Topic

The following essay is a response to topic number one on the first essay assignment sheet.

Essay

One of the most challenging aspects of cinema is to portray stories about characters that audiences can identify with, and therefore understand easily without creating stereotypical and one-dimensional characters. Racial stereotypes can become an important resource for filmmakers in their development of a character, not only because they are easily identifiable, but also because they comment on the social contexts that create these stereotypes and try to pigeonhole people into them. Chan is Missing, directed by Wayne Wang, and Glory, directed by Ed Zwick, both use racial stereotypes, but the way that they are constructed and utilized through narrative is quite different. Chan is Missing uses racial stereotypes to form a social commentary about the formation of an “Asian-American” culture and identity and how this identity is thrust upon its members. Glory uses racial stereotypes to characterize African Americans and their pursuit of a specific racial identity during the Civil War. It also uses these cliches to demonstrate how the African American identity is in a state of evolution and to show how this identity struggles for its power.

The classic detective story narrative in Chan is key to its portrayal of this construction and destruction of identity. The Hollywood detective narrative primes audiences to try to pick up clues and to piece the mystery together themselves, so when Chan presents itself as this genre of film, there are certain expectations that an audience forms. One such expectation is that the clues lead to a neat conclusion in which everything is solved and systematically tied up. Wayne Wang toys with these expectations and uses them to emphasize his social commentary about Asian-American Identity. He deliberately avoids a “neat” ending, in which everything is concluded. Instead, he presents a conclusion in which nothing is concluded and the audience is left wondering who Chan is. It is as if he is saying that the Asian American identity cannot be concluded.

In Chan many different people present an image of who they think Chan is. They all see Chan as a different person and these “different people” are all pretty stereotypical characters. It isn’t as if these different personas just show different pieces of who Chan is, either, because a lot of times these views of Chan are conflicting. One man says that he is not smart and needs to be taught how to live in America. Another man thinks he is a genius, because he designed a word processing program in Chinese. If these two views of who Chan is can’t compliment each other, then what significance do they play in our discovery of who Chan is? It shows that the Asian American identity is many things, and yet it is not any of them. Wang is demonstrating how every Asian American person has to deal with having their identity be defined by everyone around them and having assumptions be made about them. The result of this is that they are not really any of these identities, yet at the same time there are aspects of each identity in who they “really are.” If we want to take this analysis of Wang’s message a step further we could say that he is trying to show how in the Chinese/Asian culture there is no struggle for identity, a person can be and is many things at once and there is no “real identity”, it is an American trait to try and assign a name and category to who a person is. So why does Wang not choose to have Jo come to this conclusion in the end of the film? By having the detective story continue after the film has ended, Wang places the problem of trying to discover Chan’s identity into the audience’s hands. Their expectations of participating in the solving of a mystery are not let down by Wang’s deviation from the classic detective narrative. On the contrary, they are placed in an even more active role as the ones who will have to construct their own conclusion about Chan’s identity from the set of clues presented in the film. Wang uses the audience in his demonstration of how people construct identity by having them participate in constructing Chan’s identity. In this way the mystery narrative in this film is key to the message of the film.

The deliberate deviation from classical narrative in Chan contrasts with Glory’s much more traditional narrative, which includes a definite conclusion. Although the narrative may be more conventional, it still plays just as important of a role in the construction of ideas of race. Although Glory is mainly about African Americans’ struggle to build their own identity after slavery through the means of the civil war, the narrative is presented from Robert Shaw’s point of view, a white man with his own struggles with identity. He is placed in a position of authority that he is not sure he is ready for. He has to change in order to fit into this new role. This appears to comment upon how African American identity was allowed to be formed by being shaped and guided by the white American culture, as the narrative shapes and molds the African American’s identity through the use of a white narrator. It also shows how the modern American culture views African American identity today through the filter of white American culture, just as the African American identities in these film are presented through point of view of a white officer. The fact that Shaw is a higher ranking officer and was chosen as the narrator of this film illustrates how the African American identity, an identity that was to include its own source of power, has not been successfully established, just as the battle that is fought in the film is not won. By having a white higher ranking officer narrate this story Ed Zwick shows that the African American identity still does not have enough of its own source of power to create a story about its own identity formation and that the struggle for this power continues.

Within the narrative of these two films, racial stereotypes are both used to emphasize and illustrate the themes that are facilitated by the narrative forms themselves. Chan specifically uses Steve and his ability to easily slip in and out of identities based on racial stereotypes to illustrate the fragmentation and duality of the Asian American culture (Feng, 103). In one scene he pretends to be a cop. In another scene he is a jive-talking streetwise guy. Steve takes on these different roles in such a way that suggests he doesn’t entirely know which one he is, or what the relationship is between his own identity and these identities. The Asian culture is also caught up in this struggle. The Asian culture is not sure where it fits in with all of the stereotypes and comparisons that have been made about it and about other minority cultures. When a diverse population is homogenized under an encompassing form of cultural and racial classification, the fragmentation that is not allowed by the society that defines this group’s identity for them, is manifested in the fragmentation of personal identity. Chan’s narrative illustrates this quite well by not only having Steve’s character fragment several times in a scene by having him take on different identifiable personas, but also by illustrating the fragmentation of Chan’s identity through the unveiling of contradictory clues about who Chan is. In this way, the deconstruction, or fragmentation, of identity is what constructs Wang’s view of the Asian American identity. No one would say that Steve is any of the personas he briefly masquerades as, but, rather, it is this constant shifting between identities that defines who he is, and, more generally, who the people classified as Asian American are. 

Similarly, Glory illustrates African American identity through stereotypes, and then proceeds to break down these stereotypes through character evolution. The audience is first introduced to the film’s main African American characters as representatives of racial stereotypes. There is Trip, the buck; Rawlins, the tom; Thomas, the educated, northern black; and Jupiter, the coon. These stereotypes cause the audience to identify the characters easily, but also comment on the formation of African American identity, especially in how it is defined in American Culture. These stereotypes are the easiest way to conceptualize a large group of people, because they do not require having to develop or reveal individual identities. It is this system of classification that has caused much of the identity and racial issues that have existed in the past and exist today, so it is important that they are included in a film about the evolution of an African American identity. However, the film narrative does not stop there. It takes these different caricatures and develops them beyond their stereotypes. Each character gains something more beyond their pre-defined character. Rawlins gains an authority he never had before. Trip gains feelings of love and respect for the men he serves with that he never had before. Jupiter shows that he can be eloquent in his own way by making a speech at the bonfire. This shows that there is more to the African American culture then these cliché’s that are developed for it. It also shows that, even today, the African American culture is sill in a process of changing its identity; it is not a fixed thing. 

In the process of defining identity, it is necessary to pick apart identities and build on them as well. Both Chan is Missing and Glory address this idea through the use of their narrative style and conventions. The processes of building an identity is something that depends on the outer culture’s interpretation of who a person is, or who a group of people are and each of these films provide an opportunity for this kind of interpretation to be made by the audience and examined by the audience.