New place for male Asian leads: the bedroom
In one of the first scenes of “The Big Sick,” a man and woman lie next to each other on an inflatable bed. They lounge against the wall, their eyes lit up by the reflection of an old B movie playing on a ’90s-era television across the room.
Their names are Kumail and Emily. She heckled him during his stand-up routine earlier that night, which led to a series of witty exchanges that, thanks to a few drinks and an Uber, has landed them in his modest bedroom.
The film, which is currently playing in Houston, is based on stand-up comedian Kumail Nanjiani’s real-life marriage to writer Emily Gordon (they co-wrote the screenplay). Nanjiani, playing a version of himself, is as openly flirtatious as he is selfdeprecating. He responds to his date’s barbs about his dorky haircut by saying it’s inspired by Hugh Grant. The shoe fits. Like the British actor most synonymous with the romantic comedy genre, Nanjiani is gentle but not genderless, sophisticated but not pretentious, and charismatic but in a boynext-door kind of way.
And guess what? Emily, played by Zoe Kazan, falls for him. Bored with the film they’re watching, she leaps onto him, somehow smiling through their ensuing make-out session. Then, as the cheesy horror flick fades into the background, they begin to have sex.
Let’s pause and consider that last sentence again: They have sex.
Viewed one way, the scene is unremarkable. It’s the first hookup, right after the meet-cute and before the buildup to a rocky but ultimately triumphant romance seen in most conventional romcoms.
But look at the way this film presents Asian men, and it is suddenly revolutionary, if quietly so. That scene features a man named Kumail, who is Muslim and whose parents are from Pakistan, engaging in a love scene with a white American woman.
To put it broadly: an Asian-American man is featured in a love scene. When was the last time you saw that in an American film?
I have asked that question to even my nerdiest movie-buff friends and have been left with stammers and head-scratching.
“Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon”?
It wasn’t an American film. “Romeo Must Die”? Jet Li and Aaliyah simply share a hug, though a kiss was reportedly filmed and later edited out for fear of making “mainstream” audiences uncomfortable.
How about the sizzling Han Seoul-Oh in the “Fast and Furious” films? Close, but no. The fact that something so banal in “The Big Sick” — an Asian man having sex — is virtually unseen requires examination. This kind of omission doesn’t happen by accident. Sex is an expression of both desire and desirability, and the lack of sexual capability in an entire subset of the American population is one of American entertainment’s most entrenched yet least discussed shortcomings.
Consider a typical portrayal of Asian men: In one scene from the CBS sitcom “2 Broke Girls,” Han Lee, a KoreanAmerican restaurant owner, finds his employee canoodling in a Dumpster-turned-loveshack and demands that she go back to work. The employee, played by Kat Dennings, pokes her head out with her shirtless white lover and responds: “Look here, Little Debbie. If you interrupt me while I’m (having sex) again, I will drop-kick your babypowdered ass back to the Shire along with all the other Hobbits.”
The emasculation, the embarrassment, the outright dismissal of manhood — the show’s attitude toward Lee can be found in television sitcoms, action films and rom-coms in every era.
Of course, the sexual suppression of Asian men in Hollywood has a long history. Interracial romance was banned during the days of the Hays Code, guidelines for film producers. The code was eventually abandoned by the 1960s, but that sexual taboo never went away. Over the course of Hollywood’s cinematic history, the West’s fetishization of Asian women manifested itself in the presence of strippers, geishas and prostitutes (see: “Full Metal Jacket,” “Die Another Day,” the careers of Lucy Liu and Bai Ling).
Meanwhile, the idea that Asian men couldn’t be seen as sexual remained intact. Go through the pantheon of Asian representation, and it’s a grim picture that ranges from the desexualization of Bruce Lee — an icon whose exorbitant masculinity was channeled for violence but rarely sex — to baldly racist portrayals in films including “16 Candles” and “The Hangover.”
The most common argument for the invisibility of Asian men has been money. Spokespeople for the companies that have been forced to address why they engaged in yellowface often point to the financial draw of more “traditional” male leads such as Matt Damon. Two of the Asian leads in the CBS drama “Hawaii Five-O,” including star Daniel Dae Kim, recently walked out of the show after the network refused to pay them as much as their white co-stars, echoing similar controversies regarding gender inequity in the industry. The underlying case for unequal pay was that the Asian characters weren’t as important to audiences.
The argument, though, has a shaky factual basis. A 2017 report on diversity in Hollywood by the Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies at UCLA showed that the films with relatively diverse casts enjoyed the highest median global box office and the highest median return on investment, and that minorities accounted for the majority of ticket sales for five of the top 10 best-selling films.
“The shows and films that look more like America have the best bottom line,” Darnell Hunt, the report’s lead author, said in a statement.
Television has started a slow crawl toward that acknowledgement. “The Big Sick” comes out after “Master of None,” “Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt,” “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend,” “Selfie,” “Fresh Off the Boat” and “The Walking Dead,” all series featuring Asian men in prominent romantic roles.
Yet “Selfie” was canceled after its first season. Steven Yeun’s monumental role as a badass-meetsheartthrob met a shocking and violent end in “The Walking Dead.” Ki Hong Lee’s presence as the primary romantic interest in “Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt” for two seasons was tempered by the fact that his character’s name was Dong, he delivered Chinese food, he had a fresh-off-the-boat accent and the show treaded more lightly on the topic of him having sex than it did rape and trauma.
Even in the era of prestige television, the Hays Code-era taboo against Asian men is alive and well.
Which makes Aziz Ansari’s “Master of None” the closest cousin to “The Big Sick” as a story about a charming Asian American who falls in love, bridges the cultural divides of his parents and overcomes an often-racist entertainment industry. In other words, both Ansari and Nanjiani created stories in which an all-in-all average AsianAmerican man lives out a regular life, which, daringly, includes having sex.
Artistically, “The Big Sick” stands a chance. Want a view of the modern rom-com? It’s Nanjiani shedding his clothes. It’s an Asian guy having sex.
Sure, the film feels more like a sweet and smart romance than a radical gesture of Asian masculinity. It has none of the singularity of a film such as “Moonlight.” But, like that film, “The Big Sick” is an expression of humanity from someone historically denied it, a story that feels like both a gasp of air and a sudden look at the new norm.
Nanjiani having sex has symbolic meaning that flies in the face of American cinematic tradition. And it’s OK that progress feels as normal as “The Big Sick” presents itself.
History, sometimes, takes baby steps.
The fact that something so banal in ‘The Big Sick’ — an Asian man having sex — is virtually unseen requires examination.