The Subtle Rebellion Of "Better Luck Tomorrow"

 

Along with an unexpected rush of adrenaline, Better Luck Tomorrow offers a lot to consider. There are smudges of universality that could appeal to a broad audience. The universality depends on the flashiness of hyper-realness: the insightful voiceover, the flashy and jerky editing, the escalating criminality all recall standards of American cinema that entertained audiences for generations. A sense of radicalness stems from a deliberate generic intervention which launches the film into a sinister tone of startling originality. The film attempts to unravel the Californian suburban conditions that trap its protagonists. The pressure to conform to standards of model-minority stereotype blights the esteem of the teenage inhabitants. There is a double-bind for the particulars of the group of Asian-American teenagers whose actions drive the plot. The film doesn't fully suggest that skewed masculinity or cultural stereotypes have led the boys to stray from the path of individual self-fulfillment. Instead, they become not-so-simple factors that define and inform their specific selfish decline. 

I'm still more than a little impressed by the film's first opening sequence. The thought of college interrupts the calm of the heat and the idyllic setting of teenage suburban leisure for Ben, the film's narrator and leading character. His friend Virgil is eager for the numbing process to end quickly to usher the sanctuary college provides in their mind. He assures Ben that girls, intellect, and the sense of belonging await them eagerly after being shunned for so long. After the jarring discovery of a dead body, the film hammers in the markers of model-minority: Ben tiredly remains diligent and dedicated to the illusion of a well-rounded applicant, consumes a new SAT word each other, memorizes records and thresholds that he can break, picks up Basketball and works after-school to bolster his college applications. The absence of a parental helicopter figure's token appearance begins to reveal the pushes against the model-minority stereotype. There isn't any personal interest and need, which divests us as an audience from the all-consuming involved intellectualism and competition associated with the Asian-American geek. Ben and Virgil may ostensibly believe that fulfillment from college will complete their entire lives up to that point— the double-identity of criminality they soon embrace takes advantage of the only identity and ideology they have long hated. 

As petty cheating and drug dealing escalates, Ben and his friends thrive from the hedonistic rewards provided by their newfound criminal lifestyle. They insist it will not become their futures, but it becomes a crutch nevertheless. Through crime, they seize an opportunity to explore the antithesis of their life. However rewarding or freeing, the transformation into a model of traditional American masculinity becomes tinged with teenagers' complications. One striking example is Virgil and his mercurial behavior that seems most attracted towards violence: "That was better than sex," he grins in the car after the gang cements their first move towards their criminal identity at a party. Just as quickly as he adopts the identity, the allure crumbles as the remainder of his father and the system he must abide by numbs him to the drama around him. If there was ever one, Ben keeps his own moral quandary at bay by modifying his hedonistic behavior with the familiar rub of routine. Daric, characterized by his cunning, also experiences panic when his future seems jeopardized; Han seems more affronted at being collateral damage than being suspended, but the complications of their crimes irritates him. When the film startles us with Ben's involvement in the arguably worst crime, it implicates the entire group with its circling action: it forces the audience to witness every angle and ponder the exposition that occurred for the moment to unfold. 

Margaret Hillenbrand's article "Of Myths and Men" points to several facets that seem to characterize Asian-American cinema historically, notably the sense of activism and self that motivates the entire film venture. Comparatively, Better Luck Tomorrow does churn out its lessons on representations with the same edge of protest within its clear inspirational guide. Ben's subjectivity centers the film; it works, but the integration of the various stereotypes doesn't necessarily create three-dimensional characters. When Hillenbrand notes that the purpose of American gangster has been the exploration of the ethnic outsider, I couldn't help but notice that the exposition certainly differs. Audiences become immersed in a "modulated, slow-burn exposition of character and crime, nature and nurture, right and wrong" offered in traditional cinema, but Better Luck Tomorrow forgoes any such attempt towards constructing origin like that. As much as I can applaud the film for breaking the model for its presentation of ethnic details, it also functions on the idea that any notion of ethnicity signifies radicalness cinematically.