monochrome media

It's 4:13 AM and I'm wide awake. The baby is asleep, which makes this a particularly piquant bit of schadenfreude for those of you who are monitoring my sleep patterns post-child; having won tonight over his propensity for waking up every hour after midnight, I find that my mind and body have become attuned to his unreasonable schedule. Gone are the nights when I am jerked awake in a hissing rage because the baby has seen fit to start screaming in the middle of my deepest sleep cycle. Now I preempt the possibility, with the result that I find myself a wanderer in the night with nobody willing to keep me company but the random oscillations of the internet.

Hello, internet.

Since I'm awake anyway, I thought I might as well post an entry -- not about the first day of work post-maternity leave, which is T-minus-5 hours away -- but about another issue that has been making the back of my teeth itch since the end of the summer Olympics in August and the beginning of the new television season in September. Namely, the media and how white it is.

I've written elsewhere about how underrepresented Asians are in the media, and how rare it is that minorities of any sort are predominant on any quality television show. I've gotten used to that. Barring the occasional show like Grey's Anatomy and Ugly Betty, which either turns a blind eye to color or has a recurring theme of culture clashes, it's the rare show that has Asians represented as anything other than Martial Artist Enforcer #2 or Sick Patient Guest Star #6. While it's gotten better of late (and by 'of late' I mean within the past decade) it's still rare enough that when an Asian does appear on the television in a show or in a commercial, we shout, "Asian! Asian on the TV!" and the rest of the household comes running to look.

When I was younger, I got used to not seeing faces like mine on my programs. If I thought about it at all, my assumption was that (1) in the 15 million or so Asians that populate the United States, there aren't any good actors; or (2) market research has advised Hollywood that Americans don't like to look at Asians. Curiously, neither of these bothered me much, which blessing I attribute to the colossal lack of self-esteem I had when I was growing up, which didn't need proof to buttress a crushingly bad self-image, combined with the perverse and uncontested superiority complex I had simply by being Japanese.

The summer Olympics changed some of that for me. I blame it on the fact that for the first time in, oh, ever, I turned on the television on a daily basis and saw faces like mine -- and not just faces like mine, but a lot of faces like mine, everywhere, constantly: in the background, in the foreground, winning medals, kicking ass and taking names -- and not just in martial arts, to which my racial type has mostly been segregated in fictional media. There we were, on primetime no less. I felt a startling and unexpected racial recognition, as though for the first time I was part of the American experience. What is more American than television? And there I was, represented at last, on the mirror that reflects millions of American lives as they are and wish they were.

By China.

Pause to reflect on the pathetic irony of that.

Against that backdrop, the ads for the coming season of shows were especially jarring. Hollywood -- I sweep corporate television into that generalized bucket -- has made inroads on minority representation, but this season has taken several steps back on that road, and it was all the more noticeable when you compared the spots for the new shows against the rich variety of the Olympics. It seemed to my admittedly suspicious eye that the promotional shots for all the new shows were designed to fit in at the local Ku Klux Klan Clam and Coors festivals. Leading characters of color were nonexistent. As far as the eye could see, there was a vast expanse of white.

And then cut back to the Olympics. In the year where the Olympics were hosted in China and a self-identified black man became our president, it is strange that I feel myself more disenfranchised than I ever have.

Which brings me to the thing that was brought to my attention yesterday.

From Firefox News...

In the past few days, rumblings have been heard in comments and postings around the Internet , as fans who reveled in the beauty of the Avatar world reeled at the news that their favorite characters might be portrayed by an all-white cast (partially picked at a casting call in . . . Texas, that noted hub of Asian and Inuit people)....

For a cartoon that began with the news of near-total genocide against the title character's entire culture, an all-white cast is a pretty low blow. And rather misses the point of the cartoon.

I'm a fan of Avatar: The Last Airbender, if I can use that word on the internet and not automatically be bunched with the slavering weirdness to which fandom can get in this particular venue. It's a cleverly written series with interesting characters and good animation, based on a creative and meticulously researched premise. Not least, and specific to the issue, it's a show based on Inuit and Asian cultures, which did not factor significantly into my enjoyment of the show.

I've looked at the photographs of the actors (and actress) that were shown, and I will freely acknowledge that there is a resemblance between the character of Katara -- the girl -- and the actress picked to play her. Having cast a white girl to play Katara, it goes without saying that the character of her brother must also be played by a white actor, and one could stretch a bit and say there is a passing resemblance between that actor and his character, in the sense that both of them are male and have dark hair.

And that's about as far as I would go.

There is a great disturbance in the internet among the Avatar fans about the casting, and at least one letter-writing campaign. The casting is not final, according to reports, and the apparent hope is that enough protest would result in a change of casting. If you're interested, I recommend you drop by and give the campaign a looksee. Personally, I consider success a slim chance if any, though the sentiment is nice and the suggested approach -- tying in a financial boycott with polite letters -- is surprisingly reasonable and intelligent for an internet movement of any kind.

Here's why I don't think it'll work. I find it hard to believe that a studio would invest the kind of money that would hire M. Night Shyamalan (who, whatever you may think of his movies or his ego, is big enough that he can command a significant salary) and buy the rights to a successful franchise, then not do the market research that would tell them that the movie-going Americans in the demographic they are targeting would rather see white kids than Asian or Inuit ones. I may be wrong, but I don't think I am. A movie is not an insignificant investment, and no company stays in business without doing their due diligence.

Comics are a medium in which the racial boundaries have already been crossed. The dominance of Korean and Japanese animation houses and the flood of manga that have invaded bookstores and libraries around the US have seen to that. With comics and animation shows though, the Asians are safely two-dimensional and on paper. Live action is another thing altogether. God forbid we have actual Asians playing actual Asians on a potentially blockbuster movie -- even if it is ostensibly a martial arts film -- targeted towards our impressionable youth.

That I am not impressed by this casting should be pretty clear by now. I do not particularly appreciate the unsubtle message that Asian culture is really cool, as long as there aren't any actual Asians lolling about dirtying the place up. It may be that this is not a deliberately conveyed message, but it is one that not a few people will take away from it.

I may be overly cynical about this. Certainly the actors are not to blame for their casting or their race, however the latter played into the former, and it would be hard on them if there were changes made in the former based on the latter. For all I know, the casting director was not told to "find matches for the characters, preferably white." I am not familiar with the way Hollywood works, so I can't say how likely that is. However, I do know that movie-making is a business, and business is interested in making money, and in order to do that, they look at what will pay.

And what will pay, apparently, is not a face like mine.

My prediction is that the movie will end up well, even with the current fandom outrage about the casting choices. Production quality will be higher than it was in the fiasco of Sci-Fi channel's Earthsea whitewashing. On top of that, there is enough of a fan base for it to do decently in the box office, and unless mainstream news or blogosphere gets loud enough, the current brouhaha won't stop enough people that it will matter. Here and there I've read comments along the line that people are so upset by the situation, they don't know if they will even be able to enjoy the movie, which means that they will be giving the movie their money anyway. In short, they have given their tacit approval to the casting choices and will be giving Hollywood proof that they were right. I think that attitude will be prevalent for the majority of the supposedly indignant fans. I could be wrong. I certainly hope so.

Unfortunately, I don't think I am.