Hey! You booted me in the head!

[captainsblog]

I heard about this controversy from Emily when word first came out about a new movie project near and dear to her heart- Avatar, the Last Airbender aka Airbender aka Avatar No Not THAT One- but now that it's on the verge of release, it's firing up again all about Teh Interwebs. This manifesto of it is probably as pointed and passioned as you can find.

Here's my problem with the OMG They Can Only Cast Asians In This Movie business, though: where does the line get drawn in Central Casting if we buy into this?

Next month, there's going to be what sounds like a really imaginative piece of theater in town: Macbeth with an all-female cast at Shakespeare in the Park. Can't have THAT, especially since the original material had men in even the womens' roles.

Not long ago, I enjoyed the remake of The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, one of the first thriller novels I actually went out and bought in my childhood. Despite them totally messing about with racial casting from the original film, I thought Denzel Washington did an awesome job in the role first done by Walter Matthau despite the latter being much older and much whiter. Was I wrong and racist-ageist to have felt this way?

And clearly we're going to have to recast someone in the lead of House, because that Brit twit Hugh Laurie has no business taking work away from an American actor just because he has a better fake US accent than I have a real one.

I hear the cries of "That's different!" Yeah it is. All of those characters are based on, and have always been portrayed as, real, living breathing (if on occasion mentally deranged medical-doctory) human beings. The actors in Avatar II: Electric Boogaloo are re-enacting performances of toons- and magical-creature toons at that. It's not like they're providing necessary role models for the struggling Asian children of this country, except the relative few who have arrows pointing down to the bridge of their noses.

I'm not saying that race shouldn't be a consideration in casting, but I really don't think that the Hollywood establishment- one of the most liberal and diverse bunch of multigagillionaires you're going to find anywhere- is engaging in a secret plan to keep every one other than Whitey down. If the casting produces the best actors on merit, and if their appearances don't objectively distract the audience¹, or subjectively offend for legitimate historical reasons², I'll go see the finished product. Especially if it makes my daughter squee.

----

¹Point taken, especially looking at the graphic I linked to, if you are arguing based on the silliness of a bunch of white actors running around a plainly Asian backdrop. Yet it's equally silly for the 20-something cast of Glee to be dancing around a US high school, and I've yet to hear any teen actors complaining about THAT.

²Sorry, white actors, but blackface is not coming back anytime soon.

Comments

[bktheirregular]

Also, think of how hard it would be to cast Mister Spock based on those criteria.

(And do you remember the controversy surrounding Miss Saigon? Specifically, the role of "The Engineer"?)

[mayiwrite.livejournal.com]

Laurence Olivier as Othello. Have you seen that?

[bill_sheehan.livejournal.com]

Orson Welles was better.

[erinpuff]

So after reading ssj10's post, you decided this would be a good post to make? Really?

Newsflash: yes, there is white privilege in Hollywood. And all over this post, as it happens.

I'm not sure if you really think an all-female Macbeth or recasting a white role as black is the same as making Asian characters white, or if you're just trying to be clever, but no. Really not the same thing. It's not just an issue of faithfulness to the original, and I'm surprised you don't see that (or have chosen not to for the purposes of ~the lulz~). There's a difference between diversifying and whitewashing. Seriously.

It's not like they're providing necessary role models for the struggling Asian children of this country

Do you really think it's not important for Asian children to see positive Asian representation in the media? Set aside the fact that it's an animated show and think about this. I'm no expert on this particular controversy, but I've read a bit, and I've seen multiple people talk about this. Including ssj10, whose post you supposedly read.

I'm not saying that race shouldn't be a consideration in casting, but I really don't think that the Hollywood establishment- one of the most liberal and diverse bunch of multigagillionaires you're going to find anywhere- is engaging in a secret plan to keep every one other than Whitey down.

Yeah, no. We live in a racist society, and this is reflected in our media. The Hollywood Establishment might not be full of people going "bwahahaha I love oppressing minorities," but it is full of people who have all the preconceptions and prejudices and ignorance that our society feeds us and presents as normal. Yes, even though they're liberals. Consider the 2008 primaries and then tell me liberals are above racial bullshit. And if you've got time to be sucked into a TV Tropes abyss, check out the Race Tropes page.

Another thing to think about: my understanding is that there is one Asian actor (Dev Patel) in the main cast... and he plays the bad guy. Can you at least see how this would genuinely bother people?

In conclusion, I'd also suggest you check out some of the posts on the racebending community.

[digitalemur.livejournal.com]

Yes. Yes, quite so.

I'm sure casting was just trying to cast pretty, reasonably good for the price, actors. But when _everyone_ who is doing that picks white people to be pretty and Asian people to be villains and scientists, it's _still_ aggregate racism and a message to Asian kids that they aren't beautiful, they are only nerds and bad guys, etc etc.

Kal Penn has an ambiguous stage name because it got him more auditions than his real name, Kalpen Modi. He's quite open about this. My boyfriend's dad anglicized his surname when he came here for graduate school because he _knew_ it would help if his name on job and housing applications didn't immediately indicate he was Chinese. Yeah, Asian kids still get plenty of messages that they are only acceptable in some places and some roles, and if they aren't even acceptable in the cast of an action movie in a mashup of east Asian settings, yeah, I don't think that's just incidental casting.

M. Night Shyamalan is a south Asian with an anglicized name too-- he knows better than this. Does he care? Apparently not. Ordinarily I'd say hey, it's hard enough being non-white in America when you aren't also being told "hey you, tell us what non-white people in America think" about this thing or that thing, leave the man alone. But Shyamalan chose this project, and chose to let casting end up this way, and I'm disappointed, because I find the casting choices distracting and irritating and I wanted better for this movie.

[captainsblog.livejournal.com]

The line I forgot to add to my other response: if there's one color that this casting seems to be favoring, it isn't white. It's green. All about how many tubs of popcorn and action figures they can sell to the widest audience rather than about integrity in the underlying art.

But then, the even bigger concern among the fans (at least according to the kid in the next room who fits that description) is that MNS has stripped the film of all of the fun of the animated version, going instead for wanting to start the next Star Wars franchise with lots of chop-socky action. That's an even bigger problem I have with Hollywood than their casting choices.

[captainsblog.livejournal.com]

I agree with some of this. I agree with a lot more of the other reply you got, which focuses more on the casting choices of this particular situation rather than making it emblematic of some big societal problem we have to protest and boycott in order to solve.

After my original post, I asked my daughter, by far the more in-tune with the choices of casting. She's not so much pissed about the race issue but that they just did a piss-poor job of casting, period. She said that one of the actors was in the Twilight films, and was probably cast in this one to give some eye candy to the Bella Edward OTP crowd. "He sucked in the Twilight movies and he sucks in the trailer for this one," she said. Now that kind of oppression I can get behind stopping.

As for the casting the one Asian kid as the villain (who does, according to the original poster, go over to the good guys at the end): how does that fit the theory, really? I didn't hear anyone complaining about Heath Ledger (OMG I almost typed that as "Heath Schuler," shoot me now;) having his honor and legacy destroyed by having his last major role be that of a bad guy. Often the bad-guy portrayals are the most memorable, require the most acting chops, and get more accolades than the much safer good-guy roles.

I'd just like to see these kinds of things discussed rationally, and without tossing in racism allegations that only make our side of such issues seem too touchy and whiny. When well-intentioned leaders pull dumb shit like throwing students out of school on Cinco de Mayo for wearing an American flag, or zero-tolerancing a little kid for having teeny toy guns on the soldiers on his hat, it makes the pure political point for the left but makes us appear to be a bunch of intolerant idiots among that middle 10 percent of the country that, unfortunately, gets to decide everything in this totally fucked-up standoff between Left and Right we're now in.