Netflix, the American entertainment company founded by Reed Hastings and Marc Randolph in California to provide media streaming, and video-on-demand online, has been praised by The Guardian for its increased use of foreign languages, and the impact this has had on fighting rising xenophobia.
The Netflix current subscriber list sits at over 104 million, with global audiences that watch content in Arabic, Spanish, German and Mandarin Chinese among many others.
Recently released viewing figures suggest that two Netflix Original programmes, Cloverfield Paradox and Altered Carbon, drew 7.5 million viewers between them, and in both instances the lead actors spoke a language other than English.
In Cloverfield, Chinese actor Zhang Ziyi plays the lead and speaks all her lines in Chinese. Likewise, Martha Higareda’s the Mexican lead actor, delivers her lines in English, which is spoken with hints of an accent, and is liberally interspersed with Spanish. Her partner in the series, played by Waleed Zuaiter, frequently speaks Arabic in key scenes.
The streaming of these programmes, depicting foreign and first-generation English speaking actors, who communicate fluently with each other in their natives tongues (implying they fully understand each other), highlights the mixed cultural viewing audience that Netflix has obtained.
The change in priorities over US audiences began in 2014 when movie studios realised that 70 percent of their revenue came from overseas markets. They then began to tailor their productions to incorporate foreign actors and overseas filming, in a bid to cater for this new global audience.
This unique approach gives an opportunity for inclusion and diversity, allowing native actors to access to roles that would once have been filled by Hollywood actors with poor fake accents.
While English is still considered one of the most dominant languages in the world, there are other languages that are spoken by more people such as, Chinese and Spanish. It seems unfair that it has taken until now for what is actually happening around the globe to be faithfully represented upon our TV screens. The bar was originally set at English, but perhaps there is now a need for more people to learn Spanish or Chinese.
Hollywood has begun to realise the benefits of its foreign market too, casting Chinese actor Donnie Yen, in Rogue One: A Star Wars Story as a warrior. Instead of misrepresenting martial arts, they cast Yen, a wushu (martial arts) expert from China. This casting gave a real, co-operative relationship between the East and the West, not simply a biased Western slant on martial arts. Although Yen speaks in accented English in the film, it is still a step in the right direction when it comes to eliminating cultural assumption.
Netflix have led the way in tailoring their programmes to suit all viewers, instead of producing the same standardised English content. This gives audiences the opportunity be exposed to new languages, cultures and perspectives, which can only serve to help in the fight against xenophobia as viewers will soon learn that human nature is universal, and we’re more similar than appearances may lead us to believe.
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