Dear Margaret,
I should be congratulating you — Sundance
airing the movie version of your latest one-woman show Cho:Revolution
last Saturday was a big deal. But I’m writing for a different, less gracious
reason, and I’m kind of nervous about it. When I started typing, the dorky
little paperclip icon popped up on my computer screen and asked if I needed
help writing my letter. I sent it away with a snort, but now I’m regretting
it.
That paperclip had my back, just like I would have had yours years ago, whenyou rose from the ashes of drug abuse, eating disorders, and thecancellation of a hellaciously mismanaged sitcom
to bring us your live show I’m the One That I Want.
Girl, I always loved you. I thought that I’m the One was especially
good –
– smart, sharp, unabashedly brave. You turned the experience of having your
hair fall out in clumps and losing creative control over All-AmericanGirl into wrenching comedy. You were like some crazy, Richard
Pryor-esque
alchemist, turning the pain of racism and oppression into a routine that was
simultaneously revenge and embrace.
But now I’m writing to say… that you’re not as funny anymore.
I know, I’d best run and hide. Your posse of the sassily disenfranchisedwill be coming for me. I should know — I used to be one of your minions. Fouryears ago, if anyone had said a bad word about you, I would have said, “Ooh, holdmy earrings, hold my earrings,” and then sunk my Frito nail extensions — allsquare and curling and corn-chippy, with maybe some rhinestones and airbrushart — into that bitch’s face. But now, here I am, cowering in the whitest,straightest, most male place I can find, because I have cast aspersions onOur Lady of the Oppressed People’s Hilarity.
I started laughing a little less with Notorious C.H.O. My friend
Aaron
still came out of the theater deaf on the side where I was sitting, but it
wasn’t the same. You were getting… preachy. And when I watched
Cho: Revolution live last year, I was still laughing, but I was sort of
forcing
myself. All of my friends were too — it was an emperor’s new clothes
situation, and we were all shifty-eyed before we came clean that we felt
sledgehammered by your self-validating message, your rage against the -isms.
Revolution was like the end of Ghostbusters, but with a giant,
Stuart Smalley affirmation golem menacing Manhattan instead of Mr. Stay-Puft
Marshmallow Man doing the job.
I know you’re getting attacked viciously all the time. I know about theDrudge Report thing — how Drudge selectively excerpted portions of your performance at a
MoveOn.org event where you criticized Bush in your usual fierce manner.
FreeRepublic.com
thenlinked to it, and you got torrents of awful hate mail from right-wing conservatives — people were
calling you a gook, a slut, a pig. And just a few weeks ago, the president
of
the Omni Hotels, where you were doing a convention gig, turnedoff the mic and stopped payment on your check.
He’s a close friend of George Bush, so I guess he didn’t like what you had
to
say about the Mess o’ Potamia.
When stuff like this happens, I’m reminded just how radical — and, yes,revolutionary — it is for you to be you: Korean-American, feminist, queer,sexual, and scatological, an unflagging advocate and political activist onso many fronts of injustice. I see your Web site in support of queer marriage:loveisloveislove.com. I see you stumping for Ms.Magazine. I want you to keep on keeping on, you know? But I want you to
make me laugh, too. Is that so selfish?
Yes, you can still be political and funny — whoever says those
things
are incompatible is too stupid to live. The issue is the approach. Before,
it
was enough for you to lean on the “I” in the identity politics. I felt
blessed
that you even existed. When I interviewed you for a story long ago, I was
plotzing the whole time, and I couldn’t find the wherewithal to thank you
for
being a role model, an inspiration to this Mini-Cho wannabe. That “I Will
Survive” feel to your comedy — the same thing that made some magazine call
you
and Cher, Ms. “Do You Believe?”, comeback queens — was exhilarating and
great.
But your shtick is starting to feel indulgent. It’s not enough for us to
just
survive anymore, to bask in the glow of our adoring gazes, to mirror each
other, audience and performer.
We’re the ones going to your show: the converted. And we need to be jolted,provoked, we need to second-guess ourselves. One way to keep us on our toes is to mix up your timing — lately,you’ve gotten into the habit of repeating punchlines, stretching out a jokeforever, hitting us with this staggering, marcato rhythm. It’s
delivery
dogma, man, and I just want something subtler.
Instead of hitting me with a fastball where you tell me what I already knowand expect me to give you snaps in return, come at it sideways, all sly the wayyou do sometimes. I know you have it in you — I read your blogentry
on Queer Eye for the Straight Guy and marveled how you just
articulated everything I
struggled over for hundreds ofwords,
and how you were hella funnier than I could ever be about it.
I know you operate from the premise that the personal is political, butmaybe you could ease it back. Keep those personal stories coming, but don’t layout the analysis for us. We can figure it out ourselves. You’re a generousperson — so be a generous artist, too. Give us the freedom to interpret, to bepuzzled. Otherwise people start drawingthis one-to-one correlation between your life and your politics, in this amazingly reductiveway. So yeah, you got married. And you’re way skinnier these days. Are younot allowed these things, if you are happy and healthy and are still fightingthe good fight?
This has a lot to do with the way you identify with your friends, with thesuffering and joy around you. You say you’re turning into a gay man in drag– but you’re not. You’re the queen bee of the haggarati, it’s true, but youare not a gay man. So explore those tensions, those differences, thatrelationship. You’re such an insider in your communities, but what gives your comedy poweris your outsider status, too — that ability to see incongruity, hypocrisy,absurdity. Why abandon that just because you’re talking about your ownpeople?
So yeah, you will survive. That old joke about cockroaches, Cher, and thenuclear holocaust should be amended to include you. I know you’ll be sittingthere in the dead of nuclear winter, fighting those bitches for the last canof Spam. The question is, will you still be funny? Will you still have the giftof comedy that is your shock-and-awe campaign against intolerance, whateverinjustice may live in the post-apocalyptic world of this fantasy? I can hearCher now, hootling, “Do you believe?” And you know what? I do. Now go outthere and prove me right. Make us laugh again.
Your fan,Noy
Dear Tom,
Now that I’ve talked to Margaret, you’re gonna be a piece of cake. So youhave this Steven Spielberg movie that opened last Friday: The Terminal,
about an Eastern European immigrant who winds up stateless and homeless,
living
in an airport and jonesing for the incomparable Catherine Zeta-Jones. I have
to
say, I’m a little worried. I thought you had pulled out of your
sanctimonious
slump — the tedious, noble crap for which you abandoned your “winsomely comic” movies like You’ve Got Mail and Sleepless inSeattle, where you put up with the tuffet-headed Meg Ryan. I haven’t
seen
Ladykillers yet, but I thought the enormous fake choppers you were
sporting in the previews were a good way to get you out of your toothless
phase. Don’t prove me wrong, please.
You didn’t start off this way, as stiff and golden and tasteful as theOscars you won for being a gay martyr in Philadelphia and a simpleton in
Forrest Gump. I remember you when you were making junk like TheMoney Pit and The ‘Burbs and Turner & Hooch. I remember you in
your
far better work: Big, Splash, Punchline. You were crazy,
that affable likeability just a cover for some serious rage and confusion.
You
had this bray you would let out sometimes — not a laugh or a shout, but
more a
hack of comedic anger. Where’d you put that? Did you bury it under the halo
and
the angel wings?
I know you tried to be all bad in Road to Perdition. You were
so
bloated with badness, with sadness, with angst. But you were this somber
creation. Don’t you know that you are your best bad when you feed off that
manic, antic grace, the frustration you have behind that Everyman face?
I’ve been taking a lot of potshots at liberal icons today. First Margaret,now you. I so appreciate your support of queer causes, of liberal politics, oflittle indie movies, even if they turn out to be as hideous as My Big FatGreek Wedding. But does being a card-carrying liberal or progressive
mean
that you can’t be a little bit evil, a little bit funny anymore? Look at
your
buddy Steven Spielberg, the prototypical Hollywood liberal. Too bad his humanistic feelings toward his characters have run rampant — his deep concern, his sense of moral righteousness, his inability to inflict unhappy endings on characters he loves keeps him
from following the natural arc of his storylines and making the art he so badly wants to create. If someone came by and
guillotined
the last twenty minutes of almost all his movies, we’d have a serious
oeuvre.
If ET kicked the bucket, if the little boy robot of A.I. froze to
death,
if Minority Report‘s Detective John Anderton (Tom Cruise) rotted in
prison forever… well, those would be some damn fine movies, instead of some
damn fine movies nearly wiped out by a landslide of goo at the end.
This Terminal movie — I’ve seen the trailer and am feeling skittish.
Your Viktor Navorski character is supposed to “make new friends… play
matchmaker… help a beautiful stranger… discover America.” I hear the
rumbling, the sound of a goovalanche on its way down to obliterate me.
But I’m still hopeful. I hope you go against the Spielberg grain and yourrecent tendencies. I know Spielberg specializes in little boys lost, but Ihope you dig deep and find some of the adult anger of dislocation, the darknessof fractured identity in your character. He is, after all, loosely based on KarimiNasseri, a man who has lived in France’s Charles de Gaulle airport since
1988. Nasseri sounds like he is seriously troubled, yet well-loved by the
people around him — won’t you give us a bit of this complexity? Yes, your
character is supposed to discover America, maybe make a home of it — but
does
he find the America that offers such promise and menace? Does he
react
with only a simple shrug and a cutely accented epigram to life in the
existential hell of a waiting room?
I hope not. I’d love to see you give this role some unsettling dimension.You don’t have to be a gentle, bumbling, lost saint with feet of clay. Let meknow what you’ll do. I’ll be watching and hoping that you find a way out of yourown purgatory, return to your comedic roots — to that prickly-pear persona thatgives humanity to anger, and warmth to rage. It’s time to come home, Tom.Come home.
All the best,
Noy
Noy Thrupkaew is a Prospect senior correspondent.