you know another white guy to fill the roll at essentially the last minute. Who would be available? The other bankable white guys are likely all booked on short notice and the choice is probably either to push the project out or to go with that second binder of white guy "stars."
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So... Wahlberg. Now, someone should have said somewhere along this process that Wahlberg is not going to be seen kindly in a film that has anything to do with Asian heritage - specifically to the extent that it is in INFINITE where, explicitly, this white guy is the beneficiary
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of Asian experience. Wahlberg, you see, has been to prison for beating an Asian man with a stick. He's also been arrested for intimidating and shouting the n-word at a group of Black children. BUT no cooler heads were in the room and by that I mean no one with any kind of social
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awareness or decency. Here's the hard part for AAPI: it doesn't matter. INFINITE is getting blown up for being terrible, but I'm not reading very much if anything at all about Wahlberg as an offensive choice here instead of just an obviously limited actor. So whatever calculus
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the "room" went through to arrive at Wahlberg is, not justified, but not excoriated for its cultural insensitivity. They got away with it. They will again. Because no one is holding them accountable for it. And there is no real diversity at the decision-making level.
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I would even extend this to say that the casting of a white guy as the lead for this premise is just in another long, long line of white heroes learning skills from Asian masters - a conceit so exhausted that I never want to see it again. Ever. It's also a conceit so baked in
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that if you had cast, say, Donnie Yen here instead of Markey Mark, I'd wager most of whatever audience there is for this shipwreck would be confused that he even needed past life experience to know how to forge a Samurai sword and do kung fu. Don't Asians just know that? So for
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this premise to even work in the West, the lead has to be white because white men are the only ones who think that they should be good at everything without ever putting in the work; who think they should get the benefits of every culture because they don't have one of their own.
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In that way - and that way, only - INFINITE is spot on in identifying Wahlberg as the recipient of all the world's largess by just the baseline fact that he was unemployed at the right time.
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