![[personal profile]](http://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
There was an article posted in The San Francisco Chronicle about the Avatar: The Last Airbender question, which led to a long discussion on ![[livejournal.com profile]](http://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
avatar_fans about the casting again. This discussion included arguments from both sides, and after a while it made me want to make this opinion clear. It got way long—sorry.
It's easy to get sucked into trying to show that Avatar takes place in Asia and that's why the cast should be Asian. This is an unwinnable argument. The fact that the architecture, clothing, writing, utensils and philosophy--among other things--are inspired by things Asian can always be countered with: "It's magic so it can be different" or "it's fiction so it can be different".
The heroes can always be white. That's is the very tradition that makes the casting offensive. Obviously they can be cast white: so far they have been!
What race was Charlie Chan? He was Chinese. He is identified as Chinese by his narrator and by other characters within his story. I am sure he's also identified as Asian (Oriental) in looks as well.
What race is Harry Potter identified as by his narrator? His narrator never assigns him a race. Nowhere in the HP series does a character or the narrator describe Harry as white. (Not that this would probably stop people from arguing that we are told that he's white: he has green eyes! He's British! Well, yeah, we do make those inferences. But he's never identified as white.)
What race were the actors who played Charlie Chan when he was the lead in movies? They were white. What race is the actor who plays Harry Potter and most people he knows? They're white too.
Charlie Chan being specifically described as Chinese didn't mean he "had to" be played by an Asian man according to Hollywood standards. The MIT students who were the basis for the movie 21 being Asian-American did not mean they had to be played by Asians in the movie (they weren't). "Acting Chinese" took care of things for Charlie Chan. Ethnicities not being necessary for the plot, presumably, took care of things in 21. There's always an argument for why they could be white if you need one.
Do you think anybody had to make a case for why Harry should be white in HP? In that movie there was groundswell of feeling from just about everyone that he couldn't be anything but British since Harry is--fake accents just wouldn't cut it, even if the child actor in question was accomplished and talented. (Similarly the fantasy worlds of Narnia and Middle Earth are mostly populated by white people who could pass as British.) He was already understood to be white: now he had to be white and British.
Nobody had to make a case for Harry being white against somebody pointing out all the non-white British people. Or the non-white people with green eyes. (That is, blue eyes--Harry's often-mentioned green eyes was changed to accommodate the young actor's problems with contacts, I believe.)
This whole line of argument, I think, is a way of getting things away from the real problem, which is less about the reality of Avatar and more about western history with race and the part movies have played in it. Getting it "like the cartoon" is shallow compared to the wider issue. That's why it's getting written about in newspapers.
One other misleading argument I wanted to speak to is the idea that talent is more important than race. This falsely implies that by wanting to find non-white actors, a movie is abandoning it's previously-held "talent first" policy. Even if Hollywood is looking for talent, it is looking for type first.
There seems to be this idea that since this is a competition based purely on talent (which it isn't), looking at minority actors translates into less talent. Iow, since there are more white people, there are more white actors to choose from, and that means more people competing, which means people have to beat out a lot of people by having more talent.
In reality, white actors are chosen for things other than talent all the time. There are plenty of movies that feature bad performances by white child actors. Those actors were considered right off over potentially better actors of color because they weren't invited to audition, without anyone really thinking it was a problem.
I knew a guy called into coach a white child actor in a movie who was terrible. His well-reviewed performance on screen was the result of careful editing and trickery on the part of the rest of the cast. The makers of Rabbit Proof Fence chose their cast from a pool of Aboriginal children. When the first kid was cast, nobody worried that restricting the talent pool to white kids meant settling for less talent. And even with a bigger pool to choose from, the Aboriginal children gave far better performances.
Also, questions like "where are they supposed to find a ton of Inuits to choose from?" skip so far ahead they're irrelevant. The relatively small number of Inuits is not an argument for why all the leads being white is inevitable.
That got much longer than I meant it to be. It's just what's tricky about these arguments is they sound so obvious and succinct but actually hold a ton of unexamined assumptions.
avatar_fans about the casting again. This discussion included arguments from both sides, and after a while it made me want to make this opinion clear. It got way long—sorry. It's easy to get sucked into trying to show that Avatar takes place in Asia and that's why the cast should be Asian. This is an unwinnable argument. The fact that the architecture, clothing, writing, utensils and philosophy--among other things--are inspired by things Asian can always be countered with: "It's magic so it can be different" or "it's fiction so it can be different".
The heroes can always be white. That's is the very tradition that makes the casting offensive. Obviously they can be cast white: so far they have been!
What race was Charlie Chan? He was Chinese. He is identified as Chinese by his narrator and by other characters within his story. I am sure he's also identified as Asian (Oriental) in looks as well.
What race is Harry Potter identified as by his narrator? His narrator never assigns him a race. Nowhere in the HP series does a character or the narrator describe Harry as white. (Not that this would probably stop people from arguing that we are told that he's white: he has green eyes! He's British! Well, yeah, we do make those inferences. But he's never identified as white.)
What race were the actors who played Charlie Chan when he was the lead in movies? They were white. What race is the actor who plays Harry Potter and most people he knows? They're white too.
Charlie Chan being specifically described as Chinese didn't mean he "had to" be played by an Asian man according to Hollywood standards. The MIT students who were the basis for the movie 21 being Asian-American did not mean they had to be played by Asians in the movie (they weren't). "Acting Chinese" took care of things for Charlie Chan. Ethnicities not being necessary for the plot, presumably, took care of things in 21. There's always an argument for why they could be white if you need one.
Do you think anybody had to make a case for why Harry should be white in HP? In that movie there was groundswell of feeling from just about everyone that he couldn't be anything but British since Harry is--fake accents just wouldn't cut it, even if the child actor in question was accomplished and talented. (Similarly the fantasy worlds of Narnia and Middle Earth are mostly populated by white people who could pass as British.) He was already understood to be white: now he had to be white and British.
Nobody had to make a case for Harry being white against somebody pointing out all the non-white British people. Or the non-white people with green eyes. (That is, blue eyes--Harry's often-mentioned green eyes was changed to accommodate the young actor's problems with contacts, I believe.)
This whole line of argument, I think, is a way of getting things away from the real problem, which is less about the reality of Avatar and more about western history with race and the part movies have played in it. Getting it "like the cartoon" is shallow compared to the wider issue. That's why it's getting written about in newspapers.
One other misleading argument I wanted to speak to is the idea that talent is more important than race. This falsely implies that by wanting to find non-white actors, a movie is abandoning it's previously-held "talent first" policy. Even if Hollywood is looking for talent, it is looking for type first.
There seems to be this idea that since this is a competition based purely on talent (which it isn't), looking at minority actors translates into less talent. Iow, since there are more white people, there are more white actors to choose from, and that means more people competing, which means people have to beat out a lot of people by having more talent.
In reality, white actors are chosen for things other than talent all the time. There are plenty of movies that feature bad performances by white child actors. Those actors were considered right off over potentially better actors of color because they weren't invited to audition, without anyone really thinking it was a problem.
I knew a guy called into coach a white child actor in a movie who was terrible. His well-reviewed performance on screen was the result of careful editing and trickery on the part of the rest of the cast. The makers of Rabbit Proof Fence chose their cast from a pool of Aboriginal children. When the first kid was cast, nobody worried that restricting the talent pool to white kids meant settling for less talent. And even with a bigger pool to choose from, the Aboriginal children gave far better performances.
Also, questions like "where are they supposed to find a ton of Inuits to choose from?" skip so far ahead they're irrelevant. The relatively small number of Inuits is not an argument for why all the leads being white is inevitable.
That got much longer than I meant it to be. It's just what's tricky about these arguments is they sound so obvious and succinct but actually hold a ton of unexamined assumptions.
Tags:
![[identity profile]](http://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
From:
no subject
From:
no subject
From:
no subject
From:
no subject
From:
no subject
Also this reminded me of something I heard way back in HP fandom, where someone mentioned when she first read the books, she had imagined Hermione as being black and Jamaican -- she read bushy hair as kinky hair, and apparently where she lived in England there were a large number of Jamaican dentists!
From:
no subject
From:
no subject
http://www.jkrowling.com/textonly/en/ex
From:
no subject
From:
no subject
From:
no subject
It really upsets me (naively, I know) that fans of something so deeply entrenched in a love of asian culture can actively refuse to have a problem with the casting. I admit I didn't expect casting on this film to be intelligent or ground-breaking, but I certainly have a problem with it not being so. If that makes sense.
[edit] So much italic text in this comment. X/
From:
no subject
From:
no subject
From:
no subject
From:
no subject
Isn't it funny how the 'colourblind casting' and 'based on talent' excuses are almost always applied to casting white actors to play characters of colour? I wonder why that is.
In other words, great post. And beyond whitewashing of adaptations, there's most film/TV makers almost pathological fear of casting non-white characters beyond a few token and stereotypical characters (why don't we ever see the black Nerdy Best Friend, for instance?). There are exceptions, but far too few.
From:
no subject
From:
no subject
From:
no subject
From:
no subject
From:
no subject
From:
no subject
Wow. This is such a good point and one that I didn't even notice. And it makes me wonder if Tolkien ever specifically described the ethnicity of his characters or if readers just defaulted "white"? And it drives home (for me, anyway) how important it is to default the characters of Avatar as Asian.
There seems to be this idea that since this is a competition based purely on talent (which it isn't), looking at minority actors translates into less talent.
Casting is always about looks. Always. Talent counts, of course. Eventually. But if our hero doesn't immediately ping us as heroic, it won't work. Danny Devito was never going to get cast as Indiana Jones, no matter his acting talent. (I recall reading an article... somewhere about this, where someone said something to the effect of, "If looks didn't count, John Malkovich would star in everything." Which amused the heck out of me. *g*)
Which means the "talent" thing is pure bullshit. Plus! Look at the movie Whale Rider. Keisha Castle-Huges was nominated for an Academy award for Best Actress, and she was plucked out of an extremely small pool of choices compared to the pool this film had. So this idea that casting Asian children is impossibly hard doesn't pass the sniff test.
From:
no subject
It's so true about casting to type--and that's not a bad thing, it's often just reality. Casting is 90 percent of the challenge. Plenty of people who are really like a character are passed over in favor of someone who "looks like" they could be the character.
This is probably especially true for child actors who get cast because they have a "quality" the director thinks will work well for the story on screen. Then they have to work with them for other stuff. It's just funny in this discussions the way people almost think these kids are all having to prove their ability to do a convincing Iago, convince their mother their father has died and move a theater critic to tears before they can play Sokka.
From:
no subject
Oh, I know. I mean especially with Sokko where you're pretty much looking for a class clown type which... I'm imagining a really good chunk of the kids who'd show up for a casting call are class clown types.
From:
no subject
Indeed. If Hollywood looked for talent first, you'd think that not only would there be more non-white people on-screen; there would also be more who weren't stick-figured and all that good-looking.
From:
no subject
From:
no subject
One error - Maori are the indigenous people of New Zealand. Rabbit Proof Fence is an Australian movie and the indigenous actors are Aboriginal. "Mixed-race" is a very contentious and difficult term in relation to Aboriginal people (and is rarely or never used) because of what happened to the Stolen Generation for being "mixed", right up to the 1970s.
From:
no subject
From:
no subject
An Aboriginal person might say, "I'm Aboriginal but my dad is white," but they're still Aboriginal, not mixed-race. If I knew where the actors came from, there would be a more specific term, either the name of their specific group (e.g. Gurnai) or a general term for people from their area (e.g. Victorian and southern NSW people are Koori, northern NSW and southern Queensland people are Murri), but without knowing this, I can't say.
From:
no subject
From:
no subject
Which was probably true. But I still regret not seeing Danny DeVito as Uncle Vernon (preferably with his normal accent).
From:
no subject
From:
no subject
In reality, white actors are chosen for things other than talent all the time. There are plenty of movies that feature bad performances by white child actors. Those actors were considered right off over potentially better actors of color because they weren't invited to audition, without anyone really thinking it was a problem.
Yes! Exactly.
From:
no subject
From:
no subject
This is one reason why I LOVED Tropic Thunder - it totally makes fun of idiotic Hollywood traits that are so mainstream that no one even thinks twice when they see it happening. I loved how they handled the "white actor playing a black man" thing, and when the real black guy eventually called him on it. It's interesting to see that the whitewashing is observed and looked down upon by enough people within Hollywood that it is possible to make a movie where the practice is openly mocked. Ben Stiller should get massive props for this, imo.
Though I was sort of exasperated at the negative critic/audience response to the "retard" jokes in there. It makes no sense that everyone can totally get the humor of the black jokes, but miss out on what they were shooting for with the retard ones. Yes, they were tasteless, but purposefully so - they weren't making fun of mentally handicapped people in the movie, they were making fun of non-mentally-handicapped actors who pretend to have a disability in order to win over the Academy or appear to be a SRZ actor.
From:
no subject