Steven Nguyen Scaife | The Verge

Crazy Rich Asians has survived impossible representation standards

2018-08-28T12:48:51-04:00

In traditional American media, Asian characters are frequently stereotyped as meek, corner-dwelling folks with little to say. They’re rarely more than a shorthand: bully victims, the romantically inept, people who are good at uncool stuff like math or piano. (Occasionally, they know kung-fu or they dispense ancient wisdom.) Nuanced Asian representation is hard to come by in Hollywood. That’s why so many people seem to be hoping that the strong critical and box office success of the widely released romantic comedy Crazy Rich Asians, which features an entirely Asian cast playing a variety of character types, will help change the media landscape. The “quiet Asians” stereotype already looks out of step next to the film’s bombastic arrival, which has ignited discussion and praise in every corner of the internet pretty much since the project was announced.

the film has inevitably drawn scrutiny for who it depicts and how it depicts them

There’s also been a fair bit of controversy over the film, starting with an outcry over the casting of the male lead, Henry Golding. Some people questioned whether his mixed heritage meant the studio was defaulting to Western standards of beauty: was he Asian enough for Crazy Rich Asians? Next (and most notably) came vocal criticism about the film lacking diversity in depicting its chief setting of Singapore. The few darker-skinned characters who showed up in the trailers were subservient to the glamorous crazy-rich East Asians in the principal cast. Those criticisms were renewed after the film’s release: what about the South and Southeast Asians?

The title of the film is partly to blame here. It’s taken from the title of the book it adapts, Kevin Kwan’s best-selling 2013 novel Crazy Rich Asians. In bringing the story to a wider audience, Jon M. Chu’s film has attracted attention and debate over the use of “Asians” as a term. With such a broad promise of representation in the title, the film has inevitably drawn scrutiny for who it depicts and how it depicts them. And it’s been held to a burden of representation it couldn’t possibly meet.

The film follows Chinese-American Rachel Chu (Constance Wu), who travels to Singapore with her boyfriend Nick Young (Golding) to meet his family. Though they’ve been dating for some time, Rachel wasn’t aware that Nick’s family is immensely wealthy. The title works two ways: “crazy rich” is an accurate descriptor of the Young fortune, but “crazy” also describes how the rich Asians resist Rachel’s presence. Some family members and hangers-on think she’s a gold-digger, while the Young matriarch Eleanor (Michelle Yeoh) is convinced Rachel and her American pursue-your-passion philosophy are a poor model for a dutiful Chinese son and heir.

There are no white audience surrogates in ‘Crazy Rich Asians,’ and no apology for it

The movie’s cultural stakes and the scrutiny they’ve invited come perilously close to eclipsing every other facet of the movie. Crazy Rich Asians isn’t the last chance for Asian-American filmmaking outside the indie circuit, partially because “last chance” implies that there have been many other chances. It is, however, an all-too-rare test case. There hasn’t been an Asian-heavy Hollywood production like this for decades, and Chu’s film is unapologetic about that fact. There are no white audience surrogates. Non-Asian viewers are invited to see the movie’s world through someone else’s ethnic lens, as minorities have had to do since the beginning of cinema — and still have to. The film’s financial success could open the floodgates for further representation, or so the thinking goes.

But in this case, the quality of the film also matters. Though five Michael Bay Transformers movies might beg to differ, Americans tend to conflate a film’s financial success with its quality. For a film that represents a marginalized group, however — films like Moonlight or Tangerine or The Florida Project — the demands become more complicated. For people who are so rarely depicted on-screen, the well-documented hunger to be represented is surpassed by a deep-seated need to be represented well.

Decades of representation that’s either trivializing or nonexistent have made many groups protective of their image. Nobody wants Long Duk Dong in Sixteen Candles or Apu from The Simpsons to be the definitive cultural touchstone for their background, and yet it’s painfully apparent that with so little representation, any representation easily becomes the definitive representation. The 25-year-old film The Joy Luck Club is cited in countless Crazy Rich Asians articles not because it’s an easy reference, but because it’s historically the only reference for a major studio picture solely about Asian-American characters. Crazy Rich Asians has prompted retrospectives on Joy Luck Club, Better Luck Tomorrow, and a handful of other movies specifically because they represent the entirety of the mainstream Asian-American cinema.

And within such a small space, films like Sixteen Candles, The Joy Luck Club, or Crazy Rich Asians are essentially what Asian people will be to millions of people. For Slate, Inkoo Kang has written about how such a burden has had negative repercussions for The Joy Luck Club in particular: “an environment where only one person, or portrayal, is permitted to stand in for the whole is bound to turn into a breeding ground for resentment.”

Nobody wants Long Duk Dong in ‘Sixteen Candles’ to represent their culture

American society is heavily defined by the media we consume. Our real-life exposure to different types of people is supplemented with (or in some cases, superseded by) the people we encounter in our entertainment, fictional or otherwise. I grew up in the Midwest, a half-Vietnamese kid perpetually mistaken for the only other Asian kid (half-Chinese) in my grade. Growing up, I was repeatedly asked whether I spoke Chinese or Japanese (never Vietnamese) and whether I knew karate because the kids around me had only seen people like me through martial arts movies and TV shows or stories about people with strong accents.

I grew up with my appearance compared to Korean-American actor John Cho (I look nothing like him) or outright called “Harold” because all the kids in school had seen Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle. This kind of profound ignorance of other cultures is reflected in and reinforced by the culture at large where the types of projects that do or don’t get greenlit depend heavily on what people think of Asian-Americans. Can they lead films? Play love interests? Manage any role greater than the local geek, the walk-on delivery boy, or the martial-arts henchperson?

I felt relief sitting in the theater for 2017’s Ghost in the Shell. And I felt equally relieved sitting on my couch, watching the first episode of Iron Fist or the American Death Note movie on Netflix. These projects didn’t have Asian leads, but they might have. There were vocal pushes for someone other than Scarlett Johansson to play the definitively non-white character of Motoko Kusanagi (renamed Mira Killian), and the same went for Nat Wolff as Light Yagami (re-envisioned as Light Turner from Seattle). People wanted the comics character Danny Rand, the Iron Fist, to be rewritten as an Asian guy to push back against the original comics’ white-savior overtones. None of these anti-whitewashing campaigns succeeded. And none of the resulting projects were enjoyable or worthwhile, either, which is where the relief came in: Asians had escaped any marquee association with these clunkers, avoided any damage to the “brand” of Asian representation. Bullet dodged; crisis averted.

I felt relief that Asians had escaped any marquee association with these clunkers, avoided any damage to the “brand” of Asian representation

I felt relief of a different kind while sitting in the theater watching Crazy Rich Asians. The leads have great chemistry. The jokes are funny. The film is profoundly normalizing and pleasant to watch. When a group is given such a small space in the media landscape, it leaves no room for error. Creators can’t blow their handful of chances on financially unsuccessful or creatively unfulfilling projects: they need to make the most of their space by being powerful, enriching, and unique. When your voice is so rarely heard, you have little choice but to use every opportunity to prove that everyone should have been paying attention all along. A project like Crazy Rich Asians is a rare chance to change minds, and if it flops, it might be another 25 years before a similar chance comes along.

That’s why there’s been so much backlash around Crazy Rich Asians. Detractors say the film fails to represent the true diversity of Singapore, while headlines ask whether it’s “Asian enough.” With so much pressure to get things right the first time, “right” has come to mean reflecting the sheer breadth of the Asian experience in a single film. The film has been heralded as a victory for diversity, so members of a widely diverse group are all hoping to see themselves represented.

Crazy Rich Asians does have its shortcomings. Its heavily criticized narrow perspective does make sense in the context of the insular, classist culture of Nick’s family, who are largely poised as the film’s antagonists. But the movie stops short of reproach. Rachel is, after all, fighting for their approval, and she eventually reaches an accommodation with them. The darker side of the movie’s wealth fantasy dissipates once Rachel is welcomed into the fold.

Although that’s an expected part of this romantic fantasy, it’s still somewhat disappointing, given the otherwise authentic emotions the film invokes. Crazy Rich Asians shows Rachel’s sense of inadequacy and alienation in a place where it would seem she should be accepted; she’s second-generation Chinese and a young professor at the prestigious NYU. Henry even remarks that he thought she’d impress his mother. But while an outside observer might think she fits in, Rachel is all but shunned. Her feelings are amplified as Eleanor recognizes her pain and even empathizes with it yet still gives her the cold shoulder.

That combination of sensations feels deeply relatable to Asian viewers who feel disconnected from their heritage. Personally, as the child of a Vietnamese mother adopted and brought to America by a white family, I often feel like I only have a slightly stronger connection to my “homeland” than anyone else who has spent time in a pho joint. I left the movie wishing it had gone a little deeper into that interrogation of Asian-American insecurity. Ultimately, however, Crazy Rich Asians seems to prize a more broadly appealing celebration of extravagance. It must, after all, play to the largest crowd it can.

And why shouldn’t it? For BuzzFeed, Alison Willmore notes that the movie is an escapist fantasy, “blithely liberated from the obligation to offer up suffering that has long been part of the implicit bargain made with so many mainstream movies focused on characters of color.” Chu and the writers are out to tell a fun story, with Asian actors front-and-center in a narrative that could not easily be painted over with white characters. The movie does grapple with racial insecurities, but it isn’t required to. And the feeling that it must comes from a similar place as the demands that it represent a broader swath of the Asian experience. Ideally, a movie like Crazy Rich Asians could simply be what it is: a light, enjoyable good rom-com that dramatizes the lives of the wealthy, as white films have been allowed to do for more than a century. Instead, it’s being saddled with 25 years of built-up expectations and unfair hopes.

In an age where blockbusters are driven more by brand names than the people who actually star in them, Asian representation is still sorely lacking. Though films like Crazy Rich Asians may be PR wins for distributors who briefly bring the marginalized up onto the wide-release stage, that space could just as easily go to white-male-centric entertainment that’s still considered a safer, more familiar bet. We are made to fight for our space, and we argue over how to divide the scraps. We hope for optimistic box-office reports, and we pray for any movie we’re in to be good because these are the tools we have to fight and to justify the use of the small space we’ve been given. Crazy Rich Asians opened as the biggest film of its weekend, and its success has continued into its second week, with a minuscule drop in viewership. The way audiences have embraced it only proves how unfair this cycle has been, as Hollywood has consistently failed to represent the marginalized while asking them to prove the existence of an audience that has been there all along.

Cult favorite anime FLCL is back with new episodes — but 15 years later, the original still shines

2018-06-02T14:30:02-04:00

The 2000 miniseries FLCL (usually pronounced “Fooly Cooly”) has always been an outlier among popular anime in the US. While it includes familiar elements like fighting robots, malevolent corporations, and space pirates, they aren’t the focus. Instead, they’re more like set dressing for its hyperkinetic, experimental narrative about a young boy coming of age in a small town. FLCL has aliens, but it isn’t about aliens. It’s about the sensations of growing up and feeling stuck somewhere you don’t want to be — or as someone you don’t want want to be anymore.

Despite the wild, experimental nature of the series, American anime fans thoroughly embraced FLCL since its debut on Adult Swim in 2003, turning it into a cult hit with influences on familiar shows like Teen Titans and Avatar: The Last Airbender. Its legacy is so enduring that 15 years after the miniseries premiered on their channel, Adult Swim has funded two additional seasons: FLCL Progressive, the first episode of which airs tonight, and FLCL Alternative; which debuts in September.

The original FLCL follows Naota Nandaba, a pre-teen who lives with his widowed, self-absorbed dad and grandpa in a dead-end town. One day, Haruko Haruhara — the pink-haired woman who appears on most FLCL art and promotional material — crashes into Naota with her scooter, then clocks him in the head with a bass guitar. From there, Naota’s forehead serves as an unfortunate portal for the big, awful robots created by the unscrupulous corporation Medical Mechanica, which owns a hilltop factory in the shape of an iron. The soundtrack draws heavily from the discography of Japanese indie band The Pillows, whose wistful brand of alt-rock underscores every climactic scene.

The two new FLCL series shift the focus to new protagonists: Progressive follows 14-year-old Hidomi and her friend Ide as they encounter extraterrestrial beings who want to “unlock their hidden potential,” while Alternative introduces the 17-year-old Kana, whose humdrum life is interrupted by a giant mecha falling from the sky. It’s not entirely starting from scratch, however; the press release teases the appearance of familiar names like Haruko Haruhara and Atomsk, as well as the iconic Vespa Scooter from the original series.

While many of these touchstones are useful to know about in advance of the new seasons, why people care so deeply about FLCL is tougher to pin down. It’s not exactly accessible, on first glance. FLCL arrives with the force of Haruko’s instrumental assault, determined to shove you full of as much flashy animation, meta comedy, and legitimate melancholy as you can take for 20ish minutes. Each of FLCL’s six episodes are so packed with details, rapid-fire jokes and animation shifts that the show practically demands repeat viewings to disentangle the story from the noise. This is not a long-running series you can count on to gingerly guide you through a winding plot; each of its six episodes feels like a super-charged event where the story ends just as it starts to make sense.

Each of its six episodes feels like a super-charged event where the story ends just as it starts to make sense

But despite its eccentric and sometimes bizarre presentation, FLCL evokes the growing pains and complicated feelings of puberty (as well as unambiguous phallic imagery) in far more relatable terms. While some of its individual elements don’t always “make sense” (like why people swing guitars around like the jokey Hanna-Barbera vigilante El Kabong remains one of many open questions), the series as a whole coalesces into an abstract but sympathetic story about what it means to grow up — and one whose inscrutability demands closer attention.

FLCL’s protagonist, Naota, is one of those kids who’s convinced that being a grown-up is about acting cool, which means not caring about anything. Adulthood, for him, is defined by affected apathy and (eventually) the size of your eyebrows. He is especially irked by his father, his grandfather, and anyone else he perceives as needing to “grow up.” His only role model, his older brother, is gone, recruited to play baseball in America.

But while Naota may appear collected and cynical-beyond-his-years, he’s listless. He spends his days down by the river, hanging out with his brother’s delinquent ex-girlfriend and lugging around a baseball bat he’s never swung. He’s going nowhere, projecting his understanding of adulthood in no particular direction, and he holds the town responsible: “Nothing amazing ever happens here,” he says, even after robots start crawling out of his head. He feels trapped in a place where he doesn’t want to be, even if he doesn’t know where — or who — he wants to be yet. His passive discontent is conveyed through half-colored, half-finished backgrounds and the lazy yellow hue of the color palette, which evokes the drained feeling of being out in the sun too long.

The show settles into these quiet moments of powerlessness, which are enhanced by the incredible chaos elsewhere — impossible, frenetic action and outlandish, cartoonish distortions of character design and movement. This is how FLCL captures viewers’ imagination: not through anything specific or easily discernible, but through the broad strokes of oscillating tones and imagery. Loud, quiet, disturbing? It’s all a messy part of puberty.

Some of the series’ images are powerful, sad, and beautiful all at once, like the introvert truism “never knows best” scrawled onto the side of a lit cigarette being smoked at night on the bridge, alone. A girl watches a robot climb the ruins of a burnt-out schoolhouse and sees it gingerly take flight, as the sun peeks from behind the clouds and the ambling guitar strum of The Pillows gives way to their angsty vocal howl.

FLCL speaks to people because it embodies the profound loneliness of becoming an adult

FLCL speaks to people because it embodies the profound loneliness of becoming an adult. It’s a universal feeling, both in how it resonates with the audience and in how many of the characters share Naota’s aimlessness, but are too insecure to confide in one another as their perceptions of the world undergo wild shifts. And the show validates that loneliness, to a point; it suggests the affected adulthood of Naota and others is juvenile, but it that there’s no specific road map to adulthood and you pretty much have to come to terms with it on your own by getting out of your own head. FLCL empathizes but doesn’t purport to have the answers, because really, who does?

FLCL also fits in well with Adult Swim’s general surrealist aesthetic, which brings us to the question of these further seasons. Although the announcement of the two new series sparked questions from fans about whether there needs to be more FLCL, this scrutiny would be better served asking whether there can be more FLCL — a show whose bizarre confluence of references, emotions and non-sequiturs feels difficult, if not impossible, to replicate.

But after watching the first episode of Progressive, which Adult Swim aired in Japanese for April Fool’s Day, the answer seems promising: that instead of than trying to replicate the original, that the new seasons of FLCL are more interested in evolving. Shifting its focus to new protagonists has the potential to offer fresh perspectives, and while still under the supervision of the original’s director Kazuya Tsurumaki, FLCL Progressive and FLCL Alternative employ a different creative staff as well.

If the original series is about how there’s no single, prescribed way to grow up, then it follows that more episodes could succeed by focusing on others outside Naota and the people he knows, by creating different visions of youth than the one conceived by Tsurumaki and the people he worked with. As one of the show’s more obvious metaphors goes, sometimes to find out what happens, you just need to swing the bat.

Adult Swim’s website has the original FLCL series posted online in English, Hulu has it in subtitled Japanese, and Funimation has both.