“Your birthday today, Daisy. This year you have to make a choice between two life paths. Second chances comes your way. Extraordinary events culminate in what might seem to be an anticlimax. Your lucky numbers are 84, 23, 11, 78, and 99. What a load of shit.”

The “American Dream” is something many people strive for. White picket fence, wife and loving children, even a puppy dog might exist within this dream.  This was the dream of the son of Walt Kowalski. You might wonder why I bring him up at all. He’s neither a central character to the plot of the story, nor does he show up often. It isn’t him that I even really want to discuss, but more the idea of him. A man, raised by a racist war vet, trying hard to live the “American Dream”. But these people end up being quite important, as they set up the show. They bring the audience to a place of understanding, ask them to look at it critically, and then starkly contrast it with the Hmong culture next door. Its a film which wishes to base itself within the idea of cultural understanding and acceptance.

It is important to note that the film begs the audience to accept American culture just as much as Hmong culture, even though it isn’t specifically mentioned. We are brought into the story of a crotchety old man who has just lost his wife. Death always has been a great way to provoke sympathy from an audience and thus begs an understanding of Walt’s incredibly racist behavior.  It shows Walt’s family expressing very familiar life expectancies, like the attempt to put Walt himself into a retirement home and even the reading of the will at the end of the film. And though American culture through the lens of this film is intended to look less than pleasant, if you take a step back, it really is so. While I don’t intend to delve to deeply into the subject of the horrors of our culture, I did want to talk a bit about how the film takes on Hmong culture.

To a lost and clueless audience, buried deep under the constructs we’ve built for ourselves, we need a guide to this unfamiliar culture. So they throw in the most American man you’ve ever seen (see stereotypically racist war vet; Sarcasm). He stand in the place of the film to be the audience, to make their journey into this unknown new world. And in between Walt(audience) and the Hmong culture(cultural understanding and acceptance) is a girl named Sue. She had the lovely ability to be born into a family as a second generation child, being both a part of American and Hmong cultures. She stood as a marker with this “dual-consciousness”, a phrase I borrowed from Takaki’s book, Strangers from a Different Shore. She takes Walt through the culture, slowly but surely over the course of the film, and asks Walt to understand that people from a different culture are still people. Something this film did really well, as awful as this may sound, is it did not ask the audience to set aside its (mostly unconscious) racism.  All this film asked was that you understand that, while people may be different, they are still people and deserve to be treated as such, even if they don’t operate the same way as you do.

*Spoilers* A little off topic, but there was one thing this film did that really got on my nerves. They painted Walt to be this incredibly racist stubborn man, but faced with his imminent death, his entire character shifted just a little, just enough to be able to make him a  martyr in the end. This sort of white martyrdom/heroism always feels really misplaced in the face of a movie that begs for cultural acceptance.

(Trigger Tuesdays, courtesy of Gabby.)