to take? When feminists and trans activists are fighting, why isn’t it ok for me to have some sympathy for both groups? And so on.
This cleopatra casting situation, as you correctly observe, is a perfect example of how woke logic is often in conflict with itself. As, I would argue, any school of thought invented by humans will eventually be, if all outside criticism is met with anger and dismissal.
Glad you dig it, Karl! The whole point of a diverse and inclusive society is to recognize and embrace all the nuances of race, ethnicity etc that exist--even within these monolithic groups that we've created of Black, white, Asian etc etc. My issue with the Woke politics is that it is not about diversity--it's about making people perceived to have the power give up the power in the ways they dictate, using the terminology and gestures they've delineated (see: imbibed, from the scions of their movement, and old dead guys like Foucault). The danger is the rigidity and oversimplification of thought and language which encourages many of today's incurious and intellectually unvigorous young people to disengage with debate and nuanced thought.
I’ll put it less eloquently-- it’s not consistently about principle. It’s often about tit for tat. I don’t object to that, really. I object to the bogus claim that it’s all about principle.
It would be nice if this situation turned out to be a “teachable moment,” for many people who need to hear what you’re saying. I don’t see how anyone can argue that the Egyptian people objecting don’t have a legitimate point. I don’t actually have much sympathy for the idea of cultural appropriation, but if one does, they would have to engage in some fancy contortions to explain why Jada’s casting decision shouldn’t be criticized.
Instead of all that blather, I should have just said, what’s good for the goose is good for the gander.
Boom. That's right. I often suspect that certain choices are made almost to dare people to dissent so as to give the opportunity for the provocateurs to scream victimhood--and victimhood is the new elite status is it not? I find it sick.
I once observed a Facebook comment-section dustup where a gay Black woman was telling a gay White woman “you don’t get it,” and then a straight Black man jumped in and tried to gently get all parties to step back and be more civil to each other.
It was like oppression poker. I fantasized for a moment about a gay Black woman in a wheelchair showing up and winning the pot.
Ha ha!!! The Struggle Olympics. Yes, indeed. I personally don't get much empowerment from listing my victimhood credentials. As Richard Bach wrote: "Argue for your limitations and sure enough, they're yours." Deriving self esteem from victimhood means your complete dependence upon the pity of those who feel sorry for you, and a constant presence of people you can accuse of oppressing you. Either way, you're weak and without agency. Not a power position.
I have a theory (not trying to take up your whole day here, by the way!) that there’s a cycle where oppressed groups get enough of the societal change they demand to make it possible for the next generation to gain power and influence by pretending that their status hasn’t improved at all.
It’s a paradox; you couldn’t comfortably raise this much fuss without fear of reprisal unless things have in fact changed quite dramatically.
There’s still much room for improvement of course, but the continued grasping for the victimhood mantle slows the process of improvement, in my view.
Jamie - attempting to reach you directly I hollered at you in your Instagram messages last week. It way be waiting for ‘approval’ as these apps all have their own indirect way of messaging directly. If you get a chance, dig it up. Nothing too pressing, just a sort of introduction to a conversation. Greatly appreciate your voice! - TS
It’s how the META-verse works. It hides messages unless you are mutually friended, incentivizing everyone to connect everywhere always. In messages there’s a “hidden” section. It’s likely there. But now that I’ve looked (on both of my accounts) your insta appears to have vanished.
Colour blind casting should mean that anyone can play Cleopatra.
However if Plunkett Smith had wanted to make something about a sub-Saharan African queen -- there are several who would do nicely including the Queen of Sheba who apparently came from Ethiopia.
I believe from the coinage of the time -- Cleo was most likely blonde and fairly dumpy. She was of Macedonian heritage as the Ptolemy dynasty comes from Alexander's generals. But the historical Cleo and what she actually looked, sounded like and her true personality has been lost in the sands of time.
Thus it is acting and a fictionalized account. As long they are not claiming to be the definitive version, then there is not a problem. What the series does is to hold a dark mirror up to today's society and serving as a vehicle to state some truths about today's society. So this Cleopatra will speak to today's concerns of being a powerful woman who plays politics and seeks to avoid becoming a pawn. She plays the game well until she doesn't.
Omar Sharif was an Egyptian actor who did rather well for himself. I am sure there are some other female Egyptian movie stars from that time period but my mind has gone blank.
Loved Omar Sharif. I meant a living star of Egyptian extraction who might have played the titular Queen. :-) Your point about how this story has been revived again and again and interpreted through the lens of the era in which the revival happens is absolutely dead on. This is the ESSENCE of interpretive art, and it is the point of legends like Cleopatra. Shakespeare knew this. All great artists have known this.
Precisely.
It is interesting that Cleo holds such a grip whereas the Queen of Sheba, or Zenobia do not. Much blame (or credit) can be laid at the feet of Shakespeare who managed to create works which transcend time and speak directly to the human experience. Societies alter but human emotion remains universal.
It is also why when you are reading a historical, say Sir Walter Scott Ivanhoe -- you have to understand it was written through the lens of a man who lived during the Georgian period. He is using a dark mirror to cast shadows. Someone from the Middle Ages who read it would have seen the inaccuracies. Georgette Heyer's Regency romances have a different Edwardian focus as opposed to Jane Austen who is writing in the eternal present and is a contemporary author. To put it bluntly Jane Austen did not know how Britain would develop after Waterloo, Heyer did.
Solomon and Sheba were the subject of a couple films in the 50s, including a Hollywood costume drama starring Yul Brynner and Gina Lollobrigida. A recent film, "Three Thousand Years of Longing" features a Ugandan actress as Sheba. A representation of an historical figure or event will always be flavored by the artist's interpretation, colored by the time in which they live and the aspects of the story that inspire them. I often point to the many films about someone like Princess Diana or Marilyn Monroe, each drawing on the same available historical material, interpreted through the particular lens of the filmmakers. I agree with you about Jane Austen, and many other novelists who were writing about their own times, giving us a window into the worlds they inhabited. I also love films adapted from the diaries of historical figures--it's thrilling to peer into those private thoughts and experiences, and get a perhaps more frank and realistic view of history. I loved the recent series "Gentleman Jack" for this reason--how fortunate we are that such a courageous and unusual woman as Anne Lister left us this record of her life, and that it survived!
Sally Wainwright who did the screenplay is possibly the best screenwriter operating in the UK today -- also responsible for Happy Valley, Last Tango in Halifax etc. She is a v Yorkshire based writer.
I love nearly forgotten history. And there is a lot of it about because people are not statistics and sometimes the unconventional gets rapidly forgotten. It serves certain people to pretend gates were always shut. Those people just don't fit the narrative -- whatever the current narrative happens to be being pushed.
I do think Solomon and Sheba would be really interesting if interpreted through a modern lens, not a 1950s one. I shall have to look for 'Three Thousand Years of Longing'. I'd also love see the Mary Anne Buckley/James Barrie story done as a tv series -- Buckley became Barrie in order to study medicine and managed to pull off the deception to nearly everyone -- only caught by the woman who washed the body after Barrie's death because of the pregnancy scars. Barrie was the first doctor to successfully perform a C-section where both mother and baby lived as well as serving a British naval officer. Given when Barrie lived, Barrie obviously never took testosterone so it makes the feat all the more interesting. Perhaps one of your non binary mentees could work up a one person play based on Barrie's life.
Very interesting. I've been working on an idea for a stage piece based on Portrait of a Marriage, about the fascinating couple Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicholson, both gay, and love affair Vita had with Violet Trefusis. The two women ran away together, with Vita passing successfully as a man. Janet McTeer did the movie.
Harold and Vita are interesting. Sissinghurst -- the garden they created remains one of the great English gardens. I think the garden in many ways was the true love of both their lives.
The 1920s saw a fashion for androgyny for the Bright Young Things women including breast binding (and some going for the extreme to get the silhouette) -- there are reasons why they know improper breast binding can cause health problems later in life.
Lady Caroline Lamb (of the mad, bad and dangerous to know fame) also enjoyed dressing up as a boy.
And of course, Lucy Brewer served aboard the USS Constitution as George Baker during the war of 1812. US Marine Corp recognises her as the woman marine. Emma Emmonds served as Frank Turnball during the American Civil War. She wrote Nurse and Soldier about her adventures and it was later confirmed through army records. (Back in 2004, I wrote a historical romance with a friend under the pen name Jennifer Lindsay -- The Lady Soldier and to get it published, we had to prove that these women actually existed and could have served successfully)
Dear Mr. Lictor,
Thanks for another well-written article in which you reach deep into contemporary hysteria and insanity and pull out something bright and sensible and funny. I binged the Cleopatra series the other night; I thought it was great. I would only quibble with some of the conclusions drawn at the end - the Pharaonic dynasties took some hard hits with the dominance of the Medio-Persians, then the Greeks; I'm not so sure that Cleo was the last of the line going back to the first dynasties B.C. as proclaimed. She gave it her best but I'm not sure that her legacy of female power lives on forever; as the director declared; Rome pretty much chewed up everything in its path, no matter how lovely its poetry and engineering ... anyway, quibbles from an amateur historian.
The world is being treated to another wild American trope: this time, The One Drop Rule. Tell your Egyptian/Newyorican pal to chill; by American standards the whole world is black except for that northern corridor that runs from northern France eastward to North Korea with Siberia in-between. I am part of a large complicated Black American family which has (among many types) fraternal twins by a Black father and White mother; one is tall and well-built with a rich pink skin color (not white but pink) with wide West African features; the brother is shorter with straight hair, brown skin, straightish facial features and - at the risk of offending your pal - he looks Egyptian! Or Middle Eastern! Sorry guys ... dark comes from Africa .... certain culture forms too. How about Latin Americans? Having lived in Latin America for years as a young man and returning to Seattle where there was zero Latin American presence (very small), I started befriending Blacks to get my dose of whatever - Black culture that I picked up in Latin America. White Latin Americans may look white but their hips are Black; the tensions generated between Latinos and Black Americans never made a whit of sense to me ... I'm veering off topic but Americans and Egyptians are looking in mirrors and laughing (and getting mad at) each other because we live in different racial zones ...
Oh and you can call me Saucy. :-)
You're a comedian, Senor Saucy ... (among your many talents...) ... I really do sympathize with your Egyptian/Americano friend ... just remind him that part of being American is to be crazy when it comes to race and that we are going through a particularly crazy time just now ... speaking of DNA samples ... the other day I caught up with a college pal - super blond, Child of Corn, pure Aryan , you-know-who Youth looking dude - got his DNA swab back; "I'm ten percent Jewish!" he said happily, proudly - yeah!
You've got a great attitude and I love your perspectives, thank you!! I think my friend Yousef was less angered by the appropriation of things Egyptian (his parents are immigrants); he's annoyed that the draconian standards imposed on us regarding racial sensitivity and the rules about precise racial representation in the culture are being selectively applied. It's not about skin tone. Yousef's Mom makes him the food of his culture; he was raised with the values and sense of ethnic identity that his Egyptian parents instilled in him. I think his ire was more about how it seems okay to just grab something from his ancestry and culture but in reverse there'd be a sh*t storm of outrage. It's the double standard. British bad boy Laurence Fox had something spicy to say recently relating to the point you make re: racial purity. "All of us 'oppressors,' all we need to do is lob a sample of our DNA to one of the ancestry websites, cross your fingers, wait for the results--and there's every chance you'll be at least 3% Ugandan."
Rami Malek is an a-lister and of Egyptian decent. He is American, but Hollywood would be willing to call him “Egyptian” even if people in Egypt wouldn’t necessarily say that. It is one of the idiosyncrasies of the US that we will use a country as a descriptor of a person’s identity even if the person wasn’t born there.
Thank you! I enjoyed Mr. Malek's performance as Freddie Mercury. I didn't know he was of Egyptian extraction. Of course, his Cleopatra would be a very different interpretation... ;-)
I might actually be interested in watching the version of Netflix’s Cleopatra with Malek In the title role.
Gives new meaning to Drag Queen Story Hour.
This is the best thing I’ve seen on this particular topic.
I’ve found myself, several times, thinking: ok, as a straight white man, when Black people and Asian people have a beef, whose side am I supposed to take? When feminists and trans activists are fighting, why isn’t it ok for me to have some sympathy for both groups? And so on.
This cleopatra casting situation, as you correctly observe, is a perfect example of how woke logic is often in conflict with itself. As, I would argue, any school of thought invented by humans will eventually be, if all outside criticism is met with anger and dismissal.
Cf. Christianity. Patriotism. Etc.
Glad you dig it, Karl! The whole point of a diverse and inclusive society is to recognize and embrace all the nuances of race, ethnicity etc that exist--even within these monolithic groups that we've created of Black, white, Asian etc etc. My issue with the Woke politics is that it is not about diversity--it's about making people perceived to have the power give up the power in the ways they dictate, using the terminology and gestures they've delineated (see: imbibed, from the scions of their movement, and old dead guys like Foucault). The danger is the rigidity and oversimplification of thought and language which encourages many of today's incurious and intellectually unvigorous young people to disengage with debate and nuanced thought.
I’ll put it less eloquently-- it’s not consistently about principle. It’s often about tit for tat. I don’t object to that, really. I object to the bogus claim that it’s all about principle.
It would be nice if this situation turned out to be a “teachable moment,” for many people who need to hear what you’re saying. I don’t see how anyone can argue that the Egyptian people objecting don’t have a legitimate point. I don’t actually have much sympathy for the idea of cultural appropriation, but if one does, they would have to engage in some fancy contortions to explain why Jada’s casting decision shouldn’t be criticized.
Instead of all that blather, I should have just said, what’s good for the goose is good for the gander.
Boom. That's right. I often suspect that certain choices are made almost to dare people to dissent so as to give the opportunity for the provocateurs to scream victimhood--and victimhood is the new elite status is it not? I find it sick.
I once observed a Facebook comment-section dustup where a gay Black woman was telling a gay White woman “you don’t get it,” and then a straight Black man jumped in and tried to gently get all parties to step back and be more civil to each other.
It was like oppression poker. I fantasized for a moment about a gay Black woman in a wheelchair showing up and winning the pot.
Ha ha!!! The Struggle Olympics. Yes, indeed. I personally don't get much empowerment from listing my victimhood credentials. As Richard Bach wrote: "Argue for your limitations and sure enough, they're yours." Deriving self esteem from victimhood means your complete dependence upon the pity of those who feel sorry for you, and a constant presence of people you can accuse of oppressing you. Either way, you're weak and without agency. Not a power position.
I have a theory (not trying to take up your whole day here, by the way!) that there’s a cycle where oppressed groups get enough of the societal change they demand to make it possible for the next generation to gain power and influence by pretending that their status hasn’t improved at all.
It’s a paradox; you couldn’t comfortably raise this much fuss without fear of reprisal unless things have in fact changed quite dramatically.
There’s still much room for improvement of course, but the continued grasping for the victimhood mantle slows the process of improvement, in my view.
Jamie - attempting to reach you directly I hollered at you in your Instagram messages last week. It way be waiting for ‘approval’ as these apps all have their own indirect way of messaging directly. If you get a chance, dig it up. Nothing too pressing, just a sort of introduction to a conversation. Greatly appreciate your voice! - TS
I may not have seen the message! So sorry. I have been getting phished a lot on Insta.
It’s how the META-verse works. It hides messages unless you are mutually friended, incentivizing everyone to connect everywhere always. In messages there’s a “hidden” section. It’s likely there. But now that I’ve looked (on both of my accounts) your insta appears to have vanished.
I think I corrected the problem--I was blocking a bunch of bots and you got lumped in with them! Sorry about that.