DUPONT GUYS: The Resurrection
Review by Alvin Lu
Kearny Street Workshop News, Vol.1 No.1
Or a new work by Frank Chin? The value of both seems only
to be enhanced by the lengths of perseverance, felicity, or plain
connections it takes to get a glimpse of either. But considering
the fact that Chin has been steadily publishing in recent years,
though sometimes it seems the only way to stumble across a
new essay is by pure chance, while Choy's last film, as far as I
know, was 1983's epochal The Fall of the I Hotel, well, all the
better the new one is about...Frank Chin.
Choy and Chin have long served, willingly or not, as the
"terrible children" of their respective theaters of operation, with
the difference that Choy, especially in Dupont Guy: The Schiz of
Grant Avenue (1976) and I Hotel, has been the primary
documentarian of the spirit of Asian American counterculture,
while Chin, the seemingly more tormented artist of the two,
has been the manifestation of that spirit itself. This is a subject
for a much longer essay, but Chin occupies a position in Asian
America that has no analogue elsewhere. As with his camp
redress activity, he is at once the most invisible agent of and the
single individual most responsible for what we vaguely
understand to be Asian American culture. There is a very short
list of filmmakers who could examine that charged legacy
without distortions or apologies. Or would want to.
So while it is always a pleasure to see Chin in action - and
here there are plenty of opportunities, captured over the years,
of the master at his volcanic best: smoking a doobie to Flower
Drum Song, reading jazzy porn at the first ever Asian American
Writers' Conference, raving about Mike Masaoka, promising
never to come back to the David Henry Hwang theatre ever
again, and more - it is a greater pleasure, given relative scarcity,
to see Choy back in action. The weird mix; the nervous
rhythms; the snide sense of humor; the same feelings of
confusion, disgust, hilarity, and surprise one gets rummaging
through a Grant Avenue souvenir shop are all magically
familiar.
An exercise in one of my film classes was to show some of
Dupont Guy with the sound turned off and ask the class to write
down what they thought they were seeing. Delight, and
recognition, occurred when the film played again with the
sound turned on. Sound didn't reflect. It persistently
commented, counterpointed, joked, or simply had nothing to
do with. One exemplary sequence in WWWFrankChin? takes
place during the darkly humorous "chapter" about Chin's
serial-killer correspondence with Maxine Hong Kingston.
(Were those actual letters Chin Wrote?) An acted voiceover of
Kingston's earnest response, in which she defends her
transferrence of Yu Fei's tattoos to Fa Mulan, runs over footage
of an utterly bewildered present-day Chin, riding an escalator
in a glitzy Koreatown mall. This cuts to King-Kok Cheung's
Cantonese narration of a Fa Mulan poem playing over a
breakneck montage of brilliantly colored Chinese childrens'
books illustrations, showier and more dynamic than anything
in Mulan.
Choy's archival research is impressive, but he goes further,
reassembling the junk of the past into a quirky, homemade
contraption. "Assembling" is the right word: Choy's films are
more like gadgets than what we think of as documentaries,
impressing themselves with funny tricks and spewing steam in
strange spots. The sense of restless energy, which might
explode at any moment, is perfectly tuned to the film's subject
and all the more remarkable considering its narrative thread is
held together by that most deadly of devices: interviews with
writers and academics.
All the third-party testimony turns WWWFrankChin? into a
film largely about the Chin myth, the persona, not the person.
For those unfamiliar with it, it's a dead-on accurate summation
of the tangle of issues the subject has woven around itself. For
those who are, it still packs plenty of surprises (like mind-
bending footage of Chin's decidedly odd wedding ceremony).
But unlike with most writers, or even essentially literary-
theatrical personalities like Chin, one gets the sense, for all that,
there is another story here. Choy provides what he can
without descending into expose. There is enough of Chin the
person here to suggest an as fascinating story, if not more so -
and an utterly different film. We see this in a remarkable shot
that tracks our subject walking the streets of downtown L.A.,
alone at night. The shot perfectly encapsulates Chin's
fundamental disagreement with the world, an out-of-jointness
which has defined his reputation.
The best interview sequences with Chin, scattered throughout
the film, oddly enough take place inside his car, with the
seat-belt warning constantly beeping. The ride eventually
brings us to Chin's personal history, providing the ending of
the film and an unsatisfactory answer to the question of the
film's title.
During the ending, I felt a sense of deja vu. After it was over, I
turned to a literary journal based out of Los Angeles, The New
Review of Literature, which I had received in the mail, unsolicited,
several months ago. In the April 2004 issue was, as far as I
know, Chin's most recently published essay, "The Road Doesn't
Know Me Anymore," which might have been a title for this
film. In it, loosely arranged around a tale of JACL treachery
and the camp resistance movement, is the story of Choy
interviewing Chin on the road to El Dorado. Chin's essay fills
in some of the gaps the film leaves out, and vice versa. It's an
excellent companion piece. Re-reading it, I realized the whole
time Choy thought he was recording Chin, Chin was actually
writing Choy. It's an old writer's trick. It's great to see the two
of them still up to them.