Lucas Kane, Carla Valenti, and Racial Ambiguity in the Game Fahrenheit

This post is somewhat outside the course material, but I thought it noteworthy enough for a topic of discussion. I don’t know how many of you are gamers, but among those of you who are, I’m betting that even fewer of you are adventure gamers. Adventure games, due to their intricate plots and characterization, are quite interesting to read from a perspective of politics and social criticism. The game I’m talking about in this case is Fahrenheit, otherwise known by its US release title The Indigo Prophecy. This game was designed the French developer Quantic Dream, headed by David Cage (David de Gruttola), and it is perhaps this European perspective that makes the way race operates in this game quite unconventional.

Just so we’re all on the same page, I’ll recap the storyline of this game in a nutshell. The game features three playable characters, the most central of which is Lucas Kane. Lucas Kane, an ordinary salaryman, finds himself waking up from a trance in the bathroom of a diner, with a bloody knife in his hands and a dead man on the floor. He flees the scene and tries desperately to make sense of what had happened. Meanwhile, the two other protagonists, detectives Carla Valenti and Tyler Miles investigate the crime and are hot on his trail. Slowly, the three characters unravel a vast conspiracy spanning hundreds of years that threatens to herald an apocalypse for the human race. What is interesting here is that at no point does any character explicitly comment on race or identity. Even though Tyler is undeniably African American—and Carla, at least, is undeniably non-white—we learn nothing of the identities of these characters aside from how they appear on the screen.

I’m not the first person to attempt a racial reading of this game. In fact, I was motivated to write post by this by the lengthy treatment of this game on the tokenminorities.wordpress.com blog, which is dedicated to the topic of race in computer games. The author of that blog, Pam Miller, in no uncertain terms calls the game thoroughly racist and misogynist.

http://tokenminorities.wordpress.com/2006/12/

Basically, her argument is that the main character, Lucas Kane, represents the standard white male protagonist who completely overshadows the “ethnic” characters of Carla and Tyler. Tyler is a sidekick character who exits the plot before the final stages, and Carla too steps aside to let Lucas face the final battle alone. The point of misogyny is well-taken, for the bad writing and the inexplicable romance between Carla and Lucas only serves to hypersexualize what appears to be an Asian or Hispanic woman and casts her character as one who is always sexually available. In the words of one Youtube commenter, “she’s a total whore.”

However, I have a problem with this reading, since this reading rests on the assumption that Lucas Kane is a white male. You see, for the whole time I was playing this game, I was under the distinct impression that Lucas Kane was Asian:

Carla Valenti too, I thought, was Asian:

Even though I believe that the ill-scripted romance between these two characters makes absolutely no sense and is misogynistic to the extreme (as well as making the last quarter of the game deeply disappointing), the ambiguousness of racial identity in the character of Lucas Kane complicates any reading of straight racial oppression. David Cage really plays with racial ambiguousness in these two characters. Even though Lucas looks East Asian, he looks nothing like his brother Markus, who looks completely white. Moreover, in flashbacks to his childhood, Lucas is depicted as brown-haired, freckled white kid. Similarly, Carla’s last name is Valenti, which suggests an Italian background, but it’s obvious that she doesn’t look like your average Italian.

I believe a clue may be offered in Miller’s reading of Tyler Miles:

“The last character who deserves a mention is Tyler Miles, Carla’s black male sidekick. Like the two main characters, Tyler is written to be a fairly nuanced character, at least relative to general depictions of black men in video games. On one hand, he is surrounded by signifiers of black masculinity; he’s phenomenal at basketball, less than responsible when it comes to money, and loves ’70s funk and white women. However he is also defined almost exclusively by his relationships with women - specifically, his working relationship with Carla and his romantic relationship with his white girlfriend, Sam - and within these interactions he is portrayed as a fully written character rather than a stereotypical black man. He is sensitive and sexual, loyal to both his job and his woman but very conflicted when the two are at odds. Tyler is both a walking stereotype and a subversion of that stereotype.”

Both a walking stereotype and a subversion of that stereotype—in fact, when I think about it, it can apply to a number of characters, beginning with our “white” protagonist Lucas Kane.

While Tyler Miles fits into the mold of a stereotypical African American masculinity, I would argue that Lucas Kane fits the archetype of the model minority nearly to a T. He possesses habits and peculiarities that many would associate unconsciously with Asianness. He grew up next to a military base, has musical aptitude, keeps Chinese calligraphy in his room, and even does martial arts. He works in the computer room of a bank, together with another Asian character, an Indian American named Warren, whose last name is never revealed (incidentally, he speaks in a nasal yet unaccented English). During the course of the game, Lucas develops superhuman physical and mental abilities. In the final acts of the game, Lucas even participates in leaping and flying wire-fu sequences, and he eventually has a fight involving energy blasts that seems to be lifted straight from Dragonball Z.

The name “Kane” is also an important symbol, because it appears to call forth the yellowface character of Kwai Chang Caine, who was played by David Carradine in the 1970s TV series. Kwai Chang Caine was a Shaolin martial artist with the symbols of the tiger and the dragon burned into his forearms. Likewise, Lucas Kane is a martial artist with a two-headed snake scarred into each forearm (done while he was under the trance).

Despite these stereotypical characteristics, Lucas’s Asianness is never mentioned, even when the police try to profile him as a murder suspect. Lucas, like Tyler (whose blackness is never mentioned either), is a fully fleshed out and humanized character, displaying a full range of emotions and human interaction that truly make the player care about the character.

If Lucas Kane is somewhat ambiguously Asian, Carla Valenti represents complete and utter racial ambiguity. There’s nothing in her life to mark her ethnoracial identity—she exists in a strangely deracinated yet distinctly non-white state. If I were to guess, I would read her as being of mixed heritage. Her character is the weakest-developed of the three, perhaps due to her relative isolation from human contact outside of her job, so there’s unfortunately not much there to read.

These two characters are not the only ways that The Indigo Prophecy presents this enthnoracial ambiguity. It’s been a long time since I played the game, but off the top of my head, there’s one old, bespectacled Japanese-American bookstore owner named Takeo. When Tyler first enters, Takeo puts on a chop-socky Chinese accent that reminds the detective of the “Chinese dude from Gremlins.” However, by the end of the scene, it is revealed that Takeo was really putting on an act. He had lived his whole life in New York, and speaks with Brooklyn accent. He says to Tyler, “I’m more American than you.” In addition, the game’s version of the Illuminati are not the typical Illuminati in conspiracy literature that traces its lineage back to Adam Weishaupt in Ingolstadt. Instead, they, their “clan,” are descended from Mayans in a seeming reversal of the conquest narrative of the New World.

Since the game is incredibly cinematic, it can be watched as a machinima film. I’m embedding a few video plays in this blog entry for the sake of convenience, but if you want to watch the whole thing, it’s up on the guy’s account:

I'm interested to hear what everyone's comments on this are.

Welcome to America, Yao Ming

On June 28 2003, after the Houston Rockets used the number one pick of the NBA draft on Yao Ming, Shaquille O’Neal went on the Best Damn Sports Show Period to say, “Tell Yao Ming, ‘ching-chong-yang-wah-ah-soh.’” He followed his taunt with some kung fu chops through the air. Yao, a 7’6” center from China, was heralded as the NBA’s next dominant center, the next Shaq, the man who would take O’Neal’s crown as the best at his position. Shaq, ever a media darling, received almost no negative press for the comment. The Asian American community did complain, to which Shaq responded that his comments were not racist.

Surely to O’Neal’s chagrin, NBA fans voted Yao Ming to start in that year’s All-Star Game, over Shaq. In fact, Yao received more votes than any other player that year, primarily due to the fact that voting was global. Said ABC sportscaster Brent Musburger, “the hordes of China” helped Yao steal the All-Star berth from O’Neal.

Since Yao Ming entered the NBA, he has embodied a number of contradictions. His 7’6” 310-pound body is large and numbering, but his playing style has often been criticized as soft. His popularity in China generates resentment from fans and commentators alike, and yet he has been the face of the NBA’s attempts to break into new markets, especially China. The mixed results of Yao’s foray into the mainstream, masculine world of the NBA is a case study for how Asians have entered pop culture, and how Asian men have dealt with constructions of masculinity.

In basketball vernacular, players and teams can rely on power or finesse. O’Neal is the prototypical power player, using his strength to push, crash, and simply move players on his way to a thunderous dunk. Yao is the opposite: a finesse player who uses skilled shots, clever passes, and deft hooks. In a league obsessed with manly toughness, the finesse player gets no love; Yao has been called soft throughout his career. He lacks aggression, toughness, and the ability to intimidate other players. His YouTube highlights include falling down when attempting to defend against fast players, and getting blocked by a barely–six foot Nate Robinson. Commentators have noted that Yao’s lack of aggression reflects cultural differences.

How does Yao’s performance on the court affect Americans’ perceptions of Asian men? How does Yao, nick-named the Great Wall of China, represent Asia and China to the U.S. public? How does Yao’s integration into basketball (or lack thereof—none of his teammates attended his wedding) speak to Asians’ integration into U.S. culture?

Broken Blossoms

Although the portrayal of Cheng in Broken Blossoms can be seen as positive, it carries assumptions about racial identity and gender that are in fact very negative; the film ultimately suggests that Asians can't cope with modernity and that their ways are backward.

Cheng is portrayed as an effeminate man, thus equating Asianness with femininity. He looks frail and soft, in stark contrast to the rough manliness of Battling Burrows. He always stands in a way that takes up minimal space, and never asserts himself in his surroundings by taking up space--an attribute associated with masculinity.

Furthermore, he walks hunched over and with a limp--a portrayal of the physical weakness of the Asian. His frailness has more in common with Lucy than with any of the other men, and they share a bond because of this element of physical weakness.

Cheng's mission is to spread Buddhism to the West, but the treatment of his journey carries imperialistic and conquistadorian overtones. While one could read the portrayal of Buddhism as peaceful and positive, the film in actuality seems to suggest that Buddhism is idealistic and backward. The modern world, represented by the West, is rough and harsh. Once Cheng encounters the "real world" of the modern West, he's forced to take violence--his ultimate shooting of Battler represents not only his defeat of this enemy, but also the defeat of his ideals. His peaceful Buddhist ways prove to be unworkable once he leaves the Edenic East, and ultimately he loses the battle to keep his own values alive.

His missionary role is ironic, since in the end he is the one who becomes converted. I saw a parallel between this process and the colonization of the New World. Europeans, upon discovering Native Americans, found their peaceful, communitarian, spiritual ways to be backward and untenable for the modern world as defined by Europe. In the same way, Cheng finds that his own ways of peace are unworkable. If the blossom represents idyllic peace, Cheng himself is the broken blossom--his old conception of the world is shattered, but unfortunately he is a weak, effeminate Asian man who can't really make it in the real, modern world. Thus, even though he shoots Battler, he's left with a dead girl and a broken spirit. His own realization of his condition causes his suicide.