Conan of Honolulu

Our friend Kit passed along some news I should have been aware of, and wasn’t. They’re filming a new Conan movie, even as I write. Release is planned for 2011.

The most intriguing fact about the production, it appears to me, is the casting of Jason Momoa (of Stargate Atlantis) as Conan. The implications are notable, since Momoa is a man of mixed race, and Howard’s original conception of his hero was… shall we say, not oriented in that direction.

I’m sure there are some who deny this, but the plain fact, as far as I can see, is that Howard was an unashamed racist. His idea of the Cimmerians, Conan’s tribe, was that they were the pure racial ancestors of the Celts (that’s one reason I never cared much for Arnold in the role. He could have at least worn the black wig they finally stuck on James Earl Jones’ head). Some of his stories involving black tribes include pretty condescending language.

I hasten to add that (in my opinion) pre-World War II racism needs to be judged somewhat differently from the modern kind. Many people in that time considered racism the rational extension of Darwinist science, and a lot of the most respectable people subscribed to race theory. Howard’s belief in the superiority of whites was not remarkable in his day, and very likely had no tinge of personal animosity in it. The Nazis had not yet shown up to show us all, in horribly graphic fashion, where such thinking actually leads.

So this casting involves a basic reinvention of the character from the outset. For all I know, it could work.

Still, I’d like to see somebody do Howard’s Conan someday. Hasn’t happened yet.

6 thoughts on “Conan of Honolulu”

  1. You mean, they should put Sean Connery in the Conan role? If I look up an Irish actor agency and judge mostly on appearance, perhaps Steve Cash who can ride a horse and has some knife skills already, or maybe Charlie Hughes. I wonder if Colin Farrell would work.

    But even if the actor worked, they would not back it up with stupid racist rhetoric, unless they plan to undermine the story by showing the poverty of racism.

  2. I’m sure there are some who deny this, but the plain fact, as far as I can see, is that Howard was an unashamed racist.

    Howard wasn’t any more racist than most people of 1930s Texas. Though to modern eyes some of his stories would make difficult reading, there are also occasions when he rose above the bigotry that was rampant at the time. For a white Texan to write two stories with an intelligent, likeable, sensitive black man as the heroic main character speaks volumes, given this being the era of the Great White Hope and Jim Crow law.

    The matter of casting Conan has nothing to do with racism, though: it’s just about depicting a character as he was written. If a character is described as black, you’d cast a black person: if he’s described as white, you’d cast a white person. The ethnicity of Conan matters because this is a pre-modern world, and his entire outlook is based upon being a white barbarian from the cold, dark north who’s wandered into southern, civilized climes, with many cultural cues from the Irish and Scottish, as well as “The North” as a whole. It’s as simple as that.

    Momoa is a quarter-Irish and quarter German, so though he’s mixed race, he’s half-white – the other half’s Polynesian. In this case, what matters most is if he *looks* white: in recent photographs he looks pretty damn good as Conan. Hell, he looks like he could be my uncle, and I’ve traced my family roots back to 10th Century Raithlin Island.

    That said, this isn’t going to be Howard’s Conan on screen, but not because of Momoa. The script’s done that, by rehashing Conan the Barbarian and countless other Sword-and-Sorcery movies.

    Nope. The Germanics, I believe, were called Gundermen.

    It’s difficult to say what the Gundermen were based upon, though Germanic is a likely influence on their naming conventions. That said, they were more or less wiped out at the end of the Hyborian Age. The modern Germanics were formed from a mixture of Aesir, Vanir and Cimmerian tribes.

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