Danny Boyle backlash: what the Right know is being said at London Olympics 2012

In all the excitement of Danny Boyle's stunning London Olympics opening ceremony, I hadn't realised there might be a second phase of pleasure to be had for us armchair enthusiasts. Shrilling out from the widespread sigh of relief that Britain did not suck in front of a billion global viewers is a crescendo of protest from a section of Britain who've had it easy for so long they've forgotten what intelligent criticism looks like: Boyle lifted that rock on Friday and look what's emerged blinking in the light.

First off the block was Tory MP Aidan Burley whose instinctive reaction to the Olympics spectacle was to decry the inclusion of all those ethnic minorities that make up the fabric of Britain as "leftie multi-cultural crap". He was quite speedy with his now notorious Tweet, while for his spiritual bredren it's been like watching a dinosaur kicked in the tail and struggling to work out what's just happened, proving that Burley's brain-stem reflex is in better new world order than his mates.

Although Rupert Murdoch sensed political correctness, he is far too sly an old fox to express anything other than graciousness. (Watch out, Danny, your card may have been marked!)

Unlike a host of ill-wishing Tweeters such as @toadmeister Toby Young who saw "a £27 million Party Political Broadcast for the Labour Party," and Stephen Pollard (@stephenpollard) who "Found the torch ceremony truly unpleasant and deeply unsettling. Paganistic crowd manipulation" and described the whole show as "a piss-take of a lefty wet dream".

The climax of all this fear of "Other" was the hate-fuelled piece that stood out from some otherwise quite decent coverage in the Daily Mail online. “This was supposed to be a representation of modern life in England but it is likely to be a challenge for the organisers to find an educated white middle-aged mother and black father living together with a happy family in such a set-up."

On and on it went in the same unhinged vein until the inevitable complaints prompted someone on the paper to do a heavy edit. However, polishing a turd doesn't make it any less of one.

Apart from those of us of a duskier hue and less-abled being represented, what was it that disturbed the complacency of our dinosaurs so much? "Spelling out 'NHS' is an ideological statement, like spelling out 'Marxism'." said one Tweet. "The UKshould be celebrating our traditions and heritage, not nutty socialism." said another. Who'd have thought that anyone with fellow human feelings could find the wonder that is universal healthcare — a fine British invention — so upsetting? Or assume that the notion of public ownership in an equitable organisation of society for the good of everyone is not part of our tradition and heritage?

I suppose that depends on whose tradition and heritage you mean.

To think that I'd fully expected another stitch-up for the launch, such was the utter bottom-scraping build-up, as with the governments (Labour and Coalition) who sold our democratic civil rights to the lowest bidders in order to secure the 2012 games. For all I knew, Boyle might have been another chancer just like the former health and prime ministers, now carving up the NHS for their privatised personal gain. Or the ex-Home Secretary who's now a director of G4S and running the largest private army in the world.

Or he could have been a vacuous TV showbiz mogul and given us a variation on the dismal Jubilee concert, or made an idiotic attempt to out-extravaganza Beijing on a quarter of the budget during a recession.

Instead, Boyle pulled a people's Olympics opener out of the jaws of the plundering class who'd hijacked our games and tried to rip us off at every turn. (It's only through the efforts of organisations such as 38 Degrees that some of the sponsors have been pressured into abandoning their avoidance of paying their fair share of tax.)

The opening ceremony transcended party politics and took us back to root values.

In an age where the media shamefully allows lies to go unchallenged every time a supine minister or businessman caught with his hand in the till says, "Look over there", Boyle's cri de couer is refreshing. The Tory narrative that we are skint and the poor have to pay for the bankers' continuing excesses while the Sunday Times top 1000 is worth £440bn and corporate profits are at an all-time high is surely the sort of "crowd manipulation" a principled media should be challenging.

Instead it serves up the same dead-head business class in order to naturalise a status quo where the rest of us are fodder. How often do you see or hear a trade unionist or a working-class representative with the same pundit rights as Mary Portas, the Dragons' Den gargoyles, Alan Sugar, Secret Millionaires, abusive celebrity chefs, Simon Cowell and the whole finger-wagging, knife-wielding shouty gamut of grotesques now laying down the law at every level in our culture?

When Boyle decided to have the Olympics torch entry to the stadium flanked by the thousands of workers who built it, he was saying a big screw you to the business chiefs who Pollard, Young, Burley et al would have had celebrated on this occasion rather than their workers: the construction bosses who sneer at 'elf and safety, who destroy lives and blacklist anyone with enough of a conscience to seek to make the industry safer. You have more chance of dying on a British construction site than you do in Afghanistan.

Interesting that one slip of the mask can elicit such a howl of agony. The liberal press is unable to offer an analysis and, unlike the right, seems oblivious to the case being made, producing instead meaningless drivel like this.

On Friday, Boyle shone a searchlight allowing us to take stock of where we are now. The elegy was beautiful but we should do something to halt what he flagged up as being lost.

There are two great things to have come out of the London Olympics so far: the Thames cable car and the knowledge that there are still some brilliant people who can carve out a bit of space for the rest of us.

Well done Danny Boyle: reading the London Olympics 2012

Ian Sinclair in LRB: My Olympics.

Sour grapes over Ye Shiwen's swimming Gold. Although BBC commentators leapt to conclusions, it was an interview with the US coach that sparked fury following Clare Balding's intemperate accusation within seconds of the win on television.

Well done Danny Boyle: reading the London Olympics opening ceremony 2012

I'm not so sure Danny Boyle's expected establishment gong is as much of a dead cert as pundits assume now we've had a chance to unpack the movie director's critical state-of-the-nation London Olympics narrative. Last night's £27m opening extravaganza temporarily won me over from furious cynicism following the games' hijacking by Locog's pet corporations and their civil rights clampdown.

I should have realised — trust the creatives. The CREATIVES, not the crude showmen who might have turned in a vapid series of set pieces going no-where. I'm sorry I misjudged you Danny — the boy done good. This ceremony may have begun with a bucolic paradise with peasants tending their flocks but it ended with a vast setting sun as troglodyte primitives danced it into extinction.

Among the crowd-pleasers were woven some awesome subversive elements. Our unique selling points as a nation may be our musical back-catalogue, James Bond and the Queen, but even these were nicely handled. After watching Her Maj parachute into the stadium, I was hoping she might turn out to be the mystery cauldron igniter, maybe kicking a flaming football into the target, but Boyle had far more democratic plans for his climax.

He started with Kenneth Branagh as Isambard Kingdom Brunel, a benign engineer kicking off the industrial revolution before top-hatted capitalists (reminiscent of the ones in Eisenstein's Strike) mess it up, tearing up the turf and turning the peasants off the land.

Branagh recites Caliban's speech from Shakespeare's The Tempest:

Be not afeard. The isle is full of noises,
Sounds, and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not.
Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments
Will hum about mine ears, and sometime voices
That, if I then had waked after long sleep
Will make me sleep again; and then in dreaming
The clouds methought would open and show riches
Ready to drop upon me, that when I waked
I cried to dream again.

As some have noticed, this is what Caliban says just before he tries to kill "an imperial innovator who took away his island". Hmm, I wonder what Boyle is saying here.

Filling the stadium with five huge chimneys and factories and foundries to the sound of 1,000 drummers, we're reminded that British power came from its industrial (r)evolution and the people who laboured in it. Of course, most of yer actual working class were working their arses off on stage for free, not sitting in the comfy seats they couldn't afford.

But they were represented, hammering drums and metal, actually making things, while the tool-free capitalists worked thin air, much as they do with their banking tricks.

What they eventually end up with is the forging of the five rings of the Olympic symbol (yeah, the one we're all banned from using even though we paid for most of it) rising above the audience like something hellish out of Mordor.

A parade of Windrush immigrants, 1960s cultural explosion (Beatles), cockneys and the ordinary people who helped make Britain, made the most of a diverse range of the population and ensured they weren't rendered invisible. Boyle might have had an eye on Brecht who asked, "Who built the seven gates of Thebes?".

However, it was the NHS segment that gave me the most squeeing pleasure as Boyle stuck it to Richard Branson and the privatisers. Melding the NHS and children's literature, a battalion of nurses and doctors wheeled in hospital beds occupied by children (two to a bed — how it will look when the Tories get through with it).

A childcatcher (Maggie Thatcher?), a terrifyingly oversized Voldemort and assorted monsters (coalition creeps and Big Biz) harry the children while NHS staff attempt to fight them off.


Best of all, who did Danny choose to read during this scene? None other than JK Rowling herself, not only creator of the monstrous Voldemort and most successful commercial British writer, but famously a supporter of the welfare state who sends her own children to state schools. What's more, she doesn't avoid tax on her vast fortune but spreads it out. Unlike certain others now running the nation. Danny, this leftie salutes you.

Rowling read from J M Barrie's Peter Pan. J M Barrie donated the income from his book to children's hospitals.

And the music to accompany this warning to the forces of evil to get their mitts off our NHS? Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells. Significance? Tubular Bells was the phenomenal seller in the early 1970s which made Branson's Virgin empire (he even named one of his Virgin America Airlines planes "Tubular Belle"). Branson's Virgin, now scheming to run the PRIVATISED NHS SERVICE, including children's healthcare!!! Kudos, Danny!

Also noted: national hero in his own head, Tony Blair, who's been jonesing for inclusion in the Olympics all week and is looking to carve up the NHS with his Mee Healthcare company, didn't even get a mention.

(Pic montage by Eddie Truman)

But the CND did, its symbol formed out of multi-cultural dancers — including some disabled — to a musical medley of our greatest pop and rock hits.

As did Tim Berners-Lee who invented teh interwebz. (Brits also invented carbon-capture coal-burning technology but we haven't built even one.)

Abide With Me was sung to an Anish Kapoor-influenced dying sun, a reference to Boyle's movie Sunshine. The song is not only used as the rugby anthem and at FA Cup finals, but it's sung at the funerals of miners. Or mines. Or our entire productivity and everything we've known.

After the athletes paraded in, the event ended with a spectacular cauldron-lighting ceremony, carried out, not by a tired old sleb, but by the next generation of athletes: seven young men and women.


Rupert Murdoch tweeted that it was 'a little too politically correct'. At least he wasn't as crudely reactionary as the Tory who complained about multi-cultural representation and was buried in an avalanche of tweets.

Meanwhile, outside the Olympic Park, the Critical Mass bike protest was being kettled and intimidated — so unlike Beijing which British commentators never tire of sneering at. The furious cynicism is still there for Dow, McDonalds, Coke, G4S and the rest of the greedy tax-avoiding exploiting bastards (only £700m out of the £9.3 bn cost is funded by the sponsors), but the performers and athletes are the stars of the show from now on.



I noticed after I'd written this that the Arctic Monkey's first song had the lyric refrain "1984", so Orwell was present last night. Here's another gem I missed from Alex Wolff in Sports Illustrated: "Somewhere in the cacophony of last night, during what might have been the world's largest Twitter storm, this nugget emerged: Hey Jude was No. 1 on the charts the day Smith and Carlos raised their fists -- and that single's B-side was Revolution." Thanks to Noel Currid for this.

[Okay, okay, Tim Berners-Lee invented the world wide web, not the internet. I'm still impressed.]

Not forgetting Danny's writer, Frank Cottrell-Boyce who did such a great job, including introducing Boyle to Henry Jennings's Pandemonium.

Ian Sinclair in LRB: My Olympics.

I wondered when this was going to happen. Danny Boyle Backlash: London Olympics 2012

Must read Chris T-T's hilarous sharp take on the gruesome Closing Ceremony.

The Nightingale: La Jolla Playhouse debates yellowface casting

Yellowface. The monster that refuses to die in the final reel. It's back and this time it's still personal. As well as political.

There's been another ruck about the use of yellowface casting in theatre, where Asian characters are played by white actors. This time, it's in the US where La Jolla Playhouse has produced a play based on The Nightingale with mostly white and black actors, using only two Asians out of 12.

There are so few opportunities to employ Asian actors that each one, when it surfaces is precious. The argument over using blackface was won years ago, so why are we still having to fight for every Asian role?

Excluding any group from the cultural output of their own society dehumanises them. The effect of mystifying ethnic minorities — in particular east Asian who are nearly invisible both sides of the Atlantic — has political ramifications in that we become a vacuum into which people can dump all their fears. It's no good pleading the "cross-racial casting" defence when it only goes one way. Neither will "it's only a fantasy" do when the mythical world appropriates real people's culture in order to play out some inner psychic space of dominant groups.

So loud was the protest that La Jolla Playhouse finally had the guts and honesty to hold a panel discussion on 22nd July. You can watch the whole unedited debate here.

And here's American actor, Greg Watanabe, with an assessment of where we are right now.

My thoughts on "The Nightingale" at the La Jolla Playhouse, and the post show panel discussion on July 22:

I think it's important to communicate just how disrespected I feel. And I feel confident that many others in the Asian Pacific Islander American community feel the same way.

I feel like the APIA community has worked so hard to articulate and share our experience with racism, dominant culture, and white privilege and how those things have led to our exclusion and misrepresentation and to orientalism and fetishization.

So, to see a show set in "mythical China" where 6 out of 12 of the actors are white males and only 2 are Asian Americans...it's difficult not to just start shouting out swear words...it's that insulting; Asian Americans are relegated to token minority status in a play set in Asia.

And to hear the concept of "multi cultural casting" being used as a defense, as if we were against it, as if taking a show show set in Germany (an example the playwright offered) with its all its white roles and casting it non- traditionally means the same thing as taking a show set in "mythical China" with its 12 Asian characters and casting only 2 Asian Americans.

The first person chosen to speak from the audience, a white woman, asked, "are there any qualified Asians?" The African American actor who stood and spoke, enumerated the credits of the cast...as if to say they got cast because they are better than you. In addition to being beside the point, It's incredibly disrespectful.

I'm glad they spoke though, because I feel like there are others who think like them.

Just like the young white woman who stood up and said she was Polish American, and then made a reference to African Americans cast in, "A Streetcar named Desire", as if to suggest that if that's okay, then we can cast non-Asians as Asians. Again, her white privilege allowing her to think that a level playing field exists, that there is no inequity in the American theater and that "multi cultural casting" is simply a style of theater.

One of the reasons the creative team is fighting so hard against the Asian setting and the Asian characters, and therefore the Asian actors, is that they didn't want it to be seen as an "Asian show"; they wanted an "East West show". They don't realize that they are essentially saying, "we don't think of Asian Americans as western"; and in a play with no references to Europe, "western" feels like "American". They saw an Asian American cast, and said, "it's too Chinese; we don't want to tell an asian story." as if Asian Americans can't tell a westernized story.

"East meets West?" Asian Americans ARE East meets West. As someone pointed out to me: Asian Americans know a lot more about the dominant white culture than the dominant white culture knows about us.

And the thing is, seeing the show, it seems like the creators want the play to be asian, to be Chinese. They want the exotic feel, the red and gold silk gowns, the paper lanterns, the chinese junks helmed by rice paddy hat wearing boatmen, magic flying, chinese dragons...which can be great...just don't try to run away from what it is, don't deny that that's part off the story you want to tell.

So if the setting is Chinese, or at the very least asian, then it should be cast that way. And it can even be cast multiculturally. But I ask that you try and imagine beyond a dominant white culture perspective, one where multicultural means half of the people are white. Instead, perhaps you could imagine an asian american view of a mythical China. One where the lead is Asian American, where Asian Americans make up a majority of the cast. And it would still be multicultural, still be East meets West, still be an american story.

Greg Wanabe is on Twitter.

The LA Times asks Are we really living in a post-racial world?

Casting controversy at KPBS, San Diego University.

Killer whale tries to drown her keeper

Scary footage of killer whale trying to drown one of her keepers.

Iron Man 3: yellowface casting of Ben Kingsley as the Mandarin or do we really want another Chinese villain?

What have I and the Mandarin, big bad in the upcoming Iron Man 3, got in common? Both of us have Chinese fathers and English mothers. Plus we both look like the giant Sphinx mounted over the Morlocks' lair in The Time Machine ... at least first thing in the morning. Does that make me the Mandarina?


But enough about me.

There's a fuss brewing regarding a brazen example of mainstream yellowface in the pipeline. One of the biggest Chinese roles to arise in a Hollywood blockbuster has gone to an actor perceived as quintessentially English: Sir Ben Kingsley.

The Mandarin was created as Iron Man's arch-nemesis in the 1960s, when Chinese villainy was the norm. Okay, it still is, but Stan Lee had the excuse that he was birthing his characters in more innocent times, when fewer people were aware of the ramifications of cutting out ethnic minorities except to use them as villain-fodder.

While a howl of protest builds and lets the leviathans of the entertainment industry know we're fed up with our constant exclusion, it might be worth asking why a movie part-financed by and shot in China would not gift such a humungous a starring role to a Chinese actor.

China is sensitive about how it's portrayed in the west. There's a history of Yellow Peril hysteria dating from the mid-19th century complete with anti-Chinese riots and lynchings and the 1888 Exclusion Act, specifically aimed at Chinese even if they were American citizens. That's all ramping up again now that modern China is on the rise.

The holder of the purse-strings is now calling the shots. Chow Yun Fat's scenes in Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End were cut from screenings in China by the authorities because they claimed the role "vilifies and humiliates the Chinese" (reminiscent of the treatment the nationalist government gave Hollywood screen legend Anna May Wong who they accused of not wearing enough clothes and disgracing China). It's difficult to see how such editing could be achieved without the entire plot collapsing. Besides, Chow's character arc ended with him siding squarely with the heroes. But no-one's taking any chances with millions of bucks and the fate of the Iron Man franchise at stake.

Rumour has it that the movie Mandarin plans to conquer the world through a deadly nanobot virus — shades of Bird Flu and SARS. That could explain the need to cast this as far away from actual Chinese as possible. He may even be relegated to a background role as Guy Pearce's uber-villain Aldrich Killian drives the story. (Why they had to resurrect a now-ancient cold-war scenario in the 21st century is anyone's guess, but hardcore comic book geeks will want the canon, if not the Chinese, respected.)

Talk about caught between a rock and hard place. Damed if you do, damned if you don't.

It's actually a pretty shrewd bit of casting. Kingsley is, like me and the Mandarin, half Asian with a white English mother — he was born Krishna Pandit Bhanji in 1943. Yes, India's the wrong end of Asia and on the near side of the Himalayas but, from a eurocentric viewpoint, for western audiences who can't tell the difference, it's close enough. It defuses a little of the anger surrounding the continued use of yellowface and the near-invisibility of Chinese in western society, while placating the massive Chinese audience with a villain who is not of their ethnicity.

So, in his red-white-and-blue patriot armour, looking halfway morphed into Captain America, Tony Stark (Iron Man, once again played by Robert Downey Jr) can safely enact the slug-fest between the old superpower and the new usurper without everyone getting their knickers in a twist. America will win the battle of the titans in Iron Man 3, proving that life may not imitate art, after all.

Iron Man 3 is due for release May 2013.

China In Britain at Westminster Uni: Anna and Charles Shaar Murray on the bill

I'm performing this afternoon at the China In Britain event at Westminster University, 4.45pm. It's a talk with performance extracts from my shows and a bit of poetry. The wonderful Charles Shaar Murray is my musical accompanist, playing guitar.

I'll be referring to various topics so here are the links for you to explore further.

Anna May Wong Must Die! here

Suzy Wrong — Human Cannon here

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon row with the Guardian here

Foot and Mouth Disease campaign here

The Copenhagen Climate Change Summit gamesmanship here

Sherlock — The Blind Banker review here

Niall Ferguson Civilisation review here

Review of Julia Lovell's The Opium War here

The Steampunk Opium Wars here

Anna's arts website here

Anna's YouTube

Translating China website
The Old Cinema, 309 Regent Street, London W1B 2UW
Wednesday 18th July 2012