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“Dark Matter,” the filmmaking debut of Chinese-born opera and theater director Chen Shi-zheng, gets full credit for slamming head-on into any number of hot-button topics in American society. First and most interestingly, Chen’s film captures, from the inside, the strange and insular world of the Chinese graduate students who increasingly dominate the math and science fields at major American universities. It also engages the subtle forms of racism and stereotyping that continue to inform non-Asians’ perceptions of this “model minority.” I guess this is a spoiler, but there’s no way around it: Finally, “Dark Matter” tries to convey how an underslept, overworked, culturally dislocated student could erupt in a psychotic outburst of violence, as has happened in a couple of notorious cases.


Chen’s film (written by Billy Shebar, from a story he co-wrote with Chen) is based on a shooting incident at the University of Iowa in 1991, and was completed well before the Virginia Tech shootings in April 2007. Neither the movie nor the Iowa case bears any resemblance to the Virginia Tech case, in which the shooter was an undergraduate English major and a longtime legal resident of the United States, not a foreign student. (If you don’t want to know more about the plot of “Dark Matter,” don’t read news accounts of the Iowa case, as the fictional events follow the real ones closely.)


“Dark Matter” is rich with interesting themes and ideas, from the slippery, sycophantic nature of academic success to the Orientalist attitudes of rich Americans and the outer edges of astrophysical theory.
 
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Email This Post: “Model minority” goes nutzoid

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