Alien Encounters

Cusack's souped-up Camaro and his good ole' American ingenuity (aided and abetted by a French tomboy).In Sixteen Candles (1984), a kooky and lecherous Chinese exchange student named Long Duck Dong provides ''comic relief '' in his supposedly misplaced desire for the masculine female jock over the more appropriately feminine (and annoyingly petulant) heroine Samantha.In a number of these films, we witnessed fears of an '' Asian invasion'' in U.S. financial, territorial, cultural, and technological spaces managed by the lovable and comical, threatening and humiliating Asian images onscreen.Against this cinematic roll call, it is possible to interpret Data as just another racist caricature-the heavily accented model minority who is also a source of comedic relief and whose slapstick inventions seem to succeed in spite of his gadget-minded genius.But it seems to us that the predictable demand for a more ''positive'' image would diminish and subordinate the possibility for a misfit, if necessarily flawed, identification to an oftentimes simplistic conception of the political, as well as ignore the aesthetic and narrative turns of the film's championing of its awkward misfits.Though it does bear questioning the racial breakdown of these stereotypes, that Data was tied, by virtue of his ethnicity, to the more conventional collection of weirdos-the fat kid, the smart-ass, the wimp, the ''trash,'' the intellectual-made sense to us as we also ''recognized'' these outcasts among our own childhood a≈nities.(Indeed, in the universe of the Goonies, the ''perfect'' teens-tall, handsome, wasp-y, popular, and rich-are villains on par with murderous robbers.)The film trades in broad strokes and even broader humor (the kids force fat kid Chunk to do the Tru∆e Shu∆e and glue a miniature David's broken penis on upsidedown), within which Data, with his cartoonish gadgetry and dreams of superspydom, fits right in.In considering our childhood rapport for Data, we are confronted with the complexity of our a√ections, a complexity that comes to bear upon our intellectual preoccupations-stereotyping and the politics of representation, the queering of the look, cultural appropriation, fantasy, the meaning (and value) of identification, race in narrative and visual images, and the mass consumption and industrial production of popular culture among them.For instance, as scholars we could query what exactly qualifies as ''proper'' identification, or ''accurate'' representation, and through which measure we might categorize these.If Data is a stereotype, we nonetheless found that he was very much like us, an ''us'' composed of geeky Asian immigrants foundering in isolated American small towns.The fact that we were girls didn't stop us from seeing ourselves in Data.