10 Recent Movie Scenes Everyone Misunderstood

Though Paul Thomas Anderson's new drama Licorice Pizza has largely been positively received, there has been a noted backlash against a recurring joke in the film which some commentators have dubbed racist.

The gag in question involves two scenes where LA businessman Jerry (John Michael Higgins) speaks in a patronising tone to his two Japanese wives, adopting a mock-Japanese accent while talking in a slow phonetic cadence.

Many were quick to dub these scenes, the film, and writer-director Anderson himself racist, though anything beyond a superficial reading of the scene makes it clear that Anderson is not endorsing racism simply by depicting it.

For starters, the subject of the joke is very clearly the moronic Jerry rather than his suffering wives, his accent indicative of how little the stupid white man of the 1970s thinks of Asian people.

While there are certainly much wider nuances to the debate about these scenes, namely whether Anderson is inadvertently normalising anti-Asian jokes by giving white audiences permission to laugh at them, his film is designed first and foremost as a snapshot of 1970s LA in all of its splendour and ugliness.