Ghost In The Shell : the most scandalous Hollywood movie of the past decade
Whitewashing and blackface have been a major part of Hollywood since the very beginnings of the film industry. It’s a shameful tradition that has carried through cinema for decades, even as audiences have grown more aware of its obvious racism and the push for on-screen diversity became impossible for the industry to ignore.
We could probably fill an entire list of whitewashing and misguided castings of the decade, be it the continued issues of casting cis men as trans women in films like The Danish Girl or Dallas Buyers Club or the systemic erasure of people of color from film on a grand scale. Two major blockbusters, however, came to symbolize Hollywood’s desperation to hold onto the old ways and how audiences uniformly rejected them.
Ridley Scott took on the Old Testament with Exodus: Gods and Kings, casting a majority white ensemble for a story that took place in northern Africa. The director tried to justify this decision by pointing to the need to have big stars at the forefront and the apparent lack of men of color to fill such roles, but audiences weren’t having it.
They weren’t enthused about Ghost in the Shell either, yet another Hollywood effort to adapt anime for the big-screen while uniformly stripping the source material of its distinctly Japanese roots. Scarlett Johansson took on the role of Major Motoko Kusanagi, with the twist being that she was indeed an Asian woman put into the cybernetic body of a white woman. If this was an attempt to subvert criticisms of whitewashing, it failed miserably and only further highlighted what audiences really wanted. To nobody’s surprise, neither Exodus nor Ghost in the Shell performed well at the box office.
