Two nights ago Bill Maher devoted his “New Rules” segment to a rant about presentism. Terrific, I told myself — one of HE’s pet peeves will get an airing on Real Time! Then I watched it and went “oh.”
I naturally figured Maher would mention the movie manifestations of this trend, or an insistence among producers, directors and casting directors over the last four or five years that POCs were just as socially prominent in the past as they are today (hence Bridgerton, the Yale girlfriend switch-out in George Clooney‘s The Tender Bar, Jodie Turner Smith playing Anne Boleyn, African and Asian actors filling costarring roles in Mary, Queen of Scots, Olivia Wilde‘s Don’t Worry Darling**, wealthy travellers of color in Kenneth Branagh‘s Murder on the Orient Express and Death on the Nile). Not to mention the virtue-signalling reflected in the absence of Dahomey slave-trading in The Woman King,
But Maher decided against mentioning this because…I don’t know…because it might sound to some like he was against diverse casting of any kind when it comes to any historical sagas or settings? Which, certain factual histories aside, might get him into trouble. So he side-stepped it.
What he focused on instead was a James H. Sweet article called “IS HISTORY HISTORY? / Identity Politics and Teleologies of the Present,” which was posted a month ago on historians.org.
** Seemingly presentism, I should say. As it turns out it actually isn’t.