Netflix’s ‘The Outsider’ is a Profound Case of Oblivious

Hollywood’s history of whitewashing Japanese source material is a thing of appropriated legend.

From M Knight Shymalan’s ‘The Last Air Bender’ (2010) to ‘Dragonball Evolution”s (2009) lily white Goku, Nat Wolff in Netflix’s ‘Death Note'(2017), Emile Hirsch as ‘Speed Racer’ (2008) and Scarlett Johannsson’s Major Motoko Kusanagi in ‘Ghost in the Shell’ (2017), the reimagining of Japanese anime and manga with white leads is nothing new but the backlash is becoming severe.

See Ed Skrein.

Initially cast as Major Ben Daimio in ‘Hellboy: Rise of the Blood Queen’, ultimately the ‘Deadpool’ (2016) star dropped out of the film after the outcry surrounding an English actor playing a Japanese-American character in the age of “oh, hell no!”

Thatta boy, Ed.

Over at Netflix, however, the memo seems to have gotten lost under the script for ‘Bright’ (2017).

Having recently released ‘The Outsider’, a film starring Jared Leto as an American inmate in 1950s Japan summarily welcomed into the upper echelons of the Yakuza after doing one of its members a solid in an Osaka prison, Netflix proves spectacularly tone-deaf in its latest original.

Not joining Hollywood’s storied tradition of whitewashing in a Yakuza-by-numbers script by Andrew Baldwin per se, instead ‘The Outsider’ trots in the white saviour who is quick to cut off his fingers in contrition, get a Irezumi tattoo and avenge his Yakuza family all while his fellow Americans, shortly after the Allied occupation of the country, continue to belittle the locals.

Unconvincing, scant on motivation, backdropping Japanese characters and doing that weird thing movies sometimes do when situating white actors in foreign countries – namely making white protagonists quick studies in local culture, traditions and skills and the epitome of the society’s most revered virtues while awarding them the fairest significant other of them all usually against someone’s wishes – ‘The Outsider’ is white worshipping and problematic in a way that is so dumb it speaks to a profound case of oblivious.