Somebody's career needs a boost.
Now, an Asian actor who co-starred alongside Eastwood in the film, the kind of opportunity any actor would cherish, says "Gran Torino" helped contribute to anti-Asian sentiment.
Bee Vang admits the film gave Hmongs a very rare, nay "historic," cinematic close up. He still regrets the film, saying the slurs employed by Walt made racism more acceptable stateside.
People on Twitter were saying you can't go by The Daily Wire story! It's right-wing agitprop! It distorts what Vang wrote! You must go to the source to understand the context!
Okay, I'll call their bluff.
They were absolutely right, there was more to the story.
Not all of it flattering.
You should be careful what you wish for.
The underlying message of Vang's piece was perfectly fine and one any decent person would agree with. Racism is awful and you shouldn't be beating up random elderly Asians on the street for things they had nothing to do with.
But it's the very context he frames it all in that is his undoing because the piece comes off as opportunistic, self-serving, and with a strong whiff of desperation in a transparent bid for relevance.
Let's start with his attempt to essentially reframe a movie about racial reconciliation into a virulent racist diatribe.
I swear, it's the Sneetches all over again.
Gran Torino, the movie he now "regrets," was his first role and arguably the apex of his career. In fact, let's pause on that for a moment. According to IMBD, this is a summation of his 13 years in Hollywood.
Look, Hollywood is brutal. The failure rate is incredibly high and I have nothing but respect for anyone who attempts to make a living in that industry. I get it. By any reasonable financial measure, my writing career for the last several decades, in fits and starts, has been a failure (and the jury still remains out). I am the last person to beat up on someone for their struggles.
But leveraging that struggle, and essentially defaming a movie and in association a man, to your own ends is unacceptable.
Here is how he started his piece:
Back in 2008 I starred opposite Clint Eastwood in "Gran Torino" playing the lead Hmong role in a tale of two people transcending their differences to form an unlikely human bond. It was a historic cinematic moment for Hmong people around the world, despite its copious anti-Asian slurs.
Despite? More like, because, (in part) of its copious anti-Asian slurs.
But not the way he means. American audiences were not thirsty for some good old-fashioned anti-Asian racism back in 2008. I was alive then, nobody was binge-watching WWII propaganda films or attempting to mainstream Viet-Nam-era racial slurs.
The anti-Asian slurs were a necessary plot point. You can't dramatically depict "two people overcoming their differences to form an unlikely human bond" without depicting those differences, and it wouldn't exactly be gripping drama if the differences were over "extra crispy" vs. "original recipe."
At the time, there was a lot of discussion about whether the movie's slurs were insensitive and gratuitous or simply "harmless jokes." I found it unnerving, the laughter that the slurs elicited in theaters with predominantly white audiences.
To this day, I am still haunted by the mirth of white audiences, the uproarious laughter when Eastwood's curmudgeonly racist character, Walt Kowalski, growled a slur. "Gook." "Slope head." "Eggroll."
Perhaps Vang is unaware of this (and I find it disturbing that he might be), but spewing racist slurs is not funny. Sure, I have no doubt a handful of morons find that funny, but they're morons. A moron can watch a guy step on a rake and hit himself in the face forty times and still find it comical.
But that's not what makes for a box-office hit. What made the slurs funny in Gran Torino were their very absurdity. Seeing a cranky old man, Clint Eastwood in particular, regurgitating shop-warn and out-of-touch racist insults is completely ridiculous and that's what makes it funny.
They weren't laughing at you, Vang, they were laughing at Eastwood. Aside from the gang members, the depiction of the Asians was nothing short of sympathetic.
It's a "harmless joke," right?
If you understand the joke, yes, but you don't.
Until it's not just a joke, but rather one more excuse for ignoring white supremacy and racism.
I'll give him credit. He managed to resist the temptation to play the white supremacy card until the ninth paragraph.
Pretty impressive show of restraint in this day and age.
What the pandemic has epitomized is an abject failure to assimilate Asian humanity, much like the disastrous wars fought across Asia (the Philippines, Korea, Vietnam, Laos, Afghanistan and more) that were underscored by the racist military ambitions of armed white supremacy.
Sure, he may be libeling the nation that took in his family in its time of need, but at least he's historically illiterate.
There are many Americans, myself included, who find the United States' military incursions in Southeast Asia to have been a grave error, but blaming it on "racist military ambitions of armed white supremacy" is absurd.
The United States did not gain its independence fighting the Viet Cong. It did it by fighting the United Kingdom.
Not that long ago, it helped rid the world of the Nazis.
We're talking Brits and Aryans.
It is not possible to get more white than that.
Okay, maybe the Jonas Brothers, but we never declared war on them.
Not that we shouldn't...
America's wars, ill-advised or not, have been animated not by "white supremacy," but rather a rejection of authoritarianism, whether against monarchical kings, Nazi fascists, or dictatorial communists.
Shortly before trotting out his white supremacy charge, he cited some truly awful racist attacks on Asians.
In less than a year, the animus [from Covid] seems to have coalesced in the death of Vicha Ratanapakdee, an 84-year-old Thai American who was murdered in San Francisco on Jan. 31.
Interesting choice.
Ratanapakdee was not attacked by a white man, as the video included in Vang's own piece clearly shows, and in fact the suspect arrested in the case, Antoine Watson is black.
In fact, there is another link in Vang's piece in which a 91-year-old-Asian man is pushed to the ground, again, by a black man, and any story you pull up from the spate of crimes San Francisco had been suffering under seems to suggest the crime is mostly black-on-Asian.
I doubt that is the case nationwide, or possibly even San Francisco. I assume there are white people doing similarly awful things.
Humans gonna human.
But if you're going to try to tie Gran Torino to white supremacy and then to racist violence against Asians you should be more careful about the examples you choose.
There is an overall sadness in his piece. I believe he is feeling real sorrow and angst over anti-Asian violence. I share his disgust over it. We all do, I think.
But vilifying a movie that had a genuine anti-racist message (not today's racist CRT-style "anti-racism"), blaming it for anti-Asian sentiment, and claiming white supremacy to be behind it all, is just too much for me.
It should be too much for him, too.
