Better Luck Tomorrow, though on the surface setting out to de-construct stereotypes of the model minority, arguably ends up reinforcing them. Not only are the main characters true-to-type blue chip prospects for Ivy League schools with superlative GPAs and stellar ECs, but, in addition, they manage to run a crime syndicate for thrills in their spare time. However, they are not true gang bangers, just suburban wannabes. They talk ghetto but they act OC: canned food drives, beach clean-ups, homeless benefit car washes, candy bar drives. They find the swagger to go looking for trouble, but when trouble comes looking for them, they are more Cypress than South Central and more USA than Taipei. Class and nationality trump ethnicity. Though Asian American, they appropriate the suburban culture of choice. They can afford the luxury of “playing” tough as long as it is an elective. Once it turns real, they are undone.
Ben has an entry for every line on his college application: choir boy, boy scout, three-time employee of the month, JV basketball player, hospital translator, National Academic Decathlon Champion, and plenty of notable omissions: scam artist, cheat sheet trafficker, drug dealer, cokehead, thug, murderer. Clearly the entries are intended to fit the stereotype while the omissions contest the stereotype. However, as occurred with the preppie stereotypes in Cruel Intentions, despite the contestation, the underlying Asian-American stereotypes stay in tact.
The Asian-American characters are acculturated to Asian-American stereotypes and serve to reinforce them. The varsity letterman at the party who questions the legitimacy of tennis as a varsity sport is echoing Ben’s narrative introduction of Daric. His unfavorable comparison of Ben to Michael Jordan echoes the dubiousness with which Stephanie considered Ben’s future professional prospects in basketball due to his lack of stature and Daric’s award-winning article on Ben as a token Asian player. His consignment of the Asian partygoers to the Bible study class next door occurs after the display of snapshots showing Ben and Virgil in church settings. When Steve identifies their corner of the party as the Asian hangout, Daric makes a quip about the library, the mainstay Asian hangout, being closed. The societal bias against Asian Americans as athletes and the societal expectations of Asian Americans to be studious and Bible thumping are perceptions shared across ethnicities.
Gender stereotypes are even more compelling than the ethnic stereotypes. Males display proprietary interests toward females—toward both the prostitute, Rachel, and the girlfriend, Stephanie—in order to promote, with varying degrees of success, male bonding. Where group cohesion already exists and the transaction is commercial, it succeeds. Han and Daric arrange Ben’s sexual initiation and share the afterglow. However, Steve’s attempts to govern an admiration society for Stephanie backfire; he alienates both Daric and Ben, whether intentionally or unintentionally is unclear. Han uses feminine descriptors in a derogatory way, by addressing Ben and Virgil as girls or ladies.
Stephanie’s passivity in her relationship with Steve is not mirrored in regard to Ben with whom she acts more assertively. Insulted that Ben pigeonholes her a cheerleader and prom queen and completes their lab report by himself, she sets him straight as to her academic credentials: three honors classes and a 3.8 GPA. Physically, she is the aggressor: sticking him with the needle in lab, hitting him to break the jinx on their winter ball date and pursuing him after New Year’s Eve. Her snap shot intro depicts her with a long barrel gun and a dead deer; she also brandishes her make-believe handgun when telling him of her ambition to become a cop. Yet despite her obvious strength, her role in the relationship with Steve is far more submissive. Whether it is she who appears in the porno film she is reputed to have made is open to question. It is as difficult for the audience as for Ben to understand what draws her to Steve.
Homoerotic overtones can be inferred from actions of Steve and of Daric. Ben directly questions whether Steve is gay due to his refusal to escort Stephanie to the formal. Daric’s protectiveness toward his homeboys is subject to interpretation.
As in much contemporary youth media, a parental presence is totally absent from the film although Daric is the only one whose parents are living outside the country. The lack of a physical presence seems ludicrous when a child, Virgil, is hospitalized with a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head.
The use of SAT vocabulary words as a framing device with the definitions previewing the acts to follow is clever. Also recurring and also used as framing devices are practice sessions at the basketball court in the park and maintenance checks of the aquarium.
Lighting, both natural and artificial produces striking effects. The darkness of the garage where the lying in wait occurs contrasts starkly with the brightness of the back yard burial site. The red of the billiard parlor where Daric hatches the plot against Steve and persuades his confederates to participate portends the danger which lies ahead. The manner in which some shots are lit make them memorable: blue dusk at the park, a dance frenzy at the Winter formal recalling an over-populated I-pod billboard, Ben framed in the hospital elevator.
Suburbia seems to offer any number of metaphorical possibilities for erecting barriers of all sorts. The movie begins with the entry into a gated community; whether the last frame of the movie will be a shot of another gated community, one from which the only escape is parole becomes a matter of speculation once Steve’s wake-up call has laid him to eternal rest. Fences figure prominently in the imagery: the enclosure at the batting cage, the chain link fence around the pool where Ben and Stephanie discuss the winter formal, the entry gate at Steve’s beachfront home, the wall at the miniature golf course, etc. Shooting interiors through outside paned windows is effective in the scene in which a locked door separates Virgil and Han who hears the gunshot but does not know what has happened.
Non-verbal communication proves powerful in a multitude of scenes: the liquor store carding episode, the record store shoplifting episode, the winter formal dance episode. Novel camera angles provided interesting perspectives: at the batting cages, in the shopping cart. In a few scenes people switch in and out of focus. Speed varies in some scenes, especially during transitional shots of the schoolyard. Dissolves help move along the homework scene.
Like other contemporary films, temporal conventions are broken; instead of events being presented chronologically, they are non-sequential.
Virgil is as terrified of consequences as he is unable to control impulses. He fears his father, he fears incarceration, he shoots himself. Daric, uncertain of his grip on the others, loses confidence in his ability to perform damage control. Ben surrenders to not knowing how things will turn out. He gets the girl, having done in the guy, but whether or not the law will get him in the end is uncertain: ambiguity laced with irony, the favorite new media cocktail.
