More on NPR: Fresh Air and 'Columbus' Reviewed
Continuing my paratextual analysis of NPR media related to John Cho and Columbus, I will take a look at his appearance on Fresh Air, a radio-podcast series, and a review of the film itself by Mark Jenkins. Here, I juxtapose in-group and out-group discussions. Baldonado and Cho - two Asian Americans - are able to (somewhat) elucidate more nuanced and more complex claims by having an inherent awareness of the stereotypes and struggles Asian Americans face in media. Mark Jenkins, a white man, delivers a review that plays on decades-old stereotypes, ethnicizes the film's identity in a mostly over-determined fashion, and reveals his own biases that limit the film's potential, in his mind.
Taking a guest spot on Fresh Air, the conversation between Anne Marie Baldonado and Cho highlights three primary topics: transnationality and immigrant-family issues, Cho’s personal experiences in acting and auditions, and Cho’s thoughts on Asian American representation. As well, Cho is able to talk about the ethnic identity of Columbus more explicitly than in other interviews, which usually center on universality in aesthetics and themes.
Baldonado’s first line of questioning centers on Cho’s thoughts about being a dutiful son and his ideas about obligations to family. Here, Baldonado is distinct from the other NPR outlets Cho interviewed with, in that she confronts the film’s ethnic identity and culture head-on. Cho says that “immigrant children have to deal with this clash of cultures [and] what’s expected from their parents of this culture that they didn’t grow up in.”
Cho talks about being part of the so-called 1.5 generation - being an immigrant body himself (having been born in Korea) but being primarily raised in the United States. Kim & Stodolkski’s study concludes that Korean Americans “recognize cultural differences between Koreans in Korea and Koreans in the USA and they no longer saw their culture as equivalent to typical Koreans from their home country. At the same time, however, they realized that they would always be considered foreigners in the USA and face assimilation-related problem” (268). With an acknowledgement that he is not from his parent’s culture, Cho recognizes this cultural difference both between Korea and America but his parents and himself.
Baldonado later inquires into the process of auditioning and interrogating stereotypical roles. She brings up Kal Penn, Cho’s Harold and Kumar co-star, and his Twitter thread of racist casting calls.
When she asks Cho how he views these casting calls, he simply said: “I [didn’t] go in for those.” While acknowledging he wasn’t necessarily picky as an up-and-coming young actor, if something called for accents or mocking, he just wouldn’t pick up the phone. He notes that he never wanted to feel racial discomfort on a set, something he experienced in early productions. I personally find this type of question odd, of asking Cho to recollect potential trauma and racism he experienced in the workplace. The tone was not somber or serious, but joking. Perhaps this is a level of in-group communication between two people-of-color: the answer to ‘have you gotten any racist harassment’ is an obvious "yes," but the interaction must be rehearsed for the sake of a perceived white NPR audience.Found a bunch of old scripts from some of my first years trying to be an actor. pic.twitter.com/GydOwlUKGW
— Kal Penn (@kalpenn) March 14, 2017
'Columbus' Is Soulless, By Design: Reviewed by NPR's Mark Jenkins
In NPR's review, Mark Jenkins immediately begins with a comparison to the Sofia Coppola film Lost in Translation (2003). Although Jenkins points out that both films are about a ‘not-quite-romance’ between an older man and younger woman, in my evaluation, this is a thinly constructed categorization, conflating Asian aesthetics (the city of Tokyo in Lost in Translation) with Asian American bodies (Cho in Columbus) - immediately announcing this review’s understanding of the film as text of Asian image, not character, thus refusing exploration of an Asian American subjectivity and perspective.
Jenkins gestures towards the Perpetual Foreigner stereotype by describing Jin Lee as ‘Korean-born’ and ‘no hint of an accent.’ Further, Jenkins describes Lee’s relationship with Eleanor (played by Parker Posey) as a ‘crush’ - an odd way to describe two adults who engage in a physically sexual dynamic. In this review, Lee has already been dislocated as a Korean, not Korean American, and infantilized in his own sexual relationship. Jenkins then appeals to his favorite part of the film, the cinematography.
Not content with simply allowing Kogonada and the film to stand on its own merits, Jenkins reveals that director Kogonada took his mononym from Kogo Nada, "the co-scripter of many [Japanese director] Yasujiro Ozu films." While this homage is intentional and the film certainly does look like an Ozu-film from the 1950s, the comparison of Kogonada to Ozu shows that Jenkins will only allow this film to exist in relation to other Asian films and filmmakers.
After initially praising the aesthetic quality of the film, Jenkins enters with his most sizable critique: a distance from humanity. Jenkins states what the two main characters lack: “Casey and Jin are not, after all, fellow strangers in a strange land.” The question remains - did Jenkins want a story about two foreigners? Did he not find their isolation within their own communities convincing? Was Cho’s presence as an Asian American figure betraying the overall narrative themes of isolation and surprising kinship? Did Jenkins need a more explicit Orientalist-twist on this otherwise very Midwestern, very American, setting? By indicating that the film seems inhuman is to tap into a larger framework around Asians in America that creates discourse around a perceived lack of emotionality or empathy, in favor of coldness and shrewd ambition. An NPR review for The Farewell notes its "emotional restraint" (in this case, a positive) while famed reviewer Richard Brody, with The New Yorker, calls Minari a "strangely impersonal tale".
Of course, the film can be critiqued any number of ways, but I found this NPR review aligning with multiple discourses of anti-Asian rhetoric that cannot be coincidental. And - given that it is from NPR - I doubt the review was made with a racist intent, but nonetheless, these inherent biases that color our expectations going into a film made by Asian Americans can be fulfilled in any number of ways.
