By Dan Mecca
Not that Eurocentrism has ever really gone away, but at least high-profile filmmakers were trying to conceal it with “noble” films like Crash. Hell, Hollywood even buys and sells independent projects like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon every once and a while. When considering what it was like in the 1940s/1950s, in which films like Elia Kazan’s Gentlemen’s Agreement (which won Best Picture in 1948) and Delmer Daves’ Broken Arrow were regarded as milestones of equality and filters for truth (even though both revolve around white men infiltrating minorities they are not a part of, thereby rescuing them from themselves), we have taken several big steps forward.
Thanks to the productions of recent years, usually independent of Hollywood, one can find honest cultural studies like the impressive HBO miniseries Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee or realism-drenched Westerns like John Hillcoat’s The Proposition.
However, all of this progression seems to be fading fast. How else do you explain why the new Street Fighter movie starred Chris Klein and the people behind Dragonball Evolution decided to cast uber-white Justin Chatwick and Emmy Rossum as Goku and Bulma, merely falling back on Asia’s most Americanized actor, Chow-Yun Fat, for validation. And let us not forget Jake Gyllenhaal playing Prince Dastan in Mike “Goblet of Fire” Newell’s Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time.
Jake Gyllenhaal? Really? What about Cliff Curtis? Cast Tony Shaloub for Christ’s sake. Not Gyllenhaal. After all, the prince is Persian.
But then there’s always been room in Hollywood for “white man saves the strange foreign man” films, like Edward Zwick‘s historic-epic The Last Samurai, in which Mr. Tom Cruise played the glorious white man (spoiler alert: THE LAST SAMURAI) against an incredible performance by veteran Japanese actor Ken Watanabe. Unfortunately, Watanabe, since his rise up to the Hollywood plateau, has struggled to maintain stardom thanks to mediocre roles, like his glorified cameo in Batman Begins or his extended romantic lead in the horrible Memoirs of a Geisha, in which the vast majority of the dialogue is spoken in English even though the film takes place in Japan. Oh, and Ziyi Zhang was cast as the lead geisha, even though she is of Chinese, not Japanese, dissent. C’mon! Talk about a multi-cultural slap in the face.
It appears this all has been going on under our noses.
Or maybe not under anything. After all, Memoirs made 160 million worldwide, compared to the 68 million Letters from Iwo Jima made, despite its near-entire Japanese cast and complete embrace of English subtitles and Japanese dialogue. Or maybe it’s because of it. Now, of course, one could argue the vastly different ambitions of both marketing campaigns for both films, but then that also raises more questions. Why is Memoirs supposed to do better than Letters? Because of the subtitles.
The everyday viewer doesn’t like reading when he/she goes to watch something, so it won’t sell. And when there are subtitles, companies go out of their way, and out of their jurisdiction lately it appears, to simplify the dialogue to the point of creative bastardization. Take the recent scandal involving the subtitles in the American DVDs of the incredible Swedish film Let the Right One In. Eurocentrification by way of simplification.
And there are many ways to simplify. Bryan Singer and Christopher McQuarrie simplified Valkyrie by allowing all of their actors, who ranged from American to British to German, to speak in their native accents in the English language. A strange decision which Singer defended (to his credit) that makes the film feel like it should have been released 50 years ago in between From Here To Eternity and The Great Escape. I thought we were past Hollywood films full of Hollywood actors avoiding true imitation by way of historical alteration. Alas, I was wrong. Now, listen, I liked Valkyrie; I just wished they had had the balls to speak in German. But then, you don’t get a 75 million dollar budget (and Tom Cruise) if you speak German.
But this doesn’t necessarily fit with the Eurocentrism angle. Because, after all, Germany is very much in Europe. And here’s where the real dirt comes out. It’s Americanism via “the white man” that’s going on in these films that we continue to pay money to see. Whether it’s the abuse of generalities as an explanation for universal prejudice in Crash or an all-out onslaught of the English language in nearly every Hollywood film that is released no matter where the film is set (see the Belarus-set Defiance), we are being told that we live in a world of English-speaking whities. Or, at least, that that is all that’s important.
Now, I understand this means it’s not just White-Americanism then, but White-Americanism+Britain. Okay, let’s settle for that. If you’re Brit actor Michael Sheen, you can play David Frost in ’08 and a bad-ass werewolf in the third Underworld in ’09 while equally talented actors like Watanabe look for work struggle for a paycheck.
Ask yourselves why an incredible young black actor like Derek Luke takes a part in a Tyler Perry film or as Ryan Reynolds’ buddy in Definetely, Maybe. Luke should be winning Oscars and picking from a mile-deep bin of scripts – instead, he’s best known for Biker Boyz. Actors like Denzel Washington and Samuel L. Jackson are a dime a dozen because there are not that many roles out there for black actors. This is why this year’s Best Supporting Actress race needs to be celebrated-both Taraji P. Henson and Viola Davis being nominated for deserving performances.
Why can’t we have a film in which the black man saves the white man? And not because he’s magical or non-human, as in the terrible The Family Man or The Legend of Bagger Vance (or even The Green Mile).
I am sure there are normal black people out there who have saved plenty of white people before. Sounds like an interesting character piece.
This is why Spike Lee needs to keep making movies (yes, even bad ones like Miracle at St. Anna), and John Singleton, and the Hughes Brothers. This is why films like Apocalypto (yes, I see the Mel Gibson irony here) need to be made, in which native tongues, or something close to a native tongue, are used to convey the culture being observed.
Arguing whether these Americanized films are racist is a moot point. Racism has become an elusive term that can be defined by many different sets of guidelines. However, what these Americanized films do is ignore the presence of race and of racial differences, merely white-washing all of it. Whether one believe this is racist or not, it is undisputely ignorant.
We already have enough ignorance in this country. Jake Gyllenhaal running around like a Persian prince won’t help anything. Except box-office sales.