Hollywood Goes Oriental: CaucAsian Performance in American Film

3. Creatures of Evil: The Wartime Enemy

three Creatures of Evil The Wartime Enemy Lights come up. Vincent portraying a “Jap soldier.” Lighting creates the mood of an old 40s black and white movie. Thick Coke-bottle glasses, holding a gun. Acts in an exaggerated, stereotypic—almost cartoonish manner. Sergeant Moto pretends to be falling asleep while guarding American prisoners . The snake-like lids of his slanty eyes drooping into a feigned slumber. Suddenly Moto’s eyes spitting hate and bile, flash open, catching the American prisoners in the midst of their escape plans. —Philip Kan Gotanda, Yankee Dawg You Die The preceding excerpt, which opens the play Yankee Dawg You Die by Philip Kan Gotanda, addresses the legacy of wartime films and their impact on the lives of contemporary Asian Americans such as the leading character actor Vincent Chang, who portrays the “Jap soldier.” This description captures some of the basic features of Hollywood’s wartime Japanese enemy. The “thick Coke-bottle glasses,” “cartoonish manner,” reference to “Moto,” and “slanty eyes” all speak to the conventions exhibited in the films of this period. chapter 3 124 According to Edward Said, a strategic formation is a process by which groups and types of text collectively acquire referential power among themselves as well as create and influence a larger social reality . In chapter 2, we discussed the complexity and adaptability of the Oriental detective archetype, how each individual series came to be associated with one another and eventually to emerge as a remarkably unified metatext. Not only did these characters “acquire referential power among themselves,” but they also took on new life during the war that clearly engaged “a larger social reality.”1 Chapter 1 examined Hollywood’s depiction of the Orient as the creation of and refuge for Western imaginary reveries, while chapter 2 explored the deep tensions and ambivalences negotiated within the depiction of the popular Oriental detective hero. Although these earlier Caucasian impersonations have their origins within Hollywood’s studio system of mass production, Caucasian portrayals of Orientals during the war took on very specific meanings unique to the period that directly drew from and expanded on established cinematic archetypes . This chapter focuses on the remarkable adaptability of this performance practice, which can mean entirely different things at different historical moments. Although the racial impersonation of Asians by Caucasian actors remained the predominant performance practice during World War II, after the attack on Pearl Harbor the construction of a Japanese enemy in Hollywood films was perceived by government authorities as critical to the war effort. The structure of this Oriental adversary was neither entirely simplistic nor fixed, as the figure of the Japanese enemy shifted and adjusted over the course of the war years (1941–45). This chapter will address how wartime terms and concepts confirm, contradict, or otherwise modify Hollywood’s Oriental archetypes through the performances of Caucasian actors. The films analyzed in this chapter were chosen as emblematic of distinct strategies utilized in the demonization of the wartime Japanese enemy. They provide potent illustrations of how popular Oriental detectives of the 1930s (specifically, Mr. Moto and Charlie Chan) transformed from good guys to bad guys during the war. The selected cartoons from this period reflect this transformation in full effect. Indeed, Creatures of Evil 125 animation and caricature allow for the combination of wildly heterogeneous elements into a homogeneous enemy. The animated depictions exist as something drawn rather than existing as a performance that utilizes the human body. Still, the animated and live-action stereotypical qualities are pulled from the same pool of elements. Sheng-Mei Ma’s book The Deathly Embrace: Orientalism and Asian American Identity addresses this very issue, targeting the racist representation of Siamese cats in two of Disney’s classic animated feature films from the postwar period: Although demeaning racial vignettes are scattered throughout Disney productions, two feature length animations stand out in the depictions of Siamese cats in what are purportedly Asian images. A bucktoothed Siamese cat in The Aristocats (1967) performs a “chopsticks” song in “Ev’rybody Wants to Be A Cat.” . . . By the same token, Lady and the Tramp (1955) features two wily, bucktoothed, cross- and slit-eyed Siamese cats disrupting the life of the canine protagonist, the “lady” of the title. . . . The most biting burlesque comes through the lyrics, sung in the affected, high-pitched pidgin. The two cats repeat, in awkward, ungrammatical sentences, that they are...