Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 #124 Vanishing Son (1994)

Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.

Or you can be like three kind patrons and use this column to commission a series of pieces about a filmmaker or actor. I’m deep into a project on the films of the late, great, fervently mourned David Bowie and I have now watched and written about every movie Sam Peckinpah made over the course of his tumultuous, wildly melodramatic psychodrama of a life and career. 

This generous patron is now paying for me to watch and write about the cult animated show Batman Beyond and I also recently began an even more screamingly essential deep dive into the complete filmography of troubled video vixen Tawny Kitaen. 

With this entry I am officially beginning an even weirder, even more obscure, even more niche project for the patron behind my exploration of Kitaen’s contributions to cinema: an extensive look into the oeuvre of troubled former Noxzema pitch-woman Rebecca Gayheart. 

Now at this point you might be asking yourself if I’m making a foolish mistake by writing about obscure, long forgotten ephemera seemingly no one cares about other than the kind souls commissioning these projects instead of more commercial articles about popular new movies that might bring in page-views, new readers and income.

Ha! I have all but given up on popularity at this point. The page-views are gone and they are NEVER coming back. I’m in survival mode these days and if I have to write about the entire filmography of every starlet of the past four decades in order to stay in business, I am eminently willing to do so. 

Besides, I LOVE this shit. I live for this shit. I am uniquely qualified to write about this shit. I’ve been neck-deep in this shit my entire career. And it has been my perverse pleasure to discover just how bizarrely timely seemingly dated horse shit can be. 

That is certainly true of the groundbreaking 1994 television movie Vanishing Son. It’s almost uncannily prescient in its thematic concerns. 

Vanishing Son is, on a fundamental level, about the authoritarian brutality of the People’s Republic of China and its violent suppression of dissidents. But it’s also about the plight of illegal and undocumented immigrants and the perpetually shifting nature of the American Dream.

Vanishing Son’s contemporary resonance does not end there. It’s also concerned with cultural representations of Asians in pop culture, the pervasiveness of racism and the way international crime can find a foothold in the United States among immigrants cruelly denied more legitimate ways to make a good living. 

If Vanishing Son’s themes are almost perversely relevant to our current cultural obsessions it’s also an unabashed throwback to 1930s Warner Brothers melodramas and Clifford Odets morality plays where earnest young immigrants are torn between the seedy, seductive allure of crime and the straight and narrow path. 

Vanishing Son is essentially a Chinese-American, martial arts version of the old Clifford Odets warhorse Golden Boy; think of it as Golden Boy With the Fists and Feet of Fury. 

In some ways Vanishing Son is incredibly forward thinking and progressive. As its Wikipedia entry depressingly but correctly states, “The series was ground-breaking for the casting of an Asian male in an attractive leading-man role.” 

Vanishing Son does indeed have an Asian male in the attractive leading man role of Jian-Wa (the strikingly handsome Russell Wong), a violin prodigy equally skilled in using his hands to make beautiful music and beat the holy living shit out of anyone who makes the mistake of fucking with him and his family. 

Despite spending his entire life in China, Jian-Wa speaks perfect English with an impeccable American accent because his American violin teacher has been furtively giving him language and assimilation lessons along with musical instruction since he was eight years old. 

Our hero’s violin teacher is played by future Fast and the Furious director Rob Cohen, who also wrote the script and not too long ago was accused of unspeakable sex crimes by his daughter. The director, John Nicolella, is also white so even though Vanishing Son is a fundamentally Chinese story it’s filtered through the prism of white dudes with problematic attitudes towards Asian culture. 

It’s wonderful to see an Asian actor in a positive, non-stereotypical role but it’d be a lot nicer if literally every other Asian-American character we encounter in the United States wasn’t a violent, martial arts-adept mobster heavily involved in heroin, prostitution and bloody wars between Chinese and Vietnamese gangs. 

That includes our hero’s ne’er do well brother Wago Chang (Chi Muoi Lo), who illegally immigrates to the United States with his more responsible sibling after being involved in protests against the repressive regime in China hat devolve into first a massive martial arts brawl pitting the good guys against government goons and then a Peckinpah-like massacre with the sinister forces of the Chinese government firing machine guns into the crowd in slow motion. 

The brothers’ father convinces them to go to the United States to make a new life for themselves before they’re killed by the secret police for their high-profile role in a Tiananmen Square-style protest. 

#Hubbahubba!

In the United States the brothers come across a good-cop/bad cop duo whose roles are very clearly defined. The bad cop treats the brothers as sub-human because they’re Asian and throws in some jarring homophobic slurs for extra awfulness. The good cop sees their faces in a magazine article about political unrest and immediately grants them political asylum, since they’re fleeing oppression instead of doing crime and killing people.

Upon being released from custody, Wago Chang then immediately starts doing crime and killing people.

Cohen apparently got paid per racial slur. There’s a big difference between acknowledging the existence and insidiousness of racism and delighting in it in an unseemly fashion and Vanishing Son goes overboard with hate speech. 

When the brothers end up in a jail cell, for example, they’re menaced by a belligerent bully who calls them every conceivable slur for Asians, many several times in quick succession. This cartoonish monster of bigotry eats his words when the brothers turn out to be lightning-fast masters of martial arts. 

Jian-Wa’s clean-cut good looks and prodigious musical talent attract the attention of Clair Rutledge (Rebecca Gayheart), gorgeous cellist with impossibly good skin and elegantly long limbs who falls hard for the enigmatic hunk. 

This enrages Clair’s Chad of a boyfriend, who taunts, “I can see in those slanty eyes what you’re up to. You’re nothing but a slope. You’re lucky we let you into this country” before confusingly threatening, “I’m going to turn you into pork fried rice.” 

Clair understandably prefers the soulful, deeply talented musician with the fists of fury and bedroom eyes to her goober of a boyfriend so she aggressively pursues the violinist, leading to sex scenes that push the boundaries of what’s acceptable on network television. The world that Jian-Wa and Clair share is full of classical music and beauty and mind-blowing sex. 

Wago Chang’s life, in sharp contrast, revolves around hurting people for his gangland boss Fu Qua Johnson (Marcus Chong), a bloodthirsty hooligan who is black AND Vietnamese for extra racism. 

Vanishing Son goes so heavy on racist banter that it becomes weirdly meta, like when Fu Qua insists that he hates that “rap crap”, leading one of his goons to observe, “He’s part black but he no dance too good either!”

Jian-Wa ends the film vowing to walk the earth like Kwai Chang Caine in Kung Fu or Jules in Pulp Fiction while his brother sinks deeper and deeper into the world of organized crime. 

In the television movie that followed Vanishing Son Jian-Wa ends up mixing it up with Vietnamese fishermen and a Ku Klux Klan member played by Dean Stockwell. That sounds deliciously lurid and insane but Gayheart is not in that masterpiece of storytelling so the next entry in this column will be Vanishing Son III, which finds out hero reuniting with Clair. 

I didn’t have low expectations for Vanishing Son so much as I had NO expectations. So I was pleasantly surprised by the movie’s wild excess of personality and craziness. 

Vanishing Son is an eminently watchable combination of good intentions and seedy, cynical exploitation. It’s vulgar and crazy and often offensive but I was never bored.

After four TV movies, Vanishing Son became a television series following Jian-Wa as he traveled the country having adventures and helping people, assisted by his dead brother’s spirit. 

That sounds fucking insane but even I have my limits so I will watch another Vanishing Son movie for this column and then, like Jian-Wa himself, I will move onto my next adventure. 

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