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Whitewashing, Sexism, and "PC Culture" vs Hollywood: A Zack Snyder Flim
Local H Jay
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
So, breaking off from the MCU thread and elsewhere, this is a place to talk about whitewashing. And, in general minority actors, directors and more being looked over or put in a box when it comes to being portrayed and employed in Hollywood TV and films.
Some believe this is affirmative action nonsense of the highest order, while others see a disturbing trend going back over a century. Where do you stand? And try to keep it civil.
My personal opinion is thusly: it's been a long time coming to have a serious discussion on why whitewashing is so common even today. We live in a modern age where shows and movies starring minority actors do well as any others, and yet Hollywood is constantly giving roles to white actors using money as a justification. These arguments don't hold true anymore, and come across as insulting and degrading to people of color, women, and LGBT actors. We had a post in the MCU thread saying
"All roles to bi-racial multiply-disabled pansexuals
Every non bi-racial multiply-disabled pansexual cast is a crime against humanity."
Even as a mocking comment, that is fucked up and dated as an attitude. Giving these actors a voice isn't some succinct Tumblr post, about shouting down other opinions. It's about addressing a real world issue we give no thought to. People are actively annoyed when faced with discussion of this topic, and tell others to "Give it a rest". Well, we gave it a rest, for over a century. We need to be aware of the problems the film industry is facing in the immediate, and not scoff, scapegoat, and otherwise distract from the facts.
Some food for thought:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=zB0lrSebyng
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=XebG4TO_xss
Some believe this is affirmative action nonsense of the highest order, while others see a disturbing trend going back over a century. Where do you stand? And try to keep it civil.
My personal opinion is thusly: it's been a long time coming to have a serious discussion on why whitewashing is so common even today. We live in a modern age where shows and movies starring minority actors do well as any others, and yet Hollywood is constantly giving roles to white actors using money as a justification. These arguments don't hold true anymore, and come across as insulting and degrading to people of color, women, and LGBT actors. We had a post in the MCU thread saying
"All roles to bi-racial multiply-disabled pansexuals
Every non bi-racial multiply-disabled pansexual cast is a crime against humanity."
Even as a mocking comment, that is fucked up and dated as an attitude. Giving these actors a voice isn't some succinct Tumblr post, about shouting down other opinions. It's about addressing a real world issue we give no thought to. People are actively annoyed when faced with discussion of this topic, and tell others to "Give it a rest". Well, we gave it a rest, for over a century. We need to be aware of the problems the film industry is facing in the immediate, and not scoff, scapegoat, and otherwise distract from the facts.
Some food for thought:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=zB0lrSebynghttps://m.youtube.com/watch?v=XebG4TO_xss Local H Jay on
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Ultimately, the issue comes down to the topic gooseshit of cultural bias and bigotry.
I don't understand the outcry against casting Zoe Saldana as Nina Simone. I read a few articles that said Zoe was the wrong kind of black, which I cannot wrap my head around.
Law and Order ≠ Justice
It makes a lot more sense looking at a picture of the actual Nina Simone:
Saldana may be many things, but having those particular looks is not one of them. She's much more "traditionally" attractive, and that's problematic in this case:
Mainstream beauty standards emphasize features that are more common in white women than in women of color, and this is reinforced through exposure and through social status. In other words, mainstream Hollywood beauty standards are subtle examples of systemic racism. So a lot of people (rightly) feel that, in addition to all of the blatant problems with the representation of people of color in Hollywood, when Hollywood does pick black actors to be headliners, they specifically pick ones who don't look too black.
The problem here is it's hard to dive into this without deconstructing Hollywood beauty standards in general which can derail an argument from racism into sexism.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
So just to be clear, people are against Saldana playing Simone, purely because of her appearance?
A lot of comparisons have been made to the way MLK has been Flanderized in the decades after his death. The Saldana Simone thing looks to a lot of folks like trying to pretty up an icon of race and gender struggle to make her less threatening to the status quo.
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
I don't think so. It's tempting to distill these arguments into "so you're against artistic work X because it commits sin Y" but it's usually more accurate to say "artistic work X would be better if it didn't commit sin Y."
I'm sure somebody, somewhere, out there is against Saldana playing Simone and won't see the movie because of it, but you can find somebody, somewhere, who believes any arbitrarily extreme belief you can imagine.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
It's just particularly striking with Ghost in the Shell because they dyed her hair black to do it and initially did some test runs to see if they could use CGI to make her look more Asian. They failed spectacularly.
When you're casting a white actor to play a non-white part and you're looking for ways to make that actor look like some other ethnicity, that's a really big red flag that you need to stop what you're doing.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Except, and it may be a flimsy reason, the character's name is Mokoto Kusangi. That's a pretty Japanese name. Similar to Justin Chatwin being cast as a dude named Goku, it just doesn't add up.
I think this is incredibly myopic, then, and is very much akin with No True Scotsman. That Saldana doesn't exhibit the right black features means, to me, that there was literally no way to win and so the very making of this movie is a mistake to the critics of this casting. I don't think telling the money in Hollywood (Which is, unfortunately, concentrated in white hands) that making a film about a black person will get you pilloried no matter what is a good idea.
With that context, yeah, that's terrible, Cloud Atlas type terrible.
Law and Order ≠ Justice
Anime does a lot with drawing Japanese characters as looking, well, white, but the box art for GitS:
Motoko looks totally Japanese.
If it was a generic character, sure.
But it wasn't a generic character. It was a famous black artist, whose very work delved into the issues of how her appearance read to society at large. Here's an actual quote from Simone's diary:
So yeah, in this case, appearance does in fact matter, because it's incredibly fundamental to the story being told.
In the comics/anime, Mokoto Kusanagi is a full cyborg, a human brain encased in a fully artificial prosthetic body. Her appearance is fluid and subject to her whims and the needs of her profession. That was the point I attempted to make prior to the mention of the film makers using effects to alter that.
Law and Order ≠ Justice
It's not just a Japanese name, but a culturally resonant one (the English equivalent would be "Jane Excalibur".)
The funny thing is that there would have been an easy way to cast Johansson as her in a sort of fashion - cast her as Chroma (an alternate body that has been depicted as more Caucasian in appearance.)
/shrug
I see it both ways.
There's a long, sad history of American establishment only granting representation to black people who fit very narrow standards of acceptable blackness and then saying "What? We're representing you!" There's a long, sad history of American establishment only granting rights and privileges in tiny increments at a time and then saying, "Be patient! Progress can only move so fast!" So I'm particularly sensitive to arguments that sound like "you should be appeased with what we give you."
On the other hand, there's an overall problem with beauty standards in Hollywood that affects all races. It overlaps with race, in that non-white women are disproportionately affected by it. (Yay, intersectionality!) We can't really fix this without attacking the beauty standard independent of race, which effectively reframes the conversation from race to sex, thereby committing one of the cardinal sins of non-intersectional feminism.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Motoko Kusinagi, the Japanese national working for the Japanese government who has a cyborg body provided by the Japanese military which is the most popular model in Japan for Japanese women is about as far from "maybe white" as you can get
2. On the other hand, the GitS movie is going to suck, because Hollywood is incapable of understanding why the original was so good, so I'd much rather they stuff it full of White People. That way, when it bombs hard, they can't blame it on hiring Asians.
...I may be a tad cynical on this one.
The novel repeats over and over again that Katniss is African American. It is very explicit, and in no way subtle or innocuous; Collins clearly intended her work to feature a black protagonist.
Racist dickhead in Los Angeles does the casting for the screen adaptation, will only even consider a white lead.
I feel it's worth pointing-out that the distribution of white washing in the arts isn't even across all mediums; written works, even by big publishers, feature enormous diversity & so does even the biggest of big record labels. Small independent films usually do pretty good in that arena as well.
It's fucking Hollywood & the little wannabe outlets that desperately try to imitate Hollywood, warts and all, that are the core the problem (thus major video game publishers featuring mostly white dudebro casts & incubating a whole cultural undercurrent of xenophobia). I get the impression that the discussion of whitewashing starts circling the drain rather quickly because people aren't willing to just say that Hollywood is full of racist has-beens that still run the place, and this is 90% of the problem; most of the rest of the arts are either already better or striving for improvement, and people from those places get justifiably defensive when they're lumped-in with the big H.
Technically, it's just designed to look like the most common model, to conceal that it's actually a highly specialized and tuned military special operations model.
Which makes the casting that much more infuriating.
From a real-world perspective, casting a white woman to portray an explicitly Japanese character working for the Japanese government is ludicrously blatant whitewashing. It's not like the producers had to keep the film in Japan and have the characters in the film retain their Japanese names! Ghost in the Shell is a property that could have easily given an adaptation that made it distinct and Western from the original source, while still respecting its origins.
Case in point: Edge of Tomorrow, which is based on a Japanese light novel. Tom Cruise's character, Cage, was originally a Japanese soldier named Keiji. While the film ends up being rather different from the original novel in how it resolves, the broad ideas presented in the original source are respected and it comes out being a film that can stand on its own.
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I wasn't really seeing much of a problem in this particular case because 1) cyborg and 2) anime's tendency to draw its characters as white anyway, but the bolded does make it a little indefensible.
Um, Susan Collins describes Katniss as having black hair, olive skin and gray eyes which is not explicitly saying Katniss is African American.
That said, the whitewashed casting call was bullshit.
Yao, the Ancient One in the comics, is a racist stereotype. He is. He is an Orientalist nightmare of a character, the "wise old Tibetan master". He was created in the 60's by white men, the character played completely straight is just laughably, badly racist in today's world.
But on top of that, being Tibetan, he's politically a landmine for Marvel. You can't have a Marvel movie in 2016 with an ancient Tibetan mystic and expect China to just be okay with that. Even if it wasn't a racist as shit character (which it is), if you chose to do it, China would tell your movie to get fucked. China is not okay with movies that acknowledge Tibetans as y'know, people, but especially not ones that acknowledge Tibetan mysticism. It's not just a racial issue, it's a political issue. Marvel can't afford to have Yao be Tibetan, it would make the film banned in China. Plain and simple.
So, they decided to completely redo the Ancient One as a character who is sort of otherworldly looking, and uncouple the character from their racist origin. There are few actors who pull off "otherworldly" like Tilda Swinton, so she's an amazing choice for the role. Plus, they recast what was previously a male role into one for a woman, creating a role for a woman as a mentor for a superhero, something that doesn't come up a lot in the genre.
This is where the accusation of whitewashing comes in. Tilda is white (so very, very white), and since Yao is Asian (Tibetan, specifically), why couldn't they have given the role to an Asian actor?
But this has its own problems. As mentioned, you can't make the Ancient One a Tibetan, because China. A lot of people name-drop Asian actors and actresses, with Michelle Yeoh being a popular choice. Michelle Yeoh is Chinese. If you don't think there's a problem with replacing a Tibetan character's ethnicity with a Chinese actor because making them Chinese is politically easier, then that's fucking racist. It's basically saying "Chinese, Japanese, whatever", with an added dose of being extremely blithe to the cultural genocide going on right now against the Tibetan people by the Chinese government.
Now Hollywood does have a long history of treating "ethnic" actors as basically interchangeable (Erick Avari has made an entire career out of it!) but for fucks sake mate we shouldn't be encouraging that shit.
A writer for Doctor Strange called this situation "Marvel's Kobayashi Maru". The only choice they had was how to lose. There was no good way to write this character that wasn't racist and insensitive to somebody.
It doesn't talk a lot about her appearance but what little it does say is "straight black hair, olive skin, and grey eyes" which is apparently common of people in her area. That doesn't sound like any "race" that exists that I'm familiar with; I figured that since the HG series is set pretty far in the future that genetic drift had occurred to the point that there were new groups of people that don't exist in our present.
Rue was a different story, and the internet reaction to her was ridiculous.
This is not to say that whitewashing is not a problem (it is), but I'm not really sure Katniss is a good example of it. I always assumed they cast Jennifer Lawrence at least partially because her character in HG was supposed to be from what is now Appalachia, and she was then most famous for playing a teenage girl from the Ozarks in Winter's Bone.
I've seen this argument multiple times for different properties, and IMHO it's just terrible. Manga / anime is so stylized that it doesn't represent any ethnicity at all; it clearly is intended to evoke some ideal form of beauty (and arguably succeeds... I'm half tempted to ask @simonwolf to comment, since he's studied it professionally). Even just in terms of skin tone, properties are all over the place (and rare is the source manga that isn't greyscale or monochrome).
Regardless, manga /anime is a readily identifiable style with clear origins in Southeast Asia, often featuring protagonists / antagonists that are very explicitly Asian, even if they are visually depicted as the Platonic form of fuckability or whatever.
A better example would be the petition to make the MCU version of Danny "Iron Fist" Rand Asian-American, or their falling face first on race in Daredevil Season 2.
Arthur Chu has a pretty good writeup on it.
Again, look at the box art I linked. Kusanagi does not look like a white person in that artwork. She looks like she's Japanese.
So even the argument that anime characters often look white doesn't apply.
I like to link this post whenever this topic comes up
The box art you posted shows nothing to distinguish between white or Asian. Pale skin, short black hair, and sun glasses.
This is fair. Most likely the effect @miscellaneousinsanity quoted in action in my case.
I know it's sometimes hard to understand, but Motoko and Goku are supposed to be Japanese. That's just how that art style depicts asian people.
In other words, the contextual presentation of the character in their medium is what's important.
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Like, I don't especially care how you interpret the eyeshape or skin tone of anime/manga characters, look at the setting.
Hellsing is explicitly set in Europe for the most part, with characters who are specifically identified as English, Scottish, Italian, etc.
If you did a live action version of Hellsing with a white cast, it wouldn't be that weird?
But the Japanese setting is inherently part of GitS, so deciding to go "naw the characters aren't Japanese" is weird.
Not all anime/manga is set in Japan. Lots are fantasy or sci fi set elsewhere. But GitS is pretty clear about it.
So, yeah.
Manga and Anime adaptations are kind of a weird line, that is going to be subjective based on the work in question. Every character is going to look Asian, simply due to the market they are designed for. So when converting them for consumption of a different audience it's pretty important to determine if that characters nationality is actually important to this, or any story being told with them.
A:TLAB was a good example of doing this wrong, as the story plays heavily into the history and thematic's of different Asian cultures. It is a large part of the story being told. White washing is a horrible thing to do in this movie and very much ruins the experience.
Dragonball was not really a big deal, because as mentioned, Asian culture has little to actually do with this story (outside of it being based on journey to the west). Goku isn't even Asian, he is literally an alien from another planet. Casting a non-Asian actor in this case is not a big deal and actually kind of works as a concept, to show him as different from those around him.
GITS, if they wanted white actors in it, they should have stuck with Batou, I think they could have gotten away with it without too much of an issue. From the story it looks like they are going with, I remember nationality being a pretty large part of it. So whitewashing a lot of the characters in this case is pretty bad.
For properties that are actually more inclusive (than most Manga/Anime in this example), I am personally kind of against ever changing a character for any reason. Speaking as an outsider to the problem, but to me it feels disingenuous and basically saying, "We don't think a character of typeX could ever stand on their own, unless their popularity was first propped up by being known as this white/male character."
I think we should absolutely have more diversity at all levels, however I would rather see new or existing properties that stand on their own merits be proposed.
e:
As for the ancient one / tilda scandal. I still say the best answer was to just go with a, "She has become unfocused from reality", and have her constantly changing gender/race in every scene. She has become everone and everything, due to her constant exposure to the supernatural.