From Fu Manchu to Kung Fu Panda: Images of China in American Film

Afterword: The Darkening Mirror

214 The triumph of the American cultural narrative seen in films like Mulan and Kung Fu Panda is, of course, a global or quasi-global phenomenon . China’s culture is by no means the only one in the landscape of contemporary film that has been hollowed out, reduced to “banality” (to use Todd Gitlin’s term). Yet its virtual erasure in these works inevitably has a political resonance. For in the end, of course, China is different. Long granted a special place in the American imagination, it is now shrouded in fear and perceived as America’s most formidable rival. What better way, after all, to rid America of this rival than to turn it into a site of pure spectacle? And what better way to tame the awakening dragon than to replace it with a cuddly panda or a diminutive creature like the pint-size Mushu of Mulan? In this sense, I think, it is not difficult to discern the contemporary political relevance of films like Kung Fu Panda and Mulan. But the case is somewhat different when it comes to earlier works. There, practices and stereotypes that so clearly belong to the past—the use of yellowface, the force of sexual taboos, the presence of dragon ladies and brutal warlords—risk obscuring more fundamental impulses. Yet, as I argue throughout these pages, if figures like Fu Manchu and Charlie Chan have been banished from America’s screens, the schizophrenic images of China they embody are still alive and well. Again and again, one feels the continuing weight of the attitudes and beliefs that underlie even the earliest films about China. Contemporary battles over abortion and the teaching of evolution suggest the persistence of the desire for a Christian America reflected in works like Broken Blossoms and Shadows. So, too, do current suspicions of Muslims take us back to the fear of heathens displayed by the young American missionary in The Bitter Tea of General Yen. The suspicion and fear of otherness that run throughout these films—and that fuel a desire to transform the other into the self or to banish the other from America’s midst—have prompted harsh immigration laws and eruptions of populist nativism. Foreigners and immigrants are blamed for the fact that, as Ronald Dworkin suggests in an essay on Afterword The Darkening Mirror Afterword: The Darkening Mirror 215 the success of the Tea Party, America is no longer the “most envied and wonderful country in the world.”1 Suspicion of others—be they Hispanic, black, Muslim, or Chinese—both feeds into and is fueled by the outburst of the paranoid style that took shape in the wake of the attack of 9/11. Even before that watershed event, as historian Tony Judt once observed, Washington tended to view the world as “a series of discrete challenges or threats, calibrated according to their implications for America.”2 But the tragedy that took place on that fatal day prompted an outburst of paranoia as ferocious and intense as that which swept over the nation in the early l950s. Dissent was stifled, privacy concerns swept aside, civil liberties suspended , torture condoned. To read Hofstadter’s essay about the paranoid style, declared New York Times columnist Paul Krugman five years after 9/11, “is to be struck by the extent to which he seems to be describing the state of mind not of the lunatic fringe, but of key figures in our political and media establishment.”3 Striking a still bleaker note, Mark Danner suggests that the decades-long cold war that began in the 1950s has morphed, before our eyes, into today’s War on Terror. “The politics of fear,” he writes, “have been embodied in the country’s permanent policies, without comment or objection by its citizenry. The politics of fear have won.”4 In the climate of fear Krugman and Danner describe, the impulses at the heart of cold war films—the confusions that mark the films of Samuel Fuller, the paranoid cast of The Manchurian Candidate, the insistence on American benevolence seen in 55 Days at Peking, the ambivalences toward empire that run throughout The Sand Pebbles—have assumed a new resonance. Once again, paranoia seems to have engendered surreal confusions: attacked from one country, the United States invades still another. Once again—reflecting the apocalyptic worldview seen in a film like Kundun—the world seems to have split in two: in the words of the first President Bush, other nations are either...