Our Bodies, Their Selves

Altered Carbon, a maximalist cyberpunk series arriving on Netflix this Friday, is the story of Takeshi Kovacs, a half-Japanese, half-Slavic fighting machine who, after being unconscious for 250 years--more on the logistics shortly--is revived in the body of a white cop. This is a particularly complicated version of whitewashing, the Hollywood habit of casting white actors in historically nonwhite roles, insofar as Altered Carbon is based on a novel by Richard K. Morgan, in which an Asian man is stuck in the body of a white man and not happy about it. "I stared into a fragmented mirror at the face I was wearing as if it had committed a crime against me," Kovacs says in the book, after seeing his new visage for the first time. Altered Carbon is not Ghost in the Shell, the boondoggle of a film in which a (cybernetic) Asian character was played by Scarlett Johansson. In flashbacks, Kovacs is played by the Asian actor Will Yun Lee, and in future seasons the character may be played by a nonwhite actor.