I remember being really excited when Marvel released Black Panther. As a long-time fan of Marvel comics, Black Panther is important to comic book nerds. It's also important for breaking a number of important milestones in popular media.
When the movie came out, it broke more ground because, for whatever reason, Hollywood can't seem to keep up with what Marvel was doing half a century ago. I had another reason for being excited about Black Panther.
As someone who is half Asian, I assumed that no Asian representation was coming to the MCU (or if it did, not for a while), so I figured living vicariously through African-Americans in their shining moment was as close as I was going to get. I'm pretty sure a lot of non-white, non-African Americans were cheering about Black Panther for this same reason.
As I mentioned in an earlier post, director Ryan Coogler was juggling a lot of balls when he made that movie. He was challenging the Hollywood myth that big-budget action movies told from an African perspective could make money, to name one example. In addition to everything else, he was challenging and changing a lot of attitudes about representation in Hollywood.
Asian-Americans Are Different
I want to take this moment to point out that the representation needs of Asian-Americans are different from African-Americans by pointing out one big, and important difference between the two groups.
See, I can go down to a local store, and find lots of Asian movies made in Asia by Asian people. The movies are full of Asian faces and tell stories from an Asian perspective. If I were African-American, I would not be able to find a similar selection of movies telling stories from an African perspective at the local Best Buy.
Simply having a big-budget movie full of African faces was a really big deal for African-Americans, but I already have that. The budgets may not be as big, but I already have that. I can go almost anywhere and get my fill of Hong Kong martial arts movies, Japanese anime, Japanese samurai dramas, or artsy South Korean movies, and much more. I don't want Asian representation, I want Asian-American representation.
Wait, Shang Chi is Chinese, not Chinese-American, so why am I still excited about this? Because Asian-Americans (and at least one Asian-Canadian) are getting work and will have big parts in a big-budget movie made in America.
Yes, I would probably prefer Asian-American characters telling stories from an Asian-American perspective (they already introduced the mother of Amadeus Cho in Age of Ultron), but I get that China is a big market, and among those Marvel heroes who were not tied up with other copyright agreements with other companies at the time Shang Chi was green-lit, Shang Chi was the most prominent Chinese character.
Live-Action Ghost in the Shell
Just so you know, I wasn't expecting the live-action Ghost in the Shell to be any good. Up until that point, every live-action movie made in America based on a manga or anime was terrible. Heck, most Japanese live-action interpretations of manga or anime are terrible.
I am bummed that the main character was race flipped to white. I'm not going to get into the details of the big race-flipping debate with regard to Ghost in the Shell, but I think in a live-action movie, there are 3 characters who should not have been race-flipped: Aramaki, Togusa, and the main character, Motoko Kusanagi. All the other characters are fair game as far as I'm concerned, especially Saito, Ishikawa, and Batou.
Aside: for the record, if you had to choose a non-Asian to play Motoko Kusanagi, Scarlett Johansson was the right call. While there was a long list of problems with that movie, her performance was not on that list. She even got the peculiar emotional detachment of the character right.
Without going into the boring details about why this or that character should or should not be race-flipped, the thing that bummed me out about changing the race of the main character is what that said about Hollywood movies prior to the start of production on Ghost in the Shell.
You see, there were simply zero bankable Asian female stars for a big-budget American movie because there were no big-budget American action movies starring Asian women. Had this movie been made a few years earlier, perhaps they could have cast Lucy Liu, but to my knowledge, Lucy never headlined a movie, and so the Hollywood executives probably would have balked at even that.
If Asian-Americans make up one in twenty Americans, then I don't think it's too much to ask that one out of twenty action heroes be Asian. Demanding that an individual part in an individual movie be Asian is a much harder argument to make, but it is not unreasonable to say that one in twenty action heroes out of all American movies should be Asian. I don't think it's too much to ask that one out of twenty supporting characters in American movies be Asian. I don't think it's too much to ask that one out of twenty extras in American movies be Asian faces. At least not when we take all American movies into consideration. If Asians had one in twenty action hero parts in American movies, then there would have been a bankable Asian actress available for the part of Motoko Kusanagi.
It is wrong to apply the Bechdel Test to an individual movie, it is a reasonable way to judge all of the movies produced by a particular nation or studio system. For all that I think the character of Motoko Kusanagi should not have been race-flipped, I am not going to pick that hill to die on. I don't think the race of any individual character in any individual movie is all that important, but the trends of all the movies in a given movie system are worth critiquing. The fact that there are much fewer than one out of twenty Asian faces among protagonists out of all Hollywood movies is a problem, regardless of what you think about any given character in any given movie.
For all that the anti-SJW types whine about Hollywood being too politically correct, I think it's just the opposite. Hollywood is far too racist and far too accommodating to the attitudes of racists when it comes to casting movies. We already learned in the 1970s that white Americans are willing to pay lots of money to see movies starring Bruce Lee, so why act like they won't pay to watch any other Asian face in a movie?
Crazy Rich Asians
The movie Crazy Rich Asians was, I think, a good start. There have been more good quality movies with Asians and Asian perspectives in American movies since then. Hollywood has also been making a more concerted effort to make more high-quality African-American movies. Things are moving in the right direction, and I'm happy about that.
But we still have a lack of representation in big-budget action movies, and that's where Shang Chi comes in. I'm happy and excited about this movie because I'm hoping we will see at least an occasional action movie out of Hollywood starring Asians after this.
The MCU and Latinx Representation
While I'm excited about Shang-Chi, now it's time to start asking Marvel questions about Latina/Latino representation. Currently, the most prominent Latino character in the MCU is an ex-con sidekick in the Ant-Man movies. I think Marvel can do better than that, particularly now that the X-Men characters are under the Disney umbrella.
And if you claim that X-23 counts as a Latina, I'm going to kick you in the ankle for not understanding what a clone is. Apparently, the people who made the otherwise excellent movie Logan did not understand this.
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