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When last we checked in on Netflix, about eleven months ago, the company had just experienced its first ever decline in subscriptions.
Believing there to be at least some merit in the allegations from some on the right that they’d gone too Woke, corporation executives reaffirmed their intention to work with the likes of Dave Chapelle (whose special was the subject of no little discontent among employees) and actually chastised their workers who didn’t agree with the policy of “let[ting] viewers decide what’s appropriate for them, versus having Netflix censor specific artists or voices.”
This week, Netflix is in the news again, and Curmie is unimpressed. On Tuesday afternoon, Curmie received an email from the company saying they would be suspending their DVD service about six months hence. They of course have the right to do whatever they want, but this is just dumb. Yes, “the DVD business continues to shrink,” but whereas Netflix faces competition in the streaming business from Amazon, Hulu, Disney+, HBO Max, and a host of others, they pretty much monopolize the DVD-by-mail business.
They have a stock of millions of copies of tens of thousands of titles, and they’re going to just stop? One thing Netflix appeared to understand in those halcyon days of… well, a week ago was that there’s a lot of good (at least in someone’s mind) material that is available on disc but not to stream. As an example, on the date he received the email, Curmie had 258 separate titles (i.e., not counting, for example, later seasons for a television series) in his queue. Of these, precisely four are available to stream on Netflix. Curmie hasn’t checked the entire list yet, but it appears that a little over 20% of the titles are not available to stream anywhere.
There’s a reason these items were in Curmie’s queue: they’re things he and/or Beloved Spouse want to see, but we don’t need it see them immediately. Some of these titles are available to watch either free (perhaps with ads) or as part of subscriptions we already have (basic Prime, Britbox, PBS, etc.). Most, however, would incur a fee per viewing (e.g., Prime Video) or would involve a substantial monthly fee (eg., HBO Max or Disney+) for a much narrower range of options than the status quo provides. Not to mention that there are more such companies than one might imagine: Curmie has already counted over a dozen different such vendors for films currently in his queue, each with their own monthly charges. Jolly.
To be sure, Netflix has been pandering to a younger demographic, one which may not even have DVD players, for some time now. (This is perfectly fine, by the way.) The algorithm that suggests how much we (as opposed to the average viewer) would like a particular DVD is actually rather good. Almost always the rating we’d give a film is within one or two tenths of a point on their 5-star scale of the algorithm’s projection: even when our taste differs significantly from that of the general population. But some marketing genius decided that for streaming content, a simple thumbs up/down system was just peachy. Curmie can’t figure out what the “percentage match” scale is even trying to tell us, but he does know that he’s seen stuff with a personal 97% match that’s absolute dreck.
Of course, there are also the young’uns who at least pretend to have been unaware that Netflix still shipped DVDs. “You just might have assumed that era ended years ago” chirps one Michael Walsh, who is clearly one of those damned kids who needs to get off my lawn. (No shootings here, however; that’s the story Curmie hasn’t written about yet.)
Ah, but there’s a financial angle. You see, Netflix brought in a mere $145.7 million in revenue in 2022 from DVD rentals. Curmie isn’t a corporate accountant, but that seems like a fair amount of money in this neighborhood.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s probably not worth the expense of getting a gazillion copies of every hot new movie that comes out. So… don’t. Stop buying new stuff, but continue the DVD service for older films and for material that doesn’t stream anywhere for whatever reason. You’ll still make tens of millions of dollars for not much work. This also calms the anger of those folks who watched you put your competition out of business and then proceeded to abandon the customers you purport to value so much. This strikes Curmie as a no-brainer, which is, no doubt, why his degrees are in theatre instead of finance.
Anyway, we move on to the other Netflix story of the week: the brouhaha over the casting of the Cleopatra episode(s) in a Netflix series called “African Queens.” The title character of this venture is played by Adele James, a mixed-race actress who presents as black. There is, of course, nothing wrong with this. Cleopatra was Macedonian and almost certainly not black, but the “almost” in this statement allows for some wiggle-room if indeed any was needed. Jack Marshall at Ethics Alarms points out that “no one cared” when Leslie Uggams played the role in Her First Roman, a musical that had a brief Broadway run in the autumn of 1968. Curmie doesn’t want to associate with anyone who objects to James playing the role. But…
The problem is in the marketing. The Daily Mail reports that “The trailer released last week features claims that Cleopatra was black with ‘curly hair.’ One historian asserts in the preview: ‘I remember my grandmother saying to me: I don't care what they tell you in school, Cleopatra was black.’” This isn’t strictly accurate: the trailer does not identify those voices we hear as historians. If that’s what they are, one would imagine that the producers would make damned sure to identify them as such. They don’t. Next!
Moreover, the opening sequence of the trailer describes this episode as part of a “Netflix Documentary Series.” Whatever this is, it isn’t a documentary. If you want to play around with history, Curmie doesn’t get terribly upset as long as the product—play, novel, film, whatever—stays in the realm of story-telling and doesn’t pretend to be a representation of fact. Both “this isn’t likely, but it’s plausible” and “wouldn’t it have been interesting if…” are reasonable places from which to start a story.
Ay, there’s the rub (Curmie had to do something for Shakespeare’s birthday, after all…): this program asserts as true that which is extraordinarily unlikely, and does so while pretending to be grounded in fact. Jada Pinkett-Smith, the show’s producer, claims she was interested in this story because “we don't often get to see or hear stories about black queens.” Were he of cynical disposition, Curmie might wonder why she chose to tell, instead, the story of an almost-certainly white queen as if she were black.
That, by the way, is precisely how the imdb page described this program at least through three days ago: “A fictional account of what the life of Cleopatra was imagined to have been like if she was a black woman.” Now they’ve changed it to read: “Fictionalized Netflix-story about Queen Cleopatra of Egypt of the Ptolemaic lineage from Macedonia, Greece, that ruled for 21 years, between the years 51 BC and 30 BC, ending with her suicide.” Interesting capitulation, don’t you think, Gentle Reader? They still list it as a documentary, however. Don’t try to figure that one out; it’ll only give you a headache.
By way of contrast, here’s the imdb description of the first film in the series, “African Queens: Njinga”: “Expert interviews and other documentary content with premium scripted docudrama about different queens.” Holy 17th Century, Batman! That sounds like it might actually be a documentary!
The controversy over the Cleopatra episodes is reminiscent in some ways of a similar casting decision a couple of years ago, when black actress Jodie Turner-Smith was cast in the title role of a BBC mini-series on Anne Boleyn. There are several differences, though.
First is a fundamental difference in the way the casting of a major role was presented. The BBC would have us believe that race doesn’t matter, so long as it’s “surprising.” (Having the role played by a holographic image of Hervé Villechaize would also have worked, apparently.) The forthcoming Netflix series is at least honest that being black (or mixed race and appearing black, in this case) was a prerequisite for an actress being considered for the role of Cleopatra, who almost certainly was, shall we say, significantly lighter-complected.
Thus, presenting “Queen Cleopatra” with a black or black-presenting title character isn’t inherently problematic. We know who Cleopatra’s father was, but her mother’s identity is unknown, so she could, hypothetically, have looked rather like Adele James. There’s no evidence of that, but neither can it be denied with absolute certainty. But whereas the BBC just wanted to be “surprising” (i.e. they wanted a gimmick), this project not merely presents Cleopatra as black, but hints at some sort of conspiracy among, well, actual historians and archaeologists to deny that “fact.”
Of course, another difference is that no sentient adult would believe that Anne Boleyn was black, but there’s a tiny chance that Cleopatra was. Interestingly, this makes the current incident more problematic, since a black 16th century English noblewoman is, by definition, fictional, whereas a black Egyptian queen from the 1st century BCE is remotely possible, and cannot as easily be rejected outright. (It can, and should, be rejected as fact.)
What actually is a fact is that at least some actual current-day Egyptians are incensed by the casting in a way that Brits were not a couple of years ago. There were, no doubt, a fair number of UK residents who were put off by the casting of Turner-Smith as perhaps the most famous English queen not named Elizabeth or Victoria. But there were, to the best of my knowledge, at least, no claims similar to Mahmoud al-Semary’s accusation that Netflix was trying to “promote the Afrocentric thinking … which includes slogans and writings aimed at distorting and erasing the Egyptian identity.”
It’s difficult to say, of course, to what extent the reported outrage is representative of the feelings of the Egyptian public at large. The Daily Mail can be counted on to tell one side of that story at the expense of the other, and there is a good chance that some of the response is indeed motivated by anti-black racism, which certainly exists in Egypt. Still, whereas the attempt to shut down Netflix in Egypt is perhaps an over-reaction, these people are serious about the accurate portrayal of their history. In this country, of course, utterly specious claims (especially but hardly exclusively about race) from both the left and the right pop up faster than zits on prom night.
Whatever ultimately happens in Egypt, Netflix and Pinkett-Smith have done considerable harm to their reputations. Well, they would have if they had one to begin with.
It’s been a bad week for Netflix. But hey, the disc we got from them that we watched Friday night was really good. There’s that…
(Note: a good share of the discussion of “Queen Cleopatra” was adapted from a comment I wrote on the Ethics Alarms blog linked above)
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