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"On the Embedded Racism of Netflix’s “Woke” RE [Spoilers]

Race and gender progressiveness goes beyond casting.

I want to preface with some context surrounding my perspective. I’m a damn near even split of Asian (Vietnamese, Chinese), Black (Nigerian), White (Irish, German, French*). My father grew up on a corn farm in the midwest, but overall was raised to accept others. My mother came to the U.S. from Vietnam, being the child of a Vietnamese national and a US Green Beret serving in the region. I grew up in a very racially diverse area of Southern California, and went on to study myriad cultures and civilizations in my pursuit of History and Philosophy degrees.

I’m not usually the most outspoken with my opinions and emotional reactions in public forums, but the Netflix’s Resident Evil has left a fatally wounded my faith in most writing teams and show runners.

In Resident Evil’s previous installments, game or otherwise, there has been the staple of the strong and capable lead persevering in the face of incomprehensible horror born of humanity’s hubris. For these characters, the monstrosities they face are novel and transcend any precedent they may have experienced and with what feels like coincidental poetic justice, they evolve mentally/emotionally to adapt to these physical mutations surrounding them (excluding Milla Jovovich’s Alice).

[light story spoilers ahead]

Shattering that mold and taking a steamy dump on the pieces, Jade Wesker takes a literal approach to ‘dumb luck’. As the daughter of brilliant perfectionist capable of designing apocalypse level creations, Jade proves in multiple instances to be an inept, selfish, bumbling idiot to a lethal degree. Without getting into the excruciatingly poor writing of the whole chapter, I will cite episode 6’s death of Amrita as an example of this. In the dead of night, Jade smuggles a live Zero onto the ship that serves as their sole safe haven within minutes of being told by her then pregnant colleague, Amrita, that they would need to alert the ships leadership and gain permission. Knowing the strength of these creatures, Jade seems it suitable to secure it with visibly flimsy straps, ultimately leading to the Zero’s escape and the death of Amrita. Off the top of my head, I can remember 3-4 instances like this through the shows 8 episodes. Jade does not seem to understand her rash idiocy until it is laid out in bold dialog by her sister in episode 8.

The problematic traits of Jade Wesker paired with her lack of ANY character development undermine what could have been an impactful opportunity : the casting of Ella Balinska, a woman of color, in the lead role. Past protagonists of the series, who have been historically White, typically learn their lesson after 1-2 traumatizing moments. Jade, however, seems to be unaffected despite having an accidental kill count in the double digits. I could carry on about Jade all day, but unfortunately this travesty doesn’t end with her.

The majority of the cast is comprised of people of color. Having a racially diverse cast opens up a world of possibilities to create strong role models for young viewers of those races. I personally found Lance Reddick’s role as Albert Wesker to be the only reason I was able to stomach all 8 episodes (aside from some questionable costume choices at the beginning of episode 7). Establishing empathy for daddy Wesker admittedly is an uphill battle with his notoriety in the franchise, but it seems to land here despite compromised beginnings. Things take a turn for the worst from here. Billie, Jade’s fraternal twin, presents as a weak youth and unstable, treacherous adult. Being an Asian-American character, she proves to be a poor follow to the cold tact and genius of franchise favorite Ada Wong. Paola Núñez’s Evelyn Marcus serves as a key player in facilitating the plot. As the CEO of Umbrella, she greenlights the continuation and acceleration of the JOY project, ultimately leading to the downfall of New Raccoon City. The issue here is that it in the real world where us actual human beings live, the most malicious of CEO’s are not Mexican women from the gay community. Typically, they are White men ages 35-80 who are either straight or pretending to be.

All of this leads to the frosting on the cake, Simon Marcus. Our merry cast thus far has been riddled with a blinding plethora of character flaws vastly outweighing any redeeming qualities. This trend ends with our sweet Simon, the only White character with more than 10 minutes of screen time. Brilliant teenage hacker? Check. Conflict resolution skills? Check. General wry charm? Check. The issue isn’t his exclusive Whiteness, but the audacity of Andrew Dabb to take the entire season to really reinforce that sweet Simon has zero shortcomings aside from maybe being too willing to help a near stranger. This is punctuated in the worst way with his death: being executed by his own mother while a room of people she intends to kill is right in front of her.

Collating those thoughts, we have a White male giving his life in a rescue effort for several people of color. I believe the established terms for this are White Martyrdom and Salvationism, things we’ve already established are essentially subtle racist propaganda in recent years.

Typing all of this on my now overheating phone, there’s only so much depth I can write into this so I’d like to leave these last few terms as a summation to marinate on.

• Negligent tokenization
• Negative racial associations
• White Martyrdom and Salvationism

All of these things existing in what people say is “woke”. The pandering can only go so far before it becomes belittling and manipulative. I hope this series is a wake up call to studios worldwide to just shut the hell up and write quality material instead of cashing in on meta tags to force viewership.

Resident Evil is a Japanese franchise and one Japanese approach should have been applied. Japanese companies have lower profit margins in most instances due to the belief that profits are a byproduct of a focus on excellence in one’s product. Just write a good show. "