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Film critic Pauline Kael famously wrote that “Hollywood is the one place in the world where you can die of encouragement.” She’s right. The town blows more smoke up more asses than a flaming BP rig.
But we who work in the business clutch at that smoke, count on it, inhale it as deeply into our lungs as we can, just to keep us going, even as we choke on it.
In this racket, hope is a very fragile, very thin high wire, and it is razor sharp.
I braced myself. This wasn’t the first time my printer went down. It was time to call tech support, and I knew it would be a long hard slog before the healing could begin. I poured myself a cup of herbal tea, took a few centering breaths, and dialed.
Felicia. Her name was Felicia.
She was cordial and professional from the get go. After about twenty minutes of basic diagnostics, she politely asked me if it was okay if she took over control of my computer. Now being a Virgo, I’m a bit of a control freak, and was leery about turning my life over to this woman who I had barely met, but I finally agreed to hit enough “I Accepts” until I could see my cursor moving all over the place under her control.
Sweet and slightly neurotic “ethnic” guy meets and falls in love with blonde WASP beauty. He accompanies her to meet her equally WASP parents where he finds himself under the suspicious eye of her protective and scary father. Things get worse when ethnic guy initiates a series of missteps, which makes an already tense situation worse. This is the plot of the hit 2000 comedy Meet The Parents starring Ben Stiller as Greg “Gaylord” Focker a.k.a. neurotic ethnic guy (Jewish in this case) and Robert DeNiro as scary dad Jack Byrnes, but it could also describe the various times my white girlfriends took me to meet their folks for the first time. So why not Meet The Parents starring an Asian American dude in the Stiller role? It might look something like this:
Yup, if someone like my fellow Offender Roger Fan had stepped into the part, the story would have still worked with minimal changes to the script. In fact, the basic premise of the “outsider” boyfriend meeting his fiancee’s “all-American” family would be even more strengthened if said boyfriend was really “different” i.e. Asian. But couldn’t that character be any person of color–not necessarily Asian? I don’t think so. It wouldn’t have the same impact if the boyfriend were black or Latino even though they could also represent the “outsider.” Why?
