Crossing Cultural Barriers: Black Panther and BTS

Let us briefly look at what is happening in Hollywood. The biggest story in the U.S. film industry right now is the major box-office success of Crazy Rich Asians. It is a romantic comedy about the affairs of three prominent Chinese families preparing for a lavish wedding in Singapore. After opening on August 15, it held the No. 1 spot at the North American weekend box office for three straight weeks, and is ultimately expected to earn more than $150 million in North America alone. For a mid-budget film made for $30 million, that is an unusually strong commercial performance.

That alone is certainly noteworthy, but there is another reason why Crazy Rich Asians has attracted such intense attention that it has set the entire media world abuzz: most of its cast is Asian. In fact, a major studio film built from the outset around a predominantly Asian cast is the first of its kind in Hollywood since The Joy Luck Club in 1993. A gamble not seen in a quarter century has now returned with major box-office success, and Hollywood as a whole is taking notice.

But this kind of “gamble” and “surprise” has not been limited to Crazy Rich Asians this year. There is also To All the Boys I've Loved Before, released on Netflix on August 17. It is a youth romance film centered on an Asian American high school girl. It created a major sensation as soon as it was released and quickly joined the ranks of Netflix original hits. Then, on August 31, the thriller Searching, starring Korean American actor John Cho (Korean name: Cho Yohan) as the sole lead, opened on more than 1,200 screens across North America. That is, by any standard, a mainstream distribution scale.

At this point, this is no mere coincidence. It is a clear trend. In the U.S. market right now, “Asian-centered content” is working. And in a sense, that trend is only natural. Asians account for just 4.8% of the U.S. population according to the 2010 Census, but Asian Americans have consistently stood out as especially active consumers of popular culture. This is true even in film. According to Nielsen research, Asian moviegoers in the U.S. purchase about 75% more tickets than white moviegoers. They also buy about 83% more online movie downloads than whites.

It is only natural that an ethnic group with such strong preexisting consumption would show even greater interest in films centered on people of its own ethnicity. According to CinemaScore, 38% of the opening-day audience for Crazy Rich Asians was Asian. For the average American film, Asian viewers account for about 6% of the audience. In other words, the ticket-buying power of Asians in America, long undervalued, is finally beginning to be recognized, and more adventurous efforts are now being rewarded one by one.

But there is another aspect as well—arguably a far more important one. No matter how strong Asian Americans may be as consumers of popular culture in the United States, they are not enough by themselves to support box-office earnings of more than $150 million, as in the case of Crazy Rich Asians. In the end, this means that white Americans, the majority race in U.S. society, are also consuming Asian-centered films just as readily. In fact, 51% of the film’s opening-day audience was white.

Is the atmosphere in American society gradually changing—from being, culturally speaking, not a “melting pot of races” but merely a “salad” of races? At least by the indicators, the answer appears to be yes. Just look at Black Panther, the Marvel superhero film released earlier this year. Until now, it had been extremely rare for a huge blockbuster on the scale of Black Panther to feature a black protagonist. In superhero films, it was rarer still. Yet Black Panther became an immediate sensation and went on to earn more than $700 million in North America alone. Naturally, such a result could not have come from the black population alone, which accounts for only 12.6% of the U.S. population. In the end, it means that the mainstream racial majority—non-Hispanic whites of European descent, who make up 63.7%—also embraced the unfamiliar concept of a “black superhero.”

The mood in American society is certainly changing. At least in terms of cultural inclusiveness and flexibility, it is. Americans are becoming more willing to accept the cultures of other races, as well as the presence of other races within their own racial culture. And the rise of the internet is again cited as the reason. Outside major cities, where many races inevitably come into contact with one another, American society has in practice long consisted of separate living spheres formed through racial zoning, with little need for different groups to encounter each other directly. Even exposure to the culture of another race was not easy, and the resulting sense of unfamiliarity and distance was that much greater. But with the advent of the internet, people have gained easy access to a wide range of cultures, and analysis suggests that the cultural barriers between racial groups have fallen significantly as a result.

Seen in this light, it is also easy to understand the repeated Billboard No. 1 album-chart achievements of BTS, now the vanguard of Hallyu. Popularity is one thing, but BTS’s American fans currently argue that the group has no need to make and sing separate songs with English lyrics. They say the meaning of the lyrics can easily be understood through Google Translate, and more importantly, they understand that songs sung by an artist in the artist’s native language are bound to have the most genuine emotional appeal. And they insist that they are fully prepared to embrace such foreign culture.

At this point, it is clearly time to rethink the overall direction of the Hallyu industry. In recent years, Hallyu has struggled. The reason is China’s anti-Hallyu order, imposed as a matter of policy in what had been a cash-cow market. The Chinese market had been approached under the vague assumption that sharing the same racial base would somehow make things easier and smoother. But by now, everyone has come to understand that China is in fact an absurd totalitarian state that can block cultural exchange itself on the basis of nothing more than political and diplomatic conflict between countries. Three years have passed that way. At least one of the two feet deeply planted in China must now be lifted and placed elsewhere; another cash-cow market is needed.

Unexpectedly, the United States may become such a market. It is a market whose potential we may actually have failed to understand properly because we were trapped in the rough dogma of racial homogeneity. As the philosopher Hannah Arendt pointed out, “nation-states are, in essence, caught in a dilemma in which they can hardly understand a country like the United States.” And that United States is now changing. The success of Crazy Rich Asians and the achievement of BTS both attest to this.

In the end, every market—even the cultural market, where emotional communication is everything—rests far more on ideological character and the market structure built upon it than on fanciful dogmas such as racial homogeneity. And now it is time for Hallyu to cast off the layers of meaningless dogma that have built up over the years. If the starting point is the grand goal of entering the U.S. market, the result may seem far away at first glance, but it could prove much closer than expected. That is the essence of a “country that is distant, yet close.”

Moonwon Lee / Cultural Critic

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Original title: 문화 장벽을 넘어서는 <블랙 팬서>와 <방탄소년단>

Author: Moon-won Lee

Date: 2018-09-05

Source: https://www.cfe.org/bbs/bbsDetail.php?cid=column&pn=16&idx=11099