News Reporter: Act Four: Michael Corleone and Long Duk Dong have nothing in common

Friday, 23 September 2016

Act Four: Michael Corleone and Long Duk Dong have nothing in common

Alyssa Rosenberg on culture and politics

Aziz Ansari and Alan Yang accept the award for Outstanding Writing for a Comedy Series for “Master of None” at the 68th Primetime Emmy Awards. (Mike Blake/Reuters)

Last week, when Aziz Ansari and Alan Yang won a writing Emmy for their wonderful Netflix show “Master of None,” Yang used his acceptance speech to draw a parallel between the progress that Italian Americans have made in cultural representation and the limited number of stories about Asian Americans in pop culture.

“There’s 17 million Asian Americans in this country, and there are 17 million Italian Americans,” Yang said, urging Asian American parents to embrace the arts. “They have ‘The Godfather,’ ‘Goodfellas,’ ‘Rocky,’ ‘The Sopranos.’ We got Long Duk Dong [a hideously stereotypical exchange student character from ‘Sixteen Candles’]. We got a long way to go."

It’s objectively true that there have been fewer great stories about Asian Americans, and also that “The Godfather” and “The Sopranos,” at least, stand as some of the greatest works in their respective media. So it’s a shame that Italian American Foundation President John Viola decided to respond in the least productive way possible.

"Mr. Yang’s comments, while meant to point out the under-representation of Asian Americans in film,” Viola wrote in a statement that practically clucks with indignation, “ended up including a reckless disregard for Italian Americans by citing films that portray Italian Americans as violent, dim-witted and involved with organized crime — all three — and insensitive stereotypes that in no way reflect the lives of everyday Italian Americans.”

This wholly misses the first part of Yang’s point, which is that it says something that there’s a huge gap between the stories that Hollywood tells about two comparable-sized groups of Americans. Long Duk Dong is regrettable both because he’s a horrible racist stereotype, but also because for a long time, he was one of astonishingly few Asian characters to appear in American pop culture at all.

And Viola’s prissiness about mob movies, especially if he means to suggest some sort of equivalence among Michael Corleone and Tony Soprano and Long Duk Dong, is just terrible criticism. The latter is a raunchy, dimensionless stereotype whose defining characteristics are his accent and dumb double entendre of a name. Michael and Tony are the main characters in their stories, people whose choices and minds are explored for hours and hours, and with intense psychological and sociological richness.

They are also lenses through which their respective creators, Mario Puzo and David Chase, explore the assimilation of Italian immigrants and Italian Americans into this country. Michael is a character who tried to mainstream a generation too early, at a moment when Italian Americans were still having trouble getting powerful, mainstream figures to respond to them, much less claiming that power for themselves. And Tony is a character who stayed in an ethnic enclave, and in an Italian family tradition, and risks keeping his family stuck in the same rut. If the tragedy of Don Corleone’s life is that his son Michael wouldn’t become “Senator Corleone, Governor Corleone, something,” because of anti-Italian bigotry, the tragedy of Tony’s is that his daughter, Meadow, might become a mob lawyer not by necessity but by choice. Both “The Godfather” and “The Sopranos” are as much about the world that makes mobsters as the mobsters themselves.

Viola’s analysis is bad cultural analysis, and it’s bad coalition-building. Rather than making common cause with another wave of immigrants, he played the victim in a graceless and ill-timed way.