For many Asian American kids, Claudia Kishi was the first time they saw themselves as a main character. Now they're all grown & making their own art to ensure future generations see themselves too
『Never Have I Ever(私の"初めて"日記)』(Netflix)では、学校一のモテ男、パクストン・ホール・ヨシダをダレン・バーネットが演じた。役名に日本の苗字がなかったら、彼の見た目と名前だけでは、日系であることに気がつかなかったかもしれない。実際当初このキャラには日系の設定はなかったが、彼が日系であることを知ったプロデューサーのミンディ・カリングがそれを取り入れ、日本語をしゃべるシーンも入れたという。
Get your first look at Never Have I Ever, a coming-of-age comedy about the complicated life of a modern-day first-generation Indian American teenage girl, executive produced by Mindy Kaling and starring newcomer Maitreyi Ramakrishnan.@neverhaveiever premieres April 27 pic.twitter.com/5J6DsHsI4T
Netflixで新作映画『ユーロビジョン歌合戦 〜ファイア・サーガ物語〜』が配信された。おバカコメディを量産してきたウィル・フェレルがレイチェル・マクアダムスと組んで、ABBAやセリーヌ・ディオンも輩出したヨーロッパの各国対抗ポップミュージックコンテスト『Eurovision Song Contest(ユーロビジョン・ソング・コンテスト)』出場を目指すストーリーだ。
ユーロビジョンを知る人なら、ウィル・フェレルの映画にこれ以上の題材はないと心躍ったに違いない。なぜならユーロビジョンは、最高に派手でおかしくて、自虐的パロディまでできる既にコメディさながらのコンテンツだからだ。
Ferrell’s fame, Americanness and straightness mean that the film, in aiming for a mainstream comedy audience, misses the boat on campness. ウィル・フェレルの著名さ、アメリカ人らしさ、ストレートさが、メインストリームのコメディを目指す上で、「キャンプさ」を取り入れる妨げになっている。
アメリカのテレビでどのように性的マイノリティが描かれてきたか、各時代のクリエーターや出演者の話を交えてものすごく網羅的に振り返る。同性愛が違法とされていた時代の番組から、ドラマで初めて登場人物がカミングアウトした瞬間はもちろん、Glee、Grey's Anatomy(後述)、Empire(後述)、Billions、THE WIRE、Queer as Folk、Queer Eye for the Straight Guy、RuPaul's Drag Raceなど思いつく限りの近年のドラマやリアリティ番組が紹介される。
I didn’t think the term “whitewash” was this common in Japan until recently, when the news about the casting for the live action film of Disney’s Little Mermaid provoked controvercy. Some of the hideous tweets I read were “That’s blackwash”, “No that’s blackpaint”, “Why would you do this when you know people would be angry if you made Tiana, Pocahontas, or Muran white”. I felt dizzy.
As much as I was disappointed in Japanese people's ignorance of racial issues, this was a good opportunity to think about cultural representation, which we rarely do. And, in conclusion, it can be too complex to reach a single answer. This can’t be just black and white. And it is rather difficult to separate the social aspects of this issue from one’s personal preferences and feelings.
Little Mermaid is a fantasy. But if Ariel is black, should King Triton also be black? Wait, how would mermaids’ skin colour be inherited in the first place?
The casting of Naomi Scott as Jasmine in Aladdin was criticised as she had Indian heritage, but how much Arabic heritage would be enough? What if Jade from Little Mix had whiter skin?
Should LGBT characters be played by LGBT actors? But if that became common sense, what about the actors who decided not to come out?
In the film Ghost In the Shell, Scarlett Johansson played the lead who was originally a “Japanese” cyborg. I’d never watched the original anime or read the manga so I didn’t have much opinion about it at first. But now I think about how it’d have been really cool if the lead was played by a Japanese actor. I can’t recall a single Japanese lead actor in a Hollywood film. Maybe just the war film by Clint Eastwood. That Geisha wasn’t Japanese. By the way, the Japanese anime fans or the creators didn’t seem to really care either. Most of them think it’s natural that a white actor plays the lead in a Hollywood film. And she’s a cyborg anyway.
Then came Netflix’s Altered Carbon. This is another level of complicated. A person's memories and consciousness can be stored in a device called stack. Stacks can be transferred to other people’s bodies or synthetic ones, which are both called sleeves, so theoretically your mind can live forever if you keep transferring. Sleeves are expensive and you can’t choose which one to use unless you pay, so it is common to be resurrected in a body of a totally different ethnic background or a gender from your original one. Still, it’s not like people don’t care about their ethnicities or how they look. It’s not that far in the future. Or there would never be times like that.
Takeshi Kovacs, the lead character who has Japanese and East European heritage, is resurrected in the body of a white man (Joel Kinnaman) after inprisoned without a sleeve for 250 years. So he is (biracial) Japanese in his mind, but looks like Kinnaman. There are flashbacks of the time when Takeshi lived in the original body (Will Yun Lee) and also the time when he lived in the sleeve (Byron Mann) he chose himself, but the main actor is Kinnaman. By the way, Lee and Mann are both Asian but neither of them are Japanese.
This re-sleeving thing is of course integrated in the story, and it does explain why Takeshi is white. He is half East European anyway so he could look white in the first place. However, at least in the show, it is shown that Lee is who Takeshi originally looks like, and they indicate that he identifies his look as Asian man by letting him choose Mann as his next sleeve. In addition, I found out that in the book, Takeshi frequently discusses the difference between his ethnic identity and his body, which the show never really did. And the narration wasn’t even Lee’s voice, it was Kinnaman’s.
This never felt right to me. There wasn’t a single Japanese conversation about this I could find online, as this series wasn’t well known enough or people in Japan didn’t care much about these issues. (There were many people saying they enjoyed the show and I did too.) So I read English articles and tweets. I realised that it felt like this setting was a convenient excuse to make a cool cyberpunk protagonist with both “intellectual and exotic Asian background and a name” and “White hunk look”. (It’s not a matter of which came first, the sleeve thing or Takeshi’s ethnicity.)
I haven’t read the book but I also found out that some of the other characters are significantly changed. Reileen Kawahara (Dichen Lachman), whom the author of the book apparently said he’d imagined to be played by Sandra Bullock, wasn’t even Takeshi’s sister in the book. She became one of the main characters in the second half of the show, played by Lachman who has Tibetan and Nepalese heritage. Lizzy Elliot, who was originally described white in the book, was played by a black actor Hayley Law. I had no attachment to the settings of the book, and these characters were amazing in the show so I have no objections to these changes themselves. Yet I couldn’t fully agree to the article which praised the show’s diversity. These changes, after all, just made me think that the creators wanted to make up for whitewashing Takeshi.
The show has its next season coming up soon, and Takeshi will be played by Anthony Mackie which means he'll be black this time. I hope he’ll portray Takeshi in his own way, not just as a black hunk.
だから、それがドラマ『Girls』の最終話で使われているのを観て、最初は違和感を感じた。ものすごく乱暴に説明すれば、アメリカ版『ゆとりですがなにか』のようなこのドラマは、『Gossip Girl』(思春期)と『Sex And The City』(成人期)の狭間の世代、ミレニアルを描いている。4人の女子は、みんなどこか幼稚で甘ったれで、それでいて目上の人が相手でも自分を正当化できる(あるいはできてなくても勢いでその場を押し切れる)ほど弁が立つ。そんなんだから激しく言い争うこともしょっちゅうで、それでもなんだかんだ友達であり続ける、のではない。途中まではそうだけれど、最終シーズンは驚くほど急展開で、それまでも段々と離れていた4人の距離を方方に伸ばし、視聴者を置いてけぼりにしながら、主人公のハンナにフォーカスしていく。
ここで思い出したのが、アメリカのコメディドラマ(いわゆるシットコム)の「The Big Bang Theory(邦題:ビッグバン★セオリー/ギークなボクらの恋愛法則)」に出てくるシェルドンというキャラクターだった。ビッグバンセオリーは、大学に勤める学者でマンガやゲームやコスプレが大好きなオタクでもある4人組の男子と、アパートの向かいの部屋に越してきた美女の話だ。観たことのある人なら分かると思うが、彼はその4人の中でもものすごくクセのある人物で、16歳で博士号を取得するほどの天才でありながら、特定のルーティンに沿って暮らさないと気が済まない(曜日ごとに何を食べるか決まっている、家では必ずソファの同じ位置に座る、病気の時は「柔らか子猫」の歌を歌ってもらわないと寝られないなど)、一度やり出したことは終わるまでやらないと気が済まない、人の感情に寄り添えない、潔癖症であるなど、数々の特徴を持っている。それはそれは周りの人をイライラさせるし、友人たちも普段はうまく彼の習性に付き合いながらからかったり、たまにブチ切れたりするのだけど、このキャラクターは人気もすごい。演じるジム・パーソンズのギャラは1話1億円だそうで、彼はこの役で4度のエミー賞も獲っている。