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3 Image Power Seriality, Iconicity, and the Filmic Fu Manchus of the 1930s I n 1930, after twelve years of abstinence from the Fu Manchu storyline, sax rohmer resuscitated his serial figure. the decision may have had to do with the fact that rohmer had financial problems throughout the 1920s and that in 1929 the first sound film featuring Fu Manchu (The Mysterious Dr. Fu Manchu) had appeared and had done very well at the box office, attesting to an unabated public demand for yellow peril fare. it may also have been related to the fact that control over the figure was slipping from the writer’s hand; the serial figure obviously had gained a life of its own. if this was the motivation for regrounding the master villain on the printed page, it was an endeavor that was doomed to fail. the 1930s would be rohmer’s most productive and most successful decade, but it was also the decade in which the iconization of his figure evolved very much on its own, tearing itself loose for good from its moorings in print. But let us turn back to the beginning and focus once more on a moment in time when rohmer still had full control over his figure and its looks. in Chapter 2, we tracked the recurrent and recursive placement of Fu Manchu’s famous first description as the “yellow peril incarnate” in rohmer’s early writing (1997: 13, 185; 2007: 4). let us now have a closer look at how precisely rohmer envisioned his ingenious villain, in a paragraph that not only may have provided the most popular of all rohmer quotations but also seems to have been too good for rohmer to let go: imagine a person, tall, lean and feline, high-shouldered, with a brow like shakespeare and a face like satan, a close-shaven skull, 60 Chapter 3 and long, magnetic eyes of the true cat-green. invest him with all the cruel cunning of an entire eastern race, accumulated in one giant intellect, with all the resources, if you will of a wealthy government . . . . imagine that awful being, and you have a mental picture of Dr. Fu-Manchu, the yellow peril incarnate in one man. (rohmer 1997: 13) “A brow like shakespeare,” a “close-shaven skull,” “cat-green” eyes, a “smooth, hairless countenance” (as we learn later; rohmer 1997: 36), “a wicked, hairless face” (129): this is not the mental picture that anyone after 1932 would have come up with when thinking of Fu Manchu. After 1932, Fu Manchu would always look like Boris Karloff as made up by Cecil holland to personify the evil Chinaman in The Mask of Fu Manchu (hereafter The Mask). the film fixes the iconic image of Fu Manchu, with boldly accentuated eyebrows, dark-rimmed and taped eyes, long fingernails , and—most importantly—the sort of mustache that is known, to this day, as a “Fu Manchu.” ironically, this is exactly the look sported by Fu Manchu on the 1997 cover of the paperback edition of rohmer’s first novel, regardless of the seminal description of the Chinese evildoer presented in writing within. in contrast to the effect that many other hollywood adaptations had on their pulp literary blueprints, The Mask did not end up effacing rohmer’s writing. rohmer continued to be a bestselling author in the 1930s and 1940s; if anything, the film contributed to rather than detracted from his international success. But in iconographic and serial terms, The Mask did something to its title figure—and by extension to the yellow peril theme at large—that the literary texts could not take back. in this chapter, i take a closer look at this filmic contribution to the Fu Manchu series and to the yellow peril theme and situate it in a larger context of contemporary (cinematic) orientalism. the orient enacted by the film may have much in common with the phenomenon described by edward said in largely transhistorical terms as “a theatrical stage affixed to europe, [displaying] a prodigious cultural repertoire whose individual terms evoke a fabulously rich world: . . . settings . . . half-imagined, halfknown ; monsters, devils, heroes, terrors, pleasures, desires” (1995: 63). But the filmic orientalism of the 1930s and 1940s relentlessly narrows down the huge scope of this historical repertoire, zooming in on one facet of the larger picture by relying heavily on a fetishistic celebration of the visible and the material. oriental things and oriental sights take center stage in hollywood depictions of China...

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