Anti-Asian Racism in Licorice Pizza
We are entering our third year of the COVID-19 pandemic, and anti-Asian hate crimes are still occurring at a much higher frequency than before. A recent study by the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism found that anti-Asian hate crimes increased by 339% in 2021, surpassing record numbers in 2020.
Because of this, a lot more people have become aware of anti-Asian racism, especially in the media they’ve consumed. Despite this, however, films and TV shows that feature these problems continue to be praised and awarded, especially when they become hits in Hollywood.
In December 2021, I sat down to watch Licorice Pizza, expecting an indie film about middle class white people. What I got was an indie film not only about middle class white people, but also very random, unprompted anti-Asian racism, presumably inserted for comedic purposes; the film was then nominated for over 100 awards!
So, let’s talk about Licorice Pizza.
Licorice Pizza (2021)
Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, Licorice Pizza is an indie coming-of-age film about 15-year-old Gary Valentine running around the San Fernando Valley in Southern California in the 1970s with his friends and his concerningly older “love interest,” 25-year-old Alana Kane, played by Alana Haim (of the band, HAIM).
Despite no members of the main cast being Asian (or people of color, for that matter), the film includes two scenes of anti-Asian racism, because how could one tell Licorice Pizza takes place in the 1970s from just the cars, fashion, setting, or political climate, if it didn’t also include some anti-Asian racism “honest to its time” (in the words of Anderson himself)?
In the first of the two scenes, the white side character Jerry Frick (based on the real-life Frick, who opened the first Japanese restaurant in the San Fernando Valley, Mikado, over fifty years ago) meets with Gary’s mother, Anita, a publicist, to discuss promoting the Japanese restaurant Jerry is opening with his wife, a Japanese woman named Mioko.
As Anita and Jerry discuss Anita’s proposed advertisement, which included comparing the Japanese waitresses to “dolls,” Anita asks Jerry for Mioko’s opinion, as Mioko hasn’t spoken at all in the scene. Jerry turns to Mioko and asks her, in English, spoken in a very exaggerated, mocking Japanese accent, what she thinks. Mioko responds sternly in unsubtitled Japanese, and neither Gary nor his mom seem bothered by the exchange.
Later in the film, Gary and Alana go to Jerry and Mioko’s restaurant, only to be greeted by another Japanese woman Gary addresses as “Mioko,” until Jerry informs them he divorced Mioko, and that this woman, Kimiko, is his new wife. From here, we get a rinse and repeat of the same joke made previously: Gary and Alana try to make conversation with both Jerry and Kimiko, Jerry speaks to Kimiko in his “Japanese” accent, and Kimiko responds in unsubtitled Japanese. When Alana asks for a translation, Jerry delivers the punchline these two scenes have been building up to: “It’s hard to tell, I don’t speak Japanese.”
The “Message” of These Scenes
Following this scene, Jerry isn’t confronted about his racism, nor does his character ever face consequences for it. These scenes do nothing to move the stories of Gary and Alana along, and frankly, it’s unclear who or what audiences should be laughing at.
“It’s slightly less clear who is intended to be the butt of the joke, but there’s no doubt that Jerry remains the most buffoonish presence in the room,” wrote Rebecca Sun in The Hollywood Reporter. “Regardless of whether the audience is laughing with or at Jerry (or, as some viewers have reported, sitting in stunned discomfort), Jerry’s accent is identical to the syntax and tone used to mock and demean Japanese, Chinese and other Asian people across the U.S. for the past two centuries.”
In defense of the scenes, Anderson explained to The New York Times that he based Jerry’s actions on times he’s witnessed people speak to his Japanese mother-in-law in a similarly demeaning way. He also argued, “It would be a mistake to tell a period film through the eyes of 2021.”
In a later interview with IndieWire, Anderson responded more directly to the criticisms of the scenes: “It’s kind of like, ‘Huh?’ I don’t know if it’s a ‘Huh’ with a dot dot dot. It’s funny because it’s hard for me to relate to. I don’t know. I’m lost when it comes to that. To me, I’m not sure what they — you know, what is the problem? The problem is that he was an idiot saying stupid shit? What do you think?”
When the interviewer clarified that the “problem” is the scenes’ racism granting people “permission to laugh at the stereotype, rather than [Jerry’s] stupidity,” Anderson said, “Right. Well, I don’t know, maybe that’s a possibility. I’m certainly capable of missing the mark, but on the other hand, I guess I’m not sure how to separate what my intentions were from how they landed.”
Given Anderson’s lived experiences as a white person, is he in a place where he can effectively make multi-layered, satirical jokes about anti-Asian racism?
And for non-Asian viewers who are laughing along to Jerry’s antics—what part of the scenes are they laughing at, exactly?
Being Intentional with Multilingual Comedy
Some argue that the “joke” of the scene is solely Jerry’s absurdity, and that the film is making fun of racist people. But is this still clear without any characters correcting or confronting Jerry for his behavior?
Speaking to the Los Angeles Times, sociologist Nancy Wang Yuen pushed back against arguments claiming that people offended by the film are just “not reading [the scenes] right.” She argued: “[T]here’s no context. There’s no repercussions. There’s no discussion…It’s too subtle for people to say, ‘Oh, well, he’s racist and it’s terrible, and that’s what’s happening in this scene.’”
Another longtime issue these scenes perpetuate is characters of color existing in a story purely to advance the plot of or develop a white character; in this case, Mioko and Kimiko exist solely to show who Jerry is.
“This scene is classic in terms of having an Asian American character serve as a plot device that is there to develop a white or non-Asian American character, rather than a character who is a full-fledged person in their own right,” said Jenn Fang, founder of the Asian American feminist blog Reappropriate, in the same LA Times article.
The viewers know next to nothing about Mioko or Kimiko, especially because their dialogue takes place completely in unsubtitled Japanese, which Yuen also pointed out: “You don’t even understand what the women are saying. They might be saying, ‘F— you,’ but we don’t even understand that.”
These scenes are a sharp contrast to another recent and significant example of an Asian language being featured in a major film for a comedic bit: in last year’s Spider-Man: No Way Home, audiences became captivated with Spider-Man’s best friend Ned’s Lola (“grandma” in Tagalog), who speaks to other prominent, non-Asian characters in Tagalog. Though there are no subtitles, Ned translates his Lola’s words for the other characters, who listen with rapt attention and act warmly toward her.
Like Licorice Pizza, this interaction in No Way Home is intended to be comedic; but unlike Licorice Pizza, the comedy in this multilingual interaction comes not from the miscommunication between the Filipino and non-Filipino characters, but the absurdity of the fact that two different Spider-Men just showed up in Ned’s Lola’s apartment to save the multiverse. The joke centers Ned’s Lola as the main authority figure in the room—over two adult Spider-Men—and through Ned, we are able to understand her commentary on the situation.
Meanwhile, we get no such insight into Mioko and Kimiko’s commentary on their respective scenes in Licorice Pizza; we remain squarely in the perspective of every white character in the room, especially Jerry. While Ned’s Lola has agency—as her words actually impacted the scene and how the characters behaved—Mioko and Kimiko are nothing but stepping stones for Jerry to pull off his multi-scene joke at their expense.
“But Jerry Frick was Real!”
Perhaps the most important piece of context we have to consider for these scenes is the fact that Jerry Frick was a real person—did these scenes reflect who Jerry Frick was as a person? Is this how he behaved in his real-life marriages?
Podcaster Molly Lambert conducted her own research on the real Jerry Frick and found several news clippings, which she shared in a Twitter thread. She concluded Frick to be “a classic white guy obsessed with Japan and unaware he is being completely offensive, just like Higgins played him,” as Frick lived and worked in Japan for fifteen years before returning to the U.S. and eventually opening Mikado.
Whether Frick really spoke to his wives like that in real life remains unknown. Sun’s article for The Hollywood Reporter pointed out that there is very little information on Frick’s marriages to two Japanese women, Yoko and Hiroko, both of which ended in divorce. The only documented information about either marriage appears to be Frick and Hiroko’s “court disputes over division of property and spousal support.”
Regardless of whether the real Frick may have exhibited some racism “honest to its time” (as Anderson would say) toward Japanese people including his own wives, or not, we are still brought back to the main question underlying these scenes: just because they may represent something historically accurate from that time, are they necessary to include in the film when they are not part of the actual plot?
Period pieces including era-typical racism has been a long time issue in the media, as it’s often dismissed as being “necessary” to accurately portray the historical period. However, this reasoning seems unnecessary for projects like Licorice Pizza that take place within the last fifty years, as they often emphasize and center cultural aspects of these time periods to capitalize on viewers’ nostalgia for these eras (the constant references to the ‘80s in Netflix’s Stranger Things and Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy films come to mind).
Just the title of Licorice Pizza alone is a prime example of this, as Anderson has stated that it was an intentional reference to the original Licorice Pizza, a chain of record stores across Southern California popularized during the 1960s-80s. When watching the film itself, it’s nearly impossible to miss the time in which the story takes place; the Jerry Frick scenes do little to show this in comparison to other era-specific things that were included that directly influence the characters and plot, such as the popularity of waterbeds and the 1973 oil crisis.
Licorice Pizza vs. Awards Season
Due to these criticisms, media advocacy group Media Action Network for Asian Americans (MANAA) released a statement about the film in December 2021, in which they called for an awards boycott:
“To shower [Licorice Pizza] with nominations and awards would normalize more egregious mocking of Asians in this country, sending the message that it’s OK to make fun of them, even during a time when Asian Americans are afraid to go out on the streets because of the unprecedented levels of violence from fellow Americans blaming them for COVID-19…In conclusion, MANAA strongly urges voting members of the Academy and other film critic associations not to reward Anderson for the racist portrayals of Asians in his film.”
Despite MANAA’s statement, Licorice Pizza has received countless awards and nominations by prestigious organizations across the world, including the Golden Globe Awards, BAFTA, and last week’s Academy Awards, where it was nominated for Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Original Screenplay—all categories that center Anderson’s work on the film.
An anonymous Asian American Oscar voter told the LA Times that though he liked Licorice Pizza and personally connected with the representation of anti-Asian racism, the film dropped lower on his voting list due to Anderson’s responses to the criticisms: “PTA should be more transparent about why he had that character in there.”
Another anonymous Oscar voter, who shared his ballot with The Hollywood Reporter, blasted the film:
“I hated Licorice Pizza…I just can’t believe that in 2022 we’re still rewarding blatant, unnecessarily racist movies, and that people just brush over the stuff with the accent — it didn’t add anything to the movie and no one in the movie commented on it. The excuse that ‘that was of the time’ is bullshit…I cannot reward that film for anything.”
Though Licorice Pizza is still widely critically acclaimed, it’s also becoming clear, through these responses and others across social media, that, overall, the tolerance for these kinds of jokes in films is waning among both audiences and working creatives in Hollywood. Audiences especially have made it clear that they want more diverse films, with projects like Disney’s Encanto and Pixar’s Turning Red having achieved both critical and financial success.
As more BIPOC-produced films succeed, more doors for future BIPOC creatives will open within the industry. Though it’s a slow-moving process, there’s still hope—things are changing.
As for PTA, he might want to reconsider his implication that “the eyes of 2021” are actually anti-racist. I hope he reads up some on the history of and ongoing violence due to anti-Asian racism before thinking of using it again as a set piece in his next film!
Did you watch Licorice Pizza? Do you think these scenes were necessary to include? Do you think it’s justified for all period pieces to include scenes depicting racism to be “honest to its time”? We’d love to hear your take on it! Thanks for reading!
To learn more about how portrayals of Asians and anti-Asian racism in media can affect our community in real life:
NBC Asian America | Anti-Asian bias rose after media, officials used 'China virus,' report shows
Nielsen | What You See Isn’t What You Get: The Role of Media in Anti-Asian Racism
The Washington Post | Shang-Chi and the fight against yellow peril
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