Why Is It A Problem for the Star of ‘Stonewall’ Being Cast as the New Gay Green Lantern?
Share
The answer is: it’s not.
DC and Warner Bros. have finally found their Alan Scott, the first openly gay Green Lantern, for its upcoming HBO Max series Green Lantern Corps., in British actor Jeremy Irvine.
Irvine posted on Instagram Thursday: “Very excited to be joining the DC Universe!! Can’t wait to get started. #GreenLantern.”
Irvine then posted the all too famous Green Lantern oath:
“In brightest day, in blackest night,
No evil shall escape my sight.
Let those who worship evil’s might,
Beware my power — Green Lantern’s light!”
View this post on Instagram
You may recognize Irvine from such films as War Horse and Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again. Fans were excited and then quickly there was the question of whether his casting was “problematic” because of his starring role in Roland Emmerich’s 2015 bomb Stonewall.
Entertainment Weekly: The significance of this character is clear to anyone who’s even skimmed through comic book Twitter over the years. In addition to being Earth’s first hero to bear the Green Lantern name and one of the founding members of the Justice Society of America, Alan came out of the closet in 2012, making him one of the most prominent depictions of LGBTQ characters in comic books. More recently, he spoke on the page about his experience being gay in the issue Infinite Frontier #0.
For the new show, which spans decades, Alan will feature in the year 1941 as a secretly gay FBI agent. This marks the first time the character will appear on screen in live-action in a way that addresses his sexuality. He’s a precious character to many comic fans — which raises questions regarding this latest casting.
Irvine has proven himself to be an impressive actor, though it’s hard to divorce his portrayal of a famous gay comics hero from that widely loathed movie, in which he played a gay man in the midst of the most well-known moment in the American LGBTQ rights movement.
The show was criticized for its whitewashing of the Stonewall riots. His character, Danny Winters.was fictionalized and not based on any one real-life figure. Emmerich put Winters as the pivotal character who began the riots by throwing the famous first brick, that is widely known to have been hurled by a trans woman of color.
The backlash from the LGBTQ community was exacerbated by Emmerich’s repeated and defensive explanations for the decision to depict Stonewall in that way. In BuzzFeed, he said, “You have to understand one thing: I didn’t make this movie only for gay people, I made it also for straight people. I kind of found out, in the testing process, that actually, for straight people, [Danny] is a very easy in. Danny’s very straight-acting. He gets mistreated because of that. [Straight audiences] can feel for him.”
Irvine, more thoughtful, remarked to The Daily Beast how the controversy, in a way, helped educate audiences. “I don’t think any of us expected it to get the attention that it has,” he told the outlet. “But now how many people have heard the name Marsha P. Johnson, opposed to never having heard it before? Wow. I was out last night and had a few groups of people come up to me and wanted to talk about the film. They wanted to know if Marsha P. Johnson was going to be a part of the movie and I was like, ‘Yeah! But also, how cool that you are all talking about that.'”
The larger issue was that the movie was by almost any account: terrible and unwatchable, nothing that had to do with Irvine but everything to do with Emmerich.
In The New York Times, Stephen Holden wrote that the film “does a reasonably good job of evoking the heady mixture of wildness and dread that permeated Greenwich Village street life” but that “its invention of a generic white knight who prompted the riots by hurling the first brick into a window is tantamount to stealing history from the people who made it”.
Writing for Gawker in a piece entitled “There Aren’t Enough Bricks in the World to Throw at Roland Emmerich’s Appalling Stonewall“, Rich Juzwiak wrote that the film is “formally inconsistent” and “teaches you about as much about being gay as the Aristocats taught you about being an aristocrat.”
Michael Phillips of the Chicago Tribune wrote that, while Emmerich “has made a movie even less historically accurate than 10,000 BC“, the most fatal problem of the film is that it “embrace[s] every wrong cliche”, which “in the desperate lack of nuance afflict[s] nearly every performance.”
Maya Stanton wrote in Entertainment Weekly, “Roland Emmerich has taken a seminal moment in gay rights history and reduced it to mere background for a coming-of-age story we’ve seen before … Emmerich and screenwriter Jon Robin Baitz could have focused on real-life participants (the filmmakers had been accused of whitewashing history since the trailer debuted) or explored any number of themes that would’ve been more compelling than ‘pretty white kid comes out, struggles.’ The subject matter deserves better, and so do we.”
Stonewall veteran Mark Segal, writing for the PBS NewsHour said,
“Stonewall is uninterested in any history that doesn’t revolve around its white, male, stereotypically attractive protagonist. It almost entirely leaves out the women who participated in the riots and helped create the Gay Liberation Front, which included youth, trans people, lesbian separatists and people from all other parts of the spectrum of our community.”
The character of Scott’s Green Lantern, largely known as the golden age Green Lantern, debuted in All-American Comics #16 in 1940.
81 years ago.
An engineer Scott is surprised to find himself the only survivor of a train wreck, but soon learned the answer laid in the green train lantern he was grasping. The lantern, it turns out, was illuminated by a special meteorite from centuries ago and that, with Alan, it would bestow upon him great power. Scott fashioned a ring that held the lantern’s power for twenty-four hours, allowing him to do anything his mind willed him to do.
As the Green Lantern, Alan became a founding member of the Justice Society of America; he later learned his lantern was powered by the Starheart, a magical entity the Guardians of the Universe had imprisoned in that fateful meteorite.
Later the character like some his JSA counterparts The Flash and Hawkman, he would be reimagined as a science fiction based character. These are known as the Silver Age versions: Hal Jordan, Barry Allen, and Katar Hol/Carter Hall.
The characters would meet eventually when they realized that there was an infinite number of parallel universes collectively known as the multiverse.
The original Scott would even have two children, twins, who became Jade and Obsidian of Infinity Inc.
Obsidian would eventually come out as gay. As would Scott.
Bleeding Cool: With the publication of Infinite Frontier #0, Bleeding Cool’s story from a month ago, that Alan Scott will talk to his kids about hiding his true self, having married a number of women in his life, and having children, and now choosing to be out about who he is, is confirmed.
Scott was the first character to bear the name Green Lantern, and he fights evil with the aid of a magical ring, which grants him a variety of powers. Martin Nodell created him, first appearing in the comic book All-American Comics #16, published in 1940. And now – well, not heading up a new Justice Society Of America for DC Comics. But maybe his kids will.
Across the multiverse, on an Earth 2 created as part of the New 52, another Alan Scott wields the green flame after a tragic loss. This Green Lantern is the avatar of The Green, the elemental force that controls all living growth on Earth, and focuses his powers through a ring meant for his dead partner. No less powerful or compelling than his earlier counterpart, he glows green to banish evil and help restore a war-torn world to its former greatness as one of the Wonders of the World.
The New 52 resulted in a wholly different version of Earth 2 and its heroes; in this world Batman, Superman, and Wonder Woman had earlier given their lives in a war against Apokolips. Three years later, media mogul Alan Scott’s train crashes just as he proposed to his boyfriend. A mystical green flame appeared amidst the wreckage and told Alan he had been chosen to wield the combined powers of the Earth to become its protector. Using the engagement ring meant for his late partner as a conduit, Alan became the Green Lantern, protector of The Green–an elemental force of growth on Earth.
This earth would eventually be destroyed in a final battle with Apokolips and it appears that the GLC version that Irvine is playing is a synthesis of the two.
“Very excited to be joining the DC Universe!!” Irvine wrote, adding a Green Lantern oath from the comics: “In brightest day, in blackest night, No evil shall escape my sight. Let those who worship evil’s might, Beware my power – Green Lantern’s light!” https://t.co/qyBFCSoV9y
— The Hollywood Reporter (@THR) May 27, 2021
Entertainment Weekly: The significance of this character is clear to anyone who’s even skimmed through comic book Twitter over the years. In addition to being Earth’s first hero to bear the Green Lantern name and one of the founding members of the Justice Society of America, Alan came out of the closet in 2012, making him one of the most prominent depictions of LGBTQ characters in comic books. More recently, he spoke on the page about his experience being gay in the issue Infinite Frontier #0.
For the new show, which spans decades, Alan will feature in the year 1941 as a secretly gay FBI agent. This marks the first time the character will appear on screen in live-action in a way that addresses his sexuality.
The Hollywood Reporter: The HBO Max series also stars Finn Wittrock as Guy Gardner, one of the many Green Lanterns expected to appear in the big-budget series from executive producer Greg Berlanti and Warner Bros. TV. Berlanti, Seth Grahame-Smith and Marc Guggenheim are writing the series, with the Grahame-Smith set as showrunner.
Green Lantern is one of a number of DC properties in the works at HBO Max. The WarnerMedia-backed streamer is in production on James Gunn’s The Suicide Squad spinoff Peacemaker, while a Gotham Police Department drama spinning out of Matt Reeves’ upcoming The Batman film is also in the works. Meanwhile, J.J. Abrams is developing multiple series in the DC realm, including Justice League Dark and Constantine.
