The new racial body horror movie, Slanted, is asking hard questions about how we as a culture deal with social inequality. Written and directed by Amy Wang, the film follows a Chinese-American teenager raised by first-generation immigrant parents who have set up their lives in a primarily white neighborhood in the United States. She undergoes an experimental cosmetic procedure to become white in order to fit in at her high school. Shirley Chen plays Joan Huang before the transformation. Mckenna Grace plays her afterward as the newly white “Jo Hunt.”
At the center of the film is a clinic called Ethnos, which offers a permanent “ethnic modification” surgery that allows people of color to become white. Their tagline is “If you can’t beat them, be them.” Joan, desperate to win popularity and prom queen status, undergoes the procedure and instantly experiences a shift in how the world treats her. The transformation, however, comes with disturbing physical side effects and devastating emotional consequences.
Slanted is a racial body horror film that offers questions worth considering in the Ozempic Era
Bleecker Street/Tideline Entertainment
At its core, Slanted explores the psychological and emotional cost of living inside a hierarchy of bodies. Joan is trying to become white because the world around her makes it clear in overt and covert ways that whiteness is the path to belonging, happiness, love, and a respite from bullying, shame and social isolation.
Slanted is a body horror film about racial assimilation, but it’s raises important questions about how we as a culture expect marginalized people in general to deal with a social problem like racism or, say, weight stigma. The film asks a devastating question that I believe is at the heart of the Ozempic Era: what happens when you’re a victim of social injustice and you’re being told that the best way to deal with that problem is to change yourself?
Over the past two years, pharmaceutical campaigns for GLP-1s have frequently made the argument that medical weight-loss is linked to stigma reduction, arguably positing that the end of the societal problem of weight stigma is possible through the individual pursuit of weight-loss. Considering the acute nature of weight stigma, this type of messaging can be as seductive and streamlined as that of the fictional Ethnos. If your body makes life harder socially, professionally, or romantically, just change it. Suddenly, shrinking your body isn’t simply a personal choice, it’s a decision rendered as laudable by the wider culture. No questions asked.
Weight-loss is, of course, not the same as racial transformation, but the cultural logic portrayed in Slanted is probably familiar to people who live in a larger body. In both cases, the body is treated as a personal problem to solve. In both cases, it’s the individual on trial, not the discrimination they face. In both cases, there’s a difference between someone who has always had their privileged status and someone who is trying to fight their way into it through a medical procedure. The film also reveals something underexamined about assimilation projects in general. Even if they are successful, they rarely end with the uncomplicated story of acceptance that was promised. Instead, they create a new set of anxieties, expectations, and rules about how to maintain the “upgraded” self.
Joan prepares to undergo racial transformation surgery at Ethnos in the new Bleeker Street production, Slanted
Bleecker Street
Slanted exposes the experience of assimilation from the perspective of the person trying to assimilate. Ethnos promises Joan that a simple procedure will make her life instantly better, but the film shows the unsettling reality that unfolds when people take marketing at face value. In short, Jo doesn’t simply become white and live happily ever after. Jo painfully learns that there is a brutal cost that comes with trying to fit in. The logic of assimilation allows for physical and emotional suffering, and sees it as secondary to the reward of acceptance. The world that once shut Joan out has not actually changed. Its brutality has simply taken new form.
Before the transformation, Joan endured the pain of trying to reshape herself through things like pinching her nose with clothespins in an attempt to make it look narrower. She lived with the humiliation of feeling undesirable, convinced she would never get the guy and or be the girl people chose. After the transformation, Jo seemingly gets everything Joan wanted. The hot guy wants to date her. Coveted social doors open. She moves through the world with a new kind of ease. A new kind of pain, however, replaces the old one. Except this pain isn’t one she either anticipated or knows how to handle.
Joan becomes “Jo”
Bleecker Street
Jo now lives with the disorienting grief of no longer looking like her parents and grandparents. She becomes increasingly alienated from the people who love and know her. She carries the secret of who she used to be, a truth she cannot share without jeopardizing the very belonging she fought so hard to obtain. Dishonesty is baked into the romantic relationship she dreamed because she can never tell him her secret. The film suggests that assimilation does not eliminate suffering, it simply rearranges it.
To be fair, Joan is responding rationally to the incentives of the world around her. In a culture that rewards whiteness, surgically becoming a white person may look like a smart move. Likewise, in a culture that rewards thinness, trying to become a thin person may look like a smart move, too. The true horror is that assimilation often doesn’t work out the way we hoped it would, as evidenced by growing medical concerns about GLP-1s links with scurvy, muscle loss, and anhedonia.
Joan’s naive-yet-relatable miscalculation is that she can beat the game when in reality everyone is a victim for as long as systems like racism and weight bias exist.