This is
going back a few years now – The
Impossible came out in 2012 – but seeing Tom Holland as the new Spider-Man
in Captain America: Civil War, reminded me of this film,
where he played the teenage son of the central family in the film about the
2004 Indian Ocean tsunami in Thailand.
Now obviously, Tom Holland isn’t Thai, and neither are the actors
playing the rest of the family, including Naomi Watts and Ewan McGregor. However, while it’s fair to acknowledge that
the film is specifically about a family of tourists vacationing in Thailand
when the tsunami hits, it’s based on the true story of a Spanish family’s experiences. The film casts white UK actors in the roles,
anglicizes the characters’ names, and gives them English accents.
There’s
a lot going on here. The fact that the
movie is about a major natural disaster in Asia and doesn’t provide any Asian
perspective is a clear issue, and even once the film moved Asian people out of
the foreground, focusing instead on tourists, the nationality and complexions
of the actual tourist family they were talking about weren’t considered
“universal” enough and so we wound up with a white English family instead. I’ll be looking mainly at the first issue in
this post, since that’s the issue Ewan McGregor regrettably tries to discount
in this quote:
“The truth is, it’s a story about this
family, this western family, who are on holiday there. And that story is many, many people’s
story. But to say that it doesn’t tell
the Thai people’s stories… Naomi’s
character is saved by a Thai man, and taken to safety in a Thai village where
the Thai women dress her. It’s one of
the most moving scenes in the film, really.
In the hospital they’re all Thai nurses and Thai doctors – you see
nothing but Thai people saving lives and helping.”
Sigh… I
get that actors don’t want to burn any bridges against their studios, and really,
when white actors agree to take roles like this, they’re at the very least
complicit in what’s going on. Still, it
saddens me when people I like say these sorts of things. It never, never makes them look anything
resembling good.
So,
Ewan, I’ll grant you that the story is “many, many people’s story,” in that
there were many tourists in Thailand when the tsunami hit. However, that large number of tourists still
pales in comparison to the number of Thai people with their own stories to tell
(who probably didn’t get the same priority medical treatment as the injured
white tourist.) It’d be a bit like
making a Holocaust film about a Jehovah’s Witness in a concentration camp; yes,
some people in concentration camps were Jehovah’s Witnesses there, but the vast
majority were not, a fact very widely
accepted in Hollywood. Although, even
that story would be preferable to this one, since many films have been made
about Jewish people during the Holocaust and so the occasional story about
non-Jewish people wouldn’t constitute erasure.
However, there isn’t a wide body of films about the Indian Ocean tsunami
that tell the stories of the people principally affected by it, and so, a
high-profile movie that tells an outlier story is going to be much more
conspicuous.
Because
all those Thai people in your movie are serving the white characters’
story. They’re there for storytelling
utility, not as real characters. None of
them have names or fears/struggles of their own that are more than
backdrop. That’s what people mean when
they say the film “doesn’t tell the Thai people’s stories,” and to argue
otherwise is disingenuous at best.
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