Crazy Rich Asians opens with Napoleon Bonaparte and Louis Vuitton. “Let China sleep,” the film quotes the great Frenchman saying, “for when she awakens she will shake the world.” An opulent London hotel refuses to honour Singaporean matriarch Eleanor Young’s reservation, as her children slump across their LV suitcases, suggesting perhaps she might be happier somewhere in Chinatown. An enraged Young, played by Michelle Yeoh, makes one phone call to her husband, who buys the hotel – an act that has been hailed as Asian empowerment. We never see nor hear from Young’s husband, whose sole function seems to be the revenge purchasing of hotels, again. But many more vignettes of ostentatious acquisition and wealth follow. Even the pet dogs are called Astor and Rockefeller.
In a recent op-ed, Thomas Friedman, the New York Times columnist, noted that he “really enjoyed” Crazy Rich Asians because “it reminded me of an important point: Rich Asia has gotten really rich”. Friedman declared after a trip to India that the world was becoming flat, or in other words, as rich as his own plutocratic circles – which includes Mohammed bin Salman, crown prince of Saudi Arabia, who is reported to have recently dropped $450m on a Da Vinci. Perhaps Friedman’s flat-world delusion helps understand how Crazy Rich Asians can be seen as a film about Asian empowerment. For the film, which has crossed the $100m mark, and has enjoyed the highest opening for a romantic comedy in three years, and is indeed funny and charming in parts, is best described as a celebration of transnational plutocracy.
Some Asian Americans, for so long either invisible or caricatured by Hollywood, have welcomed Crazy Rich Asians for its representation of a minority. Though it is the monoculture of capitalism, not Asia, that is on display. In fact, “Asia” is used in Crazy Rich Asians in the same manner that many westerners employ “Africa”, lumping together 48 countries with distinct cultures, languages, and histories. The film’s map of the continent names only four countries: Singapore, India, China, and Thailand. As for south Asians, who make up a substantial part of Singapore’s population, I counted only four: one Sikh man at a hawker centre, the rest employed as guards.
Asianness is mere window dressing, satisfied by cliched heaps of familial guilt, food shots, and gossipy society ladies. But the film’s codes, signs and symbols actually belong to capitalism and its new elite. There are the plummy British boarding school accents, couture gowns, first-class cabins and hot bods. Bollywood, the largest film industry in the world, embraced this nouveau-riche aesthetic a good 10 years ago, replacing the downtrodden hero who grows up sleeping on footpaths with urban banker-dreamboats who drive Ferraris in London and yank off their shirts to reveal glistening six packs.
Interestingly, Crazy Rich Asians has no main white speaking parts. The only white characters to be are given dialogue – the hotel staff at the very start of the film – expose themselves as racists. This might appear to give the film a political edge – an interpretation encouraged by the film’s makers and promoters. “It’s not a movie, it’s a movement,” director Jon M Chu has said. But unbridled wealth can’t be a leader for any worthwhile mass movement. Its excesses, in cinema at least, lend themselves best to the sort of scathing treatment given by The Godfather II, the greatest ever meditation on American capitalism, and American Psycho, by far the sharpest film about the crazy rich.
Crazy Rich Asians isn’t the first film of its type to be released by a major Hollywood studio. Remember that Sex and the City 2, in which Carrie and the girls romped through “Abu Dhabi” in designer heels and, inexplicably, turbans, was released in 2010 – a mere two years after the financial crash. “How do we tip in Abu Dhabi?” Charlotte asks as they arrive at their palatial hotel. “Have ya got any loose rubies?” Carrie replies. It is clearer today that to be “crazy rich” at a time of catastrophic inequality is not a victimless crime.
The world’s richest 1% have seized twice as much growth as the bottom 50%, according to 2018’s World Inequality Report authored by Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez and others. Until this year, India had the world’s largest population of poor people, and 40% of China’s population survives on just over $5 a day (Crazy Rich Asians isn’t being released in either country even though China is the second-largest box office market in the world).
Singapore itself struggles with inequality and political disaffection. What are the crazy rich Asians doing about the downtrodden and left-behind in their midst? Nothing, it would seem. Microfinance receives a cameo mention in Crazy Rich Asians, albeit via a Thai princess who for some unexplained reason is writing papers on the subject; Myanmar is referenced only in relation to its rubies; and Rachel Chu, the non-rich love interest (played by Constance Wu), is a professor of economics at NYU, but these are the sole references to the existence of the 99%.
Free markets were promised as the rising tide that would lift all boats, but revolts against globalisation reveal that only the superyachts of the global rich have been lifted while a vast majority struggles to stay afloat in leaking rafts. Hollywood has played an crucial role in defanging crazy rich westerners: billionaire Bruce Wayne is a civil saviour, Daddy Warbucks saves sad orphans, Christian Grey is an irresistible charmer. Hollywood turned “show me the money” into a feelgood mantra – and how cute were those shopaholics in Clueless?
To be extra safe in its sanitising of the ultra-wealthy, Hollywood now lets members of minorities play them in box-office-busting films. A genuine breakthrough, however, will only come when Hollywood makes the Asian version of that great film on the modern capitalism: Asian Psycho.
