APRIL 15, 2016 3:57pm PT by Rebecca Sun, Graeme McMillan
Why Did 'Doctor Strange' and 'Ghost in the Shell' Whitewash Their Asian Characters?
Marvel's 'Doctor Strange'; Paramount and DreamWorks' 'Ghost in the Shell' Courtesy of Film Frame; Paramount Pictures
This week in cultural appropriation: Scarlett Johansson, Tilda Swinton and a conversation between two THR writers.
This week, Marvel dropped the first teaser trailer for Doctor Strange, based on its comic series about a critically injured neurosurgeon who travels to the Himalayas to learn mystic arts from a powerful sorcerer known as the Ancient One. Two days later, Paramount and DreamWorks released the first image from Ghost in the Shell, their live-action adaptation of the Japanese manga about an anti-cyberterror task force set in mid-21st century Japan and led by cyborg Major Motoko Kusanagi.
On paper, it reads like a great week for Asian representation in Hollywood — but the Ancient One and the Major are played, respectively, by Tilda Swinton and Scarlett Johansson. And so these two projects — long-awaited by many fans of their source material — instead join Gods of Egypt, Aloha and Pan as recent inductees to Hollywood's Whitewashing Hall of Shame.
Below, The Hollywood Reporter's Heat Vision blogger Graeme McMillan and senior reporter Rebecca Sun discuss the similar circumstances greeting the films so far.
Rebecca Sun: We braced ourselves when the castings were announced, but (just like that Nina trailer) the visual evidence still stung.
In flipping both race and gender to cast Swinton as a character who in the original comics is a Tibetan-born man, Marvel admirably went out of the box to correct one aspect of underrepresentation in its cinematic universe, but did so at the expense of another. Like its fellow Marvel franchise Iron Fist, it is steeped in cultural appropriation and centers around what Graeme previously noted as the "white man finds enlightenment in Asia" trope.
Give Hollywood partial credit for continuously trying to cleverly sidestep the Fu Manchu stereotype of characters like DC's Ra's al Ghul and Marvel's The Mandarin — but why is the solution consistently to reimagine those characters with white actors (Liam Neeson in Christopher Nolan's Batman films and Guy Pearce in Iron Man 3, respectively)? The Doctor Strange movie doesn't need its Ancient One to look like Lo Pan in Big Trouble in Little China, but there are creative ways to interpret the character without yet again erasing an Asian person from an inherently Asian narrative.
Graeme McMillan: The casting of Strange is a very frustrating thing; it's not just the Ancient One that's racebent — Baron Mordo, a white man in the comics, is played by Chiwetel Ejiofor in the movie; you see him for an instant in the teaser — but it all seems to be done with little thought about the implications of the changes. While I'm happy to see a "white role" played by a black man in the movie, Ejiofor's casting reinforces the implications of Thor, Captain America: The Winter Soldier and the Iron Man movies that every white hero gets a black sidekick in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (see also Zoe Saldana in Guardians of the Galaxy, but there, she's painted green, because space).
Switching the Ancient One to Tilda Swinton feels similarly well-intentioned, but thoughtless. On the one hand, yes, you're trying to sidestep the stereotype present in the source material, but in the most lazy way short of making the character a white man. Wouldn't a younger Asian actor have offered enough of a play on the trope — not to mention a play on the character's name — while also avoiding the utter tone-deafness of having Strange head to Tibet in order to learn about enlightenment from another white English person.
Sun: Too many stories, from Lawrence of Arabia to Avatar, relegate natives of a culture to background players and, at best, mentor, antagonist, love interest or sidekick. In Doctor Strange, Swinton fills the mentor role, Mads Mikkelsen is the villain and Rachel McAdams seems to be the damsel, leaving British actor Benedict Wong to play Dr. Strange's personal valet.
Of the four, he's the only one not glimpsed in the two-minute trailer, which mostly features Benedict Cumberbatch's Dr. Strange wandering through streets in Nepal and Hong Kong and learning magical martial arts from Swinton in a temple beautifully appointed with traditional Asian architectural features. In other words, Doctor Strange is a movie that looks very Oriental, except for the people part.
McMillan: To make matters worse — or, at least, more frustrating — there's the fact that, in the casting of Cumberbatch, Marvel managed to sidestep the possibility of offering up a nonwhite, non-male lead in one of its movies for the first time. Unlike, say, Iron Man or Captain America, there's nothing inherently gendered or racially-specific in the lead character's main concept — while it's unlikely that anyone other than a white man would be chosen to be the figurehead for the U.S. Army in WWII, or the head of a multinational arms manufacturer built up by his genius father, all that's really required of Dr. Strange is that they're a successful surgeon who suffers a terrible accident that sets them on a new path afterward. That role, literally, could have gone to anyone.
That train of thought points me toward a theory put forward by comic writer Kurt Busiek on social media recently — namely, that Dr. Strange as a character is an early example of the comic book industry whitewashing itself. The idea, as Busiek lays it out, is that artist and co-creator Steve Ditko "conceived Doc Strange as a stock 'mysterious Asian mystic' type", and later actually changed his look after writer Stan Lee wrote an origin in which he was Caucasian.
It's a weird coincidence that offers a worrying excuse to those supporting Marvel's decision to whitewash the Ancient One for the movie: It has historical precedent! Perhaps Doctor Strange, for all its positioning as a project that opens up horizons to new realities and new possibilities, has an accidental metatextual purpose of demonstrating how tied to the safer, cowardly white "norms" entertainment can be.
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Scar would look good as an Asian brunette.
Originally Posted by GeneChing
