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Sex, Money & Asian Stereotypes
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Sex, Money & 
new NBC series stakes out Hawaii as its turf. The prospect of seeing island backdrops is appealing because Hawaii is one of my favorite vacation spots. But I never tuned in. The previews made me assume it's another show in which white and black guys beat up on Asian/Pacific Islander guys to make paradise safe for Asian women. Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa has a recurring role — no doubt a ploy to deflect criticism.
That's how cynical I've become about Hollywood, especially network TV. I've come to see it as a parasitic industry that profits from selling offsetting fantasies. [CONTINUED BELOW]
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What's an offsetting fantasy? A fantasy that helps offset life's painful realities. Selling them to American mass audiences has made Hollywood fat and greasy. In the 50s and 60s when American men were populating corporate hives, Hollywood was pushing westerns about tough, individualists riding the open range and taking no guff from nobody. In the 70s when American women were getting heavier and more independent, it made dramas about men facing the existential dilemma of choosing between two or more eager slender beauties. After the U.S. lost the Vietnam War and was ceding industry after industry to Asian competition, it made countless flicks about white and black guys mopping up battlefields with Asian guys.
Give Hollywood credit for being in touch — if not with reality — then with the unrequited yearnings of the average joe who, for a couple of hours each day, turns his weary back on the depressing realities of his life and escapes into screens big and small. Picture Mr Average Joe in California or New York City. Chances are better than even that he's working under an Asian boss, faces the prospect of having his job shipped overseas to an Asian country, or lives in an apartment owned by an Asian landlord. When his eyes settle on the nicest homes or the sexiest cars, as likely as not, they're occupied by Asians. As his kids near graduation, he learns that half the classmates bound for top universities are Asian. These are statistical realities in places in which Asians account for 14% of the population. The situation cries out for one of Hollywood's offsetting-fantasy products. Hollywood responds by whisking Mr AJ to Hawaii, the very heart of Asian-ness, to live vicariously through guys who always put those nasty, pushy Asians in their place &mdash maybe the way locals put Mr AJ in his place, subtly and not so subtly, when he was wandering Waikiki as a sunburned tourist straining the buttons of an Aloha shirt, wanting to believe that all those tanned wahines are magnetically drawn to overweight guys with hairy torsoes. Here we approach the heart of the offsetting fantasy, the postulated racial advantage that offsets all else: sex appeal. Never mind that Mr AJ himself hardly embodies sex appeal. It doesn't matter because, being white, he sees himself in the shoes of the starring action figures. They have sex appeal because they're depicted as having bigger attitudes, bigger hearts and, by implication within American-male cosmology, bigger packages. Forget scientific data on size and virility or the character traits of real people. What matters is the strength of Mr AJ's desire to believe. Sex is the only thing that can offset success and money within Mr AJ's fantasy value system as embodied in Hollywood shows like Hawaii. PAGE 2 |
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