Image Hijack

It’s not much of a secret that Hollywood isn’t the most concerned about making movies that are culturally accurate.  While some issues like blatant racism have been address in the past, Asian Americans are still poorly represented in movies and TV.  In many cases, Asian characters usually only serve the purpose of being Asian, which often includes offering ancient and mysterious wisdom from the Far East, acting as an enemy to the American way of life with their communist ways, being huge nerds who will never get girlfriends, falling in love with the handsome, white male lead, and being the foreigners who unintentionally says funny phrases in broken English.  Even when a story is set in Asia, white characters often times steal the spotlight.  There are even occasions where white characters don yellowface and play Asian roles, leaving actors of Asian descent as background characters or even just the villans.  Here, I wanted to show a hypothetical U.S. adaption of Kurosawa’s famous film, Rashomon, where the two male leads are replaced with white actors.  The female lead, presumably played by Lucy Liu, shows how many Americans cannot name many Asian-American actors on the spot and the assumption that all Asians look the same.

            As a mixed-race person with Asian heritage, I have noticed this phenomenon in the media as I’ve grown older and more observant.  In a more recent case, The Last Airbender, the (terrible) movie based off of the popular Nickelodeon TV show, showcases the exclusion of Asian-American actors.  While the movie is set in a fictional world heavily influenced by Asian culture, the three protagonists are played by white actors, leaving the Asian actors as background characters and the “bad guys.”  While set in Japan, The Last Samurai mostly follows the escapades of Tom Cruise, leaving the more interesting Japanese characters in roles that are not as prominent as Cruise. 

            For the poster placement, I would place it in a movie theater display or somewhere around it, preferably next to a film where Asian Americans are poorly represented.