The Last Airbender and Race Politics

Asia Pacific Arts, a webmagazine I write for, recently covered the backlash in the Asian American community to the casting of white actors to play Asian roles in M. Night Shyamalan's upcoming adaptation of Nickelodeon's Avatar: The Last Airbender. The three main characters, ambiguously Asian in the original animated series, were recast with white actors by Shyamalan and Paramount, which has a recent history of such decisions. This is a perfect example of the war in Hollywood between the liberal multicultural impulse (that often seems in name only) and the much more dominant profit-based desire to present more "palatable" (white) images to the white American majority. In American cultural politics, especially in the film industry, it often feels like we are stuck in the 1950s. I liked Pixar's inclusion of an ambiguously Asian main character in Up, particularly how it was a non-issue in cinematic-cultural discourse (except among my Asian friends distressed at how overweight poor Russell was).

On the subject of the casting, Roger Ebert wrote "The original series Avatar: The Last Airbender was highly regarded and popular for three seasons on Nickelodeon. Its fans take it for granted that its heroes are Asian. Why would Paramount and Shyamalan go out of their way to offend these fans? There are many young Asian actors capable of playing the parts." It is interesting (though not surprising) that Shyamalan, who identifies as an Indian-American director, would go so far to defend his/Paramount's actions, arguing in the LA Times that "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." This is the same logic that led to the controversial casting of a white actor as Japanese anime icon Goku in the execrable Dragonball: Evolution movie. One of the only major "Asians" of any background in the cast is British-Indian Dev Patel of Slumdog Millionaire, whose presence in that film and in British soaps will no doubt make him more palatable to western audiences.

For more information on the building protest check out racebending.com. They held a screening of a documentary called "Yellowface" about this and other related controversies tonight but if you're interested you can probably track it down.

On a relatively unrelated note, here's a link to a piece of video art by a student in Jason and my Video Game Theories class. It's a thoughtful/hilarious criticism of the way American Apparel objectifies women in their ads.

http://scf.usc.edu/~sennache