From: mwgertz+@cs.cmu.edu (Matthew Gertz)
Subject: Re: "The Outcast": a missed opportunity
Organization: Dept. of ECE, The Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon
Date: Wed, 2 Sep 1992 19:20:14 GMT

johnnyp@HALDI.LCS.MIT.EDU (Johnny Piscitello) writes:
>
>In article <BtLp7F.H46.1@cs.cmu.edu>, mwgertz+@cs.cmu.edu (Matthew Gertz) writes:
>|> gwangung@milton.u.washington.edu (Just another theatre geek.....) writes:
>|> >mwgertz+@cs.cmu.edu (Matthew Gertz) writes:
>|> >>Laura_Halliday@mindlink.bc.ca (Laura Halliday) writes:
>|> >>>`The Outcast' was a major disappointment in many ways, not the least of 
>|> >>>which
>|> >>>was that all but one of the supposed androgynes looked approximately female,
>|> >>>and not androgynous at all. Grumble.
>|> 
>|> >>The problem, of course, is that they're confined to using human actors, and
>|> 
>|> >	Got two words for ya.....
>|> >	M. BUTTERFLY.
>|> >	(Now there's a SKILL component here, but that's a whole 'nuther
>|> >matter.....)
>|> 
>|> Huh?  What has "The Outcast" got to do with a (IMO) highly overrated 
>|>opera?
>|> You lost me here, Roger...
>|> 
>
>	You're lost on numerous counts.

How flattering.

>	M. Butterfly is a play. You're confusing it with Madame Butterfly, the
>opera upon which it is based.

So I learned via e-mail over a week ago.  This is old news (and an old
post to which you're replying.  I thought I left this thread behind, but
once again into the fray...)

[Synopsis of M. Butterfly deleted:]

>	The point is, for the play to work, the director has to do a good
>job of convincing the audience that the guy could be fooled. A *very* good 
>job.
>A male actor has to become female on stage.

Ahh, so a male actor, seen from 20 to 100 feet away, has to appear female to
all the viewers in the audience, who additionally are watching a medium
that relies on them "filling in" gaps in visual portrayal (minimal sets,
et al) already.  You're right.  This must take staggering amounts of talent.
(Sarcasm alert.)

>	What does "the Outcast" have to do with it? Your claim was that
>in "the Outcast" the androgynes looked female because they were limited to
>using human actors.

More to the point, I said that if the casting departments wanted to
portray an image of gender similarity, they would most likely use actors
of all one gender.

> However in M. Butterfly, a male actor becomes very 
>convincingly female. Thus your statement that human actors cannot 
>convincingly
>play the role of the opposite sex (or a neutral sexual role) has a
>counterexample.

You're mixing mediums here.  The visual requirements of TV, with its
close-ups and varying camera angles, are different from those of the stage,
as well as the amount of visual information presented to the viewer
to communicate a concept (which, in stage, is generally less than in TV).

Furthermore, what does an otherwise-gender-neutral human(oid) look like?
Chances are that the audience is going to categorize the humanoid as either
male of female anyway, with gender-neutral types being outside of most of
the viewers' experiences.

I don't doubt that there are male actors who can pass for female easily,
or vice-versa, when on camera (they may have in fact done this for this
episode -- I don't know), but this is beside the point.  I'm arguing that,
despite all makeup and casting to the contrary, the viewing audience is
going to interpret any roughly-humanoid alien as either male or female,
if only by reflex.  The casting/production/makeup crew is not spend any more 
money than they have to in order to give the illusion that these aliens are
all of one gender, so the most sure-fire way for them to minimize such costs
is to cast actors having roughly similar proportions, i.e. all male or all
female, without having to worry about if male actor X will appear to be
gender-wise the same as female actor Y when seen on TV.

>	I think the reason why they looked female was because if they looked
>too male, audiences would have had a hard time believing Riker would fall for
>one of them. The producers decided it was safer to cast them all female, even
>though Frakes wanted to have a male cast in his lover's role.

Since Soren was in fact a female, casting a female in her role was
probably the easiest thing to do...
-- 
Matt Gertz, mwgertz+@cs.cmu.edu
Dept. of ECE, The Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University.