Nash 17: FATWS vsThe Oscars on Race & UFC 261

It’s been a big week in the world of news, sport and culture, so Rick tries to digest it all as he discusses the contrast of race in ‘Falcon & The Soldier’ and the Oscars on the week Derek Chauvin was found guilty.

 

Plus: the insane (lack of) safety regulations at UFC 261 and motives of the men behind it.

 

 

TRACK LISTING:

 

• ‘No Parachute’ - Henry Jackman

‘Someone You Should Meet’ - Henry Jackman

‘Fraying Edges’ - Henry Jackman

‘A Pure Heart’ - Henry Jackman

‘Embers in the Dark’ - Osvaldo, Garot Michael Conklin

‘equanimity’ - Through & Through

‘Perspective’ - Barnes Blvd.

‘Sentimental’ - Cloudchord, Soul Food Horns

 

 

TEXT TRANSCRIPT:

This weekend, Marvel and Disney+ executives will likely be patting themselves on the back, rightfully, for a job well done having received across the board rave reviews for their Falcon & Winter Soldier series that (spoilers ahead by the way) cemented Sam Wilson as Captain America.

The show’s six episodes were extremely ambitious in their scope: trying to give us a snapshot of the frustration experienced by refugees suffering after the blip, tackling whether or not America would accept a black Captain America, introducing new characters in John Walker and Valentina Allegra de Fontaine, partially redeeming Baron Zemo, turning Sharon Walker heel...and that’s all before we even talking about our leading character arcs.

And, for the most part, they succeeded. I’ve tweeted my reservations about the one aspect of the show I think missed in the Flag Smashers, but for there only to be one miss on that to-do list in just six hours is still pretty impressive.

Today I want to discuss what I feel was the biggest home run of the show: its tackling of race relations in America through the inclusion of Korean super soldier war veteran, Isaiah Bradley.

That this finale aired on the same week Derek Chauvin was convicted of the murder of George Floyd, the story that sent the #BlackLivesMatter movement worldwide last summer, seems like fate especially once you consider the show’s airing ended up delayed due to the pandemic.

Sure, there have been more powerful and impactful movies and TV plots about race. When you consider shows like Watchmen, there may have even been more powerful stories about race involving superheroes released in the past 5 years. But what makes the Isaiah arc, about an embittered war veteran who’d been imprisoned for 30 years for doing the exact same thing that defined Steve Rogers in breaking rank to save lives, so important was the fact that it aired in a Marvel Studios project on Disney+.

The fact that the same studio responsible for 9 of the top 30 highest grossing movies of all-time centred its A-plot around race relations, and came out very strongly on one side, was not only a risk in a seriously fractured American landscape, it also forced a world still locked down to confront our own biases.

I spoke before on ‘Ask Low Blows’ about learning through listening to Van Latham and Charles Holmes’ breakdown of Sam and his sister’s application for a loan on The Ringerverse podcast. To me, that initially played as a funny scene with a bank teller asking questions I’d been interested in about financial earnings of superheroes, with a wicked twist in the end. But, as Van and Charles explained, to black viewers there was no twist. Sam’s experience of being denied a small loan because of his skin colour, despite being a fucking Avenger, was an all-too-familiar experience even in 2021. And that, frankly, is horrifying.

The show continues to prod, provoke and challenge throughout while masterfully treading the fine line of making it a show with racism as a theme, while not being a show about racism. For example, Sam is constantly referred to as ‘Black Falcon’ throughout the show despite the fact that that was never his moniker. The deftness of this approach is worth noting for two reasons:

1. Had they made it a show about racism, people may have decided to opt out by not wanting to confront these themes. Instead, it’s a show about the successor of arguably the most important moniker within the MCU. So if you want to continue to follow along with the action, which you will if you’re an MCU fan, opting out of being confronted with racism isn’t an option. And,
2. From listening to and learning of the experiences of black friends and colleagues, this inherent racial bias that can involve both subtle and seemingly inconsequential othering (‘Black Falcon’) but leads quite quickly to more serious consequences (Sam being denied a loan or being stopped by cops, Isaiah being wrongfully imprisoned and erased from history) aligns more realistically with the experience of victims of racism: it’s not always overt but it is always present in the background with dangerous, life-impacting consequences no matter who you are or what you’ve done.

You may be thinking right now, “Rick I don’t know if it’s a good idea for you to speak of the black experience,” and that’s a fair point to raise. It is, in fact, one the show itself even reckoned with this idea during this exchange between Zemo, Sam and Bucky about Marvin Gaye’s ‘Trouble Man’...

The truth is that, for years, many felt and still feel uncomfortable discussing their own racial biases. Remember the phrase “I don’t even see colour” was considered a valid defence against racism? It’s actually not. Denying that skin colour makes us different also denies inherent societal biases against those of colour. And if we deny or don’t acknowledge those differences exist, even if we’re well-meaning in our intentions, we actually enable this oppressive system.

Airing these issues so openly as part of a global machine like the MCU forces us to not only see those biases at play, we can also see the devastating consequences that enabling them to continue can have for good people like Isaiah and Sam. It forces the world to have these conversations where we can challenge our own biases and, in doing so, hopefully remove them. Because even though there was a tear-jerking ‘happily ever after’ for Isaiah, and even though people celebrated when Derek Chauvin was imprisoned, the reality is that these were both twists with positive consequences only there because of a broken system we prop up to begin with.

***

Speaking of racism, the Oscars airs this weekend. And while I’ve long since stopped caring about what a bunch of old lads with serious white guilt thought was the best movie of the year, since we’re speaking openly allow me to use this moment to put what I’m preaching into practise and challenge an old conventional view I held.

A previous source of Oscars-fatigue for me was centred around their insistence of including, without fail, at least one movie about racism in its annual list of Best Picture nominees. Part of that was me being young, stupid, placing too much stock in awards and salty because movies like Harry Potter got snubbed. But the other side of me understood that these stories were relevant, particularly in an America where even this week we all felt ill that a police officer recorded murdering a black man in broad daylight may be deemed innocent in a US courtroom yet again.

It was an irrational take that I never really acknowledged or challenged until a couple of years back when re-watching Django Unchained, which won Quentin Tarantino his second Best Original Screenplay Oscar, the first being my favourite movie ever in Pulp Fiction. As I’ve stated on various shows before, Tarantino is both my favourite director but someone who regularly makes me uncomfortable.

Those of you who know Django Unchained know that it’s a adventure-packed romp through 19th century America, culminating in freed slave, Jamie Foxx’s Django, unleashing hell upon the wealthy, racist family of Calvin J Candie, played by Leonardo di Caprio, who had enslaved and brutally mistreated his wife. The film takes an almost pornographic level of pleasure in the violence, as per usual for Tarantino, in seeing Django get his revenge.

And, when I delved into it, what troubled me about the movie as I rewatched it was remembering the one scene in Pulp Fiction that I hated: when Quentin Tarantino cast himself as a retired gangster and repeatedly used the n-word unnecessarily while addressing his former partner-in-crime, played by Samuel L Jackson. The word adds nothing to the scene and, when you consider the movie was produced by Harvey Weinstein, today it plays uncomfortably as Tarantino almost flaunting his newfound power, rubbing it in our faces that he’s so successful now that he can get away with it.

Fast forward 16 years and he’s on-stage accepting Best Original Screenplay for the 2nd time for his take on slavery, despite the first nod coming from a movie he gratuitously cast himself to use a racist term.

This kind of back-slapping hypocrisy is the white guilt I speak of when I refer to the Oscars. On one hand, every year agreeing that slavery was awful. On the other, just as guilty of the bias that created slavery, keeping in mind that #OscarsSoWhite trended just a few short years ago in 2015 and last year’s Best Actors field included just one person of colour.

This year is already being lauded as ‘the good year’, with a record-setting 9 performers of colour in the acting categories and Chloe Zhao hotly-tipped as the first woman of colour to win Best Director. But the reality that the Oscars refuses to realise is, Zhao shouldn’t win just because she’s a woman of colour. And should she do so, it shouldn’t be a moment for the Oscars to celebrate its newfound diversity. It should elicit, like Chauvin’s conviction, a sigh of fucking relief that this award ceremony is being dragged into the 21st century. Her likely victory on Sunday is deserved on merit, but it’s hers to celebrate and not the Academy’s. For the Academy, this is an embarrassing fucking stain that it finally got off its arse to remove.

Give me awards that I can take seriously, instead of those that racistly pronounce that racism is wrong, and I’ll care about the winners. In the meantime, I’ve watched the Best Picture nominees and recommend you check out Promising Young Women, Judas and the Black Messiah, The Father, Sound of Metal, Trial of The Chicago 7 and Nomadland.

***

It’s a big week in culture and sport, with a lot happening, so let’s move from a heavy subject like racism and instead finish up with the much lighter subject of global pandemics. Because this weekend UFC welcomes a full arena of fans back into its arena and gives the middle finger to COVID restrictions against all medical advice for UFC 261.

The card itself, which hasn’t aired as I’ve recorded, is stacked with three exciting title fights for the fans to enjoy...yet it’ll be significantly tougher to enjoy given that it’s being brought to you by the collective brain trust of the world’s foremost covert COVID deniers in UFC President, Dana White and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.

You may remember DeSantis as the same idiot that labelled WWE an ‘essential service’ at the beginning of the pandemic because he deemed it a ‘crisis’ that people were “sitting around watching re-runs of shows from the early 00’s.” Believe it or not, that’s a direct fucking quote from a person in a position of power.

If you’ve never seen him before, you can now find him doing a victory lap on Episode 5 of UFC Embedded asking Jorge Masvidal such important questions as “How tough is it to lose 7lbs in a day?”

DeSantis has bumbled through COVID since the beginning, having overseen 6% of both all COVID cases and deaths in the USA to-date while leaving his economy open for business to his citizens’ detriment. If you have trouble recognising him in the video, here are 5 things he looks like to assist you, because I couldn’t settle on one:

1. The sleazy, suited man your divorced, rich auntie brought over for Christmas that spent the entire meal making eyes at your 15-year old cousin.
2. The guy in court who claimed he was unaware rape was possible within a marriage.
3. The person who always sings slow songs like ‘You...Are...So...Beautiful...To...Me’ in karaoke and ruins everyone’s night while trying to get his hole.
4. A guy in the Fyre Festival documentary who gave himself a fake title like Executive VP of Touring, Staging and Sandwiches.
5. The villain in the first 6 episodes of a series of 24, the guy who works for a guy who works for a guy who works for the real villain. Not the real villain who’s been through some actual trauma that’s led down a wrong path but with some amount of sympathy and justification, the greedy, shit villain who just wanted to be important who’s killed with ease in the same episode Jack Bauer has a 4-course meal.

Yeah, that guy!

In case you’re thinking to yourself right now that maybe UFC 261 has some regulations guided by experts in place, or that the US is far enough along in its vaccination programme to somehow make this mass gathering safe: no, they don’t and no, it’s not!

Here’s an exact quote Dr Zachary Binney, an epidemiologist in Oxford College at Emory University, gave to Ben Fowlkes of The Athletic in discussing UFC 261’s safety recently: “My first thought is that having a full capacity, 15,000-person indoor event right now is morally bankrupt and negligent.”

And yet here we are, by the time you hear this you may have watched this mess take place and be lauded by all in attendance as a massive success, which leaves us more uncomfortable about what the UFC actually is.

The reality is that UFC fighters are essentially manchildren, walking around dressed in multi-coloured tracksuits, who in most cases have no other way of relating to or succeeding in the world beyond trying to pummel each other like really well trained Jerry Springer participants. It’s an industry-dominating company that has thrived under a $4billion buyout, largely because of Dana White’s ability to take advantage of fighters for low pay that sees them earn a sliver of what bigtime boxing fighters do.

Without other alternatives, they place their trust in the morally bankrupt White while he takes advantage of them at every available opportunity. This isn’t a person who gives a flying fuck about their safety, he barely cares enough to pay them, yet we’re trusting him as the first person responsible enough to bring back full arena sports? Why? Because he’s got a sleazy politician with a similar scant regard for the safety of people he represents waving to cameras on his YouTube preview shows?

And yet, the show will go on, and I’ll watch it too. There is an argument for sports during the pandemic, as a sports nut I’ll be the first to admit that it’s one of the few things that kept me sane over the past year. But MMA is one of the few sports whose presentation isn’t massively impacted by empty arenas, some would argue the emptiness even enhanced it in many ways, so this rush is entirely unnecessary and driven by greed and the weird need of the Lego-looking UFC President to say he was the first to do something. After a week we’ve called out greed at the top levels of sport, don’t let yourself be distracted by some epic knockouts and save some spite for UFC. If they ever need your support and loyalty down the line, remember this reckless weekend, and how little loyalty they had for the safety of their own fans, fighters and staff.