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Hollywood films about Asians and interracial sexuality are the focus of Gina Marchetti's provocative new work. While miscegenation might seem an unlikely theme for Hollywood, Marchetti shows how fantasy-dramas of interracial rape, lynching, tragic love, and model marriage are powerfully evident in American cinema.
The author begins with a discussion of D. W. Griffith's Broken Blossoms, then considers later films such as Shanghai Express, Madame Butterfly, and the recurring geisha movies. She also includes some fascinating "forgotten" films that have been overlooked by critics until now.
Marchetti brings the theoretical perspective of recent writing on race, ethnicity, and gender to her analyses of film and television and argues persuasively that these media help to perpetuate social and racial inequality in America. Noting how social norms and taboos have been simultaneously set and broken by Hollywood filmmakers, she discusses the "orientalist" tensions underlying the construction of American cultural identity. Her book will be certain to interest readers in film, Asian, women's, and cultural studies.
- Sales Rank: #1257404 in Books
- Published on: 1994-02-15
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.00" h x .70" w x 6.00" l, .95 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 269 pages
About the Author
Gina Marchetti is Assistant Professor of Film at the University of Maryland.
Most helpful customer reviews
5 of 7 people found the following review helpful.
Eroticism, Gender, and Race in a Sample of Hollywood Movies Featuring Asian Characters
By Etienne RP
In Romance and the "Yellow Peril", Gina Marchetti focuses on the construction of interracial sex and romance in a sample of Hollywood movies covering more than a half-century of productions, from early silent films to more recent blockbusters. Each chapter takes up one narrative pattern commonly found in Hollywood fiction--rape and the lynching mob, female rapture and captivity, Madame Butterfly in her many reincarnations, the myth of the white knight saviour, the parallel pair of lovers with opposed fates, etc.--and uses a sampling of one, two, or three films to look closely at the discursive strategies Hollywood employs in these tales of interracial romance.
By looking at these narratives critically, a picture can begin to emerge of the way in which Hollywood sets norms and breaks taboos, offers forbidden pleasures, and maintains unequal racial, gender and class hierarchies. The analysis goes beyond the mere denunciation of racial prejudice to reveal an ambivalence in most stories or aesthetics that allows for a number of potentially subversive readings. As Marchetti states, "Perhaps one reason for the staying power of these narratives can be found in their ability to voice resistance, to allow for at least a moment the possibility that women may be right to demand independent thought and action, that other races may not be inferior, that other ways of life may have a right to exist." These moments of undecidability and contradiction open the space for deconstruction and critique, offering viewers a number of interpretive positions.
In the 1950s, US military personel stationed in Japan were distributed pamphlets with titles like "Things You Are Required to Know Before Marrying Orientals" and "But Will Your Family Accept Her?" Hollywood movies, always quick to pick up social issues and turn them into stories and glamour, addressed the issue of interracial sexuality and used melodrama and romance to plead for intercultural understanding. But they did so in a deeply ambiguous and contradictory manner. The sources of this ambiguity were threefold. First, interracial relations were eroticized and projected onto a sentimental plane. Second, the liberal call for racial tolerance obfuscated a conservative vision of gender relations and power structures. Third, racial stereotypes surfaced behind the veneer of openness and inclusiveness. Following Gina Marchetti, let's review these three dimensions of eroticism, gender, and race in her sample of Hollywood movies.
For Hollywood, the exotic has always rhymed with the erotic. Hollywood used the lure of the Orient to titillate and sexually arouse male viewers, as in the poster of the movie Sayonara starring Marlon Brando and Japanese actress Miiko Taka that serves as the cover picture of this book. As the poster illustrates, Hollywood offered the provocative possibility of a meeting of Asia and America within the sexual realm. One of the enduring aspects of the Western vision of Asia involves the Orient's supposedly intrinsic seductiveness. Associated with material opulence, moral laxity, sensuality, cultural decadence, and exotic beauty, this seductiveness implies a peculiar spiritual danger and often hidden threat for the Westerner. Mata Hari usually hides a dagger in her garter, and the sexual permissiveness that US soldiers and expat workers may experience in Asian cities poses a threat to the functioning of the bourgeois family back home.
In interracial tales of seduction, the attractions of Asian sexuality are often offset by an inevitable tragic ending. The Asian seductress or seducer generally dies, and the moral lapse of the Westerner finds some suitable expiation. Indeed, because the heroine or male figure is punished by death for any taboos she or he may have broken, these films are often more open in their exploration and expression of female sexuality. The tragic end of Madame Butterfly or similar characters also conjures up ambivalent feelings among those viewers who see in her fate not the justified consequence of miscegenation but the unfair sacrifice of a woman's desire. In more recent stories love may triumph over social stigma, but each narrative upholds that stigma by exacting a price for criticizing accepted social practices. In more general terms, Hollywood pays tribute to the all-compassing nature of heterosexual romantic love, but also suggests other attachments and longings that do not fit squarely into this mold.
Hollywood's vision of the Orient is heavily gendered: stories generally favour romances involving white males and Asian females. Although most movies call for racial tolerance and appear to condemn racism, they never question the racial hierarchy that makes Asian women available to white males but preclude the possibility of a union between white women and Asian men. Their happy ending upholds the right of the white hero to tear the heroine away from her own culture and independent lifestyle. The conception of Asian feminity as alluring, provocative, and mysterious as well as passive, yielding, and vulnerable reinforce traditional notions of masculinity that appear to be challenged at home. Romantic love across the ethnic divide promises spiritual transcendence and intercultural harmony while actually delivering female passivity, domesticity, and a rationalization of women's subservient role. Indeed, by playing the Caucasian woman off against the Asian woman, Hollywood can affirm male identity against the threat of the Western "new" woman, empowered by an emerging feminism and increased access to positions of independence and leadership within society. Thus films made in the postwar period can uphold both the gender and racial status quo by depicting Asian women as more truly "feminine" than Western women, who are perceived as having sacrificed their feminity and as posing a threat to traditional conceptions of masculinity. Only in Asia can the Western man find "true" love.
The film advertised on the book cover illustrates this point. The hero, played by Marlon Brando, leaves his American fiancée for a Japanese actress playing in an all-female musical company, while she develops a platonic interest for a Kabuki actor. Secondary characters and subplots also feature love triangles and opposite fates. As the author shows, if Sayonara is about racial tolerance and understanding, it is also about keeping women in their "place" as wives and mothers. Here the conservative treatment of gender stands as a correction to the film's more liberal treatment of race. If Sayonara questions national and racial boundaries on one level, it also affirms and solidifies very conservative notions of gender identity and sexuality on another. Also Sayonara seems to be saying that just as it is natural for men to love and dominate passive women, it is natural for America to take a similar dominant posture toward Japan. Although mildly broached at the film's outset, questions surrounding both male and military prerogatives are eventually put to rest, and white, male, American hegemony is ultimately upheld.
In Madame Butterfly, a Japanese girl believes in the marriage of convenience that a US naval officer has contracted with her, waits faithfully for his return after he leaves, then sacrifices herself when he comes back to Japan with his new American wife, leaving behind a son to be adopted by the couple. The tale offers an ambivalence that may account for its enduring success. On one hand, it may portray men as insensitive brutes and cowards, who apply double standards and do not have the courage to honour their commitments. On the other hand, it is only through total submission to men and complete faith in their superiority that women can fulfil themselves and express a "genuine" feminity. Although the male hero may be insensitive and unfair, the Butterfly's suicide legitimizes his authority, allowing the heroine to martyr herself for the continuing domination of the West. Still on another level, the tragic romance can be viewed as a tale of pure and unconditional love, and its aesthetics has often been appropriated by gay persons who may project their own readings and interpretations.
Although there are early cases of openly racist films, such as DeMille's The Cheat or Griffith's Birth of a Nation, Hollywood movies usually attempt to make a case for racial tolerance and respect for foreign cultures. However, underneath their plea for racial harmony and compassion for lovers torn between two cultures, the underlying subtext is most often exclusionist and prejudiced. One therefore needs to go beyond the mere identification of stereotype in order to find the conservative and reactionary elements within the liberal project itself. This racial confusion is particularly visible in stories which break the usual gender pattern and feature a sexual or romantic entanglement between an Asian man and a Western woman. Early stories of rapture and captivity expose Anglo-American women to a "fate worse than death"--be it rape, forced marriage, or prostitution--and severely punish them for straying from male authority. In more modern scenarios, Asian or Eurasian males are pictured as asexual ennuch figures or as troubled masculinities.
Very often, Hollywood used Asians or Asian-Americans as signifiers of racial otherness to avoid the more traumatic and conflictual racial relations between blacks and whites. Stories of interracial romance deal with that fundamental contradiction within the American psyche between the liberal ideology of the "melting pot" and the conservative insistence on a homogeneous, white, Anglo-Saxon American identity. Just as Asian women embodied a model of "true" feminity that was proposed as an example to Anglo-Saxon women, Asians or Asian-American characters offer a model of assimilation to mainstream America that stand in sharp contrast with the more problematic integration of other minorities.
Firmly anchored in feminist theory, this book demonstrates that Hollywood's representation of Asia has more to do with the definition of American identity than with any attempt to understand other cultures. The reader will thus learn little about China, Japan, or Vietnam by reading the chapters or viewing the films under consideration. Indeed, Gina Marchetti insists that she is not an Asia specialist, and that her involvement with Asian cultures came almost by chance. But Hollywood has the power to produce images and stories that shape our perception of global realities. By returning this mirror onto ourselves, we will learn a lot about our tacit assumptions, our implicit values, and our unconscious longings.
Despite the author's cultural deftness, however, one cannot avoid a sensation of incompleteness and aporia at the end of the book. Gina Marchetti's ambition to contribute, through media critique, to "the dismantling of the existing inequitable social order" seems to me the epitome of the white savior myth she otherwise denounces. Her call to listen to alternative voices and especially to Asian cinema obfuscates the fact that Hollywood has become a master in incorporating alternative viewpoints and minority perspectives. Besides, as viewed from a less militant perspective, a feminist critic would have put more emphasis on the playful dimension of eroticism: the role-playing, the ambivalence, the game of seduction are also part of these romance stories, and one need not see the sectarian devil in all romantic details.
2 of 3 people found the following review helpful.
high-level, jargon-free scholarship
By Zangiku
despite the pompous cover-blurbs (and the long pompous review elsewhere on this page), this is a fine, unpompous read for anyone interested in "classic" hollywood, treatment of race in popular culture, history of anti-asian discrimitation, orientalism, sexuality & censorship in film, depictions of women, views of interracial romance, and more. it is well-researched, finely descriptive of films we might be unable to see, smoothly and interestingly written and containing rigorous scholarly apparatus. it is not remotely "militantly feminist" but simply thought-provoking, for those who like to have their thoughts provoked. good photos too.
in case the page won't let us Look Inside, chapter titles follow:
the rape fantasy
the threat of captivity
passport seductions
the scream of the butterfly
white knights in hong kong
tragic & transcendent love
japanese war brides: domesticity & assimilation
return of the butterfly: the geisha masquerade
the postmodern spectacle of race & romance
fims treated include: The Cheat (1915), Broken Blossoms (1919), The Bitter Tea of General Yen (1933), Shanghai Express (1932), Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing (1955), Sayonara (1957), The Crimson Kimono (1959), Bridge to the Sun (1961), Year of the Dragon (1985)
0 of 2 people found the following review helpful.
thanks
By Yoshiyuki Shiomi
Thank you so much!!
the item that i ordered has come in a really nice condition
that i expected.
thanks again.
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