Yet I run into assholes every day complaining about Trek being too woke & diverse.
So very inclusive.
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Yet producers wouldn’t even cast Bruce Lee in the lead for Kung Fu because they thought audiences would have an easier time accepting David Carradine as a Shaolin Monk than they would accepting a Chinese man as a central protagonist.
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If you want giant Japanese lady robots haunting cartoons they’re there.
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In “world”, but also the production knew the target Western audiences didn’t understand the kanji so they could flip the neon around and reuse it elsewhere on the set because it just looks cool
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backward or forward, it does look cool.
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I’ll just leave this slice of actual Japanese cyberpunk here.
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It’s a very interesting topic. But I need to push back a bit here.
“Window dressing”, in the true metaphoric and less pejorative sense, connotes purely visual cues added to a scene to convey an overt point. So for, say, the Hockey-mask dancers and Billboard Geishas making a point of Asian inclusion, you are perfectly on-target.
However, the characters I listed (including Gaff, - and, since you expanded Asian/Japanese to “POC”, there are a few other characters that were cited in other posts here that now qualify as well,) are not window-dressing. They have dialogue, roles and (when appropriate) names. You are absolutely correct that they do not have “fully fleshed out back stories”, but this observation is a lot less material when one realizes that this is simply inherent to the nature of the Noir Detective film: ALL SECONDARY CHARACTERS “exist only to facilitate the narratives of” either The Detective, The Villain, or The Dame, and are virtually always 2D, thinly-drawn plot-gears. (Hell, even The Detectives are barely fleshed-out in these things, regardless of their color, which I’ll grant was practically always a white male.)
In any event, to re-iterate, I was never claiming that BR featured Asians or POC in “main roles”, just “important” ones. I wasn’t - and wouldn’t - hold it up as a paragon of inclusivity, especially through the lens of today. I was saying that it did indeed feature Asians of significant import to the story; I would add that the film was a positive interim ‘step up’ in representation, particularly for a US//UK production filmed in 1981; and - as I’ve learned from so many of the other enlightening comments to this BB entry - there were so many worse “Orientalism without Asians” offending films from the same era that I’m even firmer that this film is getting a bad rap. But I thank you for your viewpoint.
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How much screen time. Collectively, do they have.
Yeah, that’s the point. It’s centering white people and using Asian people/tropes/language/etc as backdrops for the white people.
Doesn’t mean that this one can’t be called out. This is what taking a film like this seriously looks like. Not just mindlessly celebrating a film because it was the cool thing that you happened to like when it came out, but looking at the film and figuring out what it tells you about the time in which is was produced, where it failed on various metrics (like inclusivity, representation, and how that compares with other films). It’s about helping to better UNDERSTAND that point in history, so such analysis is not only interesting, but it’s actually really fucking helpful to see where people in the past actually failed or fell short.
These depictions of Asian Americans actively caused HARM to people AT THE TIME, and calling that shit out, even now, looking at it, matters. We can draw a direct line between the failure of depict racial minorities in the US as fully human in popular media, and acts of violence against them. In 1973, Vincent Chen, a Chinese American, was killed because he was assumed to be Japanese. Cultural production, after all is often propagandistic, aimed at getting us to feel particular ways about political issues, such as fearing the power of the Japanese economy during that period…
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Apologies, I yoinked that spelling from a different person’s post here without fact-checking it.
While It’s a fool’s errand to cite a character’s total scenes or screentime in a film that has been distributed in at least 8 different edits of widely-varying lengths, I will absolutely cop to Dr. Hannibal NOT being a “major character”. Of course, I didn’t claim that; I said he was “very important” - and, indeed, in every analysis of the first 12 I found in a search, that is indeed how he is evaluated, just as I remember. I will point out that I (and the others, I imagine,) may have our recollections of the character burnished by the performance of the reliably fantastic James Hong, proving as he tends to that major acting talent can make no role “too small”.
But thank you for recalling out that the character was decidedly NOT Asian in the source novel. This helpfully undergirds my larger point that Peoples and/or Scott were making an active positive effort to be more inclusive in the film. It’s not at 2024 levels of enlightenment, but it’s forward for a 1982 release. It also makes it crystal clear that I’m not the one that’s “reaching” here.
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Despite being a fantastic actor, he very much struggled to find roles that were not sterotypes or bit parts… he was very clear about that in recent interviews around Everything, Everyhwere. Maybe listen to the actors you claim to admire on these issues. He’s not the only one either… all the major Asian American actors from the post-war era have made it abundantly clear how they were treated as actors in hollywood, how they were marginalized, how they were stereotyped, how the absolutely struggled to find roles that did not do those things. 
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And it’s not just a problem of 40 and more years ago. Chloe Wang tried to have a career as an actress in Hollywood after having some success as a singer in China. She was born in the US, by the way, to a Chinese father and an American mother. Anyway, she had no luck getting auditions in Hollywood. Until she changed her name to Chloe Bennet. Then she got a starring role on Agents of SHIELD (enter Joss Whedon again), and at least Whedon did make her character also half Chinese, when the original Marvel comics character she was playing wasn’t originally. And Marvel changed that characters origin in the comics to match, so it ended up having a positive effect, but it’s still absolute bullshit that she had to change her last name to have a career.
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I’d like to think that Everything, Everywhere changed shit for Asian American actors, but we’ll see how things are in a decade or more, whether we’re back to the same old orientalist BS or if we can finally move forward…
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There was no actual “need” involved here; only the active inclination.
Being a POC myself, issues of diversity, race and representation are not some mere esoteric ‘thought exercise’ which has no actual ramifications or impact upon the real world we inhabit.
Two dimensional tokens and placeholders (aka “window dressing”) are NOT valid representations of non-White people; full stop.
As Mindysan has already rebutted the majority of your points one by one with some truly excellent responses, I won’t bother wasting any keystrokes by reiterating what she has already posited.
Good day.
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I hope so. Did you happen to see American Born Chinese? It’s a series on Disney+. Ke Huy Quan plays a supporting character in it, but that character’s story mirrors his own to a point. It’s some pretty sharp criticism of how Hollywood, especially on tv, has treated Asian actors and characters. Michelle Yeoh is also in it.
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I did not, as we don’t have Disney +. The trailer looked good, tho. Maybe they’ll decide to release it on physical media at some point…
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This isn’t an official trailer, but it incorporates a monologue Ke Huy Quan’s character gives in the show at one point that really stuck with me. In the scene, it’s a cast reunion of an old sitcom where Quan’s character played this slapstick comic relief joke of a part. And after the show ended, he was expecting to have a bunch of opportunities, but the only parts he was offered were stereotypes and more comic relief. The interviewer asks him what kinds of parts he had wanted, and he answers “I wanted to be the hero.” And I think that sums up this whole discussion. Whether James Hong’s character in Blade Runner was important or not, he certainly wasn’t the hero.
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I didn’t really remember him from the movie, but then I don’t remember a lot of the details, so I looked him up. On the wikipedia list of characters, his description is the second shortest after the guy who runs the bar (considerably more so than even “unnamed replicants”). I am reminded that he makes robot eyes and they get some information from him in his one scene. I’m sure Hong did a great job with that…but that’s really your example of how the movie features important Asian characters? Really? That’s enough for you to declare everyone else as being wrong and unfair? That didn’t feel at all like you might be reaching because you don’t want to admit a flaw with a movie you like?
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Hey, hold on now; that flat, two-dimensional character who appeared in one scene of the movie for about 30 seconds is “very important…” in some random White dude’s esteemed opinion… so it must be true.
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