Justin Lin's Better Luck Tomorrow: Model Minority

In director Justin Lin's second feature Better Luck Tomorrow four Asian-American high school students in California get involved in crime and come undone. The difference between these four boys and the boys in Martin Scorsese's Mean Streets (1973), the current model for all such movies, and in the Hughes Brothers' Menace II Society (1993), is that Lin's boys are examples of what has led Asian-Americans to be called the "model minority." They are so disciplined that doing well at school--in class, on standardized tests, in extracurricular clubs, and at part-time jobs in addition--is easy, natural. Earnest, open-faced Ben (Parry Shen), the movie's narrator, looks like a straight-A student and guides us through his regimen of activities, official and unofficial (memorizing a new word every day, shooting 200 freeshots), intended to land him in the Ivy League. Even Virgil (Jason Tobin), Ben's skinny-goofy sidekick and the kind of kid who can barely keep a lid on his horniness and turbulent resentment, is an academic standout. But doing well leaves them bored, and fails to express their adolescent hormonal urges. Sports might do that, but though Ben has hustled to get on the basketball team, everyone suspects the Coach put him on as a token, and in any case he never gets to play. Daric (Roger Fan), a tall, cool organizer, writes an article for the school newspaper about this and protestors start coming to the games. As a result of this minor stir Ben quits the team; soon he's writing cheat sheets for Daric at $50 a pop.

At first their crimes are in the model-minority vein--cheat sheets and, to a lesser extent, figuring out how to return computer equipment and keep it, too. Along with Virgil's cousin Han (Sung Kang; the least developed character), they join Daric's "academic decathlon" team, which then becomes the center of operations for more conventional criminal, and generally sociopathic, activities. The joke is that although they use academic decathlon meetings for planning crimes and unhinged partying, they're still a championship team.

Menace II Society had sociological underpinnings; the boys came from a stratum of African-American society in which disruption of socializing human relations is the normal state of affairs. Their lives were so hopelessly disorganized that crime didn't represent that much of a slide. Mean Streets was the opposite--the Italian-American boys followed an older generation into crime, which had the formality of small business in their circle. Mean Streets is far more than a sociological dramatization, but in both pictures you understood that the moviemakers were showing you situations with some statistical validity.

That's not so clear in Better Luck Tomorrow. Lin is highly conscious of having made the first Asian-American film to be picked up for distribution, and he talks about the four boys and their criminal life as if he were documenting a social phenomenon, for instance in this 27 December 2001 interview with AsianAmericanFilm.com:

"Better Luck Tomorrow" is really exploring the whole youth culture of today, specifically Asian American, but also just the general mentality of teenagers today. I mean, I work with teenagers, I grew up in the 80s, and already it's very different, the mentality. You go to suburbia, you look at upper middle class kids, and through the media they've literally adopted urban gangsta mentality…. Specifically it's very interesting when you put it within the context of Asian American males. I mean, what's more empowering than being a gangsta with a gun? I don't think I'm doing justice to it, but that was the theme that I really wanted to explore, about the fact that [teens] don't have the patience to search for things and so [they] start adopting things and then potentially this identity could swallow [them]....

What we see, however, doesn't feel real. It's highly detailed, and in that sense technically realistic, as are the performances (by an accomplished set of actors, including Karin Anna Cheung as the girl Ben likes, and John Cho, who has a wonderful face for the movies, full of fascinating, inchoate cross-currents, as Ben's rival), but I still felt that Lin was working something out in his head rather than in any California town.

Article Author: Alan Dale

Alan Dale earned a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Princeton University and a J.D. from Yale Law School. He currently works as a corporate tax attorney in Portland, Oregon.

He is the author of What We Do Best: American Movie Comedies …

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