13. After Yang, dir. Kogonada
SciFi fiction can simply dispense with the old question of "are robots human?" You can just move on, it's a settled debate, the answer has to be "yes". If you're drawing hard prejudiced lines around humanity you're being... well, really shitty. There's too many real people in this world on the margins of what their society to start creating fictional humanoids to dismiss. After Yang is not interested in the people-ness of its title character. That is a given. Everybody in the film sees him as a person, or are quickly swayed to the other side. The few characters on the other side of that debate are irrelevant to the story, very elegantly passed over and ignored. Like many forms of awfulness, it is best simply not to make time for it.
After Yang is set in a near-future that, compared to many visions of the future, seems rather pleasant, if even enlightened. The central family is mixed both racially and biomechanically, having purchased Yang (Justin H. Min) in order to guide their adopted Chinese daughter, Mika (Malea Emma Tjandrawidjaja) with her cultural heritage. Her parents, Jake (Colin Farrell) and Kyra (Jodie Turner-Smith) are extremely not Asian and do not want to imprint their backgrounds onto their daughter/. They hope she can be a more-rounded person. However, as lovely as that goal is, they still purchased a man. No matter how much he seems enjoy his life and his given task, this is slavery.
We do not get much context to the world of After Yang. You're free to theory-craft the greater implications of the world beyond Yang's family. Richard Brody interpreted this future as a secretly dystopian slice of "techno-fascism" when he wrote about the film for the New Yorker. I'm not sure there really is anything so blatantly sinister hiding behind the softness kindness of this world. Everybody lives in pristine ultra-modernist glass boxes, they get to ride around in self-driving cars that have gardens in place of their controls, and while money is a concern, Jake is still flexible enough to pursue an emotionally fulfilling job of selling exotic tea. The family takes part in a synchronized dance competition during the opening credits, which is a very fun bit of musical energy that the movie needed. But is this a cruel bit of Verhoeven irony? I see less of Starship Troopers or The Running Man as much as dancing is just fun.
However, even if you imagine this future as having no façade, being really as peaceful as it seems, it still treats its technosapiens as commodities with warranties that you can buy second-hand from shady shops downtown. At no point does After Yang shy away from the dark implications of its premise. Yang questions whether he is allowed to fear his death. Even further, he wonders whether a synthetic being such as himself is truly "Chinese". At best he is a true brother and son to his family, at worst, he's a trite collection of trivia and feel-good lessons without context. He feels especially false when he tries a mundane metaphor of two trees grafted together for Mika as a symbol of her mixed family. When the given example does not quite line up properly, he repeats it again, clearly reading from some pre-programmed speech. Eventually we learn that Yang does have an inner life, he has friends outside the family, he has a past he's kept secret, and seemed happy with his place. But the family only really gains this context after Yang already is effectively dead, and only after going through his harddrive to find his memories. Jake and Kyra see him first as a broken babysitter/tech product, it takes time before they really grasp all that's gone.
These are all uncomfortable SciFi questions much more interesting than just humanity. The meaning of race, questions of free will. But also, without the genre trappings, After Yang would still have a lot to recommend about it. This is one of the best films about grief of 2022.
Grief is painful process, but also, it can be celebratory. You are losing somebody, but you're appreciating them in ways you never could when they were still here. Jake spends most of the movie unwilling to admit to his family how bad Yang's condition is. Upon losing a loved one, we must go through our vast memory banks of that person, to ponder who they were, what we're losing, what it all meant, if it meant anything. In spite of the grotesque nature of his existence, Yang was loved.
After Yang has this fascinating cinematic trick where all of Yang's memories echo. We get two different takes for the lines in the scenes, shown one after another. This is an interesting technique, I've never seen a movie do something like this before. The echo makes the memory feel bigger, like not just a scene but a connection. I believe we are seeing both Yang's memory of the scene, and also the memory of Jake or Kyra at the same time. It plays out the same, always with there's subtle differences, as no two people can see the world the same way. Every moment in time is shaded by our minds in our own unique way. In After Yang, one of those unique ways does go away forever, but it is never forgotten.
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