Like everyone else during the pandemic, my mate and I and binge-watched our way through lockdown. The only difference is, we did for a grander purpose: to rank the top IMDb movies by how diverse their casts are. And so, The Beige Index was born.
What is The Beige Index? Well it’s sort of like the Bechdel Test — but for race.
And if you don’t know about the Bechdel Test, created by Alice Bechdel, you’re probably a guy, and you’re probably wondering why you’re still single.
Despite the simple rules of the Bechdel Test (do at least two women appear in a film and talk to each other about something other than a man?), a frankly depressing number of modern films still continue to fail it. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind? Fail. A Star is Born? Fail. Minions: The Rise of Gru? C’mon. Fail.
The test isn’t perfect, but it is a powerful and enduring litmus test to consider female representation in film and TV. And yes, some criticise the Bechdel Test for being overly simple and arguably flawed. And that’s where my mate Jonathan O’Brien and I come in. Because nobody knows more about being simple and flawed than us. We know so much.
We created The Beige Index looks at ethnic representation in film. Because, look, at the end of the day, we’re all beige to some degree. Some of us are creamier than others, some are brown, some are in between, but if there’s one thing we all sort of knew deep down in our beige guts, it’s that Hollywood film has historically been overrepresented on the creamier end of the spectrum.
Now — after having watched 22.5 days of film constituting every frame of the top 250 IMDb popular voted films — we actually have the ethnic data to back it up.
Take, for instance, The Shawshank Redemption: the reigning #1 champ of the IMDb Top 250. In a credited cast of fifty-five, four are black, and the remaining fifty-one are white. Not overly representative of America’s real-world incarceration rates, but that’s about par for the course. Don’t get me started on the narrative, though: a guy says he doesn’t belong in prison, escapes, and gets away with it. White privilege at its finest.
And that’s just one example. We’ve got a whole website of examples. 250 films, 9577 actors, and all of it run through our patented beige-o-meter™. And guys? The numbers, they’re not good.
We sorted all 250 films into five levels of diversity here:
- #Creamy AKA the whitest category, which represents a whopping 60.8% of the dataset (think It’s a Wonderful Life, Toy Story, and Inglorious Basterds).
- #Beigefever AKA a little less white, with 30% of the dataset (think Dances With Wolves, Inside Out and Everything Everywhere All at Once)
- #Middlebeige AKA way less white, with 3.2% of the dataset (Whiplash, Coco and Gandhi).
- #DownToBrown AKA “where’d the white people go?”, with 2.8% of the dataset (Hamilton, City of God and A Separation).
- #WelcomeToBeigewatch AKA “what is white people?”, with 3.2% of the dataset. (Hotel Rwanda, Dangal and Jai Bhim)
Think about that for a second. Movies rated #Middlebeige, #DownToBrown and/or #WelcomeToBeigewatch constitute only ten percent of the entire Top 250 list combined.
So what’s the solution here?
Cast less white actors? Hire more actors of colour? Boycott Harry Styles? What, are you out of your goddamn minds?
In my opinion, none of the above are going to fix this issue — or at least, not in isolation.
Should I tweet every time a trailer comes out for something where I auditioned for a role specifically written as Asian American but they went with a white person instead
— Mike Cabellon (@mikecabellon) December 6, 2022
Humbly, I think the path to change might be less to do with who we see in front of the camera, and more to do with who’s hustling behind it. The more diverse Hollywood’s producers, casting agents, directors and studios become, the more likely we are to see a shift in the pattern.
The last ten years of film have shown remarkable strides in better, and more, diverse representation in film. That’s comforting, but we can’t rest on our laurels. We’ve got more work to do.
Till then, there’s The Beige Index, for a bit of a head-shake and a giggle. Maybe both at the same time.
Siang Lu is author of The Whitewash (which is also available as an audiobook) and co-created The Beige Index with Jonathan O’Brien.
