A microcosm of race and gender that wanted to be far more daring than it is
Slanted is a film about identity. It is about Chinese-American identity inflected through the turmoil of finding yourself in your teenage years. It is about how America demands a very specific roster of traits to consider you truly included, and the most obvious of those is white skin. Through its history, America has demanded outsiders mold themselves to the white nationalist mold, and brutally punishes those outside it. This film is about one fantastical way of trying to transcend that dissonance, and the cost of becoming “American.”
Joan Huang is a Chinese-American student at a high school right out of the movies, with all the cliques and drama and entanglements we have been conditioned to accept. She is one of the few people of color at this affluent lily-white school that highly values conformity and submission, especially from its girls. Joan spends too much time on social media, and particularly is obsessed with a filter on one of said apps that makes her look white. As the culture of capitalism swoops down, she is offered the chance of a lifetime: a new experimental surgery that will turn her into a white girl. She uses this new procedure to seek the holy grail of teenage girlhood, according to Hollywood: the coveted status of prom queen.
Note that “according to Hollywood” bit in the last paragraph. This film is very much in thrall to the Hollywood genre of the “teen film”: high school is divided into mutually exclusive cliques, everyone is in a dog-eat-dog contest for popularity, everyone is seeking love and sex constantly as opposed to decent grades, and nobody can think about anything else. For example, Joan spends much of the film seeking the heart of a white boy at her school, who was tragically born without a personality, as part of her quest to join a clique that likewise has no personality. The film feels like, for no reason at all, it has a special obligation to a hackneyed formula that is already decades out of date and has been since subverted (I think that Spiderman: Homecoming was the closest film to my experience in high school in the early 2010s, for example).
The most striking example of this dated feeling is a scene where Joan is conveying her half-thought plan to become prom queen to her closest friend at school, using sheets of paper in a binder. I watched this film with my younger sister, who graduated high school in 2019, and she found the notion that this would be done on paper, rather than in a social media app, to be completely unbelievable.
Nor is the traditional “teen movie” the only genre to which this film pledges fealty. The other is the “immigrant movie,” where your unfortunate protagonist’s lunch, packed by her hardworking mother, immediately provokes disgust in her peers because it dares have a spice stronger than mayonnaise. Her parents are hard-working recent immigrants, stuck in menial labor and at the whim of rich white people. She speaks mostly in English, while her parents speak mostly in Chinese, but each understands the other language well enough. Her journey is that of what Northrop Frye defined as comedy, one where a character is ultimately reconciled with her society. At the end, she learns to be American, a newly accepted part of the nation of immigrants.
The film, though, never bothers to actually interrogate any of these notions that the narrative takes for granted, and the end result is a feeling of tonal dissonance. On the one hand, the way most characters behave is, if not “realistic,” normal enough according to Hollywood, all within the standard genre of the “teen film” and therefore part of what Hollywood considers to be “reality;” it is enough of a simulacrum of immigrant life that you can shrug and say “good enough.” But so many accoutrements of the setting, particularly her school, are exaggerated enough to feel like an inaccuracy, but not enough to feel like commentary. The school’s mascot is the wizard, and the posters for said wizard look unsubtly like a Klansman when viewed out of focus. The significance of prom is enshrined to the point that portraits of prom kings and queens past line a hallway, implying that the significance of this ritual is honored by the school administration too. The group of white kids that Joan is trying to fit into does a number of its routines completely in unison, such as when they take out their inevitably identical lunches from their packs. You have characterization that is totally at odds with worldbuilding.
The result of this is a film that feels like a machine-generated average of two other hypothetical, better films. One of them is a searing look at the insidious nature of everyday racism, where the smiling faces of Joan’s peers hide the fact they will never view her as one of them. This one would be very grounded, tragically real, with the race-changing surgery as the only speculative element, where the cost of assimilation is made viscerally real. The other hypothetical film is wilder, more exaggerated, going down past the point where One Battle After Another was with its Bedford Forrest Medal of Honor, and down to the far lands of satire where a school with a Klansman as a mascot feels earned. This hypothetical film would be biting, irreverent, and dystopian; it could have cross-burnings in the football field, lynchings conducted over Tik-Tok, and the prom queen receive the honor of being marshal at a Klan parade; in other words, it’d have to go all the way with the exaggeration or it would fall flat. Either option would be a film that would dare to say something: Is striving to be “American” worth pursuing to begin with?
The traditional immigrant story in the United States, where the newcomer passes through trials and tribulations and ultimately ends up a new American, is wrapped up in the “nation of immigrants” propaganda line that became common in this country after World War II as a reaction to the wave of decolonization sweeping the world. It was becoming clearer and clearer that Europeans had never had a right to rule Africa or Asia, and this of course raised questions about the white man’s right to rule the Americas. The response concocted was to portray this country as a land of opportunity for people from all around the world. The idea was that America’s strength came through its diversity and tolerance, and that all the anti-immigrant riots and massacres and poverty was simply human beings failing to live up to a quasi-divine ideal.
As Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz has shown in her book Not “a Nation of Immigrants”: Settler Colonialism, White Supremacy, and a History of Erasure and Exclusion (excerpted here), the “nation of immigrants” line is based on a fundamental conflation between a settler and an immigrant. The settler caste of white people came to this continent to plunder and kill so they could create a white nationalist ethnostate where they would rule forever as overlords. European immigrants, often called “white ethnics,” could to a point assimilate into the settler caste (the most precariously placed being Jewish immigrants). Those from darker countries, on the other hand, are only allowed into the country at white allowance, and will (and do) face shockingly brutal violence if they ever step out of line, or are seen as a useful scapegoat. If America were truly a “nation of immigrants,” truly a “land of opportunity,” truly “tolerant” and “accepting” and “diverse,” it would not be murdering Palestinian children on a whim in Illinois, or throwing Mexicans and Mexican-Americans in concentration camps where they are tortured. No amount of self-soothing pablum can deny the fact that America has never been tolerant of immigrants, and has never viewed them as anything other than cheap labor. The “nation of immigrants” line is fundamentally a way for affluent white people to justify slavery and genocide as a price worth paying for cheap takeout.
I am a Filipino-American, and through this film I was reminded of a bit in Dylan Rodríguez’s nonfiction book Suspended Apocalypse: White Supremacy, Genocide, and the Filipino Condition, where he argues that the idea of “Filipino-Americans” as a people is a contradiction in terms. America has historically hated Filipinos, never accepting them, indeed willing to slaughter them like cattle, as Samar and Bud Dajo and Watsonville attest. Rodríguez is in the same school of a number of critical ethnic studies theorists who argue that America’s demands for assimilation are of a fundamentally genocidal nature, not necessarily through killing but through a mechanism similar to an Indian residential school. In Slanted, America, through Joan’s classmates, sees a character like her and wants to “kill the Asian and save the girl.” This line of theory, however, overlooks the existence of half-Filipinos like me (“tisoy” in Tagalog, derived from Spanish “mestizo”), who cannot just abandon America even if we wanted to. Back to Slanted, just by growing up in America, absorbing its individualism and its enterprise and its optimism, Joan has become something other than purely Chinese, but will still never be fully American. This is a dissonance, the type of chasm that Rodríguez failed to consider and the film never bothers to reckon with.
The film is ultimately unsatisfying because it is so wedded to genre conventions that rest on shaky assumptions, and never questions any of them. Joan is railroaded down a particular path of acceptance and is not given a chance to see that said “acceptance” is not worth pursuing. Sure, by the end she sees that the surgery was not worth the cost, but she is still buying into the myth that she can be accepted into the American white nationalist project. She still views acceptance into the echelons of the “popular crowd” at a school with a logo suspiciously resembling a Klansman as a worthy goal.
The film most clearly fumbles this with a side character, Brindha, an Indian-American (played by Canadian actress Maitreyi Ramakrishnan) who is Joan’s best friend and who goes along with her plan to become prom queen, but is clearly not buying into the whole charade in the way that Joan is. There’s a piercing scene after Joan has become whitened, where to gain acceptance from her white peers she rejects Brindha from a gathering. This scene vaguely gestures towards the “model minority” placement of East Asians as occupying a somewhat higher rung on the racial ladder than darker-skinned minorities, but never commits to it. The film is not interested in interrogating this notion, and represents no real alternative when doing so could have led to a far more compelling arc.
There is one place in the film that does have some depth, although not terribly much—that of predatory capitalism. The way that the whitening surgery is pitched to Joan is through an app with a filter that makes her look white on social media, and is done with a great sense of false urgency. The surgery, then, is ultimately a scam, as is omnipresent today to the point it has overwhelmed telephone calls. This more than gestures at the way predatory capitalism harms teenagers through social media, and specifically teenage girls. Indeed the gendered aspect of all this is the film’s strongest aspect. Take, for example, the hall of prom kings and queens; Joan is ultimately aspiring to be a picture among pictures, an object among objects, something to be admired and not respected. She is chasing white beauty standards to be a more desirable thing in the eyes of American patriarchy, as that is how it values its women (and the standards have broken out of containment, as skin whitening is common in Asia). Much of this wasn’t clear to me until talking about it with my sister at length, but this story would unquestionably not be what it is if the protagonist were instead a teenage boy. What becomes frustrating, though, is that so much of this plot could be told with a white girl and more regular plastic surgery. Sure, not every story with a nonwhite protagonist needs to be about race issues, but the film clearly wanted to be about race issues in addition to gender issues. Once again, the film gestures in a certain direction, but never actually treads that path.
The film doesn’t want to critique Joan’s reasons for wanting what she does, particularly the ones she isn’t necessarily aware of. Joan is subjected to a particularly gendered form of racial capitalism, where her value can only be expressed through the ways an Asian woman could be valued according to white nationalist standards. These are the standards that, while appearing trifling in a high school context, are the things that will press on her adult life from all directions. Her school life is a preparation for her adult life and she is being prepared for a particular role. Ideally, we’d get something like the portrayal of racial capitalism in 2025’s Him, which I have reviewed for this blog previously.
Ultimately, I am conflicted about this film, and frankly am unsure if I was the right person to review it, as I have not experienced its gendered issues. To me, Slanted acts like it wants to deconstruct genres, but doesn’t dare to dig under the surface. It still accepts the liberal idea of immigrant assimilation as fact, and views the ‘80s template of high school films as the only way teenagers could ever possibly live. It interrogates gender rather well, but only glances at race when race and gender are so intertwined. Ultimately, the critical project of the film feels incomplete. I left this film with a sense of wasted potential, of a daring film that could have been rather than the timid film that is. Both my sister and I agreed that this would have been better off as an A24 film, for it would feel less need to be commercial. In any case, Slanted simply does not think big enough about its subject matter to be a truly satisfying film.
POSTED BY: Alex Wallace, alternate history buff who reads more than is healthy.
