Hollywood Whitewashing: Top Ten Racebenders

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10. Jim Sturgess & James D’Arcy – Cloud Atlas (2012)

In the 2012 epic, Cloud Atlas, critics and the audience were pretty much torn on the yellowfacing portion of the film. Depending on your school of thought the casting of non-Asian actors for the roles played by James D’Arcy and Jim Sturgess in 2144 Seoul (Korea) is either the ultimate example of whitewashing or in fact the abomination of the theory itself.

The directors would hope that by this point in the movie you are aware that despite the striking effect of the make-up/effects the overall message is that across time all our souls remain the same despite race, class or nationality. If we find ourselves worrying about actors appearing more Asian then we have simply missed the underlying point of Cloud Atlas, as that is the antithesis of the idea.

However, unless you are smoking up and getting all spiritual there is a heavy chance you are just gonna look at the two Brits and wonder why they couldn’t cast one of the many great Korean actors out there. Instead they opted for amplifying the easiest caricature of the Asian people and just changed the eyes of the British actors to seem more Asian.

I suppose I’m as bad as the rest of the world as with the ubiquity of whiteness in film, literature and wherever, without special mention of the character’s race I will automatically assume that they are white.  However, I’m not out there making the movies and deciding that whitewashing is the right way to go – and as long as the main market for films is white then Hollywood will continue to perpetuate the idea that white is the norm and that the hero should be white so that people can identify with them.

This little article isn’t going to reshape the wheel but hopefully one day very soon, America will wake up and realise that the world isn’t how it was 50 years ago. Yes, white people may still be the biggest mass market for the purchasing/watching of movies but the world is smaller now and we are part of a much more multi-cultural place. We need to export ideas and equality as much as we export our terrible romantic comedies across the seas.

The best example of a recent time when a director has had the balls not to whitewash is when Tarantino cast Sonny Chiba as Hanzo and Gordon Liu as Pai Mei in Kill Bill. Just imagine if he’d have cast Bill Pullman as a yellowfaced sushi salesman meets killer sword maker or Gary Oldman as the cycloptic martial arts master of the 5 finger death punch…ok the Gary Oldman one would’ve been sick but you know what I mean, it’s either Halloween or it’s not Halloween so stop dressing people up for no fucking reason.

[yframe url=’www.youtube.com/watch?v=21mzWdfHnwg’]

So go home or out or to work and speak of this, let’s all collectively help Hollywood and just not watch whitewashed shit when it hits our cinemas. Deal? Safe.

☛ More Casual Racism:

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