now, to some extent, I do agree with this. Yes, Clark as a character was not written to have a specific race. Yes, if he had been played by a different actor who was a different race, he’d still have the exact same lines, the exact same directing, the exact same clothing, the exact same beginning, middle, and end, the same character traits, the same fate, all of it. That is true! He COULD have been played by a man of any race. But he wasn’t.
It’s not as though Kane and everybody else involved with the movie intentionally made it have racial implications. They didn’t. But if you have a movie set in 1990 where the protagonist is a black man, you are inevitably going to have UNINTENDED implications no matter what. Sometimes these implications are good, sometimes they’re bad, sometimes they’re neither. I might not be properly articulating myself here, but I think that if your protagonist is a black man, that’s going to create implications about the way the world treats him and about the way the world expects him to be. Especially if his wife is a white woman whom he treats very poorly, and his therapist is also a white woman whom he treats very poorly, EVEN if you did not intend for it to be that way at all!
I’m not saying you can’t write a black character who is a bad person; every racial group should get nuanced portrayals from all across a morality spectrum. But what I am saying is that there are going to be racialized implications that would be different if the movie was redone, shot for shot, line for line, with a white guy instead of a black guy. (Side note, but we’d see different treatment in fandom, too; Clark would probably have a lot more people focusing on him and a lot more people excusing his actions/shipping him with mary than there already are)
I’m not trying to cancel Kane Pixels or anything. I don’t think a whole lot of people think it was done on purpose, either. But stereotypes are srill applied to different races in different ways (applied to black people in ways they wouldn’t be applied to white people), even if the inclusion of said stereotypes was entirely accidental. So I don’t think looking at the movie through a racial lens is necessarily wrong. And it’s okay to consider & criticize a piece of media’s more unfortunate implications about race or gender or ethnicity or disability or what have you when you’re analyzing it.
