If what you’re asking is what characteristics of Long Duk Dong are well known stereotypes that Americans have specifically about Korean people, then you are going to miss the point.
Long Duk Dong is a bundle of unflattering characteristics long typical of the goofy foreigner and the wacky Asian character.
He talks funny, he’s ignorant of basic courtesies, he’s sexually neutered to the point that he’s shown slobbering over a character everyone else treats as unattractive.
The very fact that mainstream American culture doesn’t really care to have a lot of specific ideas about Koreans as opposed to other kinds of Asians or foreigners is a component of American racism.
On top of that he’s the only non-white character with any significant screen time. When you live in a world in which white characters can be of almost any quality, good or bad but the very rare non-white character is often almost subhuman that piles up. White people in general already have the privilege of not having to represent their entire ethnic group.
Make your rare non-white this kind of character and every Asian kid in a majority white school the next day will be humiliated with Long Duk Dong taunts. That kind of portrayal teaches the majority what they’re supposed to think of a minority.
It’s not his poor English skills or even his excitibility but his over-the-top portrayal as a ineptly lecherous loser. Now, you can argue that this is a comedy and exaggerated portrayals are a part and parcel of comedy, but it is the context of how other characters are treated that makes it feel awkward and borderline racist.
Hughes’ films clearly have a core of innate respect and treatment of how the (all white, suburban) main characters feel and act; despite how fucked up other elements of the story are, her character actually seems like an attractive but insecure and socially outcast teenage girl caught in a classist struggle for respect. To play another character—even a peripheral one—in a way that is such a mocking, one-note fashion feels discordant and dismissive, even more so that there are no films of the era that I can think of, comedies or otherwise, that portray an Asian teenager in any positive light.
Compare to another teen comedy: Better Off Dead. There are two peripheral characters who are Japanese, one who speaks no English and the other who learned to speak by listening to Howard Cosell, who repeatedly challenge the protagonist to a race that he keeps losing, because he loses at everything. It doesn’t seem that awkward even today because everybody in the film is a sort of exaggerated stereotype, so it doesn’t feel like these characters were singled out for a cheap laugh at no-speakie-good-Japs. Although their characters are played for laughs, it is really at the expense of the protagonist rather than laughing at their funny pseudo-Asian mannerisms.
A more recent example that goes both ways is Silicon Valley (which I’ve been catching up on, so don’t spoil Season 4 for me). The incubator that has been the central setting of the show has two ethnic characters; Dinesh, who is played by Kumail Nanjiani, and Jian, played by Jimmy O. Yang. Dinesh is the butt of an almost continuous string of insults from Gilfoyle, but because the character is actually portrayed as competent if somewhat insecure (and Gilfoyle is a dick to pretty much everyone) it doesn’t come off as abject racism for the sake of a cheap joke by the writers. Jian Yang, on the other hand, is played off like a dumb Chinee who no-speakie-good but still manages to outwit Bachman despite not actually having any good ideas of his own. It is often not only painfully unfunny to watch but borders on cringeworthy, especially in contrast.
So there is a certain matter of context and comparison to how other characters are portrayed. Mickey Rooney’s portrayal of “Mr. Yunioshi” isn’t just awful because it is a broad, yellowface, screachy, false stereotype of Asians, but also because it is wholly unnecessary and is presented just because Blake Edwards thought buck-toothed screaming Oriental would be funny rather than representing the character from the novel or fitting in with the tenor of the rest of the film.
It is interesting to compare this to the response from some quarters about how the character played by Martin Freeman in Black Panther was like how minorities are played in “all white” films. Freeman’s Everett Ross is played as being competent in his own right (a former fighter pilot and senior CIA agent) who is nonetheless amazed and confused at the advanced technology of Wakanda and gently mocked for his innocence by Shuri. (“Great! Another broken white boy for us to fix!”) Although he does provide some comic relief in trying to figure out the Wakandan’s vibranium-based technology, he’s actually presented pretty heroically, risking his life twice in service of T’Challa, and yet (some white) people were still upset that he wasn’t the great white savior of a film about internal revolt in a technologically advanced African nation. Go figure.
I have disliked shows because the characters behaved badly, especially The L Word which was some HBO show about lipstick lesbians, a thinly disguised soap opera where people made stupid and dishonest life choices week after week. By contrast The Simpsons, which had equally idiotic characters, was kind of lovable because they somehow reconciled, or learned, or moved on. Maybe it was because the Simpsons wrapped up every week, while The L Word they’d set up the following week’s fiasco in the final seconds of the previous episode, you could see it coming a mile away, and there they were, lying to their lovers again!! GRR
Nobody’s misunderstanding the movie, though. Yeah, that stuff was put in the movie because the creators found it funny and entertaining. You also found it funny and entertaining, so you liked the movie. (So did I, for the record.) But not everyone finds the same things funny or entertaining. A person who watches Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and thinks Ferris is a smarmy, scheming little shit who deserves a punch in the face hasn’t “missed the point” of the movie. They *get *the point, they just don’t *like *it.
And not that I disagree with that, but the specific reason I personally don’t care for that movie is because it exists in a narrative universe specifically designed for Ferris to be a smarmy little shit. Of course, you can make the same observation about virtually any movie; James Bond exists in a world where he can kill with impunity and beautiful women throw themselves at him; Will Hunting lives in the conceit that he is somehow an effortless savant in every intellectual subject from math to history to biochemistry; Mr. Incredible lives in a world where ‘The Supers’ are real and all furniture is perfect mid-century modern design. Jeff Bailey scrapes by in a world of card sharks, tax cheats, and duplicitous dames. I can accept those worlds because there is some element of them which appeals to me or that I find entertaining in some way, and I feel as if I have some stake by proxy in the outcome.
By contrast, I don’t find the narcissistic Ferris or the world that warps around him to suit his every need to be interesting or worthy of spending time in, so the film is one long bore as Ferris basically experiences no challenge, demonstrates any growth, or is ever in even minor danger of losing out to his adversaries who are all either too stupid to catch him, or in the case of his sister, inexplicably converted to his side after being put upon for the entire film. Even as wish fulfillment it is unsatisfying because there was never any doubt that Ferris would succeed.
It helps if you think of Ferris Bueller as one of those stories where a chaotic trickster drops in to the miserable, stuck-in-his ways protagonist’s life and turns it upside down. Ferris himself isn’t the protagonist. He has no character arc - he ends the movie the exact same person who started it. Instead, Ferris is the complication, the plot engine, and the real protagonists are Cameron and to a lesser degree, Ferris’s sister Jeanie (Sloane is just the boys’ beard). Unlike Ferris, those two actually change during the film. Cameron learns to overcome his timidity and confront his father (which in the film’s reality is considered a good thing); Jeanie learns to get over her jealousy of her brother, which is hurting her far more than it hurts him, and to treat him as a family member rather than a rival.
Both of them are depicted as being slightly different, slightly better people by the end of the story. Ferris remains Ferris.
Interestingly, both of them have epiphanies when they beat Ferris in his own game, Cameron by tricking him into rescuing him from the pool, and Jeanie by out-talking the principal while Ferris is struck speechless. In a way, Ferris himself is another obstacle they both have to overcome.
This. Having to wait for the disks, I’m just finishing up season 6 of Once Upon a Time and I couldn’t count the times I was yelling at the screen, “Dammit! He/she’s lying/dissembling again! Things would go so much smoother if they told their friends what’s on their minds!”
I hadn’t put it into those words, but that’s how I’ve always seen the movie. Bueller isn’t supposed to be a real, developed person, he’s just a wild, over-the-top, cartoon-like character who engages in wacky hijinks that the real people near him deal with. If you watch the movie expecting him to be a real person who faces real consequences, of course you’re going to be disappointed.
I think your thesis has merit, at least with respect to Cameron (Sloane perhaps less so) but the problem is that while Cameron does undergo change in response to conflict and even has some scenes in which he is the primary character, the film isn’t about him, either explicitly (it isn’t called “Cameron Fry’s Day Off”) or implicitly (Ferris bookends the film with narration that is specifically about himself). The focus is on Ferris to the point that the entire narrative world is built around him to an almost solipsistic degree (“Everybody loves him…”), whereas pretty much everything we get about Cameron is exposition from Ferris or interactions between Cameron and Ferris, and while Alan Ruck does as much as he can with the role, he just isn’t given a lot to work with while Ferris is given all of the choice lines and plot drivers up to the “I killed the car,” moment.
I think it would be a better movie if it actually focused on Cameron (again, I could kind of care less about Sloane as she’s presented in the film) but it isn’t, and if it were I can’t imagine it would be all that funny since Cameron is clearly such a miserable person with emotionally distant parents.
While it is Cameron’s action that damages the headlight and inadvertantly destorys the car, the reason it is up on a jack running in reverse (and that the boys are messing with the car at all) is because of Ferris; Cameron would not have touched the vehicle otherwise. In not insisting on taking his share of the responsibility, he is sleezing his way out of another situation that he created. And while Alessan is correct that Ferris is the instigator and catalyst for transformation, the real change is how Cameron deals with his father once he is directly in front of him; regardless of how much righteous indignation Cameron may have when he decides to accept the full blame and deal with the consequences, I guarantee this is not going to go well for him, which is something we don’t get to see because the film focuses on Ferris getting away yet again without consequence.
Ferris Bueller is who Donald Trump wishes he could be, and perhaps in his mind believes that he is.
70s cinema was very troubling. The best filmmakers made brilliant movies about troubling protagonists (The Godfather, Taxi Driver) and it was wonderful. A lot of lesser filmmakers made movies with dodgy protagonists in a misplaced effort to be “edgy” or to appeal to “the movement.” They didn’t seem to be in control of their message and the films disappeared without a trace. For instance: Mother, Jugs and Speed, Aloha Bobby and Rose, and Bobby Deerfield.
Great thread, so I hesitate to bring up a less interesting example: I couldn’t stand The Florida Project, because the main child characters were selfish jerks, entirely enabled by the mother chrarcter. (At least they show us whom to blame). I almost never dislike a film just because of bad character behavior, but this was too much — unrelenting selfishness. Maybe it’s because I’m the parent of a child who happens to be quite unselfish, so I can’t just shrug it off as “kids are kids.”