thoughts on Terminal USA

I found Terminal USA to be one of the most disturbing (yet fascinating and thought-provoking) films I have ever seen. I didn’t find any of it funny and I thought it was visually (and auditorily) frightening. Like Keiko, I also found it slightly offensive that these bizarre portrayals were projected onto an Asian American family. I thought that the film was making a number of critiques on racism, suburbia, Asian American stereotypes, nuclear family, etc. but throughout watching, I felt like I was undergoing a similar feeling of the typical horror movie experience.

The two characters I thought were found particularly interesting were the parents. Over the course of the film, the father went more-and-more insane over protecting the “purity” of his family, especially the sexual purity of his daughter, Holly, and son, Marvin, and found himself disappointed/shamed by their "impurity" (Holly having sex with the lawyer and Marvin masturbating to gay pornography). At the end of the movie, the father had completely lost it. His attempt to kill his already dying father-in-law and the klan members and rhetoric about an apocalypse showed his progression of "losing it". Was this supposed to be a critique of the unspoken, insanity of patriarchal, nuclear suburbia?
The mother, on the other hand, was a drug addict yet, still trying to take care of her father, husband and children and sex and sexuality came a lot with her (the scene with the pizza man and her comment to her father with not being satisfied with her husband sexually).
I liked that this film was one of the only ones that we have watched (besides Flower Drum Song) that centered around the parents as well as the children.

There were a number of motifs I noticed in the film like the cowboy theme(Holy in cowgirl costume, the father and the scene with the gun), eyeballs, and telephones. I also thought the camera angles and strategic use of music were two techniques that particularly stood out to me.

Better Luck Tomorrow reflection

Justin Lin’s film Better Luck Tomorrow addresses the stereotypes many Asian youths face in regard to being labeled as the “model minority.” Lin paints the life of high school Asian students as one of constant pressure and stress as they grow up in a cutthroat environment where not going to an Ivy League university is not an option. The four Asian boys seem to think that the only way to escape their monotonous suburban lifestyle is to commit small crimes and break school rules hoping to bring some stimulation and excitement to their lives. But how do they first go about this? Alan Dale makes comments on the BlogCritics Magazine website that “at first their crimes are in the model-minority vein--cheat sheets and, to a lesser extent, figuring out how to return computer equipment and keep it, too” (http://blogcritics.org/archives/2003/05/14/235250.php). Thus, Dale seems to suggest that although these Asian high school boys are trying to live dangerously, they still at least at the beginning adhere to the familiar stereotypes of their race. Further, Ben, Virgil, Daric, and Han use their academic decathlon meetings in order to plan their illegal activities. Dale notes that although they “use academic decathlon meetings for planning crimes and unhinged partying, they’re still a championship team” (http://blogcritics.org/archives/2003/05/14/235250.php). So even though they are doing drugs, stealing computers, and robbing houses, these boys maintain the outward perception of being the model minorities. It is not enough for them to simply be on the academic decathlon team, they must win and be the champions. Potentially, the team could have served as a total front for their criminal operations in which they could have completely ignored studying and non take the competition seriously. Instead, they continued to study and prepare because as model minorities, even if they were rolling in dough, they needed to academically perform.

Something else that Dale suggests that I didn’t really think about before is the role of (or in this case, the lack there of) parents during this whole film. From speaking with a lot of other Asians, there is the stereotype that the model minority Asian child is a reflection of their model minority traditionalist parents. However throughout the film, there is little discussion of parental pressures and I found it interesting that the film didn’t focus in at all on introducing Ben and company’s parents to the audience. I expected to see the interactions between the sons and parents, but these relationships were never shown in the film. My own assumption is that these parents were traditional and very strict, which might explain why Ben felt he must attend an Ivy League school and participate in dozens of clubs, but we will never know for certain. I wonder, did we really need to see the parents? Or was the assumption of who they were and what they are like so stereotyped and ingrained in our thoughts that it wasn’t necessary?