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Chapter 14 Homoeroticism Contained: Gender and Sexual Translation in John Woo’s Migration to Hollywood Vicente Rodriguez Ortega This essay compares John Woo’s Hong Kong and Hollywood outputs in order to scrutinize the differing representations of gender they offer in relation to the different generic configurations at work in each production context. I aim to pinpoint which aspects of these representations have passed the test of cultural translatability and which have not. More specifically, given the diverse roles of several “generic contact zones”—action and melodrama, melodrama and comedy, comedy and action—in each of these two different cinematic traditions, I explore how the dynamic between genre and gender varies between Woo’s Hong Kong and Hollywood films. I examine how Woo’s generation of a series of action and pathos driven films negotiates generically gendered bodies and how these undergo a radical shift within his Hollywood output. I ask what were the perceived assets of Woo’s crossover appeal for Western audiences that led Universal to make him the first ever Chinese director in charge of a multimillion dollar motion picture and what were the seemingly dangerous aspects of his representational templates that had to be “translated” to the social, sexual, and cultural codes of Western popular culture, whether in the view of Woo himself, his artistic partners, and/ or the Studio executives in charge of financing and approving his projects. In particular I explore the shift from male-to-male narratives and subordinated femininity to the heterosexual romance that dominates most of his American films. Consequently, this project is less concerned with determining how Chinese and Western spectators actually read Woo’s gender representations than with establishing the kind of spectator that Woo’s Hong Kong and Hollywood films construct as the result of this complex network of industrial, social, cultural, and aesthetic factors. Taking account of the ways in which the contemporary action i-xii_1-262_Gled.indd 191 12/13/11 11:18 AM 192 Vicente Rodriguez Ortega film constructs gender categories, I analyze how the shift of gender roles between Woo’s Hong Kong and American films reveals the presence of different cultural dominants. First though, we need to understand the full impact of Woo’s triad films in the Hong Kong and the global film market in the late 1980s and early 1990s. This requires elucidating the generic fabric of his films and exploring how gender comes into play in negotiating the dynamic cross-fertilization between action and melodramatic pathos. Contextualizing John Woo’s “Hero Films” In the 1980s, the Hollywood action film produced a string of global smash hits. Films such as the first two installments of the Lethal Weapon franchise (1987 and 1989), Die Hard (1988), and Schwarzenegger’s and Stallone’s macho, bullet-driven vehicles had positioned action as a globally operative form of address that has become commercially central in world film markets, providing cultural pointers for audiences from Los Angeles to Singapore and Spain. Non-American film industries then attempted to capitalize on the privileged status of the action film, both to conquer a share of their domestic markets and succeed internationally. These indigenous rewritings of the successful formulae of the American actionoriented generic powerhouse produced the rise of directors such as John Woo in Hong Kong. In fact, the cross-fertilization of action with generic categories clearly recognizable in terms of industrial production and spectatorship—e.g., The Terminator (1984) or Total Recall (1990), combining action and sci-fi; Back to the Future (1985), comedy and action; Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), adventure and action; Desperado (1995), action and western—allows us to rethink the action film at this historical juncture not as a genre per se but as a global transgeneric mode attached to a variety of visual and aural conventions drawn from other genres, which relies heavily on the spectacularization of onscreen violence-driven action, anchoring its sensational appeal to spectators through the recurrent enactment of highly aestheticized set pieces. While mobilizing a variety of generic fabrics from different origins and time periods, John Woo explores the dimensions of the action mode, starting with defining markers from the cinematic history and contemporary social field of his native country.1 His first triad film, A Better Tomorrow (1986), was a Hong Kong box-office hit and subsequently a national media event, catapulting Woo and Chow Yun-Fats’s shaky film careers into immediate stardom (Fang 2004).2 Chow, a former TV romantic lead, known in film...

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