John Carpenter has been and always will be a familiar name to cinephiles and even the casual movie-goer. Often times he has been conveniently placed into the confining label of a cult director who gets his chops from making senseless B-grade entertainment. Films known more for their outlandish style, one-liners, and quirky characters more so then any semblance of artistic merit, auteurship, or clever commentary.
Though for any individual with half a brain, this couldn’t be further from the truth. Films such as Halloween or The Thing held such artistry and weight behind them, that even today they have been burned into the cultural psyche as everlasting memes. Even cult favorites such as They Live abundant with its nonsensical one liners like “I have come here to chew bubblegum and kick ass… and I’m all out of bubblegum” are still popularly remembered for its blatant social commentaries.
Regardless, there has always been one film that stood out in Carpenter’s prolific filmography, and the very one that established the man as a true auteur in my book but has often been sadly misrepresented. Big Trouble In Little China has if anything, remained as a cultural meme more for its laughable absurdity and seemingly offensive portrayal of Chinese culture. The sad fact of the matter is, I found myself confronted more then once in college by scholarship that hammered in the idea that Big Trouble was part of a huge consortium or succession of film that relegated Asian culture to mere exoticism. Films like The Golden Child, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, and First Yank into Tokyo for example, made liberal use of this orientalism and a tradition of yellowface.
Big Trouble In Little China on the other hand, could arguably be one of the greatest films to confront this misrepresentation of Asian culture and provide highly relevant criticism of US policies in context to an ever increasing transnationalist playing field. A sense of globalism and border breakdown which is ever so present today, especially in the face of a dwindling US economy, and an ever increasing China superpower.