Yellow Future: Oriental Style in Hollywood Cinema

Afterword

A decade after the release of The Matrix, Asiatic tropes and imagery permeate the popular culture of a nation that, on the surface, seems devoted to acknowledging and celebrating its racial and ethnic diversity. Most nonwhite Americans, meanwhile, know the limitations of this mediated multiculturalism , which falsely advertises the achievement of a colorblind meritocracy wherein people of color have come to possess the social and political privileges taken for granted by the majority of white Americans. Yet these limitations do not wholly diminish the impact of the growing presence of nonwhite bodies, cultures, and spaces in U.S. popular media generally and film specifically. Although the commercial visibility of historically marginalized groups does not directly translate to an increase in their political power, it functions as a broad cultural barometer of current and future attitudes about those groups in the popular imaginary. Furthermore, as technologies in various fields become ever more advanced, these commodi fied images of difference and the collective narratives attached to them will undoubtedly come to play an even more prominent role in forming our common perceptions of ourselves. In Yellow Future I have examined the shifting political dynamics around the presence of the marginalized in the stories and spectacles of contemporary Hollywood cinema. More precisely, I have traced Hollywood’s fascinated gaze upon East Asian cities, peoples, and cultures and tried to show the complex ways in which that gaze transforms them into virtual projections of a technologized and dystopic near future—the not-so-bright “yellow future” toward which the United States, according to the orientalist logic of the films discussed, seems to be headed. 197 Afterword Imagination is the politics of dreams. —Sherman Alexie, “Imagining the Reservation,” in The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven What I have not addressed and what subsequent research might illuminate is the countering gaze, namely, Asian and Asian American movies that return and resist, reproduce and rework the elements of Hollywoodmanufactured oriental style. Examples of such movies include, among many others, Taiwanese American filmmaker Justin Lin’s cross-over film about delinquent Asian American youth, Better Luck Tomorrow (2002); Thai filmmaker Prachya Pinkaew’s postcolonial martial arts movie, Ong-bak (2003/ 2004); Korean filmmaker Park Chan-wook’s clever and controversial thriller, Oldboy (2003/2005); and Hong Kong filmmaker Stephen Chow’s generically enigmatic comedy, Kung Fu/Kung Fu Hustle (2004/2005), which humorously alludes to action scenes and special-effects techniques from the Matrix movies.1 Well received in the United States for Asian and, in Lin’s case, Asian American productions, all four films draw on the same kinds of East Asian popular media—manga, anime, and martial arts movies—which stylistically characterize an ever-growing variety of current popular media, from music videos to TV cartoons to videos on YouTube. What, then, differentiates Asian-produced media that reference oriental style from the celebratory yellowface of non-Asian-produced media, which may seem, at least to non-Asian viewers and consumers, to be engaged in similar forms of appropriation and homage? One could respond that people of Asian descent bring a distinctly Asian sensibility to their performance of this style because they are intimately familiar with Asian culture. They speak Asian languages, eat Asian foods, and have a firm grasp of Asian histories, aesthetics, and etiquette. Although this kind of essentialist response would make the act of authenticating certain kinds of representations over others much easier, it fails to hold when one takes into account recent developments in the two realms on which I have centered: Hollywood filmmaking with regard to its representations of the Asiatic and the racial and cultural politics underlying the continual evolution of Asian America. As I discussed in earlier chapters, Hollywood is more explicitly interconnected with other entertainment media and foreign countries than ever before, because the majority of its revenue now comes from ancillary and foreign markets. Such economic factors must be acknowledged when trying to make sense of Hollywood’s present enthrallment with Asia, as reflected in the increasing number of North American, Asian, and European coproductions ; Hollywood remakes of Asian films; and Asian filmmakers, 198 • AFTERWORD such as Gurinder Chadha, Ang Lee, and Justin Lin, helming transnational film properties. Asian and Asian diasporic filmmakers, producers, and distributors adopt and adapt various modes of strategic essentialism to achieve theatrical release and distribution for their films in the United States, thereby...