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Feb. 5th, 2015 08:47 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seekingferretOn Tuesday's Agent Carter, we saw the return of the 'Howling Commandos'. Well, sort of. The group as constituted in Captain America was very nearly an entirely different group. The only continuity was Dum Dum Dugan as the leader of the group. But that's also only sort of true. There's another form of continuity to the Howlers, which is its relationship to the comic book series.
In Sgt. Fury's Howling Commandos, Dum Dum Dugan is second in command to Sergeant Nick Fury, but the rest of the squad is a strange token squad, with a single Italian, a single Jew, a single African-American, a single Southerner, all working together to kill Nazis. The Captain America movie replaces Nick Fury with Cap as the white guy in charge, and swaps out a couple of these ethnic groups for different ones, but preserves the idea of the Howlers as the token squad.
So when they are bringing back the Howlers in Agent Carter, they want to preserve this. I presume they called Derek Luke, the actor who played African-American Howler Gabe Jones, and I guess he was unavailable, because they scrambled to plan B: Must have the black token in the Howlers, so let's cast another black Howler. They do this, search through the list of names of Howlers in the comics, and name him Sam Sawyer, and consider their problem solved. In a sense it is. The Howlers as the safe harbor in the midcentury armed forces where outsiders can find a family is a theme of the episode, and Happy Sam serving alongside Dum Dum and Junior and Peggy reinforces the theme.
Within the continuity of the relationship to the comic books, problems emerge. Sam Sawyer of the comics wasn't a Howler, per se, He was their commanding officer, the lieutenant who sent Sgt. Fury and his ragtag crew on their missions. So casting a black actor as Sam Sawyer as just a regular Howler has a few metanarrative problems. There's the problem of the character getting a de facto demotion along with the cross-racial casting. And there's the problem of Sam Sawyer's personality from the comics not being transplanted along with the cross-racial casting.
Sam Sawyer is known as Happy Sam. Why? Because as the CO of the misfit Howlers, he spends most of his time yelling at them at the top of his lungs. It's called irony, I guess. Agent Carter Sam Sawyer is also called Happy Sam. Why? Because he is a little bit happy-go-lucky, apparently. The nickname inherits some nasty racial implications when it's removed from its original context.
The original Howling Commandos is informed by a weird, problematic form of 1960s liberal paternalism and it doesn't quite translate to modern understandings about race. So as long as you don't think about the act of translation, I don't think there's anything obviously problematic about this part of the episode. But I think their choice to make a translation is worth thinking about, and I think we have to conclude that on those terms, the result is pretty unfortunate.
In Sgt. Fury's Howling Commandos, Dum Dum Dugan is second in command to Sergeant Nick Fury, but the rest of the squad is a strange token squad, with a single Italian, a single Jew, a single African-American, a single Southerner, all working together to kill Nazis. The Captain America movie replaces Nick Fury with Cap as the white guy in charge, and swaps out a couple of these ethnic groups for different ones, but preserves the idea of the Howlers as the token squad.
So when they are bringing back the Howlers in Agent Carter, they want to preserve this. I presume they called Derek Luke, the actor who played African-American Howler Gabe Jones, and I guess he was unavailable, because they scrambled to plan B: Must have the black token in the Howlers, so let's cast another black Howler. They do this, search through the list of names of Howlers in the comics, and name him Sam Sawyer, and consider their problem solved. In a sense it is. The Howlers as the safe harbor in the midcentury armed forces where outsiders can find a family is a theme of the episode, and Happy Sam serving alongside Dum Dum and Junior and Peggy reinforces the theme.
Within the continuity of the relationship to the comic books, problems emerge. Sam Sawyer of the comics wasn't a Howler, per se, He was their commanding officer, the lieutenant who sent Sgt. Fury and his ragtag crew on their missions. So casting a black actor as Sam Sawyer as just a regular Howler has a few metanarrative problems. There's the problem of the character getting a de facto demotion along with the cross-racial casting. And there's the problem of Sam Sawyer's personality from the comics not being transplanted along with the cross-racial casting.
Sam Sawyer is known as Happy Sam. Why? Because as the CO of the misfit Howlers, he spends most of his time yelling at them at the top of his lungs. It's called irony, I guess. Agent Carter Sam Sawyer is also called Happy Sam. Why? Because he is a little bit happy-go-lucky, apparently. The nickname inherits some nasty racial implications when it's removed from its original context.
The original Howling Commandos is informed by a weird, problematic form of 1960s liberal paternalism and it doesn't quite translate to modern understandings about race. So as long as you don't think about the act of translation, I don't think there's anything obviously problematic about this part of the episode. But I think their choice to make a translation is worth thinking about, and I think we have to conclude that on those terms, the result is pretty unfortunate.