THE SPECTATOR 29 MAY 2023 - THE TROUBLE WITH NETFLIX'S QUEEN CLEOPATRA
It’s the worst thing to happen to Cleopatra since that snake in the mausoleum. Queen Cleopatra is the second season of
African Queens, a revisionist Netflix strand touting itself as a documentary series on black monarchs.
Produced and narrated by Jada Pinkett
Smith, it is an attempt to repackage history for a contemporary audience. Queen Cleopatra purports to explore ‘the real woman’ and ‘her truth’ as a female warrior who ‘bowed to no man’. Cleopatra was a tenacious leader and a canny strategist but her reign ended in suicide after her defeat to
Octavian at
Actium destroyed the Ptolemaic dynasty. No doubt there’s an audience for kickass girlboss history but there’s a reason Plutarch’s Life of
Antony is light on the ‘yaas, kween, slay!’.
Then again, maybe there’s not much of an audience. Queen Cleopatra has bombed with critics and viewers alike. Rotten Tomatoes records a 14 per cent score among the former and just three per cent among the latter. Camilla Long in the Sunday Times brands it ‘patchy sub-Game of Thrones cosplay interwoven with academics you’ve never heard of’. Rohan Naahar of the Indian Express says it ‘tells the legendary monarch’s tale with all the dramatic heft of a Wikipedia article’. But if Queen Cleopatra fails as a historical documentary and as entertainment, it fails even harder as a political project, and not merely in its Teen Vogue feminism.
The series sets out to jam events and personalities of classical antiquity into the framework of progressive identitarianism, not least by casting a biracial British actress,
Adele
James, in the lead role. The dominant historiography records Cleopatra as
Macedonian-Greek, though mystery surrounds her mother’s origins and some black commentators have posited that she could have been African.
Netflix says that while
Cleopatra’s ethnicity is ‘not the focus’ of the series, ‘we did intentionally decide to depict her of mixed ethnicity to reflect theories about Cleopatra’s possible Egyptian ancestry and the multicultural nature of ancient
Egypt’.
But the show gives its hand away early on. Talking head Shelley P Haley, a professor of classics at Hamilton College, cites as her ‘inspiration’ a grandmother who told her: ‘I don’t care what they tell you in school, Cleopatra was black’.
The series’ stance has prompted a backlash in Egypt, with political and academic authorities maintaining Cleopatra was ‘light-skinned, not black’ and protesting that the series was promoting ‘Afrocentric thinking’ by ‘distorting and erasing the Egyptian identity’. Dr Monica Hanna, dean of the College of Archeology and Cultural Heritage at the Arab Academy for Science, Technology and Maritime Transport, says ancient Egyptians came in ‘all colours’. However, she accused Queen Cleopatra of ‘pushing an Afrocentric agenda, regardless of the historical accuracy of whether Cleopatra was black or white’ and ‘imposing the identity politics of the 21st century and appropriating the ancient Egyptian past’.
Fortunately multi-billion dollar corporations like Netflix can always rely on the allyship of the progressive media. Salon despairs of ‘how devotedly anti-black
Cleopatra’s supposed image preservationists are’. Vogue says pushback against the series’ revisionism has ‘emboldened white supremacists’, adding:
When you strip away the academic posturing, so much of the backlash we’ve seen around
Queen Cleopatra is simply racism masquerading as a heroic quest for factual accuracy.
Really? Meanwhile, Decider frets that the series has been ‘horrifically review-bombed in a manner that is extremely unfunny and quite dangerous to the creatives involved in the production’. Truly, no one will be safe until Rotten Tomatoes is placed on the terror watch list.
James says she has received ‘fundamentally racist’ abuse, which underscores the innate ugliness of identity politics. Whether the accusation is of ‘whitewashing’ or ‘blackwashing’, the proposition that an actor’s heritage or skin colour should preclude them from playing a role is pure racial prejudice.
True, there are historical figures and fictional characters for whom race is central to their biography. A Netflix series that cast Cate Blanchett as Rosa Parks, apart from provoking a
tsunami of discourse, would place severe demands on viewers to suspend their disbelief. Then again, the blue-eyed gentile Robert Powell is considered the definitive movie
Jesus, despite the historical Christ being a Judean Jew.
So when defenders of Queen Cleopatra demand to know why Elizabeth Taylor could play the Egyptian monarch to critical acclaim but Adele James cannot, the correct response is not that the reviews were actually pretty mixed. Neither is it that Joseph L Mankiewicz’s Cleopatra didn’t purport to be a documentary, or even that Adele James is no
Liz
Taylor. The truth is that she should be able to portray Cleopatra without race ever coming into it – but it was the series that brought race into it.
Let’s be honest about why that was. It wasn’t to get people talking about Cleopatra’s heritage, it was to get them talking about
Queen
Cleopatra. Producers know that hiring black actors to play non-black characters will grab attention in a saturated streaming market.
It’s an intersectional approach, all right: it sits at the intersection of hyperidealism, cynical marketing, and the entertainment industry’s contempt for its customers. Casting a non-white actress to play a conventionally white role feeds certain elite political neuroses. It allows highly-paid entertainers to needle the unwoke masses who watch epic streaming series to have their minds blown rather than their worlds changed.
Traditionally, you sold a movie or TV show by promising a sensual experience: laughter, tears, thrills, scares, mysteries or spectacles. You identified a target audience and excited, enticed, flattered or challenged them into watching. There was no Chinese wall between casting and marketability, of course. Gossip Girl does not work if the casting director sends home Blake Lively and Penn Badgely and hires Plain Jane and Jonny McSpudface instead. But the goal was to strengthen the series and attract a wide or loyal audience.
This isn’t that. Queen Cleopatra is an example of confrontational casting, a provocation tool which submits a creative decision to a toxic mix of ideological fashion and public relations. Confrontational casting can be distinguished from counterintuitive casting because it does nothing to advance the story or the way it is told. In kicking the hornets’ nest of identity politics, producers know they can generate a reaction from cultural out-groups (white men, boomers, conservatives) which will increase the series’ appeal to cultural in-groups (graduates, millennials, minorities). What duty of care, if any, these producers feel to the actors who bear the brunt of the discourse is not clear.
Still, it’s a high-risk tactic. The most (in)famous instance of confrontational casting – the all-female 2016 Ghostbusters movie – bombed at the box office, despite almost every cultural antenna telling movie-goers to love it or be no better than a 4chan troll. Confrontational casting has found more success with Netflix’s Bridgerton, which reimagines Queen Charlotte as biracial and conjures up a Regency London that could pass for a GAP advert. It’s a terrible show and in a more level-headed cultural epoch its racial revisionism would be recognised as sinister and reactionary, but viewers can’t get enough of it. We will soon learn whether the Little Mermaid remake, on general release from Friday, follows the fate of Ghostbusters or Bridgerton with its decision to recast Ariel as black.
In an ideal world, none of this would matter. We would be post-racial and Daniel Kaluuya would be the next
Bond and John Boyega the next Superman. We won’t get there with confrontational casting because the ideology that underpins it is wedded to, predicated on, unable to see beyond race in all its grim, regressive essentialism. Queen Cleopatra is bad at history but it doesn’t do the present any favours either.
By Stephen Daisley
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-trouble-with-netflixs-queen-cleopatra/ https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-trouble-with-netflixs-queen-cleopatra/
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