Cursive Life of Clint Eastwood's Feature Gran Torino

Beyond Gran Torino’s Guns: Hmong Cultural Warriors Performing Genders Louisa Schein and Va- Megn Thoj with Bee Vang and Ly Chong Thong Jalao In the variegated worlds of Hmong America, the ongoing social and discursive life of Clint Eastwood’s feature Gran Torino () represents a site of cultural struggle that has gone largely unreported. Indeed, in this essay we maintain that the struggles pursued by Hmong cultural producers and consumers in relation to the Hollywood lm may be of import to the US social and racial order in ways that have yet to be interrogated. Particularly, we draw attention here to regimes of gender and sexuality as they interface with racial and ethnic hierarchy, asking questions about Eastwood’s white masculinity in friction with conventionalized Asian masculinities. Our trajectory is toward suggesting how ongoing Hmong cultural production in and beyond the lm matters in a social hierarchy that remains highly ambivalent about Asian malehood. What follows here emerges from an extended dialogue, begun after the positions : ./- Copyright by Duke University Press Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/positions/article-pdf/20/3/763/460567/pos203_05Schein_FPP.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 positions 20:3 Summer 2012 764 Hmong hunting incident, about potential discursive fallouts from the media circus that proliferates around such events. We interact from the respective locations of Hmong American lmmaker/activist with organizing back- ground in Hmong communities and of anthropology/gender studies scholar with decades working with Hmong Americans. The viewpoints presented emerge out of our synergistic play of insights. They are driven by a joint concern for the material effects of both hypervisibilities and their counter- part invisibilities. The rst instantiation of this interchange was published in American Quarterly as “Occult Racism” — in which we read Va- Megn Thoj’s hor- ror screenplay, about a mass murder of Hmong campers, against the Chai Soua Vang shooting to illuminate the erasure of race in the playing out of the case.1 In subsequent work, we juxtaposed a number of high- prole incidents to expose the tensions around invisibility and hypervisibility for Hmong, then turned to a reading of the recent Clint Eastwood lm Gran Torino. Our engagement with the lm has included not only a textual inter- rogation but also our close involvement with Hmong actors and production assistants, as well as concerned community members, from the moment of casting to the shooting, editing, release, and reception of the nal product. Since the release, our work has also been inected by racial visibility activ- ism in collaboration with lead actor Bee Vang and Hmong studies scholar Ly Chong Thong Jalao, among others. In this essay, we turn to the cultural and racial politics of performing Gran Torino and to arguments about how Hmong negotiate the mediated terrain of US gendered politics. As the article proceeds, we move toward increasingly multivocal modes of presentation commensurate with our praxis, with the ensemble character of our joint work, and with media production in general. Previously, we focused on the problematic of Asians being constructed as armed peril on US soil. Here we briey reprise those issues — particularly as concern Hmong Americans and Hmong gangs. We then turn to a more in- depth treatment of other Asian types — the sexual woman and the effeminate man — as played out in Gran Torino and its aftermath. We delve into the politics of gender and sexuality as they are deployed in and beyond the lm to instantiate social hierarchy. One of our tenets is that the life of the lm, and its signicance for ethnic community, extends well Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/positions/article-pdf/20/3/763/460567/pos203_05Schein_FPP.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 Schein and Thoj R Beyond Gran Torino’s Guns 765 beyond the static text that circulates as entertainment in dominant culture replayed ad innitum on airplanes, HBO, and YouTube. Our methodolo- gies are elaborated in consideration of the ongoing social and productive life of Gran Torino’s aftermath. Model Masculinities After the troubled Korean American student Seung- hui Cho killed thirty- two people at Virginia Tech in Spring , “popculturalist” Jeff Yang mused on his Web site that recent events and media coverage had “swung the image of Asian American males away from the ‘meek, passive, and mild’ end of the spectrum and toward ‘violent, bloodthirsty, and dangerous.’ ”2 “Swing,” of course, is the appropriately operative verb, since a pendulum in motion might describe the polelike imagings of Asians in the American imaginary. In recent decades, the “model minority” — nerdy, unaggressive, and politically uninvolved — has been thought to hold sway as the dominant characterization, with periodic ruptures such as the portrait of gangland Chinatown in Year of the Dragon (Michael Cimino, ) and the murder- ous high- achieving high schoolers gone haywire in Better Luck Tomorrow (Justin Lin, ). Somewhere midswing fall Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle (Danny Leiner, ) and Harold and Kumar Escape from Guanta- namo Bay (John Hurwitz, ), which paint Asian males acting out against model minority stereotypes but only as bad boys, not as reckless killers. But was the model minority gure really holding sway or was it always counterpointed by an Asian menace, one that was probably perpetually foreign, even if he lived here, and was violent as a matter of cultural essence? In her study of Hollywood cinema, Romance and the “Yellow Peril,” Gina Marchetti documents this latter character, one who is also a sexual threat to white women, as far back as the early twentieth century.3 During the Viet Nam War, as H. Bruce Franklin details, this menace came to be concretized as the barbaric Viet Cong capable of unimaginable tortures.4 It is conceivable, too, that model minority and ruthless aggressor are not necessarily polar opposites. Amy Brandzel and Jigna Desai suggest a wounded, frustrated masculinity as the diagnostic image at the root of Asian American killerhood.5 In this formulation, the Asian would be a Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/positions/article-pdf/20/3/763/460567/pos203_05Schein_FPP.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 positions 20:3 Summer 2012 766 wannabe sexual aggressor, but his geekish sensitivity would block him from being sexually attractive to (white) US women. Enraged at his “racial castra- tion,” his categorical exclusion from erotic playerhood, he would strike back with violence.6 Brandzel and Desai argue that this trope in pop representa- tion has obscured the race critique that might otherwise be salient in, say, an analysis of Seung- hui Cho’s rampage: “Perhaps the media, and white Amer- ica in general, worked so hard to t Cho within the wounded- masculinity type in order to avoid the other hermeneutical option: the racially oppressed retaliating for their isolation from the privileges of normative citizenship.”7 When the murders at Virginia Tech began to be processed, by main- stream media and Asian American commentators alike, as the un/intel- ligible acts of a Korean American student, certain of us watchers of media racialization recalled the spectacularizations of another Asian, Chai Soua Vang, the Hmong hunter who had killed six white hunters in the woods of Wisconsin in . Were these events likely to be discursively linked, and if so, what effect would they produce? Would we see the rise, or the return, of a racial menace in the form of gun- toting ruthless killer Asian men, and what would be the consequences? What difference would it make to the discursive homogenization of Asians that one of the killers was Hmong, a group that has articulated awkwardly if at all with prevailing images of Asian Americans? Would the construct of wounded masculinity come into play as it had with other Asians? Or would tropes of guerilla warrior and US street gang prevail, carrying forward an abiding image of Hmong as predisposed to killing? The attribution of Hmong killerhood was intensied once again when in June of Vang Pao, the former general who commanded Hmong troops for the Central Intelligence Agency during the Viet Nam War, was abruptly arrested in California along with nine of his purported henchmen. The accusation was of arranging to purchase arms and of conspiring to overthrow a foreign government — Laos. The media had a heyday since once again Hmong could be thumbnailed in conveniently newsworthy ways. Not only were “the” Hmong now terrorists like any other Bin Laden, they were terrorists who’d been caught red- handed and could be served up to a frightened American populace ever more doubtful about the efcacy of the 8 US search for Osama himself. Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/positions/article-pdf/20/3/763/460567/pos203_05Schein_FPP.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 Schein and Thoj R Beyond Gran Torino’s Guns 767 But regardless of whether the conspirators were guilty of an actual plot to return violently to their homeland, what concerns us here is the conation of the now deceased Vang Pao and his coterie of those scheming to go back with the entire Hmong people.9 Such a conation harks back to decades of generalizing the Hmong émigré story as the story of all Hmong, omit- ting that Hmong remain scattered several million strong across multiple states of China and Southeast Asia as well as in diasporic sites from France to Australia to French Guyana. In both Asia and the West, most Hmong pursuits are far from war mongering and revolve around simply pursuing survival through agriculture, wage labor, or small business. Hmong profes- sor Chia Youyee Vang, in a letter to the New York Times, recalled, “There were Hmong ghting on both sides, supported by both East and West.

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