Djelloul Marbrook

There are an awful lot of guys who look like FBI agents. Most of them are character actors on TV. I think this proves that Hollywood and the Washington establishment aren’t at the opposite ends of the spectrum, as they claim. And I guess the voters are pretty much in sync with Hollywood and Washington, because the voters cast the politicians the same way Hollywood casts FBI agents.

These guys don’t look like America. They look like America a hundred years ago. We aren’t a WASP nation anymore. So why doesn’t Washington resemble the country? Why does it keep on resembling only the most homogenous parts of the country?

I take a certain amount of comfort when I watch the TV series Without a Trace. I note with pleasure that the actor who plays the boss has an Italian name, and two of the other actors have Hispanic names. That’s progress. And it’s always reassuring to see Italian-American, African-American and other “ethnic” actors playing the good guys. But the thing is, they’re not ethnic anymore. They’re us. They’re who we look like.

So why is Hollywood just barely getting it and the rest of us are still not getting it? This is not a subtle argument for nominating Barack Obama. It’s just a polite suggestion that America ought to start looking like its demographics. It ought to start looking like its enlisted army.

I’ve never met an FBI agent, but obviously Hollywood casting agents have, and they all seem to be lantern-jawed North European types. Some people might call that racial profiling. I call it uninspired. I’ve never met a CIA agent either. I’m not supposed to, am I? But I did meet a guy on the Washington, DC, waterfront years ago who claimed to be a CIA bomb expert. I didn’t believe him because he had such a big mouth. I hope I was right.

Television and movies are beginning to look like the numbers, but when you look at the first estate in Washington and on Wall Street, that would be the nobility, and the fourth estate, that would be journalists, they look like the numbers circa 1880. There have been a few Darwinian fillips: the mouths are a bit more agile, if at the same time less eloquent, for example.

When pictures of our military in Iraq began appearing I said to my wife, Look, our army looks like the whole world. But as days passed and things went from bad to worse I compared these pictures to those of the old men who had sent our army to Iraq and there was that most stark of disparities: these old men don’t look like America, but the men and women they sent to fight for us do.

Perhaps the most significant constant is that we still celebrate people who look like the roles they play, and as long as we insist on doing that we’re bound to end up with empty suits. So perhaps we don’t look like the numbers because they’ve changed faster than we’re ready for. It’s often said Hollywood typecasts. I think voters far outdo Hollywood in this respect. We’d all benefit from more casting against type. In fact, we’d benefit even more by forgetting about type entirely, because typecasting has lost us at least one war and a lot of self-respect.

—DM