COLORLINES: More than 12,000 people have signed a petition protesting Scarlett Johanssen’s new role in the American adaptation of the 1995 Japanese sci-fi film “Ghost in the Shell.” The petition’s signees are demanding that DreamWorks, the studio that’s producing the film, recast the role and stop whitewashing Asian characters.
4 comments:
I think this article raises a great opportunity for a pivot in the world of cinema and casting. Clearly, with the more than 12,000 people active in this movement, Hollywood really should step out of its comfort zone and give the ‘minority’ actors a shot at roles they are assumingly very qualified to play. I only use the word assumingly because fitness for a role does not solely rely on skin color - it relies on knowledge and integrity and many other aspects of work that some actors of the ‘fitting race’ do not have. Nonetheless, it is only logical to have some integrity within films and it is a very fair point that one of the most straight forward ways to do that is by maintaining race and ethnicity within the cast. From what I can tell the only reason Hollywood does not currently practice this form of integrity is dictated plainly by Julie Rodriguez, the Care2 petitioner. She says “It’s a self-defeating cycle: Hollywood insists viewers won’t be drawn unknown minority actors, but they’re never given the chance to break out of a narrow set of background roles to prove themselves.”
It’s nice to see that there does in fact exist a growing population of people who want to see a move for more minorities on the big screen. We live in 2015, where we have a half African American president in office, and the days of which, theoretically, the ideal that the “white race is the superior race” are over. There still does exist the covert racism in our society, case and point Ferguson, but each generation has been making steps to reach closer and closer to racial equality. At it’s core this is just one of those pushes our generation is making to reach a more accepting society. We are constantly bombarded with the media every day and what we see affects our psyche. By not see minorities represented in the media, people feel unrepresented and left out. By representing a minority with an actor or actress that is a completely different race presents the message that the source race was not good enough to play themselves. So I do hope the signature continue to grow, because the more people that can’t help support this push, will help to devalue the argument that “viewers won’t be drawn unknown minority actors.”
I guess I never really opened my eyes as much as I should have to see some issues of what’s been going on in down Hollywood. To see the same actors being picked even for smaller roles, I mean come on, you’ve got to give the little guys a chance from time to time. Otherwise you are almost monopolizing the industry when in reality time never stops and people keep on getting older. It’s understandable that someone would want to make the biggest bang for the buck, but there are times when it would be wisest to go with the way it was meant to be and not to go for the Hollywood A-list. From upcoming superhero movies, to the most current casting of Scarlett Johanssen’s role in a Japanese film. That seems little obscure as to why they would cast like that, but hey, I’m not the casting director.
I chose to read this article because casting is something that I usually don’t pay much attention to, but I know that the cast of a film or play can have a drastic effect on my reception of it and the production as a whole. This issue brings me to question what the movie studio is after: is it the recognition of a bigger-name actress that they are looking for, or is it the most dynamic portrayal of the character in question? As Kimberly mentioned in her comment, the casting depends on aspects of the actor’s work aside from ethnicity. The current trend runs the other direction but still, change has to start somewhere, and what better opportunity for minority actors to step onto the screen than this adaptation? The petition sums this up well, by saying “Dreamworks could be using this film to provide opportunities for Asian-American actors in a market with few opportunities for them to shine”.
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