At the weekend The Australian published my piece on the race politics of the hit local movie Tomorrow When The War Began, about an unambiguously Asian invasion of Australia, placing it in the context of an "Asian invasion" narrative that goes back at least 100 years.
As the story, I hope, makes clear, there's little doubt that the film's writer-director Stuart Beattie, and John Marsden, who wrote the "young adult" novel from which it's adapted, can not be accused of deliberate racism. But to go from that to assuming the film has no political or racial overtones, as many of its fans like to think, is in my view naive.
Extract:
"Marsden was sufficiently sensitive to the issue to avoid naming the invading nation in the book and its sequels, though he makes it clear they are from a neighbouring country (and it's unlikely anyone concluded this meant New Zealand, Papua New Guinea or Solomon Islands). He has praised the adaptation and called Beattie's decision to go with Asian faces as "gutsy", contradicting a bizarre comment by the film's executive producer, Christopher Mapp, that the invading army "is definitely not specifically Asian at all".
"Asian-Australian filmmaker and former Young Australian of the Year Khoa Do says the decision to make the invaders Asian is "unfortunate", especially given Marsden's decision to avoid identifying them in the novel. While he doesn't think the filmmakers' intentions are racist, he worries the film has "the potential to foster racism against future Asian-Australians", especially given the popularity of the film and book. He says he has worked often with high school-aged children and is aware how easily racism can be stirred up in that environment..."
4 comments:
Given the location of Australia, do you think it's likely that it will ever be invaded by, say, Germans? Swede? No. It will be invaded by Chinese. Some parts of the Pacific have already had a visit from the Japanese forces. Do you have to set aside intelligence for political correctness? You're turning into freaking USA, and that's pathetic.
This is why, even to this day, and in the face of logic, ALL Hollywood bad guys are Nazis. Oh, please, somebody, get a clue!
I'm not a regular, only came here from Twitter, can't imagine coming back. Delete if you so desire, but someone needs to call you for being a putz.
Carolyn - the first and so far only invasion of Australia was by northern Europeans, wasn't it? And Hollywood has had plenty of non-Nazi bad-guys, though I wouldn't hold it up as a fine example of avoiding racial stereotyping.
Edmund
Carolyn, you've scarificed your debating credibility by (a) trotting out the meaningless 'PC' tag - this is a debate about the representation of race, for Chrissakes, not political corrctness - and (b)resorting to personal insults. Worst of all, you fail to discuss any of the issues raised in the article.
carolyn does have a point the most likely place for an invasion of australia to originate from is asia.
the movie red dawn stirred up some similar controversy in the early
80's because of the way the russians were portrayed an
what everyone here is failing to do is to put the movie into the proper context and understand that the movie is on elle and her friends personal struggle not the greater geopolitical and racial issues not once in the movie or in the book series did i come across any overt racism and portraying the enemy as coming from an asian country(and one that is not named)
is neccessary for the story to be believable it woundn't have been successfull if the enemy had been a army of canadian lumberjacks
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