In 2014 it was announced Scarlett Johansson would star as protagonist Motoko Kusanagi in the upcoming film “Ghost in the Shell.” The decision surprised and angered many people as Johansson – most famous for portraying the Black Widow in Marvel’s “Avengers” movie series – is obviously not Japanese. The casting choice is offensive, but the real problem extends beyond this specific decision. I doubt the controversy will be enough to stop the movie from becoming a box office success when it is released in late March. The trailers released so far have been met with overwhelmingly positive responses. The problem is this: people are willing to overlook the blatant whitewashing and culture erasure.
Whitewashing is an incredibly complicated and broad issue in the film industry. Other examples include Rooney Mara playing an indigenous native girl in 2015’s “Pan” and Angelina Jolie portraying Mariane Pearl, an Afro-Cuban woman, in “A Mighty Heart.” The purpose of this article is not to claim one race is more or less disenfranchised via media representation than another, but to criticize Hollywood’s failure to cast East Asians in its movies.
Obviously the days when Mickey Rooney could tape his eyelids back and play a pidgin-speaking, bucktoothed Japanese man as he did in “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” are gone, but I have seen several white actors take on roles that should have gone to an Asian one with little to no backlash outside of communities of Asian actors and audiences. Emma Stone portrayed quarter-Chinese and quarter-Pacific Islander Allison Ng in Cameron Crowe’s 2015 box office bomb, “Aloha.” In the adaptation of Rick Yancey’s young adult series “The 5th Wave,” Ringer is played by a white actress despite Yancey’s claims that he told the producers in charge of casting she was Asian multiple times. Tilda Swinton was cast as the “Ancient One” in Marvel’s 2016 hit, “Doctor Strange.” In the comics, Swinton’s character was a Mongolian man and, despite the whitewashing, “Dr. Strange” was one of the biggest successes of 2016.
The problems do not stop with poor casting choices. George Lucas admitted that many of the inspirations for Star Wars were steeped in Asian influence yet “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story” was the first movie to feature any Asian characters. Movies that take place in an Asian location unfailingly focus on the improbable white person in its midst like “Lucy,” also starring Johannsson in 2014, and last year’s “The Great Wall.” “Doctor Strange” and Marvel’s upcoming Netflix series “Iron Fist” both rely heavily on East Asian mysticism for their stories, yet star white men. Every time a U.S. adaptation of an anime rolls around, it unfailingly casts white people in starring roles, most of the time refusing to even hold auditions for Asian actors—“Speed Racer,” “Dragon Ball Z,” “Death Note” and now “Ghost in the Shell.”
It seems people want stories about Asia or the Asian experience or aesthetic – just not ones about Asians. This is bad news for a market where opportunities for actors are already depressingly sparse. It sounds like a ridiculous question, but I have to ask: When will Asians get the right to play Asians?