Ghost In The Shell And The Awkward Whitewashing Aspect

[Alex]

So they've released the first picture of Scarlett Johansson from Ghost In The Shell

And with it came people talking about the whitewashing aspect. I saw a lot of people complaining about casting Scarlett Johansson instead of an Asian actress (people mentioned Mako from Pacific Rim)

Max Landis made a video in regards to this

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Basically he says how it's not so much a race issue it's a money issue. Scarlett Johansson is a bankable female actress and the producers want a large return on their money that they feel they wouldn't get if they cast an Asian actress in the lead role.

He did follow it up with saying that under representation is real though

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And here's the awkward crux of the whole thing. It would be great to have more representation in movies but Hollywood is scared they won't make their money back, so they go for people who are bankable which unfortunately are predominately white.

I still believe the audience as a whole are extremely fickle. I mean a recent example is Batman vs Superman. It's made a tonne of money despite being seen as shit whereas Dredd was done as close to the source material and it barely made it's budget back.

 

[Y 2 Jake]

If I'm making a big budget American film I'm casting a bankable American star. If I'm making a big budget Japanese film I'm casting a bankable Japanese star.

 

[Uncle Sam]

The argument is circular.

We're not sure minority actors are bankable.

Why not put them in more films then?

Because we're not sure minority actors are bankable.

Why not put them in more films then?

Because we're not sure minority actors are bankable.

The main glimmer of hope is modern franchises, particularly Marvel, becoming so sprawling that they feel comfortable taking a risk. It will have taken over a decade for someone who isn't a white male to be the lead of a Marvel film but we'll be getting both Black Panther and Captain Marvel in the next few years. With the comics roster putting minority characters, such as the excellent Miles Morales (Spider-Man) and Kamala Khan (Ms. Marvel), front and center, we'll likely eventually see them in films and television as well.

The state of things at the moment is bad but I can at least see change on the horizon.

As for Ghost in the Shell in particular, it's certainly insulting - and I just as certainly don't need Max Landis to explain it to me - but I've no inferiority complex when it comes to my love of animated films, so another one on the pile of shitty Hollywood adaptations doesn't mean much to me personally.

 

[Dowdsy McDowds]

While the animation in the Ghost in the Shell franchise certainly has that Japanese quality, none of the main characters except for maybe the Chief looked distinctly Asian.

I can understand the whitewashing argument for films like Exodus and Gods of Egypt but not for a film whose source material characters have a pretty Western caucasian design initially:

 

[Harthan]

It seems like a bit of an odd battle to fight considering that her body is 100% synthetic (at least in the anime I've seen, perhaps it's different in other iterations of the property), so who says it can't look like anything at all? If the argument is that she would somehow be conspicuous in an American body instead of a Japanese one, her character model in the anime also has purple hair and is very attractive, so that's already out. There's any number of plausible arguments for the Japanese girl Kusanagi was to be given an American body and in fact it's even an interesting highlight of the disconnect between the mind ("ghost") and the body ("shell") that's at the center of the anime.

People have just really chosen the wrong fight here, considering this casting is entirely consistent with the nature of the original property.

 

[Jack-Hammer]

I don't know what the budget for this thing is or how much Scarlet Johansson is being paid for it. When it comes to certain film projects, as has been mentioned already, I can see the problem with whitewashing if the film is set in a geographic region in which Caucasian doesn't represent the racial majority.

Having a bankable star like Johansson in the lead role may be the best chance for the studios to turn a profit, especially considering that this is based on a manga that came out over a quarter century ago and that a ton of Americans, me included, aren't at all familiar with. It may not be entirely politically correct to cast a white woman in the role of an Asian character, but political correctness is going to take a backseat when these studios spend vast millions to produce such a film in the first place and I can't say I blame them. Not everything is about making some sort of racial or cultural statement; sometimes, a movie is just a movie and everybody involved in making it wants to see it make money.