Originally published at: Watch a supercut of sci-fi movies that use Asian bodies without casting Asian characters | Boing Boing
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Predominantly white directors and producers trying to appeal to predominantly white audiences will cast predominantly white actors. It’s inherently racist, but the issue seems to be profitability. As long as predominantly white cast movies make lots of money, they’ll continue to be made. The social outcry would have to affect sales to be heard.
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For all that American studios want to appeal to an “international” (really Asian, really Chinese) market to make big profits, they’re missing out by continuing to limit themselves to token gestures like those described here. It’s particularly stupid and lazy since American audiences wouldn’t reject someone like John Cho in a romantic or action lead role.
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Anyone here watch the recent Korean sci-if movie Space Sweepers? It had a silly plot and wasn’t the best sci-fi movie ever but it was still fun and had an amazingly diverse cast, probably more diverse than any other sci-fi film I’ve ever seen. There were actors from many different nationalities and most everyone just spoke their native languages because it’s the future and everyone has electronic translators. There was even a trans Android and the fact that she was trans was treated like it was no big deal because it totally wasn’t.
I can definitely recommend it if you’re in the mood to watch a sci-fi move with a diverse cast. Korean cinema has really been getting interesting lately.
(Available on Netflix.)
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Well, the hologram of Joi was played by Ana de Armas who is of Cuban-Spanish, but I could be splitting hairs on the subject.
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Three of the top 5 box office markets by revenue are Asian countries. If anything Hollywood would probably make more money if they added more Asian characters to their big-budget films.
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Surprised that India wasn’t among the top 5.
They have a lot of moviegoers, but most of them don’t pay $16 for a movie ticket.
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I’m not sure what Blade Runner was doing - it seems like the intent was to depict a multicultural future LA that was heavily undercut by the almost entirely white main cast - but so many subsequent movies have so clearly aped its aesthetics in the most superficial way, without giving it any thought at all, without doing their own world-building. At most they adopted a “future=Asian” idea that existed only as an abstract aesthetic; by having white casts, it implies contemporary protagonists out of place in an alien Asian (or perhaps even an occupied) setting. (I don’t think that was their intent mostly, either. At least not on a conscious level.) “Ghost in the Shell” is an outlier, taking that lack of thought to an absurd extreme, given that they explicitly kept a Japanese setting…
Hollywood could make more money in the US with Asian casts. I mean, “Crazy Rich Asians” made $175 million in the North American box office without any white stars bringing in the audience. (It apparently was a flop in China.)
Hollywood’s racist notions about films don’t hold up in the real world - their argument is based on the idea that certain types of movies don’t do well (the flaw being that they hadn’t actually ever made those kinds of movies to begin with).
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The Asian presence in the original 1982 Bladerunner was quite a different thing than the presence today. Back then, it was a jarring, unsettling intrusion into a white normality, very scifi. So much so it became a cyberpunk meme, just like the rain. Nowadays though, yeah, its more the other way around, its the Caucasian cast “icing” on top of an Asian cake, and its ugly and stupid, in Ghost as much as Kill Bill
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One of the the central themes of Ghost in the Shell is Mokoto’s struggle as a Japanese woman in a cybernetic body that does not match her internal identity. Not so sure that the 2017 adaptation portrayed that aspect any differently than the source material.
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I’ve always taken it to be that Asian influence has expanded, taking over the popular culture of the area, even where Asians aren’t the dominant demographic. Basically, Japanese/Chinese/Korean/etc. companies own almost everything, even in the primarily white areas of the USA, and as such have replaced white people in most of the advertising. So, while the movie is set in the USA, which would mean using typical USA racial demographics for the casting, everything they see, own, and buy are dominated by the Asian corporations who put all the advertising in their image.
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In some of the source material, it even says Motoko specifically wanted to look as generic as possible so people didn’t necessarily realize her body was a combat model, and got the current body while doing work in Europe - hence the European features.
Context matters. Hollywood does not have a long and ugly history of under-representation of robots in film.
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This isn’t sci-fi, but for me the most annoying example is when the film “Lords of Dogtown,” based on real events, erased an Asian-American, Jeff Ho, from the story in place of a blonde white character played by Heath Ledger.
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I don’t think any of these movies were set in Idaho
I get it… whitewashing sucks. But this video misses the point a little bit. First and foremost, most of these moves are clearly set in the US, and the Asian influence in them is is a corporate influence. This is a common cyberpunk trope. If you want the best tech, you buy from Asia. Because many of these tropes were created in the 80’s when Japanese investment in America was at it’s peak, Japanese imagery is heavily used. The Fruity Oaty Bar commercial from Serenity is associated with the Chinese Blue Sun Corporation, a rich and well connected corp according to cannon. This covers most of the examples in the supercut. Minority Report is also not a good example. The reason Asian imagery appears following Tom Cruise’s character is because he had a black market eye replacement to avoid capture and the “doctor” (who had a history with Cruise’s character") used an Asian man’s eyes as replacements to screw with Cruise. At no point was Cruise’s character portrayed as Asian.
Yes, the live-action GITS was a solid example of whitewashing. I would have loved to see an Asian cast GITS with an American (or maybe Russian) Togusa but that’s not what we got - and I agree that taking a beloved character and messing with their identity isn’t culturally appropriate. But let’s all make sure we’re comparing apples to apples. I would think movies like The Last Samurai would be more culturally offensive than Blade Runner. Technically, Cruise is also guilty of whitewashing in Live Die Repeat, since his character is Asian in the book.
This seems to have been a trope in the culture at the time. It’s so baked into the cyberpunk genre that it was almost already a cliché from the start. Blade Runner in ‘82 and Neuromancer in ‘84 both leaned so heavily on “the future is Asian” that they couldn’t have both invented that trope independently.
I’ve read that it may have come from the “red sun rising” fears that abounded in America in the late 1970s and 1980s. We grew up watching movies like Gung Ho that were all about how the mighty Japanese industrial base was going to take over the world. Much like fears white people have now about China with all the modern “red dragon awakens” doomsayers. I certainly remember this trope being everywhere in the culture (even Back To The Future has a nod to it) at the time.
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Yup. Or ZikZak’s influence on Network 23 (they’re the ones who demanded 23 deploy Blipverts). And I would suggest that the idea of the best tech being “alien” is so crucial that if it weren’t Asia, it would have come from India, or Germany, or even actual aliens (or even magic - like Warhammer).
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You started out so good there…
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