Diversity and representation, 1990 style

In today’s era of gender and race representation and diversity politics, 1990 was the dark ages. Harvey Weinstein and his contemporaries were harassing and raping their way through swathes of female Hollywood with impunity, and with the exception of a few names (Will Smith, Pat Morita, Jackie Chan) there weren’t many headline stars who weren’t white Americans.

Even here at home the global fame of the likes of Chris Hemsworth, Margot Robbie and Hugh Jackman were unheard of – our most famous face was still Paul Hogan because of Crocodile Dundee.

If I sat down to write Falling again today I wonder who I’d write differently, either out of fear at not promoting racial and gender diversity enough or (preferably) because such sociopolitical overtures in today’s media climate have internalised that it’s the right thing for artists, writers and directors to do.

I have to admit there were a few occasions over the last five years or so when talk about diversity started to build where I wondered who I could most easily rewrite, and if it had been easier I might have. But after the LMR (Last Major Rewrite) I just did too much work tying characters to their individual identities as men, women, white anglo Australians or otherwise, and the thought of going through another year or more of rewriting to meet the spirit of a social movement that came 25 years after I first put pen to paper was just exhausting.

I toyed with the idea of making Donald (the metallurgist who helps Barry with his investigations) a lady so Vicki wouldn’t be the token female of the cast, but I’d already rewritten, re-read, spell checked, grammar checked and proofread the %@$# out of Falling by then and going through to make even seemingly-tiny changes like ‘he’ to ‘she’ and ‘his’ to ‘her’ was just too scary. I not only would have missed one of those fiddly mechanical details, I wouldn’t be changing attitudes and characterisations that are more subtly gender-specific.

I also wondered where I might make a character LGBTQ, but there was only one aspect of the story where any of the characters’ sexualities had any bearing on the plot, and that was in Dale and Vicki’s relationship, particularly in Vicki’s response (but there I go again – no matter how hard I worked to make it legitimate character backstory the only major female character is partly defined by her sexual nature).

Making Dale a PTSD-afflicted shut-in who happens to be gay, Tim a parapsychologist who’s mid-transition or Albert (the government liaison who helps organise the Part 6 expedition/disaster) a bi female Sudanese refugee amputee might have worked if I’d built characterisations like those from the ground up and made them important aspects of the characters’ relationships to the plot.

But doing it after the fact would just be a tacky neon sign trumpeting how woke Falling is, and frankly we’re seeing that done so cack-handedly enough right now, movies bolting on a plot-agnostic, after-market declaration of political awareness just to get with the times.

My only real defence is that in 1990 when I started writing Falling we lived in a world where minority representation was already low and we wrote/directed/created what we saw in pages and on screens. We didn’t know it was important because we didn’t know it existed.

All of which is thin justification, but also a pre-emptive apology to anyone who reads Falling and realises what homological stereotypes the characters all are. It’s about three white guys and one hot chick, the hero bangs the hot chick and the only Asian character is a nerdy scientist.

It’s certainly not going to win any GLAAD or NAACP awards…