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seriousficThe big ha-ha let’s laugh at the stupid movie post is coming, but for now, a mild degree of meta. Oh, and unlike SOME people, I’ll keep the spoilers under a cut, thank you very much.
WAS THAT SO HARD? WAS THAT SO HARD? I DON’T THINK IT WAS THAT HARD.
Aaaaaanyway, yes, Benedict Cumberbatch is playing Khan, and I would kind of like to discuss that rather than just go “fuck you, J.J. Abrams!” like the internet wants to. I think there are two real, debatable reasons why they would cast a pasty white British guy (someday, Benedict Cumberbatch is going to get a tan and it’s going to be like when Anne Hathaway got her hair straightened in The Princess Diaries).
Firstly, the JJ Crew would be understandably gun-shy about having the one Middle-Eastern man in the movie be a psychotic terrorist. It’s not that Hollywood isn’t racist, but that they want to avoid the appearance of racism. Having a villain who’s a Middle-Eastern terrorist, even if he was treated with complexity and sympathy, would appear racist, far moreso than simply pretending Khan Noonian Singh is a British name. That you can shrug off.
The thing about this is that there’s no real reason for Khan to be such an incredibly on-the-nose Osama Bin Laden figure (he’s introduced sending out a suicide bomber and exits the movie crashing his starship into a series of skyscrapers—about the only way they could be more explicit is if they panned to a calender showing it was September 12th or something). I understand they’re going for a 9/11 metaphor, but they could’ve been more subtle about it and let the audience go from the universal “revenge is bad” metaphor to a specific War on Terror message.
You could just easily do the plot another way. For instance, Khan wants revenge on Starfleet, so he steals their new warp core technology* and offers to sell it to the Klingons. If the Klingons get it, Starfleet will be defenseless against them. Unbeknownst to everyone, Khan/John Harrison doesn’t care about the money, he just wants the Klingons to go to town on Starfleet. Also, Christopher Pike and assorted Starfleet officers are killed trying to stop him, prompting Kirk’s vendetta. There, see, now we’re simply saying that all Middle-Eastern people are vile traitors instead of mad terrorists. Much better.
*This would actually make more sense. Why does Mickey the Idiot go through with the bombing AFTER he gets what he wants? Why not just have Harrison arrested? But by making it an exchange—stolen technology for a cure—everything flows better.
The second reason for the casting is that if they said “the villain is someone from the Original Series” and then cast an Indian man, everyone would’ve assumed it was the one Indian man in the Original Series. And everytime someone online finds out something about his work, J.J. Abrams’ deal with the Devil forces him to eat a baby.
So, basically, the Mystery Box. Which I think most people online are fed up with. There was nothing stopping Abrams from, say, casting Naveen Andrews as “John Harrison, a Starfleet officer who’s gone rogue and must be stopped. Why did he go bad and what are his plans? You have to see the movie to find out!” And then it would turn out he was Khan and all that. You know, the Iron Man 3 approach, just having a twist and not going “NEENER NEENER NEENER, THERE’S SUCH A TWIST IN THIS MOVIE BUT YOU’LL NEVER GUESS WHAT IT IS!” Sure, some people would probably guess that this new, entirely original character might have something to do with that famous, massively popular old character, but so what? It’s not like knowing “yeah, the hero wins and gets the girl” affects our enjoyment of 99% of movies.
So anyway, those are the two reasons as I see them for casting Benedict Cumberbatch as Khan and why they’re invalid. But I should note that I also think it’s wrong to take this out on Cumberbatch. It’s not like he burst into the studio with a gun and forced J.J. Abrams to cast him over every Indian actor in the world. But because Tumblr loves to arbitrarily hate or love celebrities (“Hey, Lucy Liu said something offensive about how she got such a bad tan she looked Puerto Rican… OH, THAT LUCY LIU!”), they’re going to castigate Cumberbatch for not turning the job down on principle… then praise the rest of the cast for doing the same thing, since no one opted out. Sure, it’s nice that John Cho said Khan was a PoC, but what did that accomplish aside from making for a gif set? I haven’t even seen any news articles going “John Cho calls out Star Trek director over Khan casting!”
And yes, I know, John Cho has bills to pay. That’s my exact point. So does Benedict Cumberbatch.
WAS THAT SO HARD? WAS THAT SO HARD? I DON’T THINK IT WAS THAT HARD.
Aaaaaanyway, yes, Benedict Cumberbatch is playing Khan, and I would kind of like to discuss that rather than just go “fuck you, J.J. Abrams!” like the internet wants to. I think there are two real, debatable reasons why they would cast a pasty white British guy (someday, Benedict Cumberbatch is going to get a tan and it’s going to be like when Anne Hathaway got her hair straightened in The Princess Diaries).
Firstly, the JJ Crew would be understandably gun-shy about having the one Middle-Eastern man in the movie be a psychotic terrorist. It’s not that Hollywood isn’t racist, but that they want to avoid the appearance of racism. Having a villain who’s a Middle-Eastern terrorist, even if he was treated with complexity and sympathy, would appear racist, far moreso than simply pretending Khan Noonian Singh is a British name. That you can shrug off.
The thing about this is that there’s no real reason for Khan to be such an incredibly on-the-nose Osama Bin Laden figure (he’s introduced sending out a suicide bomber and exits the movie crashing his starship into a series of skyscrapers—about the only way they could be more explicit is if they panned to a calender showing it was September 12th or something). I understand they’re going for a 9/11 metaphor, but they could’ve been more subtle about it and let the audience go from the universal “revenge is bad” metaphor to a specific War on Terror message.
You could just easily do the plot another way. For instance, Khan wants revenge on Starfleet, so he steals their new warp core technology* and offers to sell it to the Klingons. If the Klingons get it, Starfleet will be defenseless against them. Unbeknownst to everyone, Khan/John Harrison doesn’t care about the money, he just wants the Klingons to go to town on Starfleet. Also, Christopher Pike and assorted Starfleet officers are killed trying to stop him, prompting Kirk’s vendetta. There, see, now we’re simply saying that all Middle-Eastern people are vile traitors instead of mad terrorists. Much better.
*This would actually make more sense. Why does Mickey the Idiot go through with the bombing AFTER he gets what he wants? Why not just have Harrison arrested? But by making it an exchange—stolen technology for a cure—everything flows better.
The second reason for the casting is that if they said “the villain is someone from the Original Series” and then cast an Indian man, everyone would’ve assumed it was the one Indian man in the Original Series. And everytime someone online finds out something about his work, J.J. Abrams’ deal with the Devil forces him to eat a baby.
So, basically, the Mystery Box. Which I think most people online are fed up with. There was nothing stopping Abrams from, say, casting Naveen Andrews as “John Harrison, a Starfleet officer who’s gone rogue and must be stopped. Why did he go bad and what are his plans? You have to see the movie to find out!” And then it would turn out he was Khan and all that. You know, the Iron Man 3 approach, just having a twist and not going “NEENER NEENER NEENER, THERE’S SUCH A TWIST IN THIS MOVIE BUT YOU’LL NEVER GUESS WHAT IT IS!” Sure, some people would probably guess that this new, entirely original character might have something to do with that famous, massively popular old character, but so what? It’s not like knowing “yeah, the hero wins and gets the girl” affects our enjoyment of 99% of movies.
So anyway, those are the two reasons as I see them for casting Benedict Cumberbatch as Khan and why they’re invalid. But I should note that I also think it’s wrong to take this out on Cumberbatch. It’s not like he burst into the studio with a gun and forced J.J. Abrams to cast him over every Indian actor in the world. But because Tumblr loves to arbitrarily hate or love celebrities (“Hey, Lucy Liu said something offensive about how she got such a bad tan she looked Puerto Rican… OH, THAT LUCY LIU!”), they’re going to castigate Cumberbatch for not turning the job down on principle… then praise the rest of the cast for doing the same thing, since no one opted out. Sure, it’s nice that John Cho said Khan was a PoC, but what did that accomplish aside from making for a gif set? I haven’t even seen any news articles going “John Cho calls out Star Trek director over Khan casting!”
And yes, I know, John Cho has bills to pay. That’s my exact point. So does Benedict Cumberbatch.
