A year ago today, I had an article post on /Film entitled, "Licorice Pizza Director Paul Thomas Anderson Responds to Criticism of Fake Asian Accent." The backlash Anderson was addressing stemmed from two scenes in his film, where a character based on real-life restaurateur Jerry Frick employs an offensive, outmoded, stereotypical Japanese accent when talking to his first and second Japanese wife.
At the time, Licorice Pizza was up for Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Original Screenplay at the 94th Academy Awards. In the U.S., the Media Action Network for Asian Americans had already called for an awards boycott of the film due to the “casual racism” it depicts, saying in a statement, “To shower [Licorice Pizza] with nominations and awards would normalize more egregious mocking of Asians in this country.” Ultimately, the film didn’t win any awards on Oscar night, but it did mark a turning point in how I watch movies, write about them, and think about the people who make them.
Licorice Culture Wars
Months before my article, Anderson told The New York Times:
"My mother-in-law's Japanese and my father-in-law is white, so seeing people speak English to her with a Japanese accent is something that happens all the time. I don't think they even know they're doing it."
In a subsequent interview with Indiewire in mid-February 2022, his response to mounting criticism over the mock Japanese accent — in which he said, among other things, "What is the problem?" — struck me as rather indelicate, if not outright dismissive, especially since it was coming the same week as the news that anti-Asian hate crimes were up a staggering 339 percent in the U.S. in 2021. It was as if Anderson was waving around a lighter in a gas station like one of his own movie characters. While conveying his remarks — essentially, responding to his response to an interview question — I overstepped my bounds and started soapboxing a bit without having seen Licorice Pizza.
Part of my rationalization was that Anderson himself once condemned a fellow filmmaker, David Fincher, for Fight Club without having seen the full movie. It struck a raw nerve with him, just as his comments did with me, but at least he had the option of seeing it before vilifying it in the press. The only reason I hadn't seen Licorice Pizza before writing up news about it last February was that Japan was at the back of the release bus for it. It wouldn’t hit theaters here until July 2022, though its stateside digital release was right around the corner.
The ensuing comments on social media were brutal, with some readers pointing out — quite rightly — that not having seen the movie immediately undermined anything I might say. I'm not on Facebook, but I popped over there and waded through 200+ comments, some of which were politicized and downright vitriolic. People accused me of virtue signaling and being a “woke Nazi” (Godwin's law, for the win). Other commenters, including a Black member of the Screen Actors Guild, observed a noticeable pattern whereby many of the film’s loudest defenders seemed to be white folks. However, one guy, who identified himself as Asian, wrote:
“F*** this article, and f*** the author who HASN'T EVEN SEEN THE F***ING FILM but feels his white criticism is valid because he lives in Japan.”
That one rang devastatingly true. This is the most controversy I’ve ever been embroiled in online, and it’s undoubtedly my own fault for getting dragged into the culture wars with Licorice Pizza, a movie with an esoteric title that only Southern Californian record collectors would understand. I came away feeling that, in my haste to field an assignment in the newsroom, I shouldn't have been so quick to weigh in, let alone advertise that I hadn’t seen the movie.
I wouldn’t even have to wait long to see it. Since I'm still connected to the U.S. iTunes Store, I could be there on opening night, so to speak, when Licorice Pizza had its digital release on March 1, 2022. I blind-bought it and watched it (and I even rented it again on U-Next, despite owning it, just so I could take screenshots for this). And now here we are, a year later.
I had my own thoughts about the movie, of course, but with respect to the two Japanese wife scenes, I was more interested to hear an actual Japanese perspective first. So, I turned to the nearest available person, the one on the couch next to me: my wife. And I asked for her thoughts.
Wife Imitates Art
Let me just say right off the bat that I don’t want to trot out my long-suffering spouse like a dancing bear for some unintentional parody of a me-centric think piece, such as, “What My Real Japanese Wife Thought of the Japanese Wife Scenes in Licorice Pizza.” Originally, when I began writing this last March as a potential follow-up article for /Film — an American movie news site with millions of monthly readers — she had given me the go-ahead to share her thoughts, but she asked not to be identified by name for privacy reasons.
That’s the only reason why, for lack of a better codename, I’ll revert to my old habit of referring to her as “my wife” here, though it has a whiff of objectification to it. I’m also sticking this up on my blog now, where no one will ever read it. The discourse surrounding this movie has long since died down, so hopefully, that will allow for some more nuance, cooler heads prevailing, personal attacks desisting, etc.
If the year-old controversy over these Licorice Pizza scenes is of no importance to you, feel free to click away now. It goes without saying that Japanese and other Asian or Asian-American people are not a monolith. This is only one anecdotal hearsay reaction, and I share it here at the risk of whitesplaining.
My wife had never seen any of Paul Thomas Anderson's films. He's not a household name in Japan. She speaks much better English than I do Japanese, but she usually prefers to watch American movies with Japanese subtitles. Those weren't initially available for Licorice Pizza, but we went back through the scenes together several times, analyzing and discussing them and working up our own loose translation of the Japanese dialogue, which appears in the film without subtitles.
I had no idea what her reaction would be, but long story short, she wasn't offended by the Japanese wife scenes in Licorice Pizza. She actually thought Anderson had handled them well on the Japanese end because he had filmed that part in such a way that it might read differently depending on the audience. I realized she was much more attuned to the microexpressions of the wives' faces and the nuances of their Japanese dialogue—whereas I could only catch certain words and form an impression of the basic gist of what the characters were saying.
The title of Licorice Pizza is very Fyre in that it alludes to selling something unsuccessful as a novelty. In the movie, John Michael Higgins plays the dilettantish Japanophile, Jerry Frick, Yumi Mizui plays his first wife, Mioko, and Megumi Anjo plays his second wife, Kimiko. In the first scene, Frick and Mioko sit across the desk from Momma Anita (Mary Elizabeth Ellis), the mother of Gary Valentine (Cooper Hoffman), as she reads them a promotional article she has written on Mikado, their new Japanese restaurant in the San Fernando Valley of California.
Through this framing device, we learn that Frick had a restaurant in Tokyo for 15 years and that almost the entire staff of Mikado, with the notable exception of Frick, is Japanese. Mioko offers polite smiles as she listens, but her smile disappears when she hears Anita read out:
"Those little doll waitresses are dressed in colorful kimonos …"
As Anita finishes reading the article and she and Frick discuss it, Mioko sits silent and stone-faced.
The Weight of “Wakaru?”
Frick is mostly happy with the article; he only wishes it did more to communicate the "serenity" of Mikado. Both he and Anita seem oblivious to Mioko, and it's possible the viewer may be somewhat oblivious to her, too, since it's the characters around her who are commanding attention through dialogue. Mioko’s facial expressions do speak volumes, but they’re not always noticeable when you have someone else doing the real speaking.
Without picking up on her displeasure at the "little doll waitresses" part, Frick turns to Mioko and launches into his undeniably racist accent. It's the kind of voice you'd hear Mickey Rooney doing in yellowface in Breakfast at Tiffany’s circa 1961.
Just as a reminder, Licorice Pizza hit theaters 60 years later, at the tail end of 2021. You’d think Hollywood would have made a little more progress in the last six decades, but I digress. Frick says:
"Ohhh, Mioko. How you think of this ... what you think of item from newspaper?"
The first time she watched this, my wife was confused as to why Frick changed his voice and adopted the bad accent. It was an awkward moment where neither of us laughed. However, she felt that Mioko's reactions to Frick were natural for a Japanese woman.
As we were rewatching the scene, she pointed to Mioko's face, redirecting my attention to some of those same microexpressions I had missed. Mioko blinks at Frick's stupidity, then gives him an austere look and — again, in Japanese, without subtitles — says something to the effect of:
"The waitresses don't matter. This is a restaurant. It's an article about food. It doesn't talk about the food at all. The cooking. The cooking."
She ends on a word that is all-important, in my wife's view. It's the Japanese word, "Wakaru?" which basically means, "Understand?" So much hinges on that one word because of the hierarchical nature of the Japanese language, which involves an intricate system of honorifics and levels of formalism.
"Wakaru?" is not a word that you would say to a superior. At best, you might say it to someone who’s on a peer level with you. At worst, you might say it to someone who’s dense or an outright underling. The way that Mioko says it made it clear to my wife that Mioko is talking down to Frick.
After Mioko gives her first feedback, Anita falls back on an earlier draft of the article, which highlights the food more. Frick asks Mioko in that same faux Japanese voice:
"Ohhh ... what you think of that?"
Mioko explains in Japanese, peppered with a few English words, that the other draft is more to her liking, saying:
"This is better than before because it's emphasizing the sashimi and Japanese appetizers."
Frick apparently understands her well enough to translate for Anita, but he's also talking down to Mioko. And the real issue, for some viewers, is not whether Mioko passes muster for Japanese representation. Rather, it’s the open depiction of Frick’s racism, which Licorice Pizza employs for cringe comedy, without offering a strong enough counterpoint or narrative reason to justify it.
This scene and the next one are thematically connected to the main plot, but not in an overt way, and the lack of clarity (which goes right back to the oblique title), leaves them feeling highly questionable, like they don’t add much to the movie besides controversy.
In the Alana Boat
The next and last time we meet Frick — this time at the restaurant — he has a new Japanese wife, Kimiko. For Gary Valentine, it's as if all Japanese women look alike. He greets Kimiko as Mioko, and Frick says:
"No, no, no, this is my new wife, Kimiko. Pretty as a picture."
The 15-year-old Gary, meanwhile, introduces his 25-year-old love interest, Alana Kane (Alana Haim), as his "lady friend," but she quickly corrects him and says she's his "business partner." All four of them sit down in a booth, where Gary and Alana are hoping to promote their waterbed business with some table standees. Frick gets the first word again, politely telling Gary:
"I just don't think these really fit in my restaurant."
Gesturing to himself and the kimonoed Kimiko, he says:
"We're Japanese, and this waterbed business is strictly American."
He then turns to Kimiko and says in his pidgin "Engrish:"
"Uhhh, Kimiko, what you think of this waterbed?"
In stern Japanese, Kimiko replies:
"That's so tacky. I can't put that in my restaurant."
Alana, who doesn’t understand a word of any of this, asks Frick:
"What did she just say?"
Frick replies:
"It's hard to tell. I don't speak Japanese."
In the scene right after this, Alana encounters Frisbee, a mutual friend of hers and Gary’s, in the ladies’ room. Played by Destry Allyn Spielberg (Steven Spielberg’s daughter), Frisbee is white, yet she works at the restaurant and is dressed in a pink kimono, just like Kimiko. She also talks about Gary being a “little hustler” who tries — and has perhaps succeeded — in getting hand-jobs from her.
Here, we see the thematic point: Gary is like Jerry. Though he doesn’t appropriate Japanese culture like Jerry does, we’re left to understand that he’s the same sort of guy who will appropriate women’s bodies for his own sexual and financial benefit. In the next scene, he coaches Alana to make her voice sexier for a waterbed customer on the phone, and eventually, we see her parading around in his store in a bikini as he macks on another girl closer to his age.
In Licorice Pizza, both plot and politics are picaresque, superficially rather aimless. Characters come and go, and for some American moviegoers — who, like Alana, don’t understand a word of Japanese — Mioko and Kimiko might register as two marginalized members of an already underrepresented group, stranded in a couple of throwaway scenes. Obviously, their scenes may also land differently for other Japanese viewers. However, for my wife, who could fully understand their cultural background and every word they were saying, the characters both registered as believable Japanese women, with the singular power to uncover ignorance on both sides of the argument.
Intent vs. Effect
It may be a stretch, but as my wife and I discussed Licorice Pizza the way Frick and his wife discuss Gary’s tacky table standee, she put the idea in my head that maybe Anderson was deliberately playing the provocateur, leaving the Japanese dialogue untranslated in each scene because he knew their unfiltered depiction of racism would get people talking. Going by this logic, Anderson had this all thought out beforehand and played the water cooler like a fiddle to show that even some people with anti-racist intentions could miss what was right in front of them by not really seeing the wives or hearing or knowing what they were saying.
An example of that is this NPR transcript, where one of the well-intentioned co-hosts says:
"The two Japanese wives are completely submissive, and that is a stereotype that, to me, is, like, even more insidious than the stereotype that [Anderson] is displaying of talking in that Japanese accent. The idea that these women would sit there and not say anything or not even cast a glance or - there is nothing about them that says they are upset about this or, like, bothered by it."
The thing is, if you can understand what the characters are saying, they are totally not submissive. People might form that impression of them, though, just because of the language barrier. So, the real question is whether Anderson, the writer-director, is above all this, operating on some level that’s too genius to be understood, or whether that’s giving him entirely too much credit. His screenplay for Licorice Pizza is the only one of ten nominated for a Writers Guild Award last year that wasn't made available online. We have no way of knowing what it was like on the Licorice Pizza set, how much improvisation the Japanese actresses may have brought to their scenes, and whether their most crucial bits of dialogue (like “Wakaru?) were translated word-for-word from Anderson’s screenplay.
Reading Anderson’s comments in Indiewire, where he professed an inability to understand where complaints of anti-Asian racism were coming from, I felt like Andy Dufresne in The Shawshank Redemption, when he says to the warden, “How can you be so obtuse?” In light of those comments, part of me thinks Anderson just lucked into the intricacies of the Japanese dialogue as he was setting up a bad joke with his cast members. And maybe, because he’s an elite filmmaker coming from a privileged place, he couldn’t appreciate the full gravity of the impact of that joke, which had a much different effect than he intended for some Asian-American viewers.
Licorice Pizza is a movie that was made, first and foremost, for an English-speaking audience, and it almost seems conceited to put something in there that people won't understand and then make them out to be the bad guys for misinterpreting it.
Further Reading
I’m not trying to be the arbiter of what should or shouldn’t be shown on celluloid, but at this point, I'm more inclined to listen to Japanese and other non-white perspectives on movies like Licorice Pizza. Apart from my wife, I found myself reading Walter Chaw's review on Film Freak Central, and "A Slice of Racism in Licorice Pizza?" by Jana Monji on AsAmNews. In my /Film article, I also shared David Chen's reaction, and he followed up on that in April 2022 with an episode of his Culturally Relevant podcast, where the guest was Jen Yamato, who wrote about the Licorice Pizza fallout in a piece for The Los Angeles Times.
With everything I’ve written here, I would have liked to bring in the point-of-view of a Japanese-American critic who is fluent in Japanese, but I didn’t have much luck making any contacts like that. The only comparable voice I could find was this short video, uploaded in May 2022, from a Japanese-speaking, Japanese-American YouTuber named Jonathan Low. One other thing I did cross-reference, though, was this Twitter thread with an alternate translation of the Japanese wife scenes in Licorice Pizza by Alexander Lin.
In its soundtrack, Licorice Pizza reuses "Life on Mars," a David Bowie song featured prominently in the HBO series Watchmen, which concerned itself with hidden figures (of the superhero variety) and the erasure of Black history from American history. The controversy with Anderson's film likewise reminded me of the #OscarsSoWhite kerfuffle and a 2020 New York Times article by Aisha Harris, "Stop Blaming History for Your All-White, All-Male Movie." It’s a valid question whether retreating into the past with an all-white cast isn’t just an excuse sometimes for movies to be less diverse under the pretense of historical accuracy.
I do think there's a larger discussion to be had about films like Licorice Pizza and how they fit into the overarching cultural matrix of the stories we tell ourselves. Movies and TV are America's greatest export. For me as an expat, they're my biggest lifeline to my home country outside family members and doomscrolling daily headlines.
Whether we recognize it or not, movies show us images that help shape our perceptions and attitudes. Paul Thomas Anderson, the auteur, has become one of cinema's sacred cows, but that doesn't mean he's above reproach or “missing the mark,” as he put it. It's also possible to have a thoughtful discussion about the representation in his movie with it being a hit piece or a call to #CancelPTA.
Licorice Pizza, itself a dramedy, seemingly invites such discussion when it has a white woman, played by Harriet Sansom Harris, say to Alana: "You have a very Jewish nose, which is becoming very fashionable." Elsewhere, it has Sean Penn's character, Jack Holden, recite movie dialogue to Alana, where he says, "I saw two of my best Black friends beheaded in the Congo."
What's the point of lines like these? You decide. As my wife and I ended our discussion, she just looked pointedly at me and said, "Wakaru?"
A Slice of Bias with Your Pizza
Prior to Licorice Pizza, Paul Thomas Anderson was one of my favorite filmmakers, but having been trained to question the representation we see in movies, this film was where the rubber met the road for me. It got me to realize that I’d been playing favorites with an artist who was a stranger to me.
That sounds like a no-brainer, but it's easy to form a parasocial relationship in your head with a creative person whose work you admire. It’s the kind of thing where you find yourself constructing images of someone based on scraps of media. I’m a big fan of Fiona Apple’s music, too, and reading in The New Yorker that Anderson allegedly shoved her out of a car when they were dating had me mentally reviewing old Fiona lyrics, wondering if a line about a “contemptible snob” who “lived to put things in their place” was directed at Anderson, the movie director.
I've written elsewhere about all the biblical references in Anderson’s film, Magnolia, and I used to have this whole theory that Philip Seymour Hoffman's character, Lancaster Dodd, was a stand-in for God in The Master. Yet Anderson paints an unflattering picture of religion in There Will Be Blood, which climaxes with a weaselly preacher declaring, “God is a superstition.” And I found this other old interview with him where he seemed to dismiss the religious trappings in his films as sheer coincidence, telling interviewer Matthew Pejkovic (of Matt’s Movie Reviews):
“It’s funny to hear you say religion is a big part of my films. I just don’t think of it that way. It’s like you’re talking about someone else’s films.”
I only mention this because it made me realize how off-base I was in my interpretation of another aspect of Anderson’s work. I suddenly felt like I never him, which of course, I don’t.
Did Licorice Pizza make me want to start a bonfire and burn a bunch of Anderson Blu-rays? No, but I’d be lying if I said it didn’t torpedo a certain totem pole in my head, making me further re-evaluate how I’ve idol-worshipped Anderson and some of his cinematic contemporaries. In their own way, the Japanese wife scenes in Licorice Pizza were like the Bruce Lee scenes in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood all over again. There’s a weird kind of cronyism or brand-name loyalty that occurs with some critics (and fans) where we’re willing to extend grace to our favorite directors, giving them a free pass or at least going easier on them for stuff like this, while savaging the missteps of other filmmakers we don’t like.
Watchmen doesn’t have a monopoly on “Life on Mars,” obviously, but the recycling of it in Licorice Pizza (much like the recycling of a Saw tagline as the title of There Will Be Blood) struck me as derivative. And after his dig at No Country for Old Men in an old interview with The New York Times, I still wonder if Anderson is in some kind of competition or dialogue with the Coen Brothers in his films.
In Licorice Pizza, Anderson drops the line, “Soggy bottom sounds like someone s*** their pants,” which seems like a jab at the Coens’ O Brother, Where Art Thou? and its fictional bluegrass group, The Soggy Bottom Boys. Later, Anderson practically remakes the scene from Hail, Caesar! where Ralph Fiennes gives Alden Ehrenreich a line reading, only he’s got Bradley Cooper as Jon Peters, doing it to Gary Valentine with Barbara Streisand’s name.
The Nail That Sticks Out
This has been a long, long blog post, but we’re nearing the end of it now. As I mentioned before, this originally started out as a /Film article. The first draft of it, which was less than half the length of what’s here, is something I submitted to an Asian-American editor, someone I trusted, for vetting last March.
As it turned out, the timing was not great, since just that week there had been another controversy where the site CinemaBlend pulled a review from a white critic who suggested that Turning Red — a Pixar film set in an Asian community in Toronto — would only appeal to a narrow audience. I would argue that Licorice Pizza appeals to a much narrower subset of viewers than a Pixar film, but the last thing the world probably needs is someone like that critic or someone like me giving his two cents on Asian representation in film.
Suffice it to say, my editor recognized that the optics of me wading into the Licorice Pizza controversy were not great, either. She thought it would work better if we had some other Asian voices in here beyond Mrs. Meyer.
When I first started writing for /Film in 2017, I did this other abortive project where I was interviewing Japanese people about the live-action Ghost in the Shell remake, which was the subject of its own separate whitewashing controversy for its casting of Scarlett Johansson in the lead role. I quickly learned that people were hesitant to go on the record and have their names or quotes printed, either because they didn’t want to get dragged into an American controversy and/or because of the cultural mindset that “the nail that sticks out gets hammered.”
My other main takeaway was that the Japanese and Japanese-American perspectives were fundamentally different, which is a point that also arises in this 2017 article from The Hollywood Reporter, wherein four actresses of Japanese descent discuss the Ghost in the Shell controversy. Some of the things those actresses said made me feel like my own interview project was doomed from the start, since having a white interviewer, as opposed to a Japanese one, might have set up the wrong dynamic and caused people to filter their thoughts in a different way.
Rather than have that happened again, I opted to let my Licorice Pizza story die for the time being. I figured no one needs to hear me, a hypocritical, true-life Jerry Frick of sorts, relay his wife’s thoughts secondhand. As mentioned, Frick’s backstory involves him living in Tokyo for 15 years, and I’ve been here almost as long as that, but I’ve never drilled down hard enough with studying Japanese to go beyond everyday interactions and become fluent. It’s like that line from Martin Scorsese’s Silence, about the missionary in Japan: “All the time he lived here he taught but would not learn.”
Maybe I’m no different than Frick and should do some soul-searching before I start leveling criticisms at outward targets. The internet has long since democratized film criticism, anyway. Everybody’s a critic, and it’s possible for anyone to chime in with their ill-informed takes on movies they haven’t seen, as I did. Commenters review reviewers, but I try to be thick-skinned and take criticism as well as I can dish it out. In that sense, my rush to criticize to Licorice Pizza, and the blowback I received for it, was an invaluable learning experience, one worth preserving. Hence, this post.
Final Thoughts
Putting to bed my own personal failings, I tried to go into Licorice Pizza with an open mind, but my opinion about its handling of race hasn’t changed that much since I first watched it last March (and rewatched it this week). It’s possible that I ruined it for myself or it’s possible the movie ruined itself for me.
There’s some fine technical craftsmanship on display in Licorice Pizza, like the obligatory P.T. Anderson tracking shots, including one through a teenage fair where John C. Reilly cameos as Herman Munster. It’s a well-made film overall, and I would expect nothing less from Anderson. But even after my wife, in effect, gave me permission to like the movie, I couldn’t connect with Licorice Pizza the way I have with Anderson’s other films.
So many things just seemed off about it: the rapid intimacy of dialogue among strangers, the false exuberance of its endless running scenes, the way this 25-year-old chaperone just starts dating teen actors, bringing them home for dinner and asking them what their penis looks like. It reminded me of that old Owen Gleiberman article for Entertainment Weekly, “Why I fell out of love with the films of Paul Thomas Anderson.” Then again, I’m wired to be dramatic.
Liking a filmmaker’s work doesn’t have to be an all-or-nothing proposition, but I also don’t want to be some disciple who’s in denial about their hero and his tone-deaf attempts at politically incorrect humor. As I learned from my own article, maybe some scenes are better left on the cutting room floor unless you’re able to go all-in with the subject matter. These particular movie scenes, which serve an understated thematic purpose at best, sucked me into a black hole where I felt betrayed and thought: You just don’t get it, Anderson. It’s fine for art to open a can of worms, but when you use them for race-baiting, there better be a good reason for it.
In Licorice Pizza, Anderson puts Mioko in the foreground with Jerry Frick. It’s the white co-protagonist, Gary Valentine, who is momentarily left in the background as a blur. Mioko speaks her native language onscreen, and Anderson doesn’t translate it (a tactic Steven Spielberg used to better effect with Spanish in his West Side Story remake, released around the same time in late 2021). However, because of the racist antics of the buffoon next to Mioko, and because the human ear tends to tune out languages it can’t comprehend — letting them become white noise — the English-speaking viewer winds up being more focused on Frick.
Frick’s wives do evince inner lives of their own, but if there’s any point in them being there, it’s just to show that Gary is surrounded by older white men who are hustlers like him and whose ignorance extends to the women they exploit. Witness how Jack Holden lets Alana fall off the back of his motorcycle without a care in the world. If highlighting the collateral damage wrought by such men was Anderson’s artistic intention (keeping in mind that his interview comments didn’t betray any deep level of sensitive thought), then he probably could have arrived at the same message in Licorice Pizza without pouring gasoline on the fire of race in America.