Hollywood Whitewashing

Apologies if there's already a thread about this.

So...we've got two big blockbuster movies coming out this summer, The Last Airbender and Prince of Persia, which are set in (fantastical versions of) various foreign cultures. And in both cases the characters have been cast, to all appearances, as a bunch of honkies.

Gene Luen Yang (author of the graphic novel American Born Chinese) has a little post/comic about Airbender, which makes it sound like they actually went out of their way to cast white people. Derek Kirk Kim, another Asian-American comics guy, has a more vitriolic post about this, pointing out that people would have cried foul about the presence of black people in LOTR, despite the fact that it's set in a fantasy world, but the just-as-obviously Asian characters of Avatar can apparently be swapped out for whiteys. But at least there it IS a fantasy world; Prince of Persia is clearly supposed to be our ancient middle east, and yet, again, it's all lily-white.

I expect there to be more cultural commentary on this soon, though to be honest I'm kind of surprised I haven't read more articles, etc. on this subject. It's deeply worrying to me, needless to say, and the excuses you can drag out for something like this are getting pretty thin. We're already getting them: "Hollywood's not racist, they only care about money!" being the most common. Which is pretty stupid, for obvious reasons.

What bugs me is that it may be true that casting an Asian or Middle Eastern person in the lead might have cost the movie some money...maybe...but studios are always making stupid decisions that will clearly hurt their movies' performance anyway, so why not do something socially productive? I mean, is it my imagination, or have we actively devolved in the last decade when it comes to racial depictions?

But as I say, this is handwaving away the fact that they're literally exploiting people's racism. If there was a sudden resurgence of interest in blackface, would Hollywood be justified in making a big-budget Steppin Fetchit movie "because it's just about money"? Spike Lee was right!!

It seems like as recently as a decade ago Hollywood movies were aware of their impact on society and made an effort, however clumsily, to use it for good. Which of course got them shrieked at by The Usual Suspects for having a Liberal PC agenda. Now it seems like a cavalcade of capitulation.

Naveen Andrews is of Indian descent, not Middle Eastern. Does that make him more appropriate for the role? I'm honestly asking. Obviously he just wrapped up playing an Iraqi for six years. Does that have a whiff of racism to it as well, or is it plausible for him to be playing an Iraqi or Persian? (I've known a few Iranians, and they don't look much like Andrews. They ARE lighter-skinned, though not Jake Gylenhaal-light. But the middle east is a bit of a melting pot, racially, so maybe it's not so strange.)

Oded Fehr is probably still waiting by the phone.

This is an interesting point, since to me having different voices play different ethnicities is a little more acceptable. Kung Fu Panda and Disney's Mulan both had a voice cast made of a mix of Asians and other races, white people included (So did the Avatar: the Last Airbender cartoon, for that matter). I think the important thing is the "optics"--the characters in Mulan *look* Chinese, the characters in Avatar *look* Asian and Inuit (more or less--there's some arguments to be made about the tendency of anime characters to look white, but anyone who knows anything about the genre should know to read them as Asian). Kung Fu Panda features animals, but because they exist in a clearly Asian culture and have Asian names you tend to read them as Asian, at least I think so.

I didn't mean to make it sound like I thought he was wrong. Poor phrasing on my part. I just wanted to make it clear that I couldn't vouch for whether that was a real casting sheet.

By the way, it's kind of hilarious to see all the manboy fanboys rushing in to defend the movie by saying that the original cartoon was "culturally ambiguous". How dumb do you have to be to think that?

Fun fact: Katara is voiced by a young Mae Whitman, i.e. ...Her?

Kirby's version of Thor is zany enough that you can have a black guy in there, I think. It's not like it's a faithful adaptation of the Norse myths. And The Fourth World, which was in some ways Kirby's do-over of Thor, had a couple of black "gods".

By the same token, I don't think anyone would have cared if one of the "nations" of Airbender was white. Hell, you can make a decent argument for Aang being white in the cartoon, even though that's likely not what was intended. (I think he was meant to be racially ambiguous, but ultimately Asian--the Air people are essentially Tibetan Buddhist, aren't they?)

But literally turning everyone white (except the bad guys--oy) is pretty insulting. I mean, look at those guys, it's like they found the whitest people they could possibly find to play Inuits. And it's not like they're big stars--would it have killed them to cast, say, Q'orianka Kilcher as Katara?

I've only just discovered the series, and I've only seen the first season. But yes, it's very well done.

I'm sure Whitman will be cool as Roxy, but I think Egg is going to be her signature role for some time.

I do realize that classical Persia was pretty multicultural, or at least, it could be portrayed that way; the Middle East was the hub of the world during the middle ages, and pretty much everyone passed through there. So you could argue that Gylenhaal (or Andrews) could belong there as much as Oded Fehr. But it does seem like a bit of a stretch.

So here's a question: Antonio Bandaras as an Arab in The 13th Warrior. Racist?