Nowadays, I go into movies as ignorant as possible and I end up armed with some knowledge of the director or a two sentence blurb. I walked into Licorice Pizza with that mindset. I enjoyed ‘Phantom Thread’ by Paul Thomas Anderson and my friends seemed to have enjoyed ‘Licorice Pizza’. I was aware somewhat of the discourse surrounding its portray of Asian characters, but I didn’t know the specifics.

Licorice Pizza has two Japanese characters played by Yumi Mizui and Megumi Anjo. These two characters are in purposely-similar roles - they are interchangeable mail-order brides who know little English and at the fickle whims of their white husband, Jerry Frick. Some Asian Americans criticized how the film handled these two characters, who faced discrimination and stereotypes with seemingly no pushback from the narrative. I, however, think that this is a shallow read and I want to talk about the visible and invisible presence of “Asia” in Licorice Pizza.

Licorice Pizza is set in 1973 Southern California and at face value, it is a film about an unlikely romance and the characters seem propelled by American optimism and prosperity. It’s completely unlike the America we live in now. I do not think that this was a positive portrayal of America however. Beyond the heavy curtain of celebrity and adventure, Licorice Pizza’s America is reliant on the labor and blood of Asia as an imperial power and a parasite.

Licorice Pizza introduces Jerry Frick and his wife Mioko as clients of Gary Valentine’s mother who is doing some sort of public relations work for their Japanese restaurant, The Mikado. The Mikado (unknownbest to me) was also the first Japanese restaurant in the San Fernando Valley [citation] and it was founded in 1963. In the movie, Jerry Frick makes no attempt to understand or respect his wife, and the next time we see the two, Frick has replaced Mioka with another Japanese woman Kimiko. His cruel treatment of these women adds another layer to the history of ‘The Mikado’. In the well-off white neighborhoods of Southern California, white Americans attempted to restrict where Japanese Americans could live and work through law and violence. Laws like the Alien Land Act of 1913 limited where Japanese Americans could farm and neighborhood covenants formed to restrict where they could live. The historical photo below was taken in 1920 Hollywood, not too far from the San Fernando Valley. After internment, the 3200 Japanese who called this area home found their farms taken away and their property destroyed [citation]. Licorice Pizza made a purposeful choice to include these details to show the rot within the setting. Jerry Frick’s cruelty to the Japanese women along with his ownership and management of ‘The Mikado’ shows how this “shiny” entrepreneurial dream is built on an ever-growing pile of countless cruelties and injustices towards the Asian Americans.

I now want to look at the times where Licorice Pizza’s self-contained American bubble cracks. Jack Holden is a fictional character based on the actor William Holden who was in ‘The Bridge on the River Kwai’, a movie that achieved success and critical acclaim upon its release in 1957. ‘The Bridge on the River Kwai’ was an adaptation of a book that depicted a fictionalized experience of an American soldier in a Japanese POW camp in Thailand. The book and movie were both not historically accurate and I may revise my opinion later but the movie fulfilled many Americans’ Orientalism-fueled imaginations. In Licorice Pizza, the fictional Jack Holden views his version of this movie as his crowning achievement, which seems to have been set during the Korean War. I am assuming that this version is also historically inaccurate and is full of Orientalist fever dreams. I found this choice in detail also telling of Anderson’s intent. Jack Holden, his friends, and his fans are emotionally attached to this film’s glory and time is spent on Holden failing to recreate a popular scene from that movie. Licorice Pizza is telling us, the audience, that this nostalgia is just hot, stinky air as Holden abandons Alana on the ground and his recreation falls flat.

Even during the movie, the Orient is always moving and always ready to prick America’s bubbled optimism. The 1973 gas crisis that destroyed Gary and Alana’s waterbed business was because OPEC, a consortium of 'Oriental' countries, declared an oil embargo. Licorice Pizza describes an America that is still here today - a bloated parasite of labor, blood, and violence that is all too easily popped with the real movement of the outside world. Critics pay too much attention to representation instead of the finer details and messaging that Licorice Pizza is trying to emphasize. Representation is not the first step for ending to the discrimination Asian Americans face; clear and honest realizations of what America is and was is.