White washing: business savvy, smart storytelling or just plain prejudice?

Quick—answer this question in 30 seconds: name 5 actors of non-white ethnic descent that have starred in leading or supporting roles that require more than 20 lines of dialogue? If you’re having difficulty, don’t feel bad. It’s not you. It’s Hollywood.

According to UCLA’s Hollywood Diversity Report, minorities claimed only 12.9% of lead roles in 2014 in English cinema despite making up 40% of the US population. Systemic exclusion of minority actors is not a secret. It’s a result of a dominant thought process for many studio executives:

In order for a film to bankable, its actors must be white.

In the last few months, general media has put this this assumption under fire and accused films of being whitewashed—a phenomena in which white actors play the role of non-white characters and/or a story is transformed or shifted to greater appeal to the white experience. The most timely examples include Scarlett Johansson’s casting as “The Major,” a Eurasian cyborg, in the film adaptation of the Japanese anime “Ghost in the Shell,” and Tilda Swinton as “The Ancient One,” a mystical, Tibetan sorcerer in Marvel’s “Doctor Strange.”

So, what’s behind this behind this phenomenon? 11&more weighs up the factors.

Blame Hollywood or our culture?

Neha (Asian, arts enthusiast, grew up watching way too many movies with white leads): In response to the public vitriol to Johansson’s casting, Max Landis (screenwriter of “Chronicle” and “Victor Frankenstein”) released a YouTube response explaining the reasons behind her casting. It essentially amounts to one point: There are only 5 movie female stars (all white) that audiences will go and see and thus get a movie distributed and green-lit. In other words, there are no Asian female stars at an international level that a studio would be comfortable with.

Blame the culture not the film industry since the industry is operating on fear.

Joy (white; graduate student; sci fi and fantasy nerd): I like Landis (met him at Comic Con) and enjoy his rants, though I often disagree with him. In this, I actually thought his point about culture was fundamentally right, although I’d put a little more blame on the industry than he does.

So much of the discussion seems to start and end with getting faces in movies and not looking more granularly at the incentive structure of the industry, and how it interacts, specifically, with the constraints of dominant culture. It might be an okay place to start the discussion, but limiting our condemnation to movie execs seems a bit myopic.

Neha: One of the issues that I have with Landis’s argument is that he blames Hollywood’s culture but doesn’t put blame on any of the figures that contribute to it—studios execs, actors, and the film industry in general. Rather, the implicit group that he’s putting blame on is the audience who supposedly doesn’t want to see films with minority leads or supporting characters. And that is fundamentally wrong. UCLA’s Hollywood Diversity Report has shown that relatively diverse casts have generated above average revenue in the box office as well as higher TV ratings.

It seems that the film industry is operating on a fear that doesn’t exist: audience will go see diversely casted films. I would go as far and say that white washed films have failed in part because they were white washed.

The most immediate example that comes to mind is “Aloha” that casted Emma Stone as a half Hawaiian, half Asian character and “Gods of Egypt” that casted an entirely white cast for a story that took place in Ancient Egypt. Both were ridiculed because of their inauthentic casting, and while there were absolutely other factors that came into play, the casting undermined the film’s profitability.

If we can’t even give roles that have minority characters to minority actors, how can we expect Hollywood to cast diversely in roles that are essentially color-blind?

Casting should be based on story, not cultural politics

Jia Jia (Asian; innovation consultant; loves sci-fi and fantasy): I LOVE Ghost in the Shell. And I got to say, the casting of Johansson is disappointing, though not because Johansson is white. Major Kusanagi is so iconic and exemplifies the unique nature of anime —somewhere outside the exact racial classifications that dominate our physical reality—that it makes no sense to “taint” it with the baggage that a known star brings to it.

The issue here is less about skin color and more about authenticity to the material. There are times when the racial and cultural origins of a character are defining traits, and it really matters if that person’s white or not, like Pocahontas. But more often than not, the skin color of the character isn’t the main thing—it’s the personality.

That is where simplifying the argument down to race alone is, in its own way, as racist as a casting a white actor for a supposedly “ethnic” role.

In the case of “Ghost in the Shell”, the appearance of “The Major” is Eurasian in my mind—conforming to classic anime types. But I’m really not that fussed. What matters about the Major is her pragmatic, tough and enigmatic persona; she exists in a global dystopia where differences of nationality, race, and gender are much less important that contrasting allegiances to corporations and global institutions.

To live and breathe in this world, I need to see an unknown who IS the character—not Scarlett Johansson, the star, acting the part. For that matter, Lucy Liu would be equally distracting.

My main issue is that the actor cast is not an unknown. That said, I do think that it would be easier on my eye to have this character be of more “ambiguous” ethnicity, simply because that’s how the original anime looks.

Story-based or no, non-white actors simply aren’t valued as much

Neha: Whitewashing—in my eyes—becomes systemic when Hollywood fails to recognize, celebrate, and reward its minority actors for their work. Landis claims that there isn’t an Asian Scarlett Johansson counterpart to cast; this is in part because Hollywood very rarely identifies minority actors as the top of their field and gives them the platform to truly become superstars. The industry’s boycott of the Oscars—#OscarsSoWhite—because of a lack of minority nominations underlines this issue. Only 1% of actresses and 9% of actors to win an Oscar have been people of color, and that’s quite frankly pathetic.

It’s not good enough to just say, “Well, they should act better or pick better roles.” Unless you are Denzel Washington or Will Smith,

there just seems to be a dearth of good roles that minority actors can audition and be in reasonable contention for.

Regina Hall is a good example of an actress who suffers from this predicament. A Washington Post article released last year profiles Hall and calls her the best actress you’ve never heard about; directors compare her to Meryl Streep and Lucille Ball, but she’s only what the article calls “Black-famous,” failing to crossover due to a lack of mainstream roles.

Charly (playwright and performer): I do know Regina Hall. I’ve seen many movies with her in them and honestly, I think it has to do with the fact that I am Black and go to see movies that are sometimes portrayed as “Black movies.” Just the other day, my ex-boyfriend (who is not Black) and I were chatting about this. He mentioned that when we were together he saw, and enjoyed, a number of movies (and actors) that he probably would not have watched otherwise. When I asked him why, he mentioned that he just didn’t know about them. Like I said, I do know Regina Hall. She’s great and is not utilized as much or as well in both “Black movies” and “mainstream movies” and consequently, I am not surprised that some may have never heard of her.

Alienated by the industry; aliens on-screen

Neha: It seems that even minority actors that are recognizable names—think Idris Elba, Lupita Nyong’o, and Zoe Saldana—seems to have difficulty booking or being considered for the same buzzy roles as their white counterpoints. When Elba was rumored as the new Bond, James Horowitz—the new James Bond writer—dismissed Elba as “too street” and “too rough” based on no real particular reason. Sadly, I wouldn’t be surprised if that thought has crossed the mind of executives in charge.

A recent article by entertainment news outlet “Vulture” underlines an interesting trend: minority actors tend to be placed in voice-over roles, roles that require motion capture technology, or roles where the are so made-up that they are unrecognizable. There seems to be some truth to this: out of the 6 films Elba stars in 2016, 4 are voice or makeup heavy. For Nyong’o, out of the 4 movies she’s been booked after her Oscar, she portrays a human in only 1.

Jia Jia: Minority actors have very little opportunity no matter what they do. I’m not sure that they have a much better shot at getting meatier roles in non-live action roles since their white counterparts are also competing for the same roles. If we were to tally up actors on-screen and in voice-over/makeup-heavy roles to see how the white/non-white ratio stacks up, I think the tally would still be overwhelmingly white.

It’s also worth putting out there that minority actors may in fact self-select or gravitate to roles in sci-fi or voice-over roles because they offer a space to broaden identities for minorities through the idea of aliens or other fantastic, out-of-this-world characters.

Zoe Saldana reasons for picking sci-fi films essentially boils to down to one thing: race or gender don’t seem to matter in sci-fi: “I can sit down with so many filmmakers for so many projects and play so many actors’ girlfriends or wives. But in sci-fi, I can play Gamora.”

Progress isn’t a zero sum game

Neha: One of the things that strikes me about Saldana’s predicament, though, is that she should be an A-list actress with her choice of interesting roles beyond the niche genre of sci-fi. She’s starred in enough box-office hits but has failed to star in a “human,” meaty role like those that have gone to relative unknowns to the public such as Rosamund Pike (Amy in “Gone Girl”) or Alicia Vikander (Ava in “Ex Machina”).

It’s frustrating that I have yet to see an Oscar recipient like Lupita Nyong’o as herself on screen despite her win. Moreover, it’s frustrating that minority actors have to look through different artistic mediums to find roles worthy of their time. Nyong’o mentions that her choice to star in the Broadway drama “Eclipsed” stemmed from the fact that it was an “opportunity to share in the incredible (and too rare) freedom of playing a fully rendered African woman.”

The unsaid accusation is that there aren’t any equivalent roles in film right now for her. That should be shameful for the industry.

Jia Jia: Moreover, in general, Hollywood is quick to re-write minority roles to make them white and never the other way around. I suspect that executives hearken back to an ancient and over-simplified marketing framework of “white stars sell.” Living in NYC, the monochrome of Hollywood actually jars with my daily experience of seeing people of many races around me. If ever Hollywood needed proof that stars white AND non-white can sell, just look at the music industry. Back in the early 80s, MTV wouldn’t play black artists because they didn’t sell…well the likes of Prince and Michael Jackson proved them to be very very wrong.

I think that people fundamentally crave good narratives, and good narratives can handle a wide roster of human characters.

Neha: Despite my misgivings about whitewashing in the industry, I will say this: there’s no doubt that its an industry problem, but progress admittedly cannot come overnight, and studios like Disney should be applauded for their diverse casting. It’s not often that a studio is willing to cast a Black man, a Hispanic man, and a female (all minorities in the industry) as leads of a major film like they did in “Star Wars.” And while that property will always be greater than its stars, it was still a risk that people inside and out of the industry maybe take for granted. Marvel (another Disney subsidiary) has also broke ground through it’s 2018 film “Black Panther,” casting a mostly Black cast.

Perhaps other studios will view Disney’s diverse casting as a practice to follow after seeing the studio’s amazing success at the box office. Perhaps that’s the first step.

Tags:  diversity fantasy Hollywood identity inequality multicultural politics race sci-fi whitewashing