Hollywood Whitewashing

Last weekend, a movie version of the popular Japanese manga Dragonball Z opened across the globe, to tepid box-office results. It starred a Caucasian actor, the bug-eyed Justin Chatwin, whose last truly notable role was as Tom Cruise's teenage son in War of the Worlds. Next year will see the release of at least two intended "tentpole" summer pictures with lead characters that aren't Caucasian: M. Night Shyamalan's adaptation of Avatar: The Last Airbender (simply titled The Last Airbender, due to disputes with James Cameron over the use of the word "Avatar"), and Jerry Bruckheimer's big screen version of the popular game The Prince of Persia.  The former is admittedly set in a fantastical world, albeit one heavily influenced by Asian culture as is clear from its themes, visuals, music, the names of the characters, and ultimately the admissions of the creators themselves.The latter, however, is set in the historical kingdom of ancient Persia and India though the story also has some fantastical twists.

In both cases, though, Caucasian actors have been pretty much shoehorned into roles that, to put it mildly, seem somewhat inappropriate for them. In the case of Persia, the role of the Prince is essayed by semi-popular actor Jake Gyllenhaal, apparently angling for his big breakout action movie (considering that in the last one he starred in The Day After Tomorrow, the real star was the digital rendering of the multiple catastrophes that rocked the world), while role of the princess is played by recent Bond girl Gemma Arterton. Neither actor, conspicuously, is Middle Eastern, though one could argue that Gyllenhaal's Jewish heritage brings him a couple of steps closer to the Prince, certainly more than Arterton is to an INDIAN princess.

The cast of The Last Airbender, as I have noted in another post, is even more ridiculous; M. Night Shyalaman has gone with, for the most part, a bunch of Caucasian UNKNOWNS for the lead characters; ALL of whom are clearly designed to be Asian-inspired. I was even profoundly insulted by an alleged comment I read on Wikipedia where one of the teeny-boppers cast as Sokka, who would best have been essayed by an Inuit/Native American, crassly said something like "I'll just have to get a tan and shave the sides of my head; a little suspension of disbelief is required." The belated casting of Slumdog Millionaire's breakout star Dev Patel as Prince Zuko is hardly a balm to the sting of Shyamalan's ridiculous casting decisions; the damage has been done.

Ironically enough, the voice actors of almost all of these characters, from Yuri Lowenthal who voiced the Prince to Zach Tyler Eisen who voiced Aang the Avatar, are white, but there's a world of difference between animation and live action in this respect; an animated character is an amalgam of his voice and his visual representation, but in the end it's what people, whether the gamers or the viewers, see on the screen that really leaves the impression; just about anyone could be a voice actor and in fact in other territories, the voices are quite easily replaced. With live action, though, no amount of dubbing can change what appears on the big screen, and the awkwardness of bad casting.

The way I see it, the imperative here is to create an affinity between the audience and the characters they are seeing on the screen, and to an extent I get that, especially in the case of Persia, which has been cast with a semi-well-known actor. 

But if there's any lesson that films like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and, more recently, Slumdog Millionaire have to teach, its that you don't have to put white asses on the screen to get white asses in the seats. Furthermore, the audience for these movies goes well beyond the borders of the United States now; many movies make the real money overseas. As impressive, for example, as Titanic's 600 million dollar gross is, it is dwarfed by the $1.2 billion gross it made in the rest of the world, which is, loath that I am to state the obvious, 2/3 of the film's total gross. 

In short, there is no need to just pander to white Americans, many of whom, incidentally, recently voted a black man into their highest public office. 

 It was gratifying to see Dragonball: Evolution crash and burn, even though in that case, casting a white actor was arguably not as strange considering Gokou is supposed to be an alien. With any luck, though, maybe the whitewashing will stop someday soon, and we'll see more East Asian or West Asian people actually PLAYED by East Asian or West Asian actors.