Rohan Vora, Grade 11
UWCSEA (East)
Crazy Rich Asians, a recent film, has tried to ‘re-define’ an Asian, or ‘market’ an Asian to the audience. There are admirers of the film that feel having an all Asian cast’ shattered the glass ceiling and helped various Asians in the world ‘belong’ while some critics have elucidated that the film is unrealistic, and instead of portraying an ‘Asian’, the film crafted a ‘relatable Asian’, to attract audiences into theatres. I feel some of the critics’ contentions and opinions are accurate and should be further explored.
Alison Willmore, the columnist at Buzzfeed, mentioned that Crazy Rich Asians ‘feels blithely liberated from the obligation to offer up suffering’, this statement ties into the idealistic portrayal of Singapore and Asians in the film, as it relinquishes any ‘raw’ emotions such as pain, suffering and replaces them with a fairy-tale-like setting and story. She further states that the film ‘aims to entertain, to serve up the sacred cinematic gratifications of watching beautiful people’, she is describing the film as something superficial, something unrelated to Asian culture whose main purpose is to ‘entertain’ and ‘gratify’ audiences, as instead of watching Asian culture, or the issues they face, we see ‘beautiful people’. The movie is somewhat like a magnificent, golden carpet that hides the reality hidden below.
The themes of affluence, decadence, and superficialness that have been represented in Crazy Rich Asians allows audiences to draw lines connecting the film and the novel, The Great Gatsby. Similar to the Great Gatsby, Crazy Rich Asians indulges in the escapist pleasures of ‘aspirational wealth, obscene consumerism’ which allows audiences to truly notice that the representations of Singaporeans in the movie aren’t ‘real’. The movie is represented through its extravagant clothing, mansions, and planes, but it all seems too good to seem true. In Gatsby, readers visualize his mansion ‘with a tower on one side, spanking new under a thin beard of raw ivy, and a marble’, but no one truly sees Gatsby’s emptiness -“He stretched out his hand desperately as if to snatch only a wisp of air, but it was all going by too fast now for his blurred eyes, and he knew that he had lost that part of it, the freshest and the best, forever.” In Crazy Rich Asians we see Marina Bay Sands, Clarkey and other metropolitan sites in Singapore, but we never get to see a Hawker’s center or the ‘suffering’ that Alison Willmore states, similar to Gatsby, we get to see only the affluence in Singapore, while the ‘suffering’ of some poor Singaoperans are hidden, underneath the surface of the extravagant mansions, somewhere deep in the soil.
Furthermore, there is a ‘cultural misrepresentation’ in the movie as expressed by Sangeetha Thanapal, a columnist for the online magazine, wear your voice, states — ‘What people celebrating this movie are doing is bringing a Western racial framework to bear upon a Singaporean one’. The movie itself has been ‘westernized’; In one scene, the audience watches Goh Wye Mun (Ken Jeong) repeating Rachel’s surname until it develops into a parody of ‘ching-chong’, not only feeding into the stereotypes of the way Asians speak but also mocking the way ‘other Asians’ speak, by representing ‘Crazy Rich Asians’, the film has expunged the ‘common Asian in Singapore’, who does not get to indulge in the luxuries, and by ‘Westernizing’ the characters, it trivialized Asian culture.
An example in the film is the ‘American’ accents that the characters Rachel Chu and Lin Goh converse in, this negates or expunges the ‘common Singaporean’ who has a distinct Asian accent. In many ways, it can also be deemed as a ‘misrepresentation’ not only of culture but of dialect and ethnicity, which are core elements of a person’s identity. Thus, the film has tried to ‘re-define’ and then ‘sell’ their new version of an Asian to the audience, as who wants to watch a cultured, quintessential Asian with a funny accent, isn’t an Asian with money, mansions, and with a relatable accent more intriguing and watchable?
Jeff Koons, a revered American artist, elucidates — ‘I love the gallery, the arena of representation. It’s a commercial world, and morality is generally based around economics, and that’s taking place in the art gallery’ — Crazy Rich Asians disregard Asian culture and the struggles Asians face in Singapore, as economics and the box office returns are more salient than a representation of Singaporean culture and the representation of Singaporean minorities such as Indians and Males. To conclude, in today’s world, the ‘gallery’ or the media generally only screen or display economically lucrative content, if we want to live in a more pluralistic world, content needs to be unfiltered and honest, which Crazy Rich Asians fails to be, but upcoming movies should strive to become.
Alison Willmore, the columnist at Buzzfeed, mentioned that Crazy Rich Asians ‘feels blithely liberated from the obligation to offer up suffering’, this statement ties into the idealistic portrayal of Singapore and Asians in the film, as it relinquishes any ‘raw’ emotions such as pain, suffering and replaces them with a fairy-tale-like setting and story. She further states that the film ‘aims to entertain, to serve up the sacred cinematic gratifications of watching beautiful people’, she is describing the film as something superficial, something unrelated to Asian culture whose main purpose is to ‘entertain’ and ‘gratify’ audiences, as instead of watching Asian culture, or the issues they face, we see ‘beautiful people’. The movie is somewhat like a magnificent, golden carpet that hides the reality hidden below.
The themes of affluence, decadence, and superficialness that have been represented in Crazy Rich Asians allows audiences to draw lines connecting the film and the novel, The Great Gatsby. Similar to the Great Gatsby, Crazy Rich Asians indulges in the escapist pleasures of ‘aspirational wealth, obscene consumerism’ which allows audiences to truly notice that the representations of Singaporeans in the movie aren’t ‘real’. The movie is represented through its extravagant clothing, mansions, and planes, but it all seems too good to seem true. In Gatsby, readers visualize his mansion ‘with a tower on one side, spanking new under a thin beard of raw ivy, and a marble’, but no one truly sees Gatsby’s emptiness -“He stretched out his hand desperately as if to snatch only a wisp of air, but it was all going by too fast now for his blurred eyes, and he knew that he had lost that part of it, the freshest and the best, forever.” In Crazy Rich Asians we see Marina Bay Sands, Clarkey and other metropolitan sites in Singapore, but we never get to see a Hawker’s center or the ‘suffering’ that Alison Willmore states, similar to Gatsby, we get to see only the affluence in Singapore, while the ‘suffering’ of some poor Singaoperans are hidden, underneath the surface of the extravagant mansions, somewhere deep in the soil.
Furthermore, there is a ‘cultural misrepresentation’ in the movie as expressed by Sangeetha Thanapal, a columnist for the online magazine, wear your voice, states — ‘What people celebrating this movie are doing is bringing a Western racial framework to bear upon a Singaporean one’. The movie itself has been ‘westernized’; In one scene, the audience watches Goh Wye Mun (Ken Jeong) repeating Rachel’s surname until it develops into a parody of ‘ching-chong’, not only feeding into the stereotypes of the way Asians speak but also mocking the way ‘other Asians’ speak, by representing ‘Crazy Rich Asians’, the film has expunged the ‘common Asian in Singapore’, who does not get to indulge in the luxuries, and by ‘Westernizing’ the characters, it trivialized Asian culture.
An example in the film is the ‘American’ accents that the characters Rachel Chu and Lin Goh converse in, this negates or expunges the ‘common Singaporean’ who has a distinct Asian accent. In many ways, it can also be deemed as a ‘misrepresentation’ not only of culture but of dialect and ethnicity, which are core elements of a person’s identity. Thus, the film has tried to ‘re-define’ and then ‘sell’ their new version of an Asian to the audience, as who wants to watch a cultured, quintessential Asian with a funny accent, isn’t an Asian with money, mansions, and with a relatable accent more intriguing and watchable?
Jeff Koons, a revered American artist, elucidates — ‘I love the gallery, the arena of representation. It’s a commercial world, and morality is generally based around economics, and that’s taking place in the art gallery’ — Crazy Rich Asians disregard Asian culture and the struggles Asians face in Singapore, as economics and the box office returns are more salient than a representation of Singaporean culture and the representation of Singaporean minorities such as Indians and Males. To conclude, in today’s world, the ‘gallery’ or the media generally only screen or display economically lucrative content, if we want to live in a more pluralistic world, content needs to be unfiltered and honest, which Crazy Rich Asians fails to be, but upcoming movies should strive to become.
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