Never On Sunday

Continuing my search for RPG inspiration, I checked out the Douglas Fairbanks version of The Thief of Bagdad. Boy, is it ever campy! The sets and costumes, though lavish, bear no resemblance to either Arabian folktales or the historical garb of Arabs, Mongols, et al. “Florid” is an understatement for the body language, and the plot is something on the order of Snidely Whiplash demanding the rent—which, at least, isn’t too far from the Arabian Nights from which the movie draws inspiration.

Nevertheless, it’s a good movie. Not just campy fun, but actually good, once allowances are made for the technological limitations of 1924. The flamboyant gestures are useful in the absence of a soundtrack, and the butt-spliced special effects, while unconvincing, are at least done with care. Fairbanks’ fluid athleticism is amazing, and carries action sequences with a playful grace that might otherwise look crude. It’s easy to see why he preferred to act shirtless, and why the ladies preferred him to.

Watching it has borne immediate practical fruit, as well as supplying a narrative vocabulary for a potential game. Already I’d been grappling with the issues of sexism, racism, and other ugly -isms of the era. Should my game reflect such intolerance, and stay true to the source material, or should the great serial and pulp adventures be sanitized to meet modern sensibilities? For example, should a female PC be treated as a second-class citizen? And I got my answer: a firm and unwavering “Sort of.”

As I noticed of John Ford films, the movie seeks to respect and embrace its foreign material—to an extent. Allah is recognized implicitly as the same god most Americans worship, and Islamic virtue, so far as it receives any attention, is respected. Many of the Arabs are depicted as buffoons, to be sure, but no more ludicrous than the (white) buffoons of other early films, and the heroes are just as Arabic. Are the excesses of oriental royalty ethnic slurs, or merely a celebration of the equally excessive wonders of the original tales? Two women—the princess and one of her handmaidens employed by the villain—take active roles, if never so active as the men. Fairbanks smeared himself with something to darken his skin, and I don’t think it was done with any but honest intent of verisimilitude.

On the other hand… he did have to darken his skin. All the good guys are played by white actors, and the caliph’s daughter has a decidedly WASP-y beauty. Simply a reflection of available actors? I think not. Black and Asian actors get the bit parts and villainous roles. The Mongol prince plays to the sneering and duplicitous Fu Manchu stereotype, fond of poisons and spies. The obsequious peasants and decadent monarchs of the east might be said to perpetuate stereotypes that have been with us since Herodotus.

The contrast is found throughout popular fiction of the 19th and early 20th centuries: Allan Quartermain may admire the African prince who joins his band, the Lone Ranger may consider Tonto his equal, and Indiana Jones (imitating earlier serials) may praise Sallah as the best excavator in the business, but these heroes also operate and benefit from an implicit position of privilege and superiority over their darker brethren. Adventure tales from 1800 to 1950 uniformly treat non-Europeans not only as subservient, but cheerfully subservient, and can safely be embraced by the heroes, while the few who challenge white Christian male hegemony are wholly and irredeemably evil; there is no middle ground. Women can be strong, as long as they are willing to be tamed by a stronger hero in the end.

In short, the characters and events of the films bear little or no prejudice, but the people making the movies do, if only unintentionally. (Thus the amount of prejudice you see in such fiction is largely a product of how much you want to see.) Which solves my dilemma. I can duplicate that phenomenon in a pulp-serial adventure or an Arabian Nights romp: the social environment in which the characters operate may be racist, sexist, class-conscious, and prone to religious prejudice, but the major characters therein (including PCs) are not. The potentially distasteful tropes of the genre are thus preserved without my players needing to help preserve them. Sympathetic foreigners will be pro-western by choice. The villains will be horrible, murderous, lecherous psychopaths who must be stopped; if that happens to preserve a colonial legacy, then so be it. Women may be second-class citizens, but in the rarefied atmosphere of the natural aristocracy the heroes occupy, they will be accepted as feisty equals. Aristocrats who openly stand for conservative values are to be pooh-poohed or even pitied as fossils of a bygone era, even as their values rule the world surrounding the PCs’ adventures.