haha, I thought both halves were about the same cop. I am so white.

OP, I didn't realize they were two different people until 3/4 into the movie! I watch Asian films all the time so I don't know why!!!

Who Killed Laura Palmer?

Before throwing around insults, you might take a moment to learn a bit about the topics (inadvertently) raised, lest you find yourself being the one displaying ignorance..

First of tall, take race out of it entirely for a moment: facial recognition ability varies between people more than most realize. Prosopagnosia is the extreme of that (literally "face blindness"), and people on the autism spectrum often have difficulty with facial recognition to different degrees, but beyond that: many who are otherwise neurotypical differ in how well their brain automatically performs this task, requiring cognitive effort be made to compensate for what other people just have happen automatically. If it helps, think of it as similar to how dyslexia effects the ability to read. These people aren't "dumb", I hope you agree. They do need to expend more effort on a specific task. While most manage this in every day life well enough for it to not be a big issue, it is difficult and distracting to do while watching a movie. Not recognizing actors is *really common*, basically. People mostly laugh this off as being "not good with faces" or some such, which identifies the effect but says little more about it. It's pretty uncharitable to hold this against anybody, in my opinion. People usually mean it apologetically, such as when they don't recognize a person they met recently and know they should, and life is going to be a really irritating journey if you have that kind of reaction every time someone is less than perfect around you.

Of course you can't take race out entirely, I understand this. However, before throwing stones, you should read up on the effect "cross race facial recognition bias", something that there is a good deal of study spanning academic fields, but little consensus as to the exact mechanism. What *is* known and agreed upon is that people have a harder time with facial recognition of ethnic groups other than their own pretty much universally -- frequently to the degree that others literally do "look all alike". It's not a white or Asian thing at all. So if you're going to hold people morally accountable when they fail at this, I hope you're including everyone, including yourself. Though you may not have had trouble with these actors in this movie, I can safely say you too have the same cognitive bias and thus likely have made the same mistake without even knowing it, unless you spend no time at all around anybody of another ethnicity in the first place. Which wouldn't be a good position to criticize from.

It's important to note that the bias hasn't been demonstrated to correlate with having a negative racial attitude in any significant way. Obviously, it can exacerbate it or be used in service of bigotry, but to not separate the two is a stretch that ignores how widespread the effect has been observed among all ethnic groups that have been tested for this in independent study. Rather than racial prejudice, it is seemingly a fundamental short-coming of human brain circuitry and how it performs facial recognition in the first place, which is complex and not well understood itself. It is one of the first functions an infant develops, and how much is tied to what we are exposed to at that age vs. something more biological or hereditary is more or less unknown, like a lot of things that involve a question of nature vs nurture in human development. Another thing mostly agreed upon is that more frequent exposure to other ethnicities improves one's ability to recognize individuals of the group.

Someone who is racially bigoted thinks they "all look alike" and like to say so, it's true; but it's important to understand that this is true of basically everyone as a default state without making compensatory effort. What sets the bigot apart is the unwillingness to make that effort, or even acknowledge that there is any effort to be made. The nasty implication inherit in such a statement made in the pejorative is that the other group is *less than human*, thus are indistinguishable in the same way animals or insects would be. I don't see any evidence the original poster was doing this -- even obliquely -- seeing as how she expressed embarrassment for the mistake, so this kind of response is pretty unhelpful if racial prejudice is something you care about. It just shuts people down, which is the exact opposite of what needs to happen for humans to be better at these things.

One can read more about it on The Internet, naturally: https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=on&q=Cross-race+effect will yield a good amount of material to start with. I should warn though: Most of it worth reading will be behind academic journal paywalls, and the wikipedia article is sadly of poor quality, such that I hesitate to recommend it. For obvious reasons, this is a contentious topic, and since there isn't academic consensus, it's one of those topics that various people come at with their own political hobbyhorse in tow, taking advantage the lack of consensus provides to reframe things in a way the available evidence and experimental data doesn't support as strongly as they make them out to, if at all. It can be difficult to suss out when this is happening, especially against someone citing academic studies in journals you can't even read due to how journal access works. Just be aware that even within the academic fields interested in this subject, there are pretty major disagreement on a number of points, particularly what correlation the effect has to racial stereotypes in certain contexts. It's frequently the case that Study A seems to demonstrate something (such as "white people are worse at this than African-Americans"), while study B, C, and D either contradict it or at least fail to support the conclusion or demonstrate the effect at all. Part of the problem is insisting on fitting this into the narrow context of race relations in the United States, when it's clearly a much broader topic. Someone who cherry picks among these studies to make a point is probably being dishonest. I mention this because the WikiPedia article appears to be written by a professor who has a stake in this subject, to the degree that other editors have had to remove him linking to his own publications and research, which violates policies in place for maintaining neutrality and verifiability. Even if his/her take on this is objectively correct, it hasn't been demonstrated yet at this time in any verifiable way, and is thus a highly misleading way to frame a wikipedia article. I'm not sure to what degree this is going on there, as I don't have time or inclination to go through it with a comb, but it set off my warning bells in a way wikipedia rarely does, so huge grain of salt if you end up there. And probably anywhere else for that matter, but especially wikipedia due to it normally being good about this sort of thing, and for some reason dropping the ball on this one.


TLDR version: 1) Watch more foreign films and this will happen less. 2) shaming people for the mistake is a kind of jerk thing to do if they weren't themselves being a jerk, since it's likely they found it genuinely difficult to make the distinction through no fault of their own. Of course, someone who *kept* making this mistake and being lulz about it without making any effort would be worthy of criticism too, but there's no way of knowing that is the case here, and benefit of the doubt is a thing for a reason.

Cheers,