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Abstract:
This article explores the problems of cinematic representation faced by Asian American men, arguing that Justin Lin's Better Luck Tomorrow offers a way out of the impasse. The essay contends that the strategies of parody and metacinema allow Asian American film to join the mainstream while retaining an oppositional edge.
Introduction: Invisible Men? Problems of representation cut to the core of Asian American cinema.1 First of all, there is the acute and fundamental need to get Asian Americans on screen: despite constituting 4.5% of the U.S. population (and thus numbering over 12.5 million people), Asian Americans are cast in less than 3% of film, television, and commercial parts, and-perhaps more tellingly-in only 1.7% of lead roles across the entertainment mainstream.2 Still more challenging than underrepresentation, however, is the intractable problem of misrepresentation, the habitual Hollywood reluctance to grant Asian Americans a subjectivity beyond stereotype. For women, the representational possibilities continue to be defined, and delimited, in erotic terms. Thus geisha girls, dragon ladies, China dolls, Miss Saigon/Madame Butterfly, and single Asian females seeking their white knights are still the major blueprint-all highly fevered but barely differentiated creations of the white male mind as it pursues fantasies of sexual otherness that are as old as empire itself.3 For the Asian American males who are displaced by this interracial erotic configuration, the constraints are stricter still. Seldom granted a cinematic space outside the laundry, the triad, the kung-fu club, or the academic decathlon, Asian American men are so far from landing roles where they might "get the girl" that access to fully fledged, three-dimensional masculinity (even if it is defined in heterosexist, homosocial terms) is denied them-and in the blithest, most unreflecting of ways-across the popular culture terrain.4 Lisa Lowe's observation that "Chinese male immigrants could be said to occupy, before 1940, a 'feminized' position in relation to white male citizens"5 is, in many ways, as true as ever."
This essay investigates the representational impasse within which Asian American masculinity is locked, and it takes Better Luck Tomorrow (Justin Lin, 2003) as the center point of analysis.7 I argue here that only a brash willingness to speak the language of Hollywood will get male identities out of the art house and past the multiplex gate;...