It’s tempting to read Adrian Tomine’s Shortcomings as a provocation—which is certainly among its registers. Revolving around a Berkeley movie theater manager named Ben Tanaka, the 2007 graphic novel (originally serialized in three issues of the artist’s comic book series Optic Nerve) interrogates aspects of racial identity in Asian American communities. As the first section begins, Ben is with his girlfriend, Miko, at a film festival she has helped organize. Driving home, they begin to fight, or perhaps to rekindle an ongoing dispute.
“I mean,” Ben complains, “why does everything have to be some big ‘statement’ about race? Don’t any of these people just want to make a movie that’s good?”
Miko’s terse reply reveals the tensions in the relationship. “God,” she says, “you drive me crazy sometimes. It’s almost like you’re ashamed to be Asian.”
This article appears in Issue 32 of Alta Journal.
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Such matters, it should go without saying, are perhaps more essential to society at large now than when Shortcomings was released nearly 20 years ago.
At the same time, there’s more than race to Tomine’s narrative, which features a vivid cast of supporting characters, each with issues and concerns. There’s Miko, trapped in an inert relationship with Ben; she blossoms when she takes a four-month break from Berkeley for a New York internship with the Asian-American Independent Film Institute. There’s Alice Kim, Ben’s best friend from college: gay, Korean American, and still hiding her sexuality from her family. (In one of Shortcomings’ most vivid scenes, she relies on Ben as a beard of sorts at a family gathering.) And then, there’s Ben himself—cranky, misanthropic, obsessed with white women. In the hands of another artist, this might be the stuff of sitcom or stereotype, but the narrative Tomine develops is too nuanced for that. Instead, he uses race as a filter through which to examine a host of dissatisfactions, not least the sense that Ben, close to a decade out of school, has become stuck in a life that’s going nowhere, with no clear idea of a next move.
Here, we see the genius of Shortcomings, the way it embraces not just a flawed protagonist but one who can be actively unsympathetic: whiny, self-indulgent, entitled…and yet, not entirely unaware.
It’s a tricky move, albeit one Tomine has used throughout his career, from autobiographical works such as The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Cartoonist to more overtly fictional efforts like Killing and Dying. In all these books, the line between compassion and frustration is both thin and often breached. The paradox is that as Tomine’s characters slip and slide and make a mess, we begin to recognize ourselves in their machinations. We begin to recognize their humanity. Likability, after all, is nothing if not overrated. Or, more accurately, it is a lie.
It’s for this reason, too, that Shortcomings resonates. Ben, it turns out, is his own worst enemy, scared to commit, scared to be alone, scared to grow up, scared to love. “If you want her to [miss you],” Alice tells him about Miko, “then you’re gonna have to be strategic. You can’t act all pathetic and lonely and desperate.”
“But that’s my specialty!” Ben answers.
It’s a funny moment but also a telling one, in which we become privy to how the character sees himself. In such a state, he can’t change—how could he?—which also means he cannot get unstuck.•
Join us on Thursday, August 21, at 5 p.m. Pacific time, when Adrian Tomine will sit down with CBC host John Freeman and a special guest to discuss Shortcomings. Register for the Zoom conversation here.
