Lin beats Asian trap

Credit card piracy. Crib sheets. Straight A's. Drug dealing. Guns. Prostitutes. Dead bodies. And that's just the first hour of Justin Lin's breakaway indie success, Better Luck Tomorrow. Shopped around last year at the Sundance Film Festival, the film earned a controversial, but strong, reputation built on the charges of indecency, racial self-loathing and immorality -- charges repudiated by perhaps the film's greatest defender, critic Roger Ebert. (For more details, watch the new documentary Better Luck Tomorrow: Genesis.)

First and foremost, the charges leveled against the film carry no weight whatsoever. If anything, this is a film that wants to defy the racial stereotypes and connotations thrust upon its protagonists, but to do so is not to ignore the social mores and realities these teenagers must deal with. If anything, the film ignores pandering to stereotypes to the point of actually making the issue invisible. Past a certain point, one no longer looks at the characters as Asian -- it's merely a detail shrugged off early on. They are not computer whizzes or kung fu experts; rather, they are very ambitious and intelligent kids who have used their intellect to con the system where it is most weak, to "get away with anything if [I'm] clever enough." The word "Asian" is rarely spoken and even the traditional nationality cliques are not present -- these young men clearly think of themselves as Americans and ask to be treated no differently. This extends to the point that when Ben, a second-stringer on the basketball team, is confronted by newspaper editor Daric who questions his own merits.

The plot is a strange mZlange of stationary picaresque (spiritually, at least) and anti-bildungsroman, because it refuses to judge the characters on the merits of their actions, nor does it insist upon a coherent moral structure to correspond to the fates of the young men. If these choices make the audience feel uneasy up to the end -- as they are intended to -- then perhaps this is because it reflects the logical conclusion to a system where, as Ben says, "straight A's were our alibis; as long as our grades were there we were trusted." Any method that focuses solely on the ends will inevitably divorce itself from any ethical considerations of the means.

And perhaps this is really what Lin is criticizing, though if anyone believes that such a criticism is leveled against the American-Asian community's work ethic at-large, then they do so at the peril of exposing their own prejudices of the said community. The film ostensibly has Asian-American youth at its center, but there is no reason that the same story could not be applicable as much to any other group of high school students, to say nothing of the American corporate power structure or even (heavens!) our own presidential administration. Don't underestimate overachievers (or over/underachievers for that matter) indeed.