On the surface, the story of Watching TV with the Red Chinese is a simple one, documenting several months in the lives of literature teacher Dexter Mitchell (Ryan O’Nan), his on-again-off-again girlfriend Suzanne (Community’s Gillian Jacobs), and the three Chinese students (Leonardo Nam, James Chen, and Keong Sim) recently arrived to America who move into his building. But the film, based on the novel by Luke Whisnant, is a lot meatier at the core, serving as an examination of how we perceive ourselves and others through the veil of culture, both geographical and pop (with a side order of destiny versus free will).
The film takes place in New York in the fall of 1980, a pivotal time for America, which was transitioning from the “Me” decade into the “Me” decade with money, and a pivotal time for the city, which had yet to clean up its act after the grimy decadence and burgeoning class divide of the ’70s. In other words, tensions were running kind of high, culminating in nothing less than the symbolic death of the peace movement through the actual assassination of John Lennon.
It’s an effective backdrop—with such uncertainty in the air, the characters are pressured into a kind of myopia. Dexter takes on a brotherly role with the Chinese, teaching them English and football, and introducing them to his friends, but his feelings for all of them turn on a dime when one of them, Chen, snatches Suzanne out from under him. Suzanne herself is so fickle that she rebounds between men like a ping-pong ball. (Yes, in a pre-AIDS society, love was a lot freer, but all the historical context in the world can’t endear the audience to someone who makes little effort to rise above it.) Chen comes to fear all black strangers when he’s mugged and beaten by two of them. Dexter’s filmmaker friend Billy, making an artsy documentary about the three Chinese, and Suzanne’s creepy stalker ex are both similarly single-minded.
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