Rush Hour Film Analysis

Stereotypes were present in the film in regards to Asians. Jackie Chan, playing Lee, was the first to stand out in the film. In the film, Lee is a martial arts maniac. This is a very common stereotype talked about in the film, The Slanted Screen. The Slanted Screen discussed other stereotypes such as uncultured Asians that speak with foreign accents, restaurant workers and gangsters. These stereotypes were prevalent in the film, Rush Hour. Sang and the Juntao’s men are the perfect example of Asian gangsters in the film. Some of the subservient positions, especially for Asian women in the film featured restaurant workers, Lydia Look as the waitress at Foo Chow and Ai Wan as the hostess at Foo Chow, and the flight attendants played by Christine Ng, Ada Tai and Arlene Tai.

There were several times in the film in which humor was used to mask and desensitize viewers of racial comments. The first scene when Lee first arrives in America, Carter tells him when we steps off the plane, “Please tell me you speak English.” After no response from Lee, Carter gets very loud and speaks to Lee as if he is ignorant. In the same scene Carter refers to Lee as, “Mr. Rice-a-Roni.” Towards the end of the scene, Carter calls Captain Diel and tells him that the assignment

According to the article, Online News and Race: A Content Analysis of the Portrayal of Racial Stereotypes in a New Media Environment, “In news media, it can be thought that a racial group is in the ridicule stage of representation if they occupy a smaller than expected proportion of the overall racial landscape and have negative portrayals associated with them.” This is the second stage of Clark’s four stages. From the discussion regarding Asians and the third of Clark’s stages, in this film, Blacks fall somewhere between the two stages. Although they are more fairly represented in numbers, there is a negative association tied to