Tuned In

Perrineau: Was Lost's Michael Whitewashed?

  • Share
  • Read Later

In an interview with TV Guide, Harold Perrineau, plainly ticked off that his character Michael was killed so soon after his return to Lost—”What the hell? I came back for that?”—suggests that not letting Michael reconcile with his son Walt plays into a racial stereotype:

TV Guide: Were you disappointed Michael and Walt didn’t reconnect before your character died?

Perrineau: Listen, if I’m being really candid, there are all these questions about how they respond to black people on the show. Sayid gets to meet Nadia again, and Desmond and Penny hook up again, but a little black boy and his father hooking up, that wasn’t interesting? Instead, Walt just winds up being another fatherless child. It plays into a really big, weird stereotype and, being a black person myself, that wasn’t so interesting. [Responds Cuse: “We pride ourselves on having a very racially diverse cast. It’s painful when any actor’s storyline ends on the show. Harold is a fantastic actor whose presence added enormously to Lost.”]

Incidentally, if there was any lingering doubt, I guess we can officially call Michael dead now.

OK, I don’t want to write off Perrineau’s complaint altogether, because he has a point, insofar as pop culture could use more role models of black dads who aren’t missing in action. But that’s about as far as I can agree. Leaving aside the question of whether the producers should decide whether characters should live or die on the basis of some larger social-justice issues, one thing that’s always distinguished Lost is how it’s not just very diverse by primetime TV standards, but diverse in a matter-of-fact way that largely avoids racial cliches or self-consciousness. (The one, atypical, example I can think of where real-world race issues blatantly emerged on the show was a very early scene where Michael articulated the racial subtext to his antagonism with Jin—”Where I come from, Koreans don’t like black people!”)

The other problem is that when you have a show with a large cast that has—and kills—characters of all manner of ethnic backgrounds, is that once you start to analyze the death toll, you can argue it just about any way. I recalll after the deaths of Shannon, then Libby and Ana Lucia, there were complaints that the show must be misogynist, since it killed off females so easily. On the other hand, if it spared them, couldn’t you just as well argue that it was patronizing women, treating them as too delicate and ladylike to be subjected to the same dangers as the show’s men.

Yeah, I know: So sayeth the white man! Let me know if you disagree.