Yellow Future: Oriental Style in Hollywood Cinema

Abstract

[...]Yellow Future examines the ways in which East Asia has been increasingly linked to futuristic and technologized subjects in a range of Hollywood movies produced since the 1980s. According to Park, the popularity of the "oriental style" and "techno-orientalism" in Hollywood cinema manifests itself through the social perception - or, more accurately, fear - in America that East Asia has an ability to appropriate and improve on Western technology and to beat the West at its own game (8). According to Park, this is not only because the cinematic representation of Asian racial identification is forged against and alongside whiteness and the depiction of the racial and cultural identity of other nonwhites, but also because in a number of contemporary science fiction action films the bodies of the key characters are often racially ambiguous.

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Jane Chi Hyun Park's Yellow Future: Oriental Style in Hollywood Cinema distinguishes itself from many other scholarly writings on Hollywood's imaginary representation of East Asia and Asian people in at least two respects. First, through the analysis of background settings, rather than the foreground mise en scène and performances explicitly displaying oriental themes, this book explores the ways in which Asian bodies, objects, and images sometimes have become hypervisible and other times are rendered invisible in America's popular culture. Second, Yellow Future examines the ways in which East Asia has been increasingly linked to futuristic and technologized subjects in a range of Hollywood movies produced since the 1980s. Diverting readers' attention from Hollywood's imaginary narrative of East Asia's long history, past and cultural myth, Park therefore identifies a new trend in Hollywood cinema in an era characterized by cybernetic communication, globalization and multiculturalism.

Clearly, Yellow Future has been greatly influenced by Edward Said's Orientalism. Whilst Park recognizes that the post-1980s cinematic representation of Asian tropes and themes in Hollywood movies has deviated from earlier more explicit stereotypical depictions of East Asia and Asian people, she, as a Korean American scholar, also argues that the "oriental style" and "techno-orientalism" are "part of the ongoing historical process of the racialization of East Asians in the United States" (ix). According to Park, the popularity of the "oriental style" and "techno-orientalism" in Hollywood cinema manifests itself through the social perception - or, more accurately, fear - in America that East Asia has an ability to appropriate and improve on Western technology and to beat the West at its own game (8). As Park explains, the representation of future and of technologized Asian subjects often combines two prototypes of Asian imagery - model minority and gook - both of which signify the stereotypical narrative of the yellow peril and racial others. Similar to the other two racially stereotypical prototypes of model minority and gook, the cinematic construction of techno-oriental others in Hollywood cinema, as Park argues, is also frequently associated with the depiction of Asian characters' violence, sexual perversity and repressed homoeroticism, in addition to an emphasis upon sadistic and masochistic tendencies. Such a stereotypical narrative can be traced back to the perception of mechanistic coolie labour as an economic menace in America's popular culture, despite the fact that this character type often also appears as both well educated and cosmopolitan.

Through her contextualized analysis of films, including Blade Runner (1982), The Karate Kid (1984), Gung Ho (1986), Rush Hour (1998), Rush Hour 2 (2001), The Matrix (1999), Kill Bill, Vol. 1 (2003) and Kill Bill, Vol. 2 (2004) and Batman Begins (2005), Park notices that the cinematic representation of East Asian and Asian people in contemporary Hollywood cinema has become more "fluid, disembodied, and metaphoric" (165). According to Park, this is not only because the cinematic representation of Asian racial identification is forged against and alongside whiteness and the depiction of the racial and cultural identity of other nonwhites, but also because in a number of contemporary science fiction action films the bodies of the key characters are often racially ambiguous. As Park agues, the insertion of non-East Asian bodies in distinctly East Asian styles and settings combines with the employment of mixed-race actors to carry on the Hollywood tradition of marginalizing East Asian talents by limiting Asian actors to the background in secondary roles while Asian signifiers are appropriated and performed by white, non-Asian and mixed-race actors.

Following a historical trajectory, Yellow Future delineates a clear genealogy mapping the "oriental style" and "techno-orientalism." However, although Yellow Future recognizes the fluid and diversified representation of East Asia and Asian people on Hollywood's big screen, Park's interpretation of the gender identification of Asian people, male characters in particular, still suffers from the fixation upon race-gender binaries as typically found within a Western paradigm. For instance, Park argues that Neo (Keanu Reeves) in The Matrix is effeminized because he is not compelled to "perform the hard, Anglo-American masculinity" (179). Given Reeves's multiracial (including Asian) ancestry and his character's association with other nonwhite characters in the film, he has been interpreted as evidence that Hollywood reproduces the asexual stereotypical oriental others. In other words, Park fails to address the fluidity and multiplicity of gender or to break from the rigid connection between racial division and the binary gender structure. This notwithstanding, Yellow Future is a well-organized and compellingly argued book which provides a new theoretical framework in which to evaluate the cinematic representation of East Asia and Asian people in Hollywood movies during the era of globalization.