Discuss: Is '21' Racist for Changing the Ethnicities of Its Characters?
Filed under: Drama, Celebrities and Controversy
When I saw the blackjack drama 21 at South By Southwest, I was instantly struck by its major flaws: It's full of clichés, and its supposedly brilliant main characters do a lot of stupid things. I had no idea I was missing another flaw, too -- that most of the real-life people who pulled off the scheme were Asian-American, while almost everyone in the movie is white. People commenting on my review of the film mentioned this fact, and some subsequent Internet browsing confirms that it's been a hot topic among some observers ever since the film was announced. (I confess not having paid the film any attention until the marketing campaign kicked into high gear around the first of the year.) The character played by Jim Sturgess in the movie was named Jeff Ma in real life, and he and most of his teammates were Asian. In the movie, only two minor characters are still Asian, played by Aaron Yoo and Liza Lapira.
So the question is: Is the ethnicity-swapping the result of racism? Is it something else? Does it matter?
At the blog Angry Asian Man, the author (whose name doesn't seem to be anywhere on the site) says that the characters' ethnicity played a part in their success: "[Being Asian-American] was actually advantageous to their strategy, as it happens, because Asian dudes winning big money at the casinos apparently aren't quite as conspicuous as white dudes who win big at the casinos." At Ultrabrown, Manish Vij writes, "Are you kidding me? A movie about math, MIT and gambling, and the lead was made white? Have you ever seen the pai gow tables in Vegas?"
Some people are angry about it; others are merely shaking their heads and laughing at the screwed-up Hollywood movie-making process. A post on a Rotten Tomatoes message board was quick to throw out the "R" word: "By any definition the casting process in '21' is racist."
Well, now, hang on. Most people define "racism" as believing one race is inherently better than another, or automatically disliking people of a particular race. Did the studio executives who whitewashed the 21 cast do so because they don't like Asians? Probably not. The most likely reason is simply that they figured an all-Asian film wouldn't sell as many tickets. Usually, when an American film has an all-minority cast, it's because the movie is aimed directly at that minority group. The studio guys were probably just doing their job, which was to give the film as much widespread appeal as possible. I don't think they were "racist," unless we dramatically expand the definition of that word. I also think that crying "racism" all the time diminishes the impact of when something truly is racist, i.e., when there really is malice or hatred involved.
Is it true that a version of 21 with an all-Asian cast wouldn't have made as much money as one with attractive white people? There's no way of knowing, of course. But in general, yeah, movies populated mostly by minorities tend not to be as popular. So is that the result of racism? Probably not consciously, no. I doubt most white Americans see a commercial for a film about Asians and think, "Well, I don't like Asians, so I probably won't see that."
A sociologist could tell you more about this can I could, but it seems to be human nature to gravitate toward people who look like us -- hence a movie starring Diane Keaton and Jack Nicholson (to name the two whitest actors I can think of) will be attended mostly by white people, while the audiences at a Tyler Perry film are overwhelmingly African-American. Is that bad? Is that wrong? I dunno. It just is.
That said, I do sympathize with Asian-Americans who are frustrated by the serious lack of movie roles for their fellow Asians. They hear a book about Asian card-counters is being made into a movie, and they get excited ... only to learn the movie will be almost all-white. Sigh. I've never been part of an ethnic minority, so I can't exactly relate to what it must be like to go to movies all the time and almost exclusively see people who don't look like me. (Not that Brad Pitt or George Clooney really look like me, either, but you know what I mean.) It would be nice if more Hollywood studios would take a bigger chance on films with minority casts, especially in stories -- like 21 -- where it would be appropriate to do so.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 3)
4-02-2008 @ 12:32PM
Stella said...
I don't think racism has to involve malice. Not at all. After all, most people are bred with an innate sense of racism or racial superiority. I do agree that people cry "racism" too often, but this casting process does seem pretty racist to me. Why couldn't they have just had the main character be Asian and the supporting characters be white?
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4-02-2008 @ 12:44PM
attractive white guy said...
Does your definition of racism - which absurdly doesn't stretch to thinking an entire race of people are incapable of "selling" a movie - include implying that an entire race is less "attractive" than white people?
"Is it true that a version of 21 with an all-Asian cast wouldn't have made as much money as one with attractive white people?" "Racism" may or may not include re-casting Asian characters as white but I'm pretty damned sure it includes implying all Asians are unattractive.
Way to go, genius!
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4-02-2008 @ 1:29PM
Eric D. Snider said...
Sorry, that was inelegantly phrased. I should have added a qualifier -- "generically attractive" or "mainstream-Hollywood attractive." I definitely didn't mean to suggest Asians were less attractive, believe me! (Of course, if I suggest that I have a "thing" for Asians, that probably makes me a racist, too, so I'll stop now.)
4-15-2008 @ 9:06PM
Jesse said...
I thought the leader of the MIT card counting team was Russian. At least he was on the History channel special about the team.
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4-02-2008 @ 12:50PM
John said...
The casting was done to protect Asians from that pernicious stereotype that all Asians are gamblers. So, you see, it was done with the best of intentions. Sort of like in the "Sum of All Fears", the Islamic nuclear terrorists were changed to white neo-nazis.
In Hollywood, hurt-feelings trumps realism. ;-)
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4-02-2008 @ 12:50PM
Lord Bodak said...
Jeff Ma has said in multiple interviews that he wasn't bothered by it at all. What more do you need?
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4-02-2008 @ 1:01PM
GearsofWar said...
Jeff Ma said ""My race is important to me, and I see their concerns here," Ma said. "But I'm not sure they understand how little control I had in the movie-making process; I didn't get to cast it."
But nice try with the "Jeff is fine with it, so all Asians should be fine with it" argument.
4-02-2008 @ 1:11PM
Lord Bodak said...
Jeff Ma (AICN interview): For me it wasn’t a big deal, because for about three years people had been asking me who I wanted to play me in a movie and I never was saying like “John Cho” or “Chow Yun-Fat” or “Jackie Chan…” I really wasn’t and I mean if I asked you who you would want to play you in a movie, you wouldn’t be thinking “I want the most similar person,” but you would be thinking ”Who’s cool?” or who do you think would personify your personality or who is a good actor or who is talented, so as much as I think people like to look at it at face value like that, the reality is if you ask anyone who they wanted to play you, it wouldn’t necessarily be “Who’s the most ethnically tied to me?”
4-06-2008 @ 12:43PM
Adam said...
Right, because Jeff Ma is the elected and recognized spokesperson for all Asians in America. Stop trying to assuage your white, liberal guilt for failing to see the racism in 21's casting.
4-06-2008 @ 12:46PM
Lord Bodak said...
He's not the "elected spokesperson" for Asians, but he IS the main character who was cast with a white actor. If it doesn't bother the person being portrayed, then any controversy is projection from people who look for an excuse to cry "racism" whenever they see something they don't like.
4-02-2008 @ 1:04PM
PST said...
I'm also not sure that racism has to imply malice (or even self-consciousness).
I've long seen the complaint that Asians are given short shrift in American films, and it's fairly hard to contest it; what Asian women there are tend to be involved with one of the white men and what Asian men there are tend to be kung fu masters, 2-D triads, or doormats. All white, American remakes of Asian films outnumber remakes of pretty much any other type of film by a huge amount. It does not seem like there's much room for Asian Americans in American cinema.
I've also noticed that, among people I know, Asian cinema is probably the most unexplored of prominent world cinemas. The number of otherwise cinema literate people I know who haven't seen even part of a film by Mizoguchi, Ozu, Oshima, Wong Kar-Wai, Hsiao-Hsien Hou, Edward Yang, Johnny To, etc - that is, haven't seen a film by any of them - is surprisingly large, especially if you think of their European contemporaries (imagine claiming that somebody who is cinematically literate has never seen anything by Fellini, Antonioni, Bergman, Godard, Truffaut, Herzog, Jeunet, etc) . As somebody who spent a good deal of my college years studying Japanese cinema it really boggles the mind.
So why the aversion to seeing Asian people on the screen? I really don't know. But if there's racism in this whole scenario, it's underlying that, and while it may be the background for the specific decision to populate 21 with white actors, I don't think the decision itself is so much racist as the business sense not to rock the boat. So it may be appropriate to say that racism is at work here, but it's bigger than the decision to cast Jim Sturgess and Kate Bosworth.
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4-02-2008 @ 1:01PM
GearsofWar said...
"Did the studio executives who whitewashed the 21 cast do so because they don't like Asians? Probably not. The most likely reason is simply that they figured an all-Asian film wouldn't sell as many tickets."
Well thats the point. The fact they whitewashed the cast. Because they "figured" white people wouldn't go see a movie with asians starring it. Even though the real story was about a group of ASIANS who took on Las Vegas.
They "figured" that one group of actors wouldn't sell a movie as well as another group of actors, based on one factor. Race.
Liking or not liking isn't a definition of racism.
And the whole "we just gravitate toward people who look like us" defense is right out of the Turner Diaries and Stormfront literature.
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4-02-2008 @ 1:05PM
Bill said...
I think that Jackie Chan and Jett Li would both have issues with the idea that lead Asian roles are not capable of provding a big box office draw. Being white, I would certainly have gone to see this movie if the leads were kept to their original ethnicity(and prefered it to be so). The only issue I can think of is that financial backers of a film may not want to invest their money unless the characters in the movie are a proven draw at the theaters and hence producers may have tried to get names and faces that they thought would help bring in the money. But this only reinforces the idea that white investors in Hollywood base their decisions on racial make up of casts. I probably will see the movie, but I feel a sense of disappointment that such a dramatic alteration of the real events was made in the changing of the race of the characters. BTW, hopefully not to sound biased, but my wife is Asian and daughter is half Asian(of course).
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4-02-2008 @ 1:05PM
Bill said...
BTW: my wife is very attractive
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4-02-2008 @ 1:14PM
Jen said...
Kate Bosworth is enough of a reason for me to not see it. Ugh. Horrible actress.
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4-02-2008 @ 1:24PM
kevjohn said...
I'm starting to think we need a bit of diversity here on the Cinematical writing corps.
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4-02-2008 @ 1:30PM
Chase said...
It's not 'racism' you speak of. And it doesn't matter anyway...it's a movie. If the filmmakers did this to protect a stereotype, then fine; movies don't need to follow life. But more likely, it's because they could draw in more people with a certain ethnic casting.
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4-02-2008 @ 2:31PM
kevjohn said...
umm, those are two great examples of racism!
Why shouldn't a restaurant say we only hire an all-white wait staff because that's what they believe the public prefers? Shouldn't a company be able to exclude any minority executives because they feel the public trusts white execs more and will be more lilely to support the company? Why stop with movie casting?
4-02-2008 @ 1:35PM
Mouthpiece said...
This is certainly a meaty topic that I'm glad you've written about.
"Racism" is certainly a knee-jerk term that does a lot to excite tension and little for people to investigate the processes that underlie the result.
But, there is an underlying belief in the industry that to be "universally appealing" lead actors must be "non-ethnic" or rather: white; which guides the economic and aesthetic choices of studio execs. Your argument that audiences go to watch people that look like them is flawed because I find it hard to believe that Spider Man 3 became a blockbuster hit with only a white demographic. The argument doesn't work the other way. But, studio execs make the very same argument and buy into that one-sided mentality.
Mezrich has criticized the casting of 21, and argued that it plays into fears of the marketability of an all-Asian cast.
http://www-tech.mit.edu/V125/N43/43vegas.html
This is certainly a result of the limited/conservative social imagination on the part of studio execs and what they believe the public is interested in watching. The fact is that because of this dynamic less minority actors are giving good roles in which to prove themselves and be exposed to the public and thus less likely to headline movies with few exceptions. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. As a filmmaker, I've certainly been told (and have heard numerous stories) that if I had made some characters white, the film would be easier to finance. Of course that is because there are few bankable minority stars because of the very dynamic described above.
"But in general, yeah, movies populated mostly by minorities tend not to be as popular."
Without many minority celebrities, the films are not given the marketing attention they could if Matt Damon is headlining the film. Also, minority films in the USA are ghettoized, made on lower budgets and almost exclusively targeted toward that minority. Could 21 have been a hit filled with Asian Americans? Of course, if the studio was willing to invest in new talent and put the marketing dollars behind it. The fact was that they weren't willing to take the risk and challenge the status quo and made a bland film filled with the usual gambit of pasty bright young things.
Ken Leung being casted in LOST is great because he's on screen but not justified by his ethnicity. He's Asian American but flawed and crazy. Let's have more roles like that for Asian Americans. As rare as it is, it does happen and it's inspiring when it does.
Now, come on y'all, let's hold hands and sing Kumbaya.
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4-02-2008 @ 1:42PM
John R said...
Hollywood whitewashes their movies?! No...
21
Dragonball (Possibly the 2nd most egregious)
Forbiden Kingdom (Yes Jet and Jackie are in it but the vehicle used to have the white guy in it is a stretch and not neccessary)
Robotech/Macross (The "Rick Hunter" character is actually a Japanese named Hikaru but the rumor is Tobey Maguire is snagging that one)
Speed Racer
Street Fighter (Yes I know Kruek has some Chinese ancestry, but come on its like less than a 1/4. You mean to tell me Hollywood couldn't find ONE Chinese actress...that knows martial arts?!)
You know, there used to be a time when Hollywood didn't think African-Americans could draw an audience either. Now Denzel and Big Will packs 'em in no matter what the persuasion.
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