Race matters? [spoilers]

The politics of race in modern TV and cinema can be extremely confusing, and Poison is a good example why.

It seems that race is both important in Poison and then again not. The film-makers clearly went to the trouble of ensuring that actors of Indian descent were included in the film, but the representation of race is careless at best.

The actor playing the racist character is white, while the character who is racially abused is played by a half-white, half-Indian actor. OK, that seems fine, given that Kingsley can pass for white or Indian. But then Dev Patel, who is completely of Indian descent, plays a white British character, or a character who was so in the original story. (As a friend of Harry's named Woods in colonial India, it seems very unlikely he would be anything other than White British or Irish.) All three characters have British accents, even if the syntax is sometimes off.

I generally have no issue with colour-blind casting unless the depiction is of a real person or race is important to the context of the show/film. The latter is clearly the case in Poison, with Anderson even rewriting the end of the original story to amplify the offence caused to the doctor. (In the original story, Dr Ganderbai insists that Harry is not himself due to the chloroform and just needs a good holiday, while in the short he takes great offence and insists that nothing can atone for the insult.)

Why go to the effort of casting actors of Indian descent if the concept of race is so blithely treated in the narrative and direction? Why amplify the importance of race in one aspect while completely disavowing it in another? Why not cast an Indian actor with an Indian accent as the doctor and a white British actor as Woods? The film both adopts and rejects colour-blind casting at the same time.

Another example is House of the Dragon, the showrunners of which cast a family as entirely black, even though they were notably pale-skinned and light-eyed in the books. When they had children with a white family, the offspring were mixed race, though these two families had been interbreeding for generations and yet each had retained its skin colour up to that point. As far as I remember, there was no mention of race in the show, but attention was clearly paid to ensuring that the real-world mechanics of race-mixing existed - but only up to a point. Lip service was paid to racial politics, and yet the effects were so obtrusive that they couldn't be ignored or help but raise questions. Once again, race is important, yet not. There are countless other examples of when the purposeful race-swapping of characters - even real ones - is held up as important and progressive, but results in contradictions or the total neglect of race within the context of the show/film.

Apologies for making this a longer post than it deserved to be. Perhaps none of the above is important, and I'm sure there are many people who happily watch shows and films without ever thinking or caring about this issue - and good for them. But it does rankle with me and seems dishonest. I don't see why creative types find it so hard to represent race in a logical and consistent way, or to just ignore it altogether if it isn't relevant to the story. There wasn't much in Poison to reflect on, being a short and fairly shallow film, but I spent nearly all of it wondering what race Woods and the doctor were supposed to be, because apparently it mattered.