Blog Post #2: Hillenbrand “Of Myths and Men”

Posted on August 21, 2018 by by | 1 Comment
  1. Margaret Hillenbrand first lays out the issues that arise when Asian American males are portrayed on screen in her article “Of Myths and Men: Better Luck Tomorrow and the Mainstreaming of Asian America Cinema.” She characterizes the representation of Asian American men in cinema with three different categories:
    close-focus empiricism, political grandstanding of one kind or another, and art house avant-gardism. She then uses specific films such as Wayne Wang’s Eat a Bowl of Tea and Better Luck Tomorrow to provide examples of the different representations of Asian American men in cinema.
  2. Hillenbrand uses the film Eat a Bowl of Tea as an example of a film that portrayed Asian American men using close-focus empiricism. In the film, there is a particular scene in which the bachelors have a party for a young Asian newlywed couple. One of them claims this as a “historical” moment. This claim in addition to the lack of female characters in this scene is meant to emphasize how many of these bachelors left their wives and children back home during the war, and due to the Chinese Exclusion Act and the anti-miscegenation laws. As Rachel Moon mentions in her blog post, many Asian American films attempt to enlighten its audiences; however, often times these audiences are not the target audience. Films such as Better Luck Tomorrow use common cinematic genres to portray Asian American men in a way that strides away from the stereotypical “model minority” character. Perhaps ironically, the Asian American male protagonists in this film who are supposed to be the smart and good students are feared by the white/Caucasian characters who are the jocks and the cool kids at school.
  3. One word that comes up in Hillenbrand’s article is ‘metacinema,’ which is a term used by a film to inform the audience that the film they are watching is fictional. I find this interesting and a little ironic because these so-called metacinema films are used to convey messages pertaining to real social issues regarding Asian American culture, struggles, and representations of men.
  4. Another metacinema film that I was reminded of while watching Better Luck Tomorrow is a Thai movie called Bad Genius. The female protagonist starts out as an extremely smart student (or at least she is good at studying). She portrays a very stereotypical character of an obedient Asian child who listens to her parents. However, after a series of events, she decides to help her classmates cheat on exams as far as to travelling abroad to Australia to help them cheat on the SAT, breaking the stereotype of the ‘good Asian student.’ I think the catch to this is that she was trying to earn money to help lift some of the burden from her single dad. In a sense, she still demonstrated filial piety but in the wrong way.
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