Hollywood Goes Oriental: CaucAsian Performance in American Film

1. Figures of the Imagination: Hollywood’s Orient/al

one Figures of the Imagination Hollywood’s Orient/al In Hollywood, the face of Asia is cast in shadow and cloaked in darkness. It is often a Caucasian face made up to appear Asian. In the film The Mask of Fu Manchu (1932) the face belongs to Boris Karloff as he appears for the first time in the title role. Karloff’s facial features are the visual focus in this first shot set in Fu Manchu’s scientific laboratory. His figure, dressed in Chinese costume, faces a mirror that reflects a distorted, grotesque, and larger-than-life image of his face. Sounds of crackling electricity from his scientific experiments can be heard over this image. In the frame Fu Manchu is alone, and yet not alone, when coupled with his disturbing mirror reflection. This image is a monstrous but clearly unreal face. Karloff’s reflected image asserts and foregrounds the artificial and theatrical quality of the Fu Manchu character. Here, Fu Manchu functions primarily as a sign of fantasy, an apparent construct of the mind and the imagination. The spectator sees two faces, one simply made up and cast in shadow, but the other, in the mirror, is more expressive, expansive, and monstrous. This character is presented as a Westerner’s worst nightmare, and significantly, nightmares are generally assumed to be of the dreamer’s own making. chapter  34 The same year in Universal Pictures’ The Mummy, Karloff’s performance of ancient Egyptian Im-Ho-Tep and his modern alter ego Ardeth Bey created another memorable characterization in the horror genre. Also an Orientalist film, albeit of the Middle East rather than the Far East, The Mummy again offers a monstrous Karloff who at key Boris Karloff in The Mask of Fu Manchu. (MoMA) Figures of the Imagination 35 moments gazes straight into the camera with evocative high-contrast lighting. At these times, his makeup (particularly dark eyeliner under the eyes and a wizened skin texture that appears ready to disintegrate as dust) and dark countenance (both literally and figuratively) are isolated from the rest of the action and, indeed, especially the other characters . Though Karloff’s initial appearance as Fu Manchu exists as a highly artificial fabrication, he stands as one of the most well known cinematic symbols of the Orient. This chapter takes as its focus performances from Hollywood films of the 1930s. Elements of makeup, physical demeanor, costuming, and style of speech assemble to create archetypal figures that embody qualities that Western culture both covets and simultaneously seeks to repress. We will specifically examine in this section how cinematic depictions of Orientals and the Orient designed for mass audiences during the 1930s are rendered as products of the Western unconscious mind. Whether portrayed as fantasy figures, nightmarish monstrosities , or inscrutable mystics, these figures of the imagination embody elements both strongly seductive and deeply threatening. The creation of the Orient itself also comes to represent a utopian metaphor for remaking (and often redeeming) one’s identity across cultures and time. However, this promise is not without its commensurate dangers and thus offers within its domain, as Robert Young suggests, “both poison and cure.”1 In the 1930s, Hollywood films were disseminated virtually all over the world. The images at this time had a tremendous impact on how ethnic groups, in particular, were perceived in different parts of the world. Of course, Hollywood’s creation of standardized “national types” includes nationalities other than Asian. In the chapter on Asians in the work Ethnic and Racial Images in American Film and Television, the authors Allen Woll and Randall Miller describe the rather “fuzzy” designation historically given Asians in Hollywood films. Between Hollywood ’s vague “geographical boundaries” of Asian characters and the seemingly indiscriminate casting of whites in Asian roles, specific national character types were subsumed under a generalized Oriental character.2 Reaction to this Hollywood tradition was not confined to this country . Indeed, Woll and Miller also note a strong international response chapter  36 to a specific and markedly pernicious strain of Asian representation evident in the early years of motion pictures. Specifically, various governments in Asia registered complaints and criticism in response to characters such as the evil Fu Manchu. During the 1930s, Hollywood made some attempt to rectify this tension with the presentation of occasionally more positive images such as Charlie Chan. However...