Roles Confined to the Second Banana Republic
November 26, 2004
When did Asian Americans become the acceptable second bananas of cinema? You know, the best friend, the buddy or the girl on the side. Oh yes, there are occasional martial-arts stars (Jet Li, Jackie Chan) or the solitary action-dramatic actor (Chow Yun Fat). But what stands out is that Asian faces are so often relegated to the ornamental “Oriental” background. The word “banana” captures a little of the problematic state — yellow on the outside and white on the inside, bananas usually fill space on camera quietly and admirably.
Recently released horror flicks The Grudge and Saw both have Asian directors — Takashi Shimizu and James Wan, respectively — and both rely on Asian actors when the films kick into police procedural mode. In Saw, Ken Leung is Detective Steven Sing, the baby-faced, rock-solid partner of Danny Glover’s psychologically fragile Detective David Tapp; though he is riveting in the scene where he saves the victim from certain death via power drill, he’s generally completely dispensable — a momentary distraction, without a known life, home or back story. The same goes for Ryo Ishibashi’s Detective Nakagawa in The Grudge: Here, even in the thick of Japan, a veteran officer is helpless before the taint of second-banana status.
The most notorious second banana, Gedde Watanabe — both unforgettable and much-maligned for his role as the goofy student Long Duk Dong in 1984’s Sixteen Candles — pops up in Alfie. Playing Wing, Alfie’s boss at a chauffeur company, Watanabe catches disdain from employees Alfie (Jude Law) and Marlon (Omar Epps) on a regular basis. Though his accent is as thick as the cockney lover boy’s, Wing can’t get a break. His underground garage office is chaotic, he tends toward the paranoid and mean-spirited, and he rarely reaches out beyond his own little world. He is that familiar stereotype: the clueless immigrant to Alfie’s suave émigré. (French words make everything sound more glamorous!) Ultimately Wing yells at his long-suffering wife once too often, and she leaves him, a sign of true-loser status. Alfie catches him trying to win her back, and he provides some lovelorn advice for the annoying, muddled Wing: write her poetry.
Why tap Watanabe for this role? The choice seems designed to evoke the “fun,” borderline bigotry of Sixteen Candles that had Watanabe lisping, “What’s up, hot stuff?” And why does Watanabe get typecast as the archetypal ugly foreigner, bumbling around in the outermost reaches of humiliating neediness? You may fidget and complain about the portrayal — much as you might over the dumb laughs at the Elmer Fudd/Korean accent of the Kim Jong-il puppet in Team America — but advocates will point to the crowds in front of the box offices and say that not all meaty roles are positive ones.
Meanwhile Sandra Oh gets in touch with her sex-pot side in Sideways, playing the frisky second-banana single mom to Victoria Madsen’s bright, wine-savvy grad student. In Alexander Payne’s (Oh’s real-life husband) film about two middle-aged boys’ escapist excursion into wine country, her role may be poor, adopted and loveless, but she’s also feisty, caught in flagrante delicto with Jack (Thomas Haden Church) and last sighted attacking him with a motorcycle helmet. After she’s done with him, he looks as if he were the victim of a hit-and-run by a semi. This second banana bites back — and stands out.
Perhaps second bananas are simply part of a long, lingering final phase in the evolution of Asian Americans on film, and today’s API actors are prepping the culture to make a step into leading roles of their own.
Yet when even an Anglo golden boy like Jude Law can’t open a star-making vehicle like Alfie, one wonders whether Asian American images can draw the mass audiences to satisfy corporate box-office requirements. Heck, even Jet Li has to play a collared, caninelike torture victim in the upcoming Unleashed while Jackie Chan still has to take the quasi-second-banana path in the Rush Hour and Shanghai Knights series. Evidently even established Asian actors can’t escape the character parts.
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