Why “To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before” is Everything This Country Needs Right Now

Twitter blew up over the past few weeks about some guy named Peter Kavinsky and the resurgent ideal of young love. In digging, I found a light-hearted, well cast, adapted to screenplay, and directed, quirky Young Adult romantic comedy called To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before on Netflix that is so much more than the sum of its parts.
Race and Culture Are Not Characters, Nor Are They Ignored
So much about Hollywood’s narrative of race and culture are that they often need to be centerpieces in the storyline in order to tell the story — that they are causal to key parts of the film or are foundational secondary characters themselves in screenplays.
Race and culture in “To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before” are deeply woven into character backstories and identities, where the roles they play are much more transformative to the viewing experience. Characters in this film are afforded the time to develop and the complexities of their backstories, race and culture included (but also fractured families and lost parents). Here, race and culture offer opportunities for curiosity, learning, and connection instead of stereotype and trope.
In Lara Jean Conway’s story, we find ourselves in a world where neither race nor culture are a part of the primary storyline — they do not impact choices that are made between the two characters that affect the primary outcomes of the love story at all, nor do race and culture come up as points of friction among the secondary characters in the film. It’s certainly not a post-racial world, but it is an ambitious view into what American culture could evolve to — where race and culture are acknowledged but are not necessarily drivers of how we are perceived.
In fact, there is a striking and notable amount of diversity in the background characters in nearly every scene. For what looks like a fairly small town, viewers experience a remarkable amount of ethnic representation at that high school and in town, and it all feels very natural. When Lara Jean walks out of the cafeteria post back-pocket spin and love letter, viewers are delighted with an array of faces of all races.
It is a world where one of Lara Jean’s former crushes is not only black but also gay — and while he may be tentative about shouting his sexual orientation from the rooftops (because “it’s just… high school”), it is still common knowledge and he gets invited to the popular crowd parties. It is the potential of what American cities and towns can be.
The Conways themselves being an interracial family in some modern English speaking country offer viewers very little additional context when it comes to the struggles of growing up not quite White and not quite Korean. It’s simply a part of the film’s subtext — they live in a world where race and culture do not influence relationships and their outcomes. Given that as of 2013, 1 in 4 living in the US were first generation American or had at least 1 parent who was foreign born, to assume that race and culture can be entirely neutral in America is still somewhat of a delightful stretch. And this absence, while some may argue is naive at its best, makes me hopeful.
