Hollywood’s fascination with eastern literature is not a secret, at least not a well-kept one. Time and again, we’ve seen films that make an effort of telling a story that comes from the East but is presented in a manner that falls under the category of cultural misappropriation and re-writing of ethnic identities and history.
Hollywood’s white hangover continues as an upcoming film on Persian poet Rumi hopes to
cast Caucasian faces, Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert Downey Jr. as Rumi and Shams.
Hollywood’s fascination with eastern literature is not a secret, at least not a well-kept one. Time and again, we’ve seen films that make an effort of telling a story that comes from the East but is presented in a manner that falls under the category of cultural misappropriation and re-writing of ethnic identities and history. In Hollywood, no matter what the subject, the actor will always be white.
Case in point: the upcoming film on 13TH century Persian poet/mystic Rumi that is being penned by Academy Award winning Gladiator writer David Franzoni. According to a story in The Guardian (by Kareem Shaheen), both Franzoni and producer Stephen Joel Brown, believe that Rumi has “enormous talent”, one that deserves to be explored. And the way they plan on exploring it is by going “HollywoodSoWhite” in it. For example, both Franzoni and Brown want to cast Leonardo Di Caprio as Jalaluddin Rumi and Iron Man Robert Downey Jr as Shams of Tabriz.
Not surprisingly, social media is seeing an explosion of sorts with many wondering why this terrible cultural misappropriation of sorts is being planned and what good will it do. And truth be told, this isn’t the first time a plan like this has been hatched.
In 2015, actress Rooney Mara and the film, Pan met with some serious backlash after the actress was cast in the role of Tiger Lily. Why? Because the character was supposed to have Native American lineage, an egregious error that simply goes to show how Hollywood has whitewashed Native American history over time.
There are plenty of other examples that tell us why this particular film, should it happen with this cast, makes for a ghastly idea. One example is the biblical epic, Exodus and Kings, the 2014 film in which Christian Bale was cast as Moses. In fact, the film irked people even before its release since most of the Middle Eastern and African characters featured in the film were, once again, played by white actors. Filmmaker Ridley Scott defended this decision of casting white actors as Egyptians by saying that he wouldn’t have been able to finance the film otherwise. Look closely at Bale’s face or Joel Edgerton and you can see the “bronze” effect. Not making it is apparently not a choice.
Similarly, in 2014, Russell Crowe, Emma Watson and a bunch of other white stars featured in Darren Aronofsky’s Noah, a re-telling of the story of Noah’s Ark. The film made money but earned flak for its non-white characters.
Anthea Butler, an associate professor of religious studies at the University of Pennsylvania, said on the subject: “It’s a world where only white people get saved...this doesn’t look like the world that God created.”
