A surgery turns you white in the racial satire ‘Slanted’

The premise of Amy Wang’s directorial debut Slanted—which won the Narrative Feature award at SXSW—features wonderfully satirical concepts, but the film approaches them with no bite. At the festival’s post-screening Q&A, the Los Angeles-based, Chinese Australian writer-director noted that the ideas which ended up on screen had to be toned down and scaled back after conversations with her producers.

It’s hard to put a number on such changes, but Wang certainly tried, claiming to have pushed the envelope only “about 60 percent” of the distance she intended. Unfortunately, it shows, though there’s no telling who’s to blame for exactly which decisions. Slanted is what it is, even though it’s hard to shake the sense that there’s a more appropriately vicious version of its assimilation drama lying on some cutting-room floor.

Slanted follows Joan Huang (Shirly Chen), a high school teenager who immigrated to a small U.S. town from Guangzhou when she was young enough to adopt an American accent, but old enough to have her sense of cultural identity torn in half. Now in her mid-teens, she’s embarrassed by her father’s blue-collar cleaning job (the film carefully observes the ways race and labor are entwined), and by her mother’s insistence on making dumplings together. She also seems to dislike her Chinese facial features, made apparent by the clothespin she keeps pinched on her nose.

Joan has been obsessed with becoming prom queen from a young age. However, the enormous posters of past winners lining her school halls, of blond white girls staring down at her, are a stellar externalization of her inferiority complex. However, while this visual approach works in this one instance, it’s something the movie tries numerous times in different iterations. Alongside its depictions of immigrant double consciousness (and the umpteenth tale of a first-gen Asian kid being made fun of for smelly lunch), Slanted dips its toe into satire of American culture at-large, but never fully finds an effective in-road. Its pot-shots mostly take the form of logos of famous corporate brands, changed slightly to highlight some ludicrous aspect of American culture from an outsider's POV—Whole Foods become “AK 47-Foods,” Starbucks becomes “Freedom Coffee”—but these buzzwords are about as far as its caricature gets.

In the movie’s purview, “satire” tends to mean louder emphasis on things people might recognize, which, after a while, applies to its tale of white beauty standards too. It’s a film in which what’s said overrides what’s felt—where dialogue carries more weight than experience dramatized. After receiving mysterious messages and discount offers via text, Joan is introduced to a revolutionary new surgery that promises to turn her Caucasian, of which she readily avails in order to experience what its inventor calls “true equality.”

On paper, this sets up a razor-sharp spoof of respectability politics, and the belief that assimilation is the be-all and end-all to American existence, built on the misguided belief that ignoring race altogether erases racism. However, the film’s actual satire is only skin deep. After her surgery, Joan is played by McKenna Grace, and starts going by “Jo,” much to her parents’ shock and dismay. She also alienates her South Asian best friend Brindha (Maitreyi Ramakrishnan)—a well-rounded character who’s less concerned with how she’s perceived—in favor of a group of popular white girls, including an influencer on the verge of Hollywood stardom, Olivia (Amelie Zilber). But despite establishing these interpersonal teenage tensions, Slanted never gets to the root of what’s causing them. It never even comes close, and its filmmaking is seldom used to enhance Joan’s perspective or experience on either side of the procedure. The movie’s initial, boxy, 4:3 aspect ratio expands after her surgery, theoretically widening her world, but all that really changes is the shape of the screen. Nothing in the movie’s framing or blocking ever speaks to her experience as an Asian American or as a white girl, and her relationship to her surroundings is only defined by cutaway shots to gags on posters and signs, rather than by how she relates to the world or moves through it.

The characters make frequent (though usually passing) reference to feelings of racial animus, but the film’s parody of whiteness, as both culture and institution, is where it falters most. Chen’s performance adequately taps into Joan’s suppressed self-loathing, offering a brief window into one half of what causes it: the boxes and stereotypes built around East Asians in the west. However, the notion of who builds those boxes—the white culture into which Joan is trying to assimilate—is presented with particularly limp criticism. If self-hatred is a product of being hated and put down, then the people responsible for that paradigm are just as worthy of scrutiny as Joan herself, especially after she transforms.

Slanted’s critique of whiteness is banal. It never extends to anything truly hateful, vicious or violent within the dominant culture—certainly not enough to make any white viewers uncomfortable (or any viewers, for that matter). Instead, it’s made up only of jokes about bland food and Michael Bublé, with barely a hint of the perspective that creates and perpetuates the very cultural hierarchy that allows jokes about white people to be so inherently tame. The film also veers towards body horror elements on occasion, which are brought to life with realistic makeup, but its filmmaking is never visceral enough to feel either disturbing or cathartic until quite literally its final shot. It’s a movie about the violence infected upon oneself in the name of belonging, but it never explores the root of that violence, or even its impact, beyond a few melodramatic exchanges that can be reduced to easily digestible sound bites.

Slanted aims for the highs of Get Out in its send-up of whiteness and racial double standards, but it ends up somewhere in the realm of The American Society of Magical Negroes. It’s anodyne, un-confrontational racial satire, with rote observations more befitting of an Instagram slide. Whatever version of the movie may have once existed, the final product has little intellectual or emotional rigor. Instead, it uses mere observation as a crutch, as though the act of reflecting some element of the world were somehow akin to saying something meaningful about it.