Get your head outta the Cloud [Atlas]

I haven’t seen the movie or read the book. I sure have heard about it though. Is Cloud Atlas a racist film? On purpose? Mehh, probably not. But all that “race bending” sure is ballsy. From my experience, you have to be pretty privileged to think up something like that in a time like this… Playing with race is a pretty touchy thing to do, especially in a country that is for the first time, a minority majority. 

So the movie is definitely not about race. Race is just the usual casualty of this type of… creativity. People from the film have defended their choices by calling the “race bending” not about race itself, but of humanity. I guess they’re trying to show some transcendence– an Asian woman can be a Latina, a white man can be Asian, a black woman can be a white lady… It’s about humanity. Post-race, right? Any race, any person can perform any character, no matter what race because we’ve passed that shit. Right? Just slap on some light colored foundation on that dark skin and we’re there. Asian? Slant-ish eyes. Boom! 

What I find problematic about this post-race/ transcendence is that we are still conforming to the most basic assumptions and stereotypes of race– eyes, noses, skin color. We just put it on and we’ve nailed it. For something that is supposed to transcend seems to focus on some specific physical differences. And it doesn’t even look cool. It looks like makeup.

The film got the most heat from Asian American organizations, who complained that the ridiculous looking dude in “yellow face” was just that: ridiculous. Asian men are super rare in film, especially in heroic, main-character-esque roles. To cast a white man with dumb wannabe Asian eyes is just insulting. 

My point is that the whole “post-race” thing is a cop-out. The transcendence thing, and the “we are all part of humanity” thing is bullshit. If we were really trying to get closer to transcendence and humanity, we would be casting Asian men. We would be casting people who are hardly ever casted in films– not putting putting on yellow-face or brown face.  There are real implications to this: Asians are reduced to slanty eyes, Latinos reduced to brown skin… 

So before we get our societal heads stuck in the clouds, maybe we should deal with our white supremacist earth.