“I can’t mount a film of this budget... and say that my lead actor is Mohammad so-and-so from such-and-such."
That's what director of Exodus: God and King, Ridley Scott, responded when criticized for casting white actors for roles that are supposed to be Egyptian. This phenomenon of "Hollywood Whitewashing" has never been new. White Actors have played the role of Asians, African Americans, Hispanic Americans, and other races since the dawn of the film making industry.
Arguably, the modern American film industry was built on blatant racism. Directed by D. W. Griffith, Birth of a Nation was often credited as the first modern film in American History and the turning point that had led to the birth of American cinema. Yet, while possessing with both historical and cultural significance, the film itself, adapted from the book The Clansman, was a celebration of the Lost Cause mythology, white supremacy, and racial hierarchy. Birth of a Nation romanticized the Confederate ideology in the Civil War, presented African Americans as unintelligent, portrayed KKK members as heroic figures that "redeemed" the South from African Americans.
The film also brought real life social consequences. The film inspired the formation of the second KKK, created a resurgence of Lost Cause Mythology (construction of Confederate monuments, for example), and boycotts and protests led by NAACP.
This goes on to show how much mass media, such as movies, influence the public. Directors make conscious choices in the story, setting, and casting that in part deliver the message of the movie. Yet, this is especially the case with the genre of history movie. We cannot find one perfectly answer from history. Instead, history is multifaceted in nature. It is a result of different arguments, each with its own perspective and bias. Yet, assuming that the majority of the audience in mass media is not well educated on the historical context of the subject of the movie to understand the complexity of the issue, historical films can easily render a one-sided argument that becomes universally believed. Birth of a Nation, for instance, presented a skewed and flawed interpretation of the Civil War and the Reconstruction that would last with the entire young generation at the time who had no personal memory of the reality of the Civil War. (These people would later become the segregation hard-liners of the 50s and 60s).
While Birth of a Nation was certainly an extreme example, the issue still exists in the genre. This often puts directors in dilemmas, who clearly understand that their artistic imagination is limited by historical events and context. They need to learn how to push their ideas through without altering historical facts. Sometimes, the hardest part is how to combine history with diversity and inclusion.
These movies often receive backlash from both sides: the progressive audiences criticize that not enough minority roles have been offered; the conservative audiences criticize that the film is not historically accurate and turns history into PC. For instance, Dunkirk was criticized by the Guardian for the lack of lack and south Asian representation in the British army
(https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/aug/01/indian-african-dunkirk-history-whitewash-attitudes). The article describes the danger of turning the WWII history into a White Men's successful crusade.
At the same time, while films of other genres could easily hide their tokenized characters in the overarching story, audience becomes more picky with historical movies from both right and left. In the case of a WWII movie, when a black soldier is added to the screen, the conservative audience can easily spot it as an "anomaly"--since our history was taught in such a white and Eurocentric way-- and question whether this character is tokenized or over representing the ethnic group for the PC. At the same time, more liberal audience might question whether such character serves no purpose other than making the movie more "diverse".
Movie directors are often conflicted in deciding where their movie should land on the spectrums of both issues, and many stay in the middle just to be safe. They create tokenized characters to represent "diversity" as well as some nuanced changes to the real history to try covering up such tokenization. For a WWII movie desiring the U.S. Army in the Western Front, this might mean inventing an African American companion to the White main character, hiding the fact that in reality African Americans were forced to serve in segregated units. Movies like this exist in a limbo between diverse and homogenous, and historically accurate and purely imaginative. Many of them don't want a more homogenous cast, but they also don't have the courage to go all out.
But honestly, why not try going all out? Why not tell a completely historically accurate tale of African American soldiers suffering through the segregation policy in the army, fighting against the oppression, and potentially eventually bonding with the white soldiers because of the war?
The reasons why these movies never happened was because directors were afraid of the commercial impact of going all out. The recent success of Hamilton, however, proves that some Americans are ready for a more diverse re-imagination of the history. It is time for the Hollywood history movies to re-imagine themselves.
That's what director of Exodus: God and King, Ridley Scott, responded when criticized for casting white actors for roles that are supposed to be Egyptian. This phenomenon of "Hollywood Whitewashing" has never been new. White Actors have played the role of Asians, African Americans, Hispanic Americans, and other races since the dawn of the film making industry.
Arguably, the modern American film industry was built on blatant racism. Directed by D. W. Griffith, Birth of a Nation was often credited as the first modern film in American History and the turning point that had led to the birth of American cinema. Yet, while possessing with both historical and cultural significance, the film itself, adapted from the book The Clansman, was a celebration of the Lost Cause mythology, white supremacy, and racial hierarchy. Birth of a Nation romanticized the Confederate ideology in the Civil War, presented African Americans as unintelligent, portrayed KKK members as heroic figures that "redeemed" the South from African Americans.
The film also brought real life social consequences. The film inspired the formation of the second KKK, created a resurgence of Lost Cause Mythology (construction of Confederate monuments, for example), and boycotts and protests led by NAACP.
This goes on to show how much mass media, such as movies, influence the public. Directors make conscious choices in the story, setting, and casting that in part deliver the message of the movie. Yet, this is especially the case with the genre of history movie. We cannot find one perfectly answer from history. Instead, history is multifaceted in nature. It is a result of different arguments, each with its own perspective and bias. Yet, assuming that the majority of the audience in mass media is not well educated on the historical context of the subject of the movie to understand the complexity of the issue, historical films can easily render a one-sided argument that becomes universally believed. Birth of a Nation, for instance, presented a skewed and flawed interpretation of the Civil War and the Reconstruction that would last with the entire young generation at the time who had no personal memory of the reality of the Civil War. (These people would later become the segregation hard-liners of the 50s and 60s).
While Birth of a Nation was certainly an extreme example, the issue still exists in the genre. This often puts directors in dilemmas, who clearly understand that their artistic imagination is limited by historical events and context. They need to learn how to push their ideas through without altering historical facts. Sometimes, the hardest part is how to combine history with diversity and inclusion.
These movies often receive backlash from both sides: the progressive audiences criticize that not enough minority roles have been offered; the conservative audiences criticize that the film is not historically accurate and turns history into PC. For instance, Dunkirk was criticized by the Guardian for the lack of lack and south Asian representation in the British army
(https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/aug/01/indian-african-dunkirk-history-whitewash-attitudes). The article describes the danger of turning the WWII history into a White Men's successful crusade.
At the same time, while films of other genres could easily hide their tokenized characters in the overarching story, audience becomes more picky with historical movies from both right and left. In the case of a WWII movie, when a black soldier is added to the screen, the conservative audience can easily spot it as an "anomaly"--since our history was taught in such a white and Eurocentric way-- and question whether this character is tokenized or over representing the ethnic group for the PC. At the same time, more liberal audience might question whether such character serves no purpose other than making the movie more "diverse".
Movie directors are often conflicted in deciding where their movie should land on the spectrums of both issues, and many stay in the middle just to be safe. They create tokenized characters to represent "diversity" as well as some nuanced changes to the real history to try covering up such tokenization. For a WWII movie desiring the U.S. Army in the Western Front, this might mean inventing an African American companion to the White main character, hiding the fact that in reality African Americans were forced to serve in segregated units. Movies like this exist in a limbo between diverse and homogenous, and historically accurate and purely imaginative. Many of them don't want a more homogenous cast, but they also don't have the courage to go all out.
But honestly, why not try going all out? Why not tell a completely historically accurate tale of African American soldiers suffering through the segregation policy in the army, fighting against the oppression, and potentially eventually bonding with the white soldiers because of the war?
The reasons why these movies never happened was because directors were afraid of the commercial impact of going all out. The recent success of Hamilton, however, proves that some Americans are ready for a more diverse re-imagination of the history. It is time for the Hollywood history movies to re-imagine themselves.