Copyright by Chi Hyun Park 2004
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Copyright by Chi Hyun Park 2004 The Dissertation Committee for Chi Hyun Park Certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: Orientalism in U. S. Cyberpunk Cinema from Blade Runner to The Matrix Committee: S. Craig Watkins, Supervisor John D. H. Downing, Co-Supervisor Charles Ramírez Berg Mia Carter James Kyung-Jin Lee Thomas G. Schatz Orientalism in U. S. Cyberpunk Cinema from Blade Runner to The Matrix by Chi Hyun Park, B.A., M.A. Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas at Austin May 2004 Dedication For my teachers Acknowledgements My dissertation could not have been written without the assistance of many kind and generous people. I would like to begin by thanking my students at The University of Texas at Austin in Narrative Strategies (fall 2002 to spring 2003) and Asian American Literature and Culture (spring 2003). Their enthusiasm for this project encouraged me to keep researching and writing, and their spirited conversations in and out of the classroom gave me exciting new leads to follow. Huge props go out especially to Bobby Chu, Vanat Sermpol, Mike Cintron, Jennifer Malone, and Mike Jones. To pursue any kind of research productively, one must eat and occasionally shop. For steady financial support, I thank the Office of Graduate Studies and the department of Radio-TV-Film at UT, which provided me with a Pre-emptive Fellowship during the summers of 2000 and 2001, teaching and research assistant positions from 1999 to 2003, and travel grants to present my work at various national and international conferences. I also want to extend heartfelt thanks to the selection committee that granted me a William T. Livingston Fellowship in 2003-2004. Without the considerable aid of this fellowship, I would not have been able to finish the dissertation as quickly as I did. For giving shape and direction to what began as an overly ambitious mess of random ideas, I must thank my dissertation committee. I am deeply indebted to my supervisors, Craig Watkins and John Downing, who played key roles in the development v of this project and who at various stages, forced me to ask difficult and necessary questions not only about the work itself but my stakes in pursuing it. Other committee members gave me important intellectual and emotional support through a sometimes grueling process. I am grateful to Thomas Schatz, James Kyung-Jin Lee, Mia Carter, and Charles Ramírez Berg for their time, patience, and constant words of encouragement. Special thanks go out to John Downing and Jim Lee for wading through (sometimes very) rough drafts of the work-in-progress and providing incredibly lucid, always useful suggestions for improvement. Along with my dissertation committee, I had the pleasure of working with some immensely talented faculty at UT from 1999 to 2003, including Jill Dolan, Mary Kearney, Horace Newcomb, John Park, América Rodríguez, Janet Staiger, Sandy Stone, Joe Straubhaar, Karin Wilkins, and Stacy Wolf. I would also like to recognize my former mentors at the University of California, Irvine who knew and nurtured me back when I was an aspiring literary theorist: Chungmoo Choi, Gabriele Schwab, and Victoria Silver. From these teachers, I learned how to learn and when necessary – unlearn. A department is nothing without its staff, and the RTF department at UT is blessed with a terrific one. Many thanks to Susan Dirks, Bert Herigstad, Maureen Cavanaugh, and Gloria Holder, who countless times helped me to conquer the temperamental xerox machine and other bureaucratic hurdles. For assistance on this project in particular, I thank media librarian and friend Lee Sparks, who knows more about anime, Asian action movies, SF, and comics than I ever will. As much as this dissertation addresses a Film and Media Studies audience, it speaks to those in Asian American Studies. I was introduced to the scholarship and culture of the latter by Leslie Bow, Jim Lee, Julie Cho, Glen Mimura, Peter Feng, L. S. Kim, Jeanette Roan, Christina Klein, Glenn Man, Celine Parrenas Shimizu, LeiLani vi Nishime, Shilpa Davé, Tasha Oren, and Jon Cruz among others. I also benefited enormously from my participation as RTF liaison to UT’s Center for Asian American Studies; I thank then interim director Mia Carter, CAAS faculty Kim Alidio and Sharmila Rudrappa, and the graduate and undergraduate students with whom I worked for showing me how activism and scholarship can converge successfully to form community. One of the ways that I maintained interest in the dissertation was by stepping outside its academic parameters every now and then to remind myself why I had chosen to write on such a unique topic in the first place. I was able to get this much needed distance by accessing my creative voice, which I rediscovered during my participation as a poet in the Austin Project led by Sharon Bridgforth and Joni Jones in fall 2002. Any real risks that I take in my writing, especially those that appear in moments of confession and attempts at humor, I attribute to the honesty that I learned to value and express with the amazing women of the Austin Project. A million thanks go out to friends whose emotional solidarity and scintillating conversations over food, phone, and all kinds of drink got me through the extended grind that is grad school: Tara Rodgers, Melisa Salazar, Jae Lee, Rebecca Lorins, Bernd Moeller, Richard Lewis, Casey McKittrick, Kelly Kessler, Doug Norman, Rana Emerson, Zeynep Tufecki, Henry Puente, Carlos Beceiro, P. J. Raval, Scott Nyerges, Justin Garson, Adrienne Baker, Anita Mannur, and Rosanna Brillantes. Finally, most importantly, I thank God who brought me to this point, and I thank my mother Jung Won Huh and my brother Herbert Park for their strength, love, and relentless faith in me. Saranghanda. vii Orientalism in U. S. Cinema from Blade Runner to The Matrix Publication No._____________ Chi Hyun Park, Ph.D. The University of Texas at Austin, 2004 Supervisors: S. Craig Watkins John D. H. Downing This dissertation looks at the role of “oriental” imagery in Hollywood through case studies of two Hollywood cyberpunk films: Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982) and The Matrix (Larry and Andy Wachowski, 1999). Drawing from scholarship in Asian American Studies, Film and Media Studies, Postcolonial Theory, and Cultural Studies, my work explores why the futuristic mise-en-scène of such films looks and feels so uncannily “oriental.” It considers the relationship between these East Asian-inflected settings and changing attitudes about East Asians and Asian Americans in the U. S. from the 1980s to the present. Furthermore, it situates that relationship within larger shifts in national discourses around “race” during this time period. My analyses of these films are grounded in their industrial and historical contexts: economic and aesthetic developments in Hollywood since the 1980s, the rapid growth of the Asian American community during the same period, and the recent internationalization of East Asian popular culture, particularly Hong Kong cinema and Japanese animation. viii My study endeavors to show how oriental imagery in Hollywood has changed as the Asian American population has grown and as East Asian countries have entered economic First World status. In the process it poses the following questions. How does oriental imagery function in cyberpunk films? What relationship does such imagery have to past and present racial constructions of Asians and Asian Americans in the U. S.? How does this imagery rework Edward Said’s notion of Orientalism? And what new analytical frameworks does it suggest for examining racial and cultural exchange, appropriation, and commodification in U. S. popular culture? My dissertation approaches these questions by looking at expressions of the contemporary “Orient” in Hollywood’s celluloid projections of the future. In doing so, it attempts to make sense of the growing representations of East Asian bodies and cultures as “oriental style.” ix Table of Contents INTRODUCTION .....1 PART 1: HOLLYWOOD, CYBERPUNK, AND THE "ORIENT" Chapter One The Hollywood Orient ................................................................22 Chapter Two The Cyberpunk Orient................................................................58 PART 2: MULTICULTURAL NIGHTMARES Chapter Three Blade Runner and the Beginnings of Hollywood Cyberpunk..94 Chapter Four The Orientalized City...............................................................128 PART 3: MULTIRACIAL DREAMS Chapter Five Cinematic Asiaphilia: Martial Arts, Anime, and The Matrix ...179 Chapter Six The Orient Disembodied ...........................................................215 CONCLUSION ...278 Filmography............................................................................................................296 .References..............................................................................................................303 Vita.........................................................................................................................322 x Introduction SEEING ASIAN AMERICAN ALIENS In October 2001 I was naturalized as an American citizen after spending most of my life in the United States as a permanent resident alien. Only a month had passed since the September 11 terrorist attacks, so patriotic sentiment naturally was running quite high in the San Antonio auditorium where