The Will to Dream

In a 2024 New York Times feature titled “Asian Men Are Finally Starting to Get the Girl (or Guy),” Joel Kim Booster, who wrote and stars in the 2022 queer romance Fire Island, notes optimistically that Asian American filmmakers these days seem less concerned with “the white gaze.” As the article specifically references the history of racist and “emasculating” portrayals of Asian men on-screen—which have stereotyped the group as weak, asexual, or hypersexual—it tracks a number of recent attempts to counter that narrative, which, beyond Booster’s work, are largely centered on straight men. Kumail Nanjiani, reflecting on his role as “Kingo” in Marvel’s Eternals (2021), shares that he sought to reject notions of South Asian men as scary or pathetic via his take on the superhero: “I wanted this guy to be like a playboy, you know? I kind of wanted him to be like a brown Iron Man or Batman.” And actor Manny Jacinto, who starred in The Good Place, adds that “all of us want to push that narrative of Asian males being more desirable.”

These comments speak to the difficulty of truly escaping “the white gaze” on-screen without abandoning the gender binary, heteronormativity, and the roots of patriarchy along the way. After all, what can desirability alone accomplish? What does a “brown Iron Man” change? This becomes even more apparent when listening to those at the very top in Hollywood, where white-led hypermasculine blockbusters like Gladiator II (2024) or Deadpool & Wolverine (2024) still attract the biggest investments. In a 2024 interview promoting his Playboy era–set film Unfrosted (2024), for instance, billionaire comedian and director Jerry Seinfeld said that he misses the “dominant masculinity” of the 1960s and its “agreed-upon hierarchy”—pining for when we upheld “real” men like “JFK . . . Muhammed Ali [and] . . . Sean Connery” as ideals to pursue (conveniently leaving out mention of any allegations of abuse). 

The Seinfeld star shared his thoughts before Donald Trump took office for a second time, but the sentiments were echoed on Fox News and elsewhere in the celebrations that followed the election, which has been seen by many on the right as a welcome “return” to more traditional gender norms. Meanwhile, there were political strategists on MSNBC expressing that “young men feel rejected” by the Democrats and that the party must now figure out “what masculinity means” to them. The fact that in this context white cisgender men in power can still express a desire for even more is a terrifying reality and speaks to the depth of the backlash against the intersectional feminist organizing of the last two decades—including the Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, and pro-Palestinian movements—which has played out on our screens as much as anywhere else. 

The popularity of cinema like Gladiator II attests to the resiliency of the “dominant masculinity” that Seinfeld mistakenly labels as forgotten. But tellingly, in some of the few independent films directed by and/or starring men of color, we also see expressions of this—whether intentionally or not. By centering people who are not white in unconventional ways, these projects may present a challenge to the patriarchal ideal, but in other ways, as projects by, for, and about straight cis men and boys, they struggle to imagine something else. 

Director Sean Wang, in the same New York Times feature last year, talks about growing up in the Bay Area and hearing, “Oh, you’re the cutest Asian I know,” an experience that ended up influencing his feature debut, Dìdi (2024). Wang’s self-described “personal story about an Asian-American boyhood,” has been called “the First Great MySpace-Era Coming-of-Age Movie,” lending it comparisons to everything from Superbad (2007) to Lady Bird (2017). Wang expands the familiar genre by focusing on a Taiwanese American protagonist and his family. Chris, who is called Wang Wang by classmates and Dìdi by his mother and grandmother, is a 13-year-old skater navigating the pressures of adolescence in Fremont, California, among a diverse community that—unlike in a Judd Apatow or Greta Gerwig film—includes many other kids who also aren’t white. Within that world he covets the acceptance of the girl he crushes on, the boys he looks up to, and his missing dad, all while taking for granted the love of the women he lives with.

Dìdi is imbued with a specific point of view that enhances its poignancy, most often in the scenes between Chris and his mother, Chungsing (played by Joan Chen), who is herself a struggling artist. The final moments of the film, with Chungsing lovingly staring at the son she sacrificed so much for, linger long after the closing credits. Unfortunately, we learn very little about Chungsing beyond her familial relationships, and there aren’t enough of these tender moments to overcome a style of comedy that can feel influenced by the very hypermasculine cinema that has previously excluded characters like Chris and his mother. 

Chris calls his sister Shirley a “bitch” and fights another boy for calling him a “fag,” and throughout, Dìdi matter-of-factly presents homophobia and sexism as aspects of adolescence, with the main character often taking part uncritically and without consequences. At a party where the boys are attempting to impress girls, the group is even shown watching Superbad on TV, a film that co-writer Seth Rogen himself has called “blatantly homophobic.” Wang has said that first versions of his script were more directly indebted to that 2007 comedy, but in an interview with The Washington Post, the 27-year-old director explains how the script evolved over time to be more emotionally centered on his relationship with his mom, just as his own perspective on desirability was also changing: “I remember people would be like, ‘You’re the whitest Asian.’ . . . And, at the time, it’s a compliment, right? But in my 20s, I started to look back and realize how those things shaped the way I look at myself, because if you do the mental math, it’s like, ‘Okay, it means I’m the best of the lower tier.’”

Madi—who is herself Asian—tells Chris that he’s “pretty cute for an Asian boy,” and later Chris lies to a group of potential new friends about being only “half Asian” as a way to gain their approval. The film does not make a grand statement about overcoming or surviving these racial stereotypes, but it does through Chris zero in on the experience of what Wang describes as being “an outsider among outsiders.” Even in a community of mostly Asian American kids, Chris struggles to feel accepted as a boy and desires more proximity to whiteness. In a climactic scene, as Chungsing chastises Chris for getting into his fight, he lashes out at his mom for not providing him with more guidance in this regard: “Maybe if Dad raised me I would have been a better son. But no, I’m stuck with you, and you can’t do shit.” 

In representing Chris’s challenges with masculinity in this way, the film inadvertently underscores how the categories of “boy” and “girl” are themselves racialized. In fact, one of the primary ways Chris torments his sister is by wearing her clothes, and he often sees his grandmother, Nǎi Nai, critique Chungsing on behalf of her son, standing in for the absent father. None of the characters seem truly secure in the gendered roles thrust upon them. One wonders what might happen in the future, for him and his family, if adult Chris learns to give up the pursuit of desirability entirely.

Dev Patel’s Monkey Man (2024), an action thriller he wrote, directed, and stars in, is another recent attempt to subvert a familiar genre by shifting the focus to those typically left out of frame. The film tells the story of Kid, a man who makes his money street fighting while plotting revenge on behalf of his mother in a fictional Indian city besieged by the greed and violence of the elite. Patel has described the film as “an anthem for the underdogs, the voiceless and the marginalized,” and so on his way through boxing rings and bar fights, Kid stands up for sex workers, gender-nonconforming people, the poor, and others resisting fascism. Indeed, in comparison to vacuous Hollywood fare like Gladiator II, Monkey Man reads like an exciting alternative.

In a key sequence, which represents the film’s longest stretch without fighting, Kid is given safe haven by a group of hijra—a “third gender” in South Asia that can include intersex, eunuchs, transgender, and/or gender-nonconforming people—led by Alpha (Vipin Sharma, who is a cisgender man. There were at least three trans women cast in the film, but the rest of the hijra are played by cis men). The hero hides out and trains in Alpha’s temple, growing stronger while learning to fight to the rhythm of his own beat, supplied by Zakir Hussain’s intoxicating tablas, and being cheered on by his newfound friends. The training montage is accompanied by news reports that draw a not-so-subtle link between the film’s antagonists—a politician named Rana Singh (Sikandar Kher) and a religious leader, Baba Shakti (Makarand Deshpande)—and the policies of India’s actual ruling class (i.e., Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Yogi Adityanath of the Hindutva movement). 

Yet, its potentially radical messages are sped past and delivered within a familiar frame, where bloody and stylized scenes of fighting often pull focus away from human connection. The film critic Renata Alder once observed that cinema “confers celebrity” to everyone and everything it shows on-screen, and thus she doubted that the medium could “argue effectively against its own material.” And here, as the camera whirs and swings stylishly in parallel with Patel’s choreographed movements, it’s unclear how these long sequences with him in the middle—which the director has described as a “violent ballet”—challenge the viewer to think more deeply about class, caste, gendered oppression or any of the other social issues raised. 

The film has drawn comparisons to the John Wick series (2014–), and Patel has said he was personally inspired by directors like John Woo, Park Chan-wook, and Quentin Tarantino. As in some of those directors’ films, there is a kind of rejection of Hollywood that happens simply by having Patel—with his brown skin and wavy hair—in the lead role or Kid’s supporters being filled with masked hijra fighters. And it’s worth noting that its political messages are strong enough that Monkey Man’s release has been postponed by the Indian government and may have scared off Netflix, which dropped the film after initially backing it. But as bell hooks writes about Black filmmakers in Reel to Real: Race, Class and Sex at the Movies, “the simple fact of [. . .] skin color does not ensure that [they] will create images that are radical or subversive.” And while Monkey Man is certainly not Django Unchained (2012), it does feel limited by a sense that the highest calling for a man is protecting others from men. 

We know very little about any of the other characters, and Kid’s own interior world is only hinted at—left primarily to flashbacks with his mother and the inspiration he draws from the story of Hanuman, the monkey-like Hindu deity of the Ramayana. Meanwhile, when Shakti’s true motivations are revealed to not be religiously based, it muddles the political message by disconnecting it from the real-world Hindutva movement that’s built on belief in the supremacy of Hindu men at all costs. In an alternate universe, Kid might truly adopt the life of his hijra friends or step back to be led by organizers of any other faith who collectively liberate the workers trapped under Shakti’s grip. But in the end, by keeping the heroic man at the center of a film that seeks to elicit thrills from a “violent ballet,” Monkey Man doesn’t actually cut a new path and risks reaffirming the very systems of domination it seeks to challenge.

Sydney Freeland’s Rez Ball (2024), which she co-wrote with Sterlin Harjo, gives us hints of something else through its story about Navajo boys dreaming of basketball careers, led by their coach, a former WNBA star who has returned home to prove herself. Partially based on real events, including Freeland’s own experience playing basketball in high school, the film might appear to be a conventional sports movie, hitting all the right beats of titles like The Mighty Ducks (1992) or Friday Night Lights (2006–2011). Yet there is a devastating series of twists a short while into the story, rooted in the lived experience of the people it portrays, that not only upend the typical trajectory of the genre, but also shift the expected protagonist from one character to another. Rather than the star player making a triumphant return after facing tragedy, it’s about his teammate picking up the pieces in his wake and the community that helps him survive compounding traumas.

This subversion of our expectations, along with the realism of the setting, draws attention to what is happening in the background (and whom it is happening to), which becomes as much about institutional oppression, gender, and the legacy of genocide as it is about sports. Amidst all this, we still hear boys calling each other “bitch” and making crude jokes about sex, as you might expect. But Rez Ball is a prove-them-wrong film about a basketball team that also conveys an understanding of the many who are excluded from the so-called “agreed-upon hierarchy” of the United States. We watch as Indigenous boys are kept out of the inner circle of masculinity via systemic barriers and overt racism from white players and coaches, but we also witness the extent to which those around them aren’t thriving in the system either. 

The film certainly takes shortcuts at times, like revealing key plot points via text message or radio commentary, but it does so in service of painting a wider picture. In one moving storyline, player Jimmy Holiday (Kauchani Bratt) butts heads with his pessimistic mother Gloria (Julia Jones), who was herself once a star but has been sidelined by alcoholism and multiple setbacks. Jimmy struggles to get his mother’s resignation to failure—cast by her as something innately Indigenous—out of his head, but he is helped by his coach, Heather (Jessica Matten), who is battling her own self-doubt in a profession filled with men. 

Heather, while also struggling to stay connected to her long-distance girlfriend, ultimately organizes a scrimmage with the girls’ basketball team and then enlists elders in the community to create a game of sheep herding, to teach her players a style of cooperative play rooted in shared culture and language. Freeland, who is trans and grew up on a Navajo reservation herself, has said that the character of Heather was invented but based on real people and the truth that “the girls’ teams on reservations have actually had . . . a lot more success than the boys’ teams.” Though the film still relies on a traditional formula to reach its conclusion, these transgressive moments shine through. They invite greater imagination for what might be.

In C. Riley Snorton’s Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity, the scholar traces the history of racialized gender ideals, including their development amidst the transatlantic slave trade, to argue that Blackness and transness are inextricably intertwined. Which is to say, challenging white supremacy while upholding transphobia doesn’t work, and vice versa. Citing the invention of medical, legal, and cultural definitions of “man” and “woman” rooted in anti-Black racism—including the “father of gynecology,” J. Marion Sims, experimenting on enslaved Black women—Snorton shows that rather than being biological facts, sex, gender, and race are ideas forcibly crafted to maintain power over colonized peoples. The scholar also cites countless parallel stories of Black people evading these definitions and categories by changing how they identify, altering their appearance, or both. 

Escaping “the white gaze” has always required attention to more than one system of domination and a willingness to walk outside the paths presented. In response to the sustained power of an abuser like Trump or the complacency of Hollywood billionaires like Seinfeld, we are called to push our storytelling much further. Beyond brown playboys and Batmen, there are the queer possibilities we deserve, where liberation is not predicated on how attractive you are to the dominators, nor on whether or not you can out-dominate them. We can choose not to replicate the same patriarchal structures with ourselves inside, or to desire inclusion in a system built to oppress us, but to instead dream of other structures, other narratives, and other ways of being.