Word: hollywoodizations
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Hollywood, in its drive to make shocking, profitable movies, has described mentally ill people in a manner that has caused the population to have unjustified fear of mentally ill people. Generally speaking, mentally ill people are not dangerous. Even the vast majority of medically treated psychotics pose absolutely no danger to anyone...
...play opens, Bradley Yamashita (Young Lee '99) and Vincent Chang (Allen Soong '96) meet at a Hollywood party. Bradley, a young actor who wants to change the way Asians are portrayed in the media, tells the older Vincent that he admires his work and speaks of how much it means to the "community." Bradley also explains that he has sought out Vincent because he feels more comfortable talking to the only other Asian-American in the room...
...play proceeds, the two men engage in a series of debates, each one defending his way of dealing with a racist Hollywood. But by the final scene, when Bradley and Vincent meet up again at a similar party, they have reversed their initial positions; Bradley has had a nose-job and is playing a lucrative but demeaning role in a big-budget film, while Vincent is about to make an independent documentary about a Japanese family during World War II. As if to emphasize his enlightenment, Gotanda even has Vincent come out in the play's last scene, adding sexual...
...part of homosexuality. The film is bold enough to propose the integration of gays--and by extension of anyone "different"--into an America that at the moment seems ready to take up arms and shoot holes in the melting pot. Indeed, that may be a part of Hollywood's continuing reluctance to confront the issue. As exotics--drag queens or dying swans--gays are fine fodder for movies. But Hollywood sees little need to show that the vast majority of gays are ordinary, reasonably complicated people. They are the folks who work next to you at the steel press...
...film studio. For the final irony is that Hollywood, with its dozens of gay stars, its hundreds of gays in positions of creative and executive power, is afraid to depict homosexual life--the world it knows and could persuasively dramatize. The whole town, timid as ever, prefers to reside in one huge, beautifully appointed celluloid closet. Or a gilded birdcage with a cover over it. The world looks safe and cozy from inside. Why would anyone want to come...