Aesthetics and Absence: Asian American Representation Onscreen
I finished reading Viet Thanh Nguyen’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Sympathizer the same week that New York subways started putting up posters of Scarlett Johansson in a horrendous black bob for Ghost in the Shell. It was also the week that preliminary reviews came out for Marvel’s new Netflix show Iron Fist, which stars a rich white guy superhero who trains in martial arts (wow, how original). In The Sympathizer, the narrator, a communist sleeper agent in the 1970s, becomes a consultant for a Hollywood film about the Vietnam War. “My task was to ensure that the people scuttling in the background of the film would be real Vietnamese things and dressed in real Vietnamese clothing, right before they died,” the narrator says. In his first meeting with the director, he points out that “all the places in the script where one of my people has a speaking part, he or she screams. No words, just screams. So you should at least get the screams right.”
Thankfully, we’ve made a little progress from the white savior / Asian props mold that Nguyen depicts. We have less screaming and more speaking parts (admittedly in television more than film). We have Fresh Off the Boat, The Mindy Project, and Master of None. We have Crazy Rich Asians to look forward to, which is directed by someone Asian and will cast ACTUAL ASIANS (a bar so low that it is on the ground). But we also have Matt Damon defending The Great Wall, Tilda Swinton treating Margaret Cho like her “house Asian” over Doctor Strange, Scarlett Johansson looking suspiciously Asian as the lead of a huge Japanese media franchise, and Finn Jones white/mansplaining martial arts to an Asian-American woman. Hollywood and the media love Asian culture (which is, in itself, a monolith rarely acknowledged), and increasingly Asian money and consumer markets. But what ends up happening is that these movies and TV shows incorporate what is narrowly seen as “the real Asian things,” like Far East kung-fu mysticism, Buddhism, or (vomit) Orientalism that can help center tortured white male heroes, but leave actual Asian Americans scuttling in the background. Because of this, we still don’t have much of a voice.
I understand that politics and economics are at play in each and every scenario. The Great Wall was a joint venture between American and Chinese studios, directed by Zhang Yimou, and starred a predominantly Chinese cast (and apparently in the movie itself, Damon plays a mercenary who learns teamwork rather than swooping in to be the savior). Ghost in the Shell likely needed a famous, bankable actress, which is already a scarcity, to shoulder the franchise. Doctor Strange needed to change The Ancient One from a Tibetan man to some other person in order to distribute the film in China. If the Netflix show wanted to be true to the source material of the Iron Fist comics, it’s understandable to cast someone who is white for Danny Rand’s character. These reasons all make sense, but frankly, most people won’t bother to investigate or consider these nuances. What people see is Matt Damon on The Great Wall when he shouldn’t be and Scarlett Johansson painfully altered to look Asian as the lead in a “Japanese cult manga.”
These reasons are also ultimately copouts that point to a much larger problem: Asian Americans are never seen as top-billed actors and actresses because they are not given the chance, not even in their own stories. We lose out on both the money and the prominence that it takes to convince studios that we are worth investing in, as well as the optics and representation it takes to convince audiences that we can be reflected meaningfully in the entertainment we consume. Asian culture, aesthetics, stories, and stereotypes are everywhere, but god forbid a movie contains multidimensional Asian characters who might be superheroes or romantic leads or tortured billionaire geniuses or carry multimillion dollar franchises or have their own fucking Lego figures (Chris Pratt alone has three).
And it’s not like these studios aren’t capable of rectifying their source material. Even Iron Man 3 subverted the evil Oriental trope by having a twist where the REAL villain was actually an evil Guy Pearce all along (and they cast Ben Kingsley, who is Asian, as The Mandarin). How is it that Marvel has more white guy superheroes played by a guy named Chris than people of color? No matter what the political or economic justifications are for these casting or creative decisions, the end result is the same: whiteness dominates and is seen as the pragmatic decision. If people and leaders in the industry don’t challenge and speak out against these decisions, whiteness remains the status quo and the cycle is never broken.
In The Sympathizer, the narrator notes, “not to own the means of production can lead to premature death, but not to own the means of representation is also a kind of death.” We certainly don’t control the means of production in terms of film representation, so the only real pathway to controlling the narrative, the cash flow, the casting decisions, etc. must first come from owning the means of representation. The quantity and quality of opportunities for Asian Americans are both so rare that when they come around, it is a slap in the face when those roles are then handed to white actors and actresses. It also only highlights the disparity in decision makers and people positions of power behind the screen — directors, producers, writers, etc. So every time I see another white face where an Asian one should be, I’m reminded that not owning our representation is a kind of death. 💀
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