podcast friday

 Today's podcast rec is "Everything Everywhere All At Once and the Asian American Family," on It Could Happen Here. I'm highlighting it because 1) it's a take I haven't seen anywhere else and I happen to agree, and 2) it's just an excellent piece of media criticism of the sort that I don't see enough. Mia chats with filmmaker Tiffany Yang about the film and where it's positioned more generally within Asian American cinema and culture. They are both Asian American and I am obviously not, and they do a good job of exploring nuances that I'm either unaware of or did not realize was a thing.

First of all, we all liked the movie. My initial impressions were that its reach exceeded its grasp and it was overlong, which I don't really object to, and that it didn't land the ending, which I do object to. But why? I saw it a second time and liked it a lot more, but I still felt the ending was kind of unearned. Its Oscar sweep and Michelle Yeoh and Ke Huy Quan finally getting the recognition they richly deserve is something we should all truly celebrate. Mia talks about how the character of Joy was the closest she's ever come to seeing herself on screen. And I don't think that any critique can take away from how important all of that is.

But we can also critique things we like, can't we? The problem with media criticism on the internet is that it so often boils down to Thing Good or Thing Bad with zero analysis or nuance. So when I see a piece like this that genuinely appreciates a work while picking it apart, the film critic in me goes absolutely bonkers with joy.

Mia describes it as the best version of the only type of film Asian American filmmakers seem allowed to make. Which, once you see the pattern, is impossible to avoid. There's a family struggling to run a small business that's in financial trouble. They struggle to assimilate into American society. There is intergenerational tensions. That tension is resolved, and the family is reconciled. No other story is allowed to be told, and the class positionality is very specific. Tiffany points out the difference between the film and book versions of Crazy Rich Asians; in the book, the family is not reconciled, and they change it for the film, because no other story is allowed to be told. She also references some filmmakers who tell other types of stories but these are not considered Asian American Films (TM), which is fascinating to me.

The most interesting element of it is the discussion of queerness, because I keep seeing EEAAO described as "queer joy" and like. It isn't? to me? Like it struck me how remarkably sexless the relationship was between Joy and her girlfriend, how that relationship only exists as a point of tension between Joy and Evelyn. But Mia and Tiffany go deeper, talking about the generational trauma that is glossed over by the film's resolution, the way in which the trauma to older generations must always supersede the trauma that parents and grandparents do to their children, the ways in which queerness is always framed as Other (note that both of the queer relationships depicted in the film are between Chinese characters and white/white-passing characters), and most of all, the fact that it's not anything intrinsic to Joy and her queerness that Evelyn embraces at the end, but the sheer fact of biological relation. Which is often just not enough.

They also talk about the role of the Elder in Asian American political discourse, and how it gets conflated with, say, Indigenous ideas of the Elder but is fundamentally different. There's a dovetail here with the concept of family abolition, which they suggest but don't explore, and I am absolutely dying to discuss this with the family abolition academic I know (who, incidentally, loved the film).

Anyway, I enjoyed the absolute hell out of this analysis and it made me really excited to talk about film again.