Photos Of Macaulay Culkin's Actual Halloween Costume Go Viral After He's Accused Of Donning Blackface

Halloween is not just an annual tradition of donning costumes, but also an annual tradition of arguing about whether or not those costumes are appropriate.

And this year, actor Macaulay Culkin was among those in the hot seat after he was accused of wearing blackface after a selfie he posted of himself in costume.

Culkin dressed up as an Army soldier of old, perhaps of the Korean or Vietnam War era, and posted a dimly lit selfie to Instagram in which he stared at the camera in face paint looking shell-shocked.

The dim lighting immediately made people assume he was wearing blackface. Many in fact thought the costume might be an homage to Robert Downey Jr.'s character in the film Tropic Thunder.

In that film, a satire of Hollywood, Downey plays an insufferable method-actor Australian movie star who undergoes a skin-darkening procedure to play a Black Vietnam soldier in a bid to win an Oscar.

Downey Jr.'s costume for the role included blackface.

Others thought Culkin's character was a reference to the "thousand-yard stare meme," which uses artist Thomas C. Lea III's painting "The Two-Thousand Yard Stare" depicting a shell-shocked World War II soldier gazing into space.

Whatever the case, Culkin's costume touched off quite a controversy on social media, with many convinced it was either blackface or way too close to it.

The problem, of course, is that anyone who passed kindergarten can clearly see that Culkin's face is green, not black, and many found the controversy absurd.

But it became even more so when photos of Culkin out and about on Halloween with his fiancée Brenda Song hit the internet.

In those photos, Culkin is very clearly dressed as a green Army soldier from the Toy Story films, with Song dressed as Jessie the Cowgirl from the films and one of their sons dressed as Buzz Lightyear.

Which touched off a whole other round of discourse.

Others attempted to explain what actually happened—the lighting in the room made the green look darker than it was, and people jumped to conclusions.

Which is all fair enough, but the makeup still very clearly looked green in the photo and the reference to the meme was pretty clear. But nevertheless, some are refusing to back down.

Moral of the story is, it seems, to never do greenface either. Because you just never know if the viewer of your social media post can tell one color face paint from another.