Monday, June 14, 2010

More fail, or Jayne needed to adress this ages ago

So me and Darcy agreed that the blog should probably be called The Laziest Girls You know, because Dancing Shadow is the only one among us who remembers to update occasionally.

This is more of a linkspam and not a full fledged post because other people have already talked about this more in depth and with much more nuance and insightful criticism than I could manage (since my reaction to this is to go into a rage blackout and pull out the uncontrollable strangly hands), but check out Racebending on the whitewashing of Avatar: The Last Airbender. (One of my favorite parts--in which "favorite" means "rage inducing"--is that Jason Rathebone, the actor portraying Sokka, says that to prepare for the role he just needs to get a "tan." Because, you know, the Inuit are just white people with a dark tan!)

I've talked a little about whitewashing here before, mainly in regards to the graphic novel adaption of Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere, in which the Black Friars, who in the book and the miniseries were black, magically became white.

Whitewashing is not just limited to Hollywood (although they are some of the worst offenders), but is popping up everywhere: books, comics, tv, pretty much in all of popular culture. This isn't, sadly, a new phenomenon, but at this point in time it's infuriating that Hollywood is convinced no one will see a movie without a white hero, because we all know us white poeple can't connect with a character unless they have the same skin color as us!

In the same vein, check out this for a time line of RaceFail '09.

For those of you who weren't around, this was the lj implosion involving science-fiction/fantasy book community and diversity that started up in January '09. While the initial conversation sort of...exploded, what came out of it, for the most part, was a lot of really needed discussion and criticism and analysis.

While maybe the initial controversy that kick started this discussion is past, the conversation is in no way dropped, nor should it be. If anything, the casting of The Last Airbender showed us that this activism regarding diversity and representations of people and characters of color and the whitewashing thereof is absolutely vital for our culture.

ETA: So I am made of fail. In the comments I said the Water Tribe was influenced by the Inuit and referenced "the indigenious population of Greenland." Darcy pointed out how that was confusing and I apologized for the inaccurarcies. To clarify, Greenland's population consits of nearly 90% of Inuit heritage. Therefore I was inaccurate in both my original comment and then the failed and also inaccuarate apology.

10 comments:

Danicus said...

yeah, my friend Chris (who has hosted my link to your site before) has a long essay up on ComicsAlliance about exactly this sort of thing cropping up at DC comics. It feels..... incidental with them trying to go back to the 60s.... but.... aww, hell, ill just link to his brilliant essay.

http://www.comicsalliance.com/2010/05/06/the-racial-politics-of-regressive-storytelling/

Darcy said...

I personally feel that the whole thing is being blown entirely out of proportion. The only nations that I feel should be represented in the Avatar movie or show are Fire, Air, Earth and Water. Yes, they each have clear cultural origins and influences in each nation. But the show does not take place in a reality where any of those cultures actually exist. If the filmmakers do a good a job of showing the cultural diversity of each nation of the Avatar world regardless of the skin color of the nations inhabitants then I will say well done to the cast and crew. The Fire nation isn't making war on the rest of the world because of the color of the people in the other nations. The only distinguishing features that concern me are Zuko's scar, Aang's arrows, Sokka's ponytail and Katara's hair loopies. (sadly, those were lost, not because the actress playing Katara is white, but because hair can't actually do that.) IT DOESNT FECKING MATTER how brown or not brown the characters are. The decisions they make are in no way influenced by it, the way they interact with each other is in no way influenced by it. People in that world are judged by what element they command, not their natural SPF. As a biracial person, whos cultural origins are not immediately apparent at a glance, I am SO UNBELIEVABLY SICK of this topic it cannot be textually rendered. I, and a great number of the fans of this series, love the show for the characters and the world that they live in. As long as those things are translated to the screen I couldn't give a flying bison fart if they cast Aang as a purple people eater, so long as that creature could bring Aang's character to life and make me give a damn about his story.
But that may be just my opinion.

Jayne said...

Danicus, I totally read that essay and it is brilliant. I think I was originally going to post about it but then I got lazy (as seen by me not doing anything here in forever). Basically anything I have to say about comics and diversity is just me going, "No, go read this post by Chris. Do it now."

Darcy, Oh man, Darcy. We are never going to agree on this subject ever.

The nations are exretmely infulected by Asian and indegnious cultures in the show, and the characters themselves are given characteristics that match those cultures (like Sokka and Katara having the structure and skin tone to match the Inuit). Too ignore those character designs and say, hey, let's make Sokka and the other heroes white, is deeply problematic.

"If the filmmakers do a good a job of showing the cultural diversity of each nation of the Avatar world regardless of the skin color of the nations inhabitants then I will say well done to the cast and crew."

The problem with this is that this is basically the definition of cultural appropraition. By just giving these cultural trappings to a group of white people without connecting it to the actual people of the culture is, well, it's pretty much showing off their privelege.

And one of the main things that Racebending.com brings up is that you do see people of color in the movie, but as extras in the background and not as the heroes. It reinforces the idea that only white poeple are heroes and everyone else is backdrop. The other problem is that the actual actors of color cast in the movie (Dev Patel and the actor whose name I can't remember playing Zuko's father) are playing the villains, once more reinforcing the fucked up view that white people are the heroes and the peopel of color are the villians or, more recently as seen in Avatar, the populcae that needs to be saved by the white guy. It's the same problem Firefly/Serenity had: Chinese culture and language had been integrated into that universe but you saw no Chinese people or, for that matter, any people of Asian descent. Again, it's problematic.

The casting of this movie is also deeply frustrating because it takes a show that was deeply diverse and offers oppurtunites for non-white actors and gives it the white people. Same thing for Prince of Persia, where Jake Gyllenhall plays the prince of PERSIA.

Last Airbender is not an isolated incident, but part of a larger systematic andd institutionalized problem that still sees white as the defualt.

" IT DOESNT FECKING MATTER how brown or not brown the characters are. The decisions they make are in no way influenced by it, the way they interact with each other is in no way influenced by it."

From a character point, yes, it doesn't matter they are characters of color, because the entire show is full of well-roudned, amazingly written and protrayed characters. But in casting for the real world, it does matter that Ang is white. It matters because it's just one more example of our culture saying that anyone who isn't white doesn't matter and we can whitewash history until white becomes the default.

(So this was way longer than I meant it to be. Also, Darcy, you know I love you and you should totally argue with me some more if you take the fancy.)

Darcy said...

"The nations are exretmely infulected by Asian and indegnious cultures in the show, and the characters themselves are given characteristics that match those cultures (like Sokka and Katara having the structure and skin tone to match the Inuit)."

I'm sorry, Jayne my dear, but I have a very hard time believing that you could seriously look at the animated characters of Sokka or Katara, minus their clothes and cultural trappings, and think they have the structure of the Inuit people. They are brown, yes, but if you'd go back and look at the earlier episodes where they show the Water tribe, even in the small Southern tribe of women and children there is quite a varience in shades of brown amongst the people. Sokka and Katara seem to stand out all the more because they are the "darkest" of thier tribe. This example is even more apparent in the Earth Kingdom, where the people vary, not only in skin tone, but in facial structure all over the Asian continent. The main cast of the show seem to have more of a mixed up multi-cultural quality that most of the world that they live in.
The characters in the show were designed, like the creatures in the world, to be an amalgam of several cultures at once. The characters are meant to appeal to, and be relatable to children and families of all backgrounds. M. Night Shamallama-whatever, who is a professed fan of the show even talked about the way his own family sees the main cast in an article on iO9.com, in which he did his best to defend the casting choices.

"Here's the thing. The great thing about anime is that it's ambiguous. The features of the characters are an intentional mix of all features. It's intended to be ambiguous. That is completely its point. So when we watch Katara, my oldest daughter is literally a photo double of Katara in the cartoon. So that means that Katara is Indian, correct? No that's just in our house. And her friends who watch it, they see themselves in it. And that's what's so beautiful about anime." (And yeah, I want to kinda remind M. Night that Airbender is not anime, but whatevs.)
"When we were casting, I was like, "I don't care who walks through my door, whoever is best for the part. I'm going to figure it out like a chessgame." Ideally we separate the nations ethnically — ideally. I didn't know how or what it was going to be. And it was so fluid. For example if you found a great brother, [but] he didn't go with my favorite Katara, then we couldn't use him. Theoretical things like that. There was an Ang that we really loved, but he was like 5'10." There's all kinds of issues that come to the table physically. And I had a board of all the people that I was considering, the seven or eight. There was, at one time, a Chinese Sokka and Katara, and they were over here. One of them was a better actor than the other, and so I was gathering my pros and cons.

I was without an agenda, and just letting it come to the table. Noah is a photo double from the cartoon. He is spot on. I didn't know their backgrounds, and to me Noah had a slightly mixed quality to him. So I cast the Airbenders as all mixed-race. So when you see the monks, they are all mixed. And it kind of goes with the nomadic culture and the idea that over the years, all nationalities came together." He goes on about building the world in the article, about trying to make the world make sense culturally first, casting for talent first and ethnicity second.
(I have to split this into two, dammit)

Darcy said...

Addressing another of your points:
"...you do see people of color in the movie, but as extras in the background and not as the heroes. It reinforces the idea that only white poeple are heroes and everyone else is backdrop. The other problem is that the actual actors of color cast in the movie (Dev Patel and the actor whose name I can't remember playing Zuko's father) are playing the villains, once more reinforcing the fucked up view that white people are the heroes and the peopel of color are the villians or, more recently as seen in Avatar, the populcae that needs to be saved by the white guy."
I'm sorry, but again, looking at the characters as they appear in the show, Aang himself doesn't look Asian to me. The actor, Noah Ringer, LOOKS JUST LIKE AANG. The director, as quoted above, felt that Noah suited the part because he looked like Aang, and he had the talent to pull off what the part demanded of him. Aang is the Avatar, the titular character, a blending of all of the nations and, to me, he looks multicultural. Yes, the cultural trapping of the Air Nomads in the show look Tibetan in nature, but if you look at their faces, they have a range of ethnic features, as do the people of all of the nations in the show. The only thing that brings them all together as a tribe, as far as features go, are the blue arrows.

As far as casting ethnic people as villains, if you remember Zuko and Uncle Iroh are not painted as villainous in the series. Zuko's reasons for hunting the Avatar are clear, you feel for him. You don't want him to succeed, but you don't really want him to fail either. You want him to find another way. The true villains of the series are General Zhou, Princess Izula and the Fire Lord Ozai and in the show to me, they really don't have a defined cultural resemblance to any one people. The fan base seems to think they look Chinese, they'd still be casting the "villains" as Asians, just a different set of them. Would that be any better or worse?
I call upon you to show me what culturally defining characteristics any of the lead cast of the show has if you remove them from their costumes. Skin color be damned I'm talking about their faces.
The actors playing Sokka and Katara don't look pure Euro white to me either. The actress playing Katara DOES have the wide eyed beauty that her animated counterpart does. The guy playing Sokka looks like he's related to her; of the cast he looks the least like his counterpart, but I'm talking in face structure. Then again, he sounds a lot like Sokka when he talks. Whatever.
I think an open dialog about this topic is a good thing. It makes people think about the world that they live in and the way that they see the people they share it with. But the world is getting flatter by the minute and cultures are bleeding incrementally into the other so much that soon, the world might look a lot like the one in Avatar. Showing kids a world where nobody looks like their neighbor, even in a small isolated tribe, but everyone is united by the ideas of their nation, community, family etc, is what I see when I look at Avatar.
I can see what people are saying when they get mad about the casting of this movie. I'm right there with 'em on the picket line when casting gets flubbed up in movies that are meant to depict a specific culture or country. (I'm lookin' at you Memoirs of a Geisha) It's messed up when a character is supposed to be at least partially defined by their background and that gets ignored by the casting director.
But in the Last Airbender movie that just isn't the case. And I just can't bring myself to see this particular thing as a horrifying injustice. I'm going to see the movie and judge for myself.

Jayne said...

So the first time I tried to reply my post got eaten. Let's try this again.

Darcy, you start of addressing many of my points, so that's what I'm going to do here. It's like blogging ping pong! Only slightly more interesting.

You say: "I'm sorry, Jayne my dear, but I have a very hard time believing that you could seriously look at the animated characters of Sokka or Katara, minus their clothes and cultural trappings, and think they have the structure of the Inuit people."

That's why I said "influenced" (actually, what I said was "influected" because apparently that's how spelling works now). Just like the other nations are influenced by Asian Cultures, so too were the Water Tribe influenced by the Inuit and other indigenous peoples from artic climates (like, say, the indigenous people of Greenland).

The Water Tribe is not supposed to be the Inuit (which I know I kept saying, which was bad use of language on my part), but they are analogous to them.

"They are brown, yes, but if you'd go back and look at the earlier episodes where they show the Water tribe, even in the small Southern tribe of women and children there is quite a varience in shades of brown amongst the people. Sokka and Katara seem to stand out all the more because they are the "darkest" of thier tribe."

I'm not entirely certain what you're getting at here. Yes, there is a range in skin tone. This is true for any population. I don't see just because you have some characters lighter than Katara or Sokka that translates into casting them with white kids. Maybe casing someone lighter skinned than them, sure, but not white.

"This example is even more apparent in the Earth Kingdom, where the people vary, not only in skin tone, but in facial structure all over the Asian continent. The main cast of the show seem to have more of a mixed up multi-cultural quality that most of the world that they live in.
The characters in the show were designed, like the creatures in the world, to be an amalgam of several cultures at once. The characters are meant to appeal to, and be relatable to children and families of all backgrounds."

And this gets to the main thrust of my argument. The show WAS multi-cultural and it was AWESOME. It was so awesome that you appeal to kids of all backgrounds and that's one of the reasons I love it. And this is also the reason why I really hate the casting: this multi-cultural cast of characters gets replaced by white people. So you have these kids watching a show where, for once, THE HEROES LOOK LIKE THEM, only to see the movie and realize psych! Heroes are white people, sorry.

Jayne said...

I also must split mine into two---oh christ, three comments!

And now for M. Night Shyamalan's interview. Oh Jesus. Where to begin?

First quote you used:

"Here's the thing. The great thing about anime is that it's ambiguous. The features of the characters are an intentional mix of all features. It's intended to be ambiguous. That is completely its point. So when we watch Katara, my oldest daughter is literally a photo double of Katara in the cartoon. So that means that Katara is Indian, correct? No that's just in our house. And her friends who watch it, they see themselves in it. And that's what's so beautiful about anime."

You already pointed out how Airbender isn't anime, so that's one strike against Shyamalan already. The part I'm most concerned about is where he links an audience's ability to identify with a character with the character's race. He uses his daughter and her friend's as an example; just because his daughte rand her friends, all coming from different cultural backgrounds indentify with Katara that means Katara's skin tone magically changes? That's just dumb.

Let me give another example: Nico from Runaways and Jamie Reyes from Blue Beetle. They are both, respectively, Asian-American and Mexican-American. I absolutely adore them. I IDENIFTY with both of them: yeah, being a teenage superhero IS hard and high school/running across the country to escape our sueprvillian parents SUCKS. Does that mean me, a white woman from a middle class background, able to identify with them magically change their ethnicity? Of course it doesn’t. It just means both Nico and Jamie are well-wrriten, well-rounded, amazing characters. Same goes for Aang and Toph and Sokka and Katara. Just because you have a bunch of people from different cultures identifying with them in no way makes their race “ambigious.”

Second quote: "When we were casting, I was like, "I don't care who walks through my door, whoever is best for the part. I'm going to figure it out like a chessgame."

There’s an essay at racebending.com talking about colorblind casting, which I’m going to link you too because it does a much better job than me: http://www.racebending.com/v3/background/the-problem-with-colorblindness/

As for the equal opportunity casting, I’m going to let this quote from Deedee Nicketts, casting director of Last Airbender, speak to that:

“If you’re Korean, come in a kimono. If you’re from Belgium, wear lederhosen. Even if you came with a scarf today, put it over your head so you’ll look like a Ukrainian villager or whatever.”

Nothing says equal opportunity like fail and stereotypes!

Jayne said...

One of your points was where I talking about cultural appropriation and say, “Yes, the cultural trapping of the Air Nomads in the show look Tibetan in nature, but if you look at their faces, they have a range of ethnic features, as do the people of all of the nations in the show. The only thing that brings them all together as a tribe, as far as features go, are the blue arrows.”

Again, this brings me back to the wide range of characteristics and skin tones found in a population (for example, anthropologically speaking, the term Caucasoid refers to features found from West Asia through Polynesia, so that’s a wide range right there). But the problem, again, is that you have non actors of color playing these roles. You have white people appropriating those cultural aspects. Not cool.

You also say, “As far as casting ethnic people as villains, if you remember Zuko and Uncle Iroh are not painted as villainous in the series. Zuko's reasons for hunting the Avatar are clear, you feel for him. You don't want him to succeed, but you don't really want him to fail either. You want him to find another way. The true villains of the series are General Zhou, Princess Izula and the Fire Lord Ozai”

You’re right. The way I worded that was really unclear. Zuko starts out as the villain, and then through the series is, if not redeemed, not on the bad guy side. For this movie, you know that Zuko will be painted as the antagonists. Also, General Zhou and Fire Lord Ozai are both played by non-white actors. So, again, we’ve got a tradition of characters of color being the villain.

“The actors playing Sokka and Katara don't look pure Euro white to me either. The actress playing Katara DOES have the wide eyed beauty that her animated counterpart does. The guy playing Sokka looks like he's related to her”

But they are, emphatically, no longer characters of color. There is no way to look at the Katara in the movie and mistake her for looking like Shyamalan’s daughter. And as for that wide eyed beauty, try this: http://community.livejournal.com/ohpretty/6767.html. It’s a recasting of Last Airbender, and I have to say that Ayesha Kapoor looks much more like Katara than Nicola Peltz ever will. And, if nothing else, this shows there ARE actors of color out there for these parts and we don’t have to put up with this “but they were the best for the part” bullshit. (actually, look at all the racebeding recasting --http://dhobikikutti.dreamwidth.org/82368.html because-- they are deeply awesome and show that, hey, white people don’t have the market on being talented actors).

“I think an open dialog about this topic is a good thing. It makes people think about the world that they live in and the way that they see the people they share it with. But the world is getting flatter by the minute and cultures are bleeding incrementally into the other so much that soon, the world might look a lot like the one in Avatar.”

Yay open dialogue! And yes, the world will eventually look like in the animated Avatar. But you would never know that if you just used the live action movie as your basis for comparison.

“I can see what people are saying when they get mad about the casting of this movie. I'm right there with 'em on the picket line when casting gets flubbed up in movies that are meant to depict a specific culture or country. (I'm lookin' at you Memoirs of a Geisha) It's messed up when a character is supposed to be at least partially defined by their background and that gets ignored by the casting director.
But in the Last Airbender movie that just isn't the case”

I respect your opinion, and your arguments here have been insightful, especially when you pick holes in my own. But I cannot agree with you on about it. And while I hope you enjoy the Last Airbender, I won’t be paying my money to see a movie with institutionalized privilege firmly in place.

Jayne said...

So as Darcy pointed out said "indgenious people of Greenland" doesn't make any sense. I apologize for the inaccuracies and general fail of that statement.

Darcy said...

Yeah, though Ice Giants are technically humanoid, they don't really count as people do they?