Last week, Paramount Pictures released the first image of actor Scarlett Johansson as Major Mokoto Kusanagi in the live action movie adaptation of Ghost in the Shell , based on the original 1989 manga of the same name, written by Masamune Shirow.
Ghost in the Shell is a series set in the then-imagined mid-21st century following the life of the cyborg, Major Kusanagi, who investigates cyberterrorism for a fictional counter-terrorism organisation in Japan. Major Kusanagi is ethnically Japanese. While Johansson is… not.
Needless to say, fans of the series were not in a very forgiving mood.
Though the news of Johansson playing the role of Major Kusanagi was already out in 2015, the release of the promotional image has re-ignited the debate on ‘whitewashing’. That is, white people are cast in roles that are meant for people of colour.
Major Kusanagi wasn’t the only casualty. Marvel Entertainment released the trailer for Doctor Strange . One of the franchise’s lesser-known characters, Doctor Strange’s mentor, The Ancient One, is said to have born in Tibet. And the actor playing the role is — wait for it — Tilda Swinton.
Whitewashing, or for that matter, using an actor from the mainstream to replace a person of a different ethnicity or community is not new.
Comedian Mickey Rooney in ‘yellowface’ as the Japanese landlord in Breakfast at Tiffany’s or Laurence Olivier in ‘blackface’ in and as Othello — both in the 1960s — are notable as some of the very first examples of whitewashing. Maybe, just maybe, we can explain that away considering the inherent racism and cultural insensitivity of those times. But fans are outraged that this is still a thing in 2016, when awareness levels and political correctness seem to be at a peak.
This problem isn’t restricted to Hollywood. Indian cinema is a culprit too. Fans were in uproar over the casting of Priyanka Chopra as boxer MC Mary Kom, who is from the Kom tribe in Manipur. Those from the north-east are routinely discriminated against, with some considering them ‘not Indian enough’ due to their looks. The discrimination ranges from being labelled an ‘outsider’ to outright violence.
Backing that up is a 2014 Delhi-NCR Discrimination Survey 2014, prepared by Reachout Foundation, which showed that found that more than half of the 1,000 respondents who were surveyed in the region perceived discrimination as reality. A majority of the respondents were from Manipur, followed by Assam and Nagaland. Against that background, casting someone like Priyanka Chopra, who is such a racial, ethnic and diametric opposite, to portray the life of a five-time boxing champion like Mary Kom, puts things in perspective.
There have been attempts to explain this reluctance to cast minority actors in main roles. Exodus: Gods and Kings , a movie about middle-eastern Biblical characters set in the middle-east, had Christian Bale, Joel Edgerton and Sigourney Weaver in the lead roles. The film’s director, Ridley Scott, is reported to have told Variety magazine, “I can’t mount a film of this budget, where I have to rely on tax rebates in Spain, and say that my lead actor is Mohammad so-and-so from such-and-such. I’m just not going to get it financed. So the question doesn’t even come up.”
Another argument is that movie-goers (read the majority) will not want to watch someone they can’t relate to (read: minority).
Comedian Aziz Ansari tore down the argument swiftly in a scathing New York Times piece where he argued that only 16.7 per cent of lead roles in Hollywood went to people of colour in 2013, when over 40 per cent of the audience is coloured.
The problem lies as much with them as with us, Baradwaj Rangan wrote in an op-ed piece ( The Hindu , 10th February 2016): “How many films with ‘non-mainstream’ faces have we transformed into huge hits? How many of our stars, our big box office draws, represent anything other than the generally accepted ‘Indian look?’”While the debate rages on, fans of the Ghost in the Shell franchise are earnestly campaigning to get Japanese actor Rinko Kikuchi ( Pacific Rim ) cast in the lead instead of Johansson. Fans have taken to photoshopping the image of Johansson, replacing her with Kikuchi.
There is also an online petition aimed at DreamWorks Studios, asking them to re-cast the character with someone who is Japanese. Started after the news first came out in 2015, the petition has garnered more than 90,000 votes so far.
