I cannot wait to see Kaufman’s latest film, Synechdoche, NY, coming to you courtesy of Kameron (ARMOIRE_, who sadly does not frequently update his most beautifully designed tumblr). But one thing disturbs me about it. At the end of the trailer, as the cast is rolled out, not one of them is … not white.
Almost always, our hip expressions of discontent happen strictly through a cast of white characters. While calling it racism might be extreme, there is an ongoing white hegemony implicit in the realm of indie music, language, literature, &c. Meanwhile, a lot of Asians are having similar experiences of quietly frustrated clashes with and within the present-day combine. And I guarantee you that other “ethnics” are here too, although you wouldn’t know it from going to a festival concert and its throngs of white people ripped from the latest Urban Outfitters catalog. I suppose the directors who depict the shared truths of a modern/postmodern emotional experience just didn’t have an Indian or Chinese best friend in high school (insert picture of now classic Korean hipster here: plaid shirt, big boxy black frame glasses, skinny pants rolled at the bottom with flat white dirtied sneakers). In way of an explanation, I’m guessing that it wasn’t as common then as it is now to have a token cute Asian friend, or even a few of them.
Perhaps they’re just too old, these directors that represent our times and our ennui&neuroses&subdued panic or whatever you want to call it - after all, Wes Anderson was born in 1969 (39), and Charlie Kaufman was born in 1958 (50). It’s likely that soon, we’ll see a new generation of directors rise to “indie popularity” to rectify the situation.
