USC Report: Lack of AAPI screen presence a factor for climate of anti-Asian hate

CREDIT: ANNENBERG - USC

Like it or not, Hollywood movies have undue influence on this country's values and perspectives. A new report suggests Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders have a lot of work to do to gain recognition, support and presence in the film making industry and in the United States.

It is the "soft power" of movies, television and literature, (and more recently, social media)  that moviegoers soak in, unaware that their views of the world and people, ie. AAPI, are being shaped by a Hollywood still stuck in the 20th Century.

"The Prevalence and Portrayal of Asian American and Pacific Islanders Across 1,300 Popular Films," a report from the USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative released Tuesday, May 18, reveals how popular films perpetuate erasure and stereotyping of this group, a state of affairs that can lead to discrimination and psychological harm and eventually leads to the wave of racist violence and hate directed towards the AAPI communities.

Of the 1,300 films over a 13-year time span, 2006-2019, included in the study, 39% had no AAPI characters at all contributing to the invisibility, or erasure, of a major demographic that has been in this country for centuries.

“People often ask me whether representations of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders are improving,” said Dr. Nancy Wang Yuen, who co-authored the report with Dr. Stacy L. Smith. “Unfortunately, when representation looks like tokenism, Hollywood is doing the bare minimum for inclusion."

READ the full report, 'The Prevalence and Portrayal of Asian American and Pacific Islanders across 1,300 Popular Films" 

Dwayne Johnson accounts for almost a third of the lead roles for AAPI actors.

The Anneneberg initiative produces an annual report about inclusion and the diversity of the movie-making and television industries but this is the first time that a report has been focused solely on AAPIs. The study is full of loads of data that includes AAPI directors and behind-the-scene artists.

Out of 1,300 top-grossing movies, the report states, only 44 or 3.4% featured an AAPI lead or co lead. The 44 films with API leads/co leads were driven by 22 individual actors that worked one or more times as a protagonist. The wildly popular Samoan American actor Dwayne Johnson, by himself, is the lead protagonist in 14 of those films. Next in line is Keanu Reeves, who starred in five of those films.

"In 2019, 30% of API primary and secondary characters were either the only one or interacted with no other API characters on screen," said Yuen. "We need to see more than one API character on screen interacting with one another in meaningful ways.”

The USC study takes a look at Asian and Pacific Islander (API) leads and speaking characters across 1,300 top-grossing films over a 13-year span, from 2007 to 2019. 

Across 51,159 speaking characters in 1,300 top-grossing movies, 5.9% were API, the report finds. The number of films did not significantly change over the 13-year study period. This percentage falls far short of the 7.1% of the U.S. population that identifies as API. 

The USC report, released Tuesday, also found that of the 79 primary and secondary AAPI characters across the top films of 2019, “Portrayals of the API community range from invisible to fully human, with most portrayals falling into the categories of silenced, stereotyped, tokenized, isolated, and sidekicks/villains."

STEREOTYPES PERSIST

Hollywood studios and filmmakers find it all too easy to fall back to the old negative  stereotypes that have helped create the general public's images of AAPI men and women held by the general public.

"The stereotypes still present in top films include the persistent emasculation of API men – 58% were shown with no romantic partners compared to 37.5% of API women without partners – as well as that of the perpetual foreigner, evidenced by non-U.S. accents and use of non-English language. Most troublingly, portrayals of API characters still include violence, death, and disparagement.”

AAPI women, when they were seen at all, were hypersexualized or portrayed as submissive Lotus Blossoms.

Additionally, a closer look at films from 2019, the most recent year included in the study, shows that underrepresentation is only one facet of the bias facing the AAPI community in film.

DEATH & INVISIBILITY

“With the rise of anti-AAPI violence in the United States, on-screen deaths of Asians and Pacific Islander characters are particularly jarring,” Yuen said. “In the top 100 films of 2019, just over a quarter of Asian and Pacific Islander characters die by the end of the film and all but one death ended violently. This, along with 41.8% of API characters receiving on-screen disparagement – some of which are racial slurs – films can fuel anti-AAPI hate. 

"With over 6,603 hate incidents reported to Stop AAPI Hate from March 19, 2020 to March 31, 2021, Hollywood needs to take responsibility for problematic representations of Asians and Pacific Islanders,” she said.

"These findings offer more evidence that the epidemic of invisibility continues to persist and with serious consequences,” Smith agreed. “Mass media is one factor that can contribute to aggression towards this community. When portrayals erase, dehumanize, or otherwise demean the API community, the consequences can be dire. Without intention and intervention, the trends we observed will continue.”

"I've died so many times on-screen that it became a real issue for my kids," actor Daniel Dae Kim said Tuesday in response to the report. "It's now one (of) the primary factors in deciding whether I take a role or not."

Based on the study, Hollywood's popular image of AAPI is predominantly East Asian (Chinese, Korean and Japanese) even though South Asians and Southeast Asians together make up the majority of today's AAPI population in the U.S.

East Asian characters made up 65.4% of the AAPI roles. Only 13.3% of the characters were Southeast Asian and South Asians made up 17.4% of the movie roles. 

"Looking to ethnic heritage, the majority of the 22 leads/co-leads were of Indian (31.8%) followed by Chinese (18.2%) and Korean (18.2%) descent. By region, East Asian (45.5%) outnumbered South Asian (36.4%), Polynesian (18.2%), and Southeast Asian (9.1%) actors as leads/co leads," the report states. 

"Focusing on ethnic heritage, Chinese, Indian, Korean, and Japanese actors were the most likely to work across the 200 top-grossing films. A full 65.4% of all API actors were East Asian, 17.4% were South Asian, 13.3% were Southeast Asian, and 6.5% were Polynesian," the study continued.

The report also delves into the advantages of having directors, writers, casting directors, producers and studio executives of Asian, Asian American and Pacific Islander heritage. Having these behind-the-camera decision makers enhances the chances of including actors and humanized characters in the movies.

CONCLUSIONS & SUGGESTIONS

Besides the increased hiring of actors and other artists in their productions, the study also suggests that one of the solutions is that Hollywood productions include AAPI actors in front the camera in all films. Period movies and focused storylines are not excuses to not cast AAPI actors giving the success and audience appeal of the productions of Hamilton and Bridgerton.

Among the report authors' conclusions: "There are consequences to invisibility. First, it limits the career opportunities of API actors by relegating them to secondary or tertiary roles -- if they are cast at all. This prevents talented creative voices from working and achieving career sustainability. Moreover, it communicates to the millions of API youth who spend time with these stories that they do not belong at the center of storytelling and in fact may not even merit inclusion at all."

“The numbers speak for themselves — again. They are a sobering look at how far the industry still has to go to counter the invisibility of our community onscreen," actor and producer Daniel Dae Kim told Variety. "If anything is to improve, the historic indifference on the part of decision-makers toward increased Asian American representation must go beyond the usual performative rhetoric to actual, demonstrable change.”