Now introducing... John Cho!
John Cho. Born 1972 in Seoul, grew up in California and Texas, and now is a Hollywood mainstay and - perhaps - Asian America's most famous actor. His nearly three-decade duration in Hollywood has granted him multiple franchise roles. Audiences may know him best as Harold from the three Harold and Kumar films, Sulu in the 2009-2016 Star Trek films, on television in his starring roles in Selfie (ABC, 2014) or FlashForward (ABC, 2009-2010), or his new dramatic fare like Searching (2018) or Columbus (2017).
The Coolest Asian You've Ever Seen: Better Luck Tomorrow
Cho's first film was Shopping for Fangs (1997), directed by Justin Lin. With an all Asian American cast and crew, this film barely impacted the film industry but provided both Cho and Lin with an impressive debut. Cho later went on to portray MILF Guy in the first American Pie film, where his use of the term MILF popularized the phrase in America.
Cho's true breakout came in 2002, reteaming with Justin Lin. In a supporting role, Cho starred as Steve, the main rival to the main character (Ben). Steve is cool. Just cool. And he's rich. Very rich. Steve has a girlfriend (who Ben wants to date). He rides a motorcycle, smokes like its his job, has prestige internship hookups, and easily schmoozes his way into the Ivy League. Steve goes from Ben's rival to customer, buying Ben's cocaine, and then to Ben's victim. Sharing a fate with Steven Yeun's character on The Walking Dead, Steve ultimately gets his head bashed in with a hammer.
I hadn't seen Better Luck Tomorrow before embarking on this project, but was recommended the film by my advisor, Dr. Mary Beltrán. While the film's gendered politics are a little (or a lot) dated, it is still so rare to see a movie constructed by and for Asian Americans that has nothing to do with histories of immigration, of oppression. No, these kids are bored and do crime just for the fun of it. Steve appears only sporadically - not being within the main cast of characters - but his appearances are impressive and sickeningly charming. On Crackle, the online streamer I watched the film on, the film goes to commercial breaks everytime Steve appears in the first hour; this just re-emphasizes that Steve only appears when the plot needs him to shake something up. The New York Times notes that Cho plays Steve with a "lazy magnetism." Roger Ebert infamously defended the film during its Sundance premiere against an audience heckler, who noted that the film should only present Asian Americans in a positive light.
Discourse and reviews surrounding the film provide a perfect jumping off point for the rest of this project. Better Luck Tomorrow is seen by some as the kick-starter to a new wave of Asian American films that appeal (some say, "sell out") to the mainstream by co-opting traditional narrative and filming devices, becoming 'colorblind' to some extent, and becoming politically neutralized. The successes and triumphs of this film can in some ways be distilled down to its masculinist and transnational aesthetics. Jun Okada summarizes both in a single point: "Better Luck Tomorrow’s appeal lies precisely in the mimicry of a hypermasculine Hong Kong action cinema, which blurs the lines between Asian genre cinema and the identity politics of Asian American media" (118). He expands, describing that director Justin Lin apes the aesthetic of Hong Kong action films (popular in the early 2000s) in order to ride the wave of a rising global cinephelia. This action aesthetic prioritizes hypermasculinity as expressed through heterosexual desire and cartoonish violence. Margaret Hillebrand expands on this masculinist identity, noting that the film refuses to create a distinctly Asian American masculinity - preferring to mimic or parody Hong Kong action heroes or Italian American gangster films - precisely because these are the dominant notions of masculinity that are already accessible to Asians in America. She notes that "by slotting Asian American men into these well-worn cinematic models of masculinity, the film gestures powerfully to the absence of any established paradigms that they can call their own. Asian American men have to beg, borrow, and steal a presence on screen because the cultural hegemony continues to deny them more legitimate access" (64). Better Luck Tomorrow's retrospective response seems to be one of ambivalence, popularizing Asian American Cinema in the mainstream but also sacrificing and simply mimicking White Hollywood or the transnational aesthetic, rather than curating an identity of its one.
In either way, the film truly propelled John Cho to fame. In his words, he says "people responded to the visual of look at all these Asian faces. It felt powerful... My lasting impression of the film is that it mattered. In some ways, it’s harder to make a film that matters than it is to make a good film. Better Luck Tomorrow mattered." And it's this essence of mattering in some ways. The leading questions that drive the rest of my analysis of Cho as a star - and the surrounding interviews and paratexts - is seeing how much of an active participant he becomes, in terms of representing Asian American politics and furthering the community's interests and how he must balance acting as a career and artistic choice as well as a political message.
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