Yes!
Which is also why I tend to be a bit contrary in discussions about “representation” in American movies. The debate tends to be about proper representation of American minorities, which feels quite unimportant to me as a non-American.
I guess we all tend to categorize people into groups, but how we do so depends on our own culture. Americans tend to put the category “race” way ahead of other categories that I care about much more.
Star Trek does a good job of representing America’s racial diversity, but there are twice as many aliens on star trek crews as there are non-native English speaking humans. For reference, native English speakers make up about 10% of Earth’s population.
The newest series, Star Trek Discovery, features a milestone in representation on American SciFi TV. No, I’m not talking about the lead character. I’m talking about Captain Philippa Georgiou, who, as a non-native English speaker, gets to captain a space ship whose name is not taken from the naval tradition of English-speaking countries .Too bad she gets stuffed into a fridge right at the beginning of the series.
Well, I guess movies about the future will play in LA as long as there are people in LA making movies. Nothing wrong with that. If I want to see a movie imagining the future of Graz, Austria, I guess I’ll have to wait for the Austrian SciFi movie industy to get its act together (or more exactly: to appear out of nowhere).
There is still something wrong with the premise of Blade Runner, though. Whether or not Replicants are allowed to live freely or ruthlessly hunted down is not a local issue. You’ll either have all fleeing replicants trying to get out of LA and out of the US, or you’ll have replicants from other countries trying to get into LA. The level of persecution just won’t be uniform. “Everything happens in LA and other places or countries need not be mentioned” does not make sense.
This same problem happens a lot in American SciFi - some future world is imagined that is the consequence of some law passed by some American president at some point in the future - with not even a mention in passing of other countries. John Scalzi’s Lock In was another particularly bad offender in this respect.
I thought they get more representation than they want, seeing as they’ve been America’s favourite bad guys for a while now. India and Pakistan are former British colonies. My guess is former French colonies in Africa are much less represented in English-language media. Also, you don’t always need to make the stories about the big population centers - just pick the smaller country next to whatever comes into your mind.
