Hollywood Goes Oriental: CaucAsian Performance in American Film

Conclusion: The Fading Oriental Guise?

Conclusion The Fading Oriental Guise? The lyrics of the song “You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught” from the movie musical South Pacific (1958) comments on the powerful messages of racial discrimination sent to us as children, often by family members and others close to us. They particularly bring to mind a memory of watching the film for the first time on a local television station in Chicago when I was about eight years old. I instinctively felt even at that young age that the stories of thwarted love and racial prejudice, though set in the exotic South Pacific islands, had little to do with the Tonkinese but rather really enacted the social conflicts of the civil rights movement between African Americans and whites in the United States. What made the most significant impression upon me in this regard was the portrayal of Bloody Mary by actress Juanita Hall. Her severely styled hair (a tight bun set atop her head) seems designed to cast her facial features in bold relief. Possessing brown skin and a coarse manner and treated with a distinct lack of respect by the common sailors (a far cry from her role as Madame Liang in Flower Drum Song), Bloody Mary in an early scene is described as being “nobody,” merely Tonkinese, by one of the men. And when she fancies the handsome Lieutenant Cable for her daughter, she offers him a black shrunken head (strategically conclusion 232 held beside her own), from which he recoils. So when my mother told me that Juanita Hall was actually a “Negro”—as was my family (it was the 1960s, after all)—I received my first indication (and confirmation) that depictions of racial difference in the movies of Hollywood might not always be what they appear. Perhaps there is a truth and veracity in the racialized impersonations in Hollywood films, but as stated earlier the film industry has never been interested in depicting truths per se but rather is interested in the creation of fantasies to transport an audience from a relatively mundane existence. In this sense, the veracity of these Hollywood films had less to do with the specific culture being depicted than it does with revealing the desires, fantasies, and ambivalence of the mass audience whom those movies sought to entertain. This has been a study essentially presented as a narrative with a beginning, middle, and end. Perhaps a different author might have interpreted the films and their contexts another way, resulting in a completely different conclusion. The main purpose of this inquiry was to trace how these culturally constructed characterizations change and modify over time, creating distinctly different meanings depending on the historical framework. From its preeminence as a Hollywood performance practice in the 1930s to its gradual dissolution as a frequent and uniformly accepted form of cinematic enactment in the 1960s, Hollywood’s Oriental reflects most often the ambivalence intrinsic in the majority of widely disseminated (mis)representations of Asia and Asians as well as Asian Americans. It has been argued that Fu Manchu and General Yen overlap in their depictions. Clearly, the image of Fu Manchu haunts the dream of Megan in her attempt to process her sexual attraction to the general in The Bitter Tea of General Yen. In a broader sense, the dynamic of an Oriental impersonation being injected and reinterpreted within ostensibly divergent film texts occurs with regularity in the films in this study. Surely, the demonization of the Oriental detective character illustrated by the two animated films Japoteurs and Bugs Bunny Nips the Nips reflects this tendency to recirculate familiar images and invert them according to the historical moment. Jessica Hagedorn, in her introduction to the anthology Charlie Chan Is Dead, describes a litany of Hollywood movie images, with all their contradictory qualities, that she grew up watching in the Philippines: conclusion 233 The slit-eyed, bucktooth Jap thrusting his bayonet, thirsty for blood. The inscrutable, wily Chinese detective with his taped eyelids and wispy moustache. . . . Always giggling. Bowing and scraping. Eager to please, but untrustworthy. The sexless, hairless Asian male. The servile, oversexed Asian female. The Geisha. The sultry, sarong-clad, South Seas maiden. The serpentine, cunning Dragon Lady. Mysterious and evil, eager to please. Effeminate. Untrustworthy. Yellow Peril. Fortune Cookie Psychic. Savage. Dogeater. Invisible. Mute. Faceless peasants breeding too many children. Gooks. Passive Japanese Americans obediently marching off to “relocation...