Saw two interesting movies, and three shorts, as part of the Urbanworld film festival, which focuses primarily on black and latino films.
Friday saw The Slanted Screen, Jeff Adachi's look at how Asian American men have been portrayed in movies. The film consisted of clips and interviews and would make a good addition to any Asian American Cinema 101 class.
It had its flaws--a weirdly-affected female narrator, an abrupt beginning, the startling omission of either Greg Pak or any of his films, and no interviews with Justin Lin or Wayne Wang--but managed to pack a lot into its 60 minutes.
I learned about Sessue Hayakawa, a silent-film era star born in Japan who had a remarkable life and career in Hollywood. From Wikipedia:
Sessue Hayakawa was born Hayakawa Kintaro in Nanaura, Chiba, Japan on June 10, 1890, the second eldest son of the provincial governor. From early on he was groomed for a career as a naval officer. But in 1907, at 17, he took a schoolmate's dare to swim to the bottom of a lagoon and ruptured an eardrum. He was studying at the Naval Academy in Etajima but his perfect health was now shattered and he failed the navy's rigorous physical. His proud father became depressed, humiliated and shamed. Consequently, the father-son relationship suffered.
The strained relationship between the Kintaros drove the 18-year-old to decide to commit harakiri. One quiet night after dinner Hayakawa entered a garden shed on his parents' property, locked his favorite dog outside and spread a white sheet on the ground. To uphold his family's samurai tradition, Hayakawa stabbed himself in the abdomen more than 30 times. But the dog's barking alerted Hayakawa's family and his father smashed through the shed door with an axe in time to save his son.
Hayakawa was on vacation in Los Angeles when he drifted into The Japanese Playhouse in Little Tokyo and became caught up in acting and staging plays. That was when he first assumed the name Sessue Hayakawa. ...
This was Hayakawa's Hollywood heyday. Hayakawa was one of the highest paid Hollywood stars of his time, making over $5,000 a week in 1915, then $2 million a year through his own production company in 1920s. Hayakawa's popularity rivaled that of Douglas Fairbanks, Charlie Chaplin and John Barrymore with film audiences. He drove a gold-plated Pierce-Arrow. He entertained lavishly in his Hollywood castle, the scene of some of the film community's wildest parties. Just before prohibition took effect in 1920 he bought a carload of booze. Hayakawa once claimed that he owed his social success to his liquor supply.
A bad business deal forced Hayakawa to leave Hollywood in 1921. The next 15 years saw him performing in New York, France, England and Japan. In 1924 he made The Great Prince Chan and The Story of Su in London. In 1925 he wrote a novel, The Bandit Prince, and turned it into a short play. In 1930 he performed in a one act play written especially for him, Samurai, for King George V of Great Britain and Queen Mary. He also became very popular in France thanks to the prevailing French fascination with anything Asian. In 1930 Hayakawa returned to Japan and produced a Japanese-language stage version of The Three Musketeers, and adopted two girls and one boy.
In one night during the peak of his success, he gambled away $1 million at Monte Carlo, shrugging off the loss while another Japanese gambler who lost a fortune committed suicide.
In the 1930s his career began to suffer from the rise of talkies, and a growing anti-Japanese sentiment. Hollywood deemed his gifts unsuited to the new talkies. Hayakawa's talking film debut came in 1931 in Daughter of the Dragon starring opposite Anna May Wong.
I'd only known him from Bridge Over the River Kwai; hearing and reading about him reminded me of
Anna May Wong's perhaps even-more remarkable story. She suffered a similar career arc, which reminds you that progress is neither linear nor assured and you never know when those days are over.
The documentary also focused on Bruce Lee, of course, winding up with more recent film and television series such as Better Luck Tomorrow, Charlotte Sometimes and Lost. The message seemed to be Asian American males are increasingly occupying the behind-the-scenes power positions of screenwriter, director and producer (not to mention high-level studio and network executives), and are thus able to share their view of reality.
Then again, one of the guys interviewed recounted how an Asian American friend of his had been invited to submit a screenplay for
The O.C.; when he got it back, all of his incidental Asian American characters were changed to white. When he asked why, the reply was well, the O.C. characters aren't the type to hang out with anyone non-white.
Which is interesting, insofar as that makes the characters racist--anyone who's ever been to Orange County knows only a deliberate attempt would allow you to avoid non-whites. Glad to see in 2006 a hit television series isn't afraid to show the interior lives of racists, look forward to Ryan/Marissa/Seth discovering the Klan.
At any rate, the most interesting discovery for me was
Dr. Darrell Hamamoto, a professor of Asian American Studies at UC Davis, and
Frank Chin, a Chinese American playwright.
Hamamoto was well-put-together, smoothly articulate, affable and gave off an air of being easily perceptive. Chin was his opposite. Hamamoto, I'd say, is the perfect person to analyze Asian American film on camera, he's someone whites would be persuaded by and easy to understand, like most female Asian American newscasters. But at the same time he's not a sell-out nor does he just make shallow, unobtrusive points.
Chin is not as good at playing the game. The Heath Anthology says:
Much of Chin’s notoriety stems from the positions he and his colleagues take in the introductory essays in those collections. One of their central concerns is the emasculating effect of anti-Asian racism as epitomized by stereotypical figures like Charlie Chan and Fu Manchu. Another controversial aspect of Chin’s nonfictional writing has been his relentless criticism of writers such as David Henry Hwang, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Amy Tan; in his view, these writers falsify Asian and Asian American culture. Critics point out the misogyny and homophobia that propel Chin’s polemics, but they also acknowledge the significance of his pioneering work as a literary historian. Indeed many of the writers that Chin and his colleagues champion—such as Louis Chu, John Okada, and Hisaye Yamamoto—have been accorded a privileged place in Asia American literary studies.
I can see why people, even Asian Americans, might not like him and dismiss what he has to say. The way he communicates is a bit too straight; it's not polished or prefaced.
For example, he says straight out he thinks of
Bruce Lee more of an indictment of the way Asian American males are portrayed on-screen, rather than as the transcendental figure most of the other commentators (the actors especially) make him out to be.
After all Lee, Chin says, was an American (now how many people know that?!), born in San Francisco. His family returned to Hong Kong when he was a year old--despite coming back to America to attend school and start his filmmaking career, he could only become a big star by going back to Hong Kong. In this country, his on-screen roles, Chin points out, were relegated to driving and washing a car for his white boss, and attacking--sic, Bruce!--when told.
It's an uncomfortable but accurate truth that continues to this day--there are very few incidents on-screen where Asian American males are leaders, and white males are followers.
And those rare cases tend to be written or directed or produced by Asian Americans themselves. Chin says this is because whites are afraid of Asian Americans--we're smarter, we work harder, if we're not blocked we'll take over. This is made manifest in shows like 24, a wildly-popular series where a white male single-handedly drives all and saves all, and who next season takes on the Chinese government (wonder who'll win).
But it's usually more subtle than that--head doctors and executives are white, underlings are Asian American; undermining comments are made by whites and directed at minorities; plot is driven by the motivation and personal stories of the white characters, people of color either play the patronizing 'magic negro' roles, are the bad guys, or are there to bring out elements of the white characters--to be talked to or acted upon.
And less you think it's just Chin and me, Lois Salisbury, the former director Children Now, says in the documentary that in the studies they've done with children, kids always assign leadership roles to whites, and underling roles to minorities. And that the Asian American kids notice that they're rarely portrayed in media.
Maybe that's because certain white actors are better at playing Asian and Asian Americans?
Angry Asian Man: More yellowface news! There's a Marco Polo TV miniseries in the works, telling the story of the 13th-century traveler and his journey to Mongolia and his time in the court of Kublai Khan: 'Lost' Vet Plays 'Marco Polo'. Ian Somerhalder, formerly of Lost, will play Marco Polo. That's not the yellowface news. B.D. Wong will plays Marco Polo's servant. That's not the yellowface news either. Brian Dennehy will apparently play Kublai Khan... who, if history remembers correctly, was Asian. Now how are they going to pull that one off?
Of course, Asian American males aren't alone in Hollywood et al's myopia; preceding the documentary were two shorts, both by female directors.
Untold Legacy used NYC to explore a national movement to require companies that do business with cities to research their archives and disclose the company's actions and profits, if any, during slavery. As the first step toward reparations, there are no penalties of any kind, except for companies that refuse to disclose.
Theresa Thanjan's
Whose Children are These is probably one of the most powerful short documentaries I've ever seen. It looked at three American Muslims in NYC who were affected by the 2002 National Security Entry Exit Registration System, which required boys and men 16 and older from 23 Middle Eastern and Arab countries (and North Korea) who were not citizens or green card holders to register with the government.
Ultimately, Thanjan's film says, 83,000 men registered; 13,799--many long-time American residents with families--were put into detention or deported. How many were charged with terrorism, or a terrorism-related crime? None.
Each of Thanjan's three subjects are great on-screen--one because of her well-argued points, another for the power of how he and his friends respond, a third because of sheer emotion. They're all throughly American, represent the fulfillment of their parents' immigrant dreams and actually you'd be hard-pressed to find three more normal and appealing teens.
And they've had a more hard-headed version of American shoved down their throats. Including the well-meaning but idiot teachers of one of them, who had her take off her headscarf and crouch down in the back of her car as she raced to get her home on 9/11.
Symbolism matters--for a white person to tell someone that in their own country the only way they could survive is by hiding is pretty harmful.
Photo of Sessue Hayakawa via Golden Sea.Photo of Navila from Whose Children Are These.
