March 23, 2008
Racial Controversy brewing over '21'
An exercise in stereotyping or just Hollywood being race-blind?
I'd be the first to admit. I was a wee bit reluctant about devoting space to a glossy, run-of-the-mill pic like 21, opening this Friday.
After all, as the old adage goes, there's no such thing as bad publicity. And let's just say that the trailer streaming on my laptop, moments earlier, amounted to little more than a five minute studio pitch. Poor but brilliant MIT student-cum-math prodigy does Vegas to fund med school. Think Ocean's Eleven meets Revenge of the (Hot) Nerds.
But here goes: in recent weeks, there has been a small but vocal group of Asian Americans voicing dissent over the film's casting. Two of the main fictional characters from 21, Ben Campbell and Jimmy Fisher, are Asian Americans (Jeff Ma and Mike Aponte, respectively).1
Check out the racial tension, currently flaring between posters at the IMDb and Facebook. Pretty heavy stuff.
And while I'm, admittedly, siding with the folks who interpret the casting decision as stereotypical2, this only confirms what I already know as a life-long consumer: certain images sell, and certain images don't. It is very much part of the visual quotidian to have white faces staring back at me from the billboards and pages of Vogue. Why make a fuss over something you have no control over?
In the meantime, however, I'll avoid wallowing in the attractive but shallow depths of identity politics-mongering (avoiding CNN and Headline News or any coverage of Obama and Hillary, for that matter), and instead, revel in some much needed cathartic laughter (watching hilarious bits of Abercrombie & Fitch-skewering satire, courtesy of MadTV and YouTube).
1 21 was adapted from the book, Bringing Down the House. In Bringing Down the House, the characters, Kevin Lewis and Jason Fisher were used solely as fictional aliases, rather than real-life names. Author Ben Mezrick noted this in beginning of his book.
2 The generalized "Hollywood casting is not ethnic-specific" argument doesn't cut it here, contextually; lest we consider how integral race was to the gambling scheme, at hand. Unsurprisingly, Mezrick was not amused about the casting choices.
