JOMEC Journal Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies
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JOMEC Journal Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies Pacific Crossings: Remaking Bodies and Cultures Through Film Jane Chi Hyun Park University of Sydney Email: [email protected] Twitter: @jchihyunpark Keywords Diaspora Transnationalism Crossover Orientalism Hallyu Cultural Translation Hollywood Australian Film Masculinity Abstract This paper draws on scholarship from Inter-Asia and Asian diasporic cultural studies to look at two recent attempts by East Asian performers to appeal to Western audiences on the big screen, reading their crossover attempts as embodied forms of cultural and aesthetic translation. The first considers the ‘success’ of an Australian film, Mao’s Last Dancer, based on the life of a male Chinese diasporic ballet dancer, and the second, the ‘failure’ of two Hollywood films, Blood: The Last Vampire and Ninja Assassin which star Korean actors, Jeon Ji-hyun (Gianna Jun) and Jung Ji-hoon (Rain), Focusing on the ways in which these stars were produced and consumed transnationally, the paper questions the cultural, institutional and generic terms through which western films showcasing non- western bodies and themes are deemed to fail or succeed. It argues, ultimately, that a close examination of how certain narratives, genres, stars and performances are (mis)translated across different cultures demonstrates the continued existence of cultural and national differences in a supposedly swiftly globalizing world. Contributor Note Jane Chi Hyun Park is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Gender and Cultural Studies, University of Sydney and has published widely on the social uses of media technologies, the cultural impact of minority representations, and transnational flows of popular film, music, and television, with a particular focus on East Asia and Asian America. Her most recent book is Yellow Future: Oriental Style in Hollywood Cinema (University of Minnesota Press, 2010), which looks at the ways in which East Asian bodies and cultures get articulated through and as technology on the big screen. cf.ac.uk/Jomec/Jomecjournal/6-november2014/Park_Bodies.pdf Introduction and identification of viewers with the radical difference that these sub- In Yellow Future: Oriental Style in cultures signified. These two modes of Hollywood Cinema, I examined the representation occasionally merged as ways in which Hollywood films since in Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger Hidden the 1980s, have imagined the Dragon (2000), the action films of dystopian near future, focusing on the Robert Rodriguez and the ghetto- role of Asian images and iconography centric cycle of Black youth films in the backdrop of popular genre films directed by Allen and Albert Hughes in such as Blade Runner (Scott 1982), the 1990s. Rush Hour (Ratner 1998), The Matrix (Wachowski Brothers 1998) and Along with other minority groups, Asian Batman Begins (Nolan 2005). I Americans since this period have attempted to show how this pattern of become more visible in US media referencing East Asia as fantastic culture. The number of Asian bodies in spectacle and mise-en-scène – a front of and behind the camera has pattern I coined ‘oriental style’ – increased, and oriental style continues contributes to the process of racialising to be showcased in everything from Asians in the US (‘oriental’) even as it requisite martial arts action sequences sells this racial difference as an to remade versions of the futuristic aesthetic product with wide appeal due Blade Runner city in recent films such precisely to its lack of depth, as Looper (Johnston 2012), Total Recall subjectivity, and history (‘style’) (Park (Wiseman 2012), Cloud Atlas (Twyker 2010: vii-xii). 2012) and many others. These developments would seem to indicate During the three decades the book that the once abject and undesirable surveyed, explicitly stereotypical ‘Oriental Other’ has been made over depictions of racial and ethnic into ‘Cool Asia’ – an object of attraction minorities from previous eras gave way and even emulation in the US as well broadly to two alternate modes of as other places around the world representation in US cinema. The first where American popular culture is appeared in realist narratives that routinely consumed. showcased the lives and experiences of minorities, usually in emotionally Yet, as I discussed in the book, many of deep and complex ways that the new, seemingly celebratory images humanised the characters. Written and of East Asia in Hollywood replicate the directed by members of the minority uniquely Orientalist forms of racism group, examples of such films that that have structured previous successfully crossed over into the representations. For example, an Asian mainstream include The Joy Luck Club actor’s top billing does not ensure that (Wang 1993), Boyz n the Hood the film in which she or he appears will (Singleton 1991), Smoke Signals (Eyre not utilise one-dimensional stere- 1998), and Real Women Have Curves otypes. Indeed such stereotypes often (Cardosa 2003). The second mode continue to be played to the hilt for continued to portray non-white people, spectacular or humorous effects, such places and cultures from dominant as in the character of Mr. Chow in the Anglo-American perspectives but in Hangover films (Philips 2009; 2011; ways that highlighted the fascination 2013), a comic caricature of Fu 1 www.cf.ac.uk/JOMECjournal @JOMECjournal Manchu updated for the twenty-first Pacific region, tracing the effects of century. Performed with an ironic, different countries’ cultural contact postmodern wink in a supposedly with Western and neighbouring nations post-racial and post-feminist era, such through war, diplomacy, education and effects not only detach cultural trade (Chen and Chua 2007). These signifiers of race, gender, and sexuality forms of contact are linked to the from their historical contexts but also colonial history of countries such as elide their legacy in the unequal India, Malaysia, Singapore, Vietnam, relations of power underlying express- Taiwan and Korea and the ‘colonisation ions of present-day racism, sexism, of consciousness’ (Comaroff and classism and homophobia. Comaroff 1989) that characterises the relationship to Western modernity in Since the publication of Yellow Future, these formerly colonised nations and my work has turned to look at the others such as China, Japan, and creative ways that Asian and Asian Thailand which were only ‘semi- diasporic films, actors, and directors colonised’. For instance, in many of have performed, negotiated and these countries, the aspirational attempted to resist oriental style. In the connotations of the American Dream process, I have found myself being have been internalised and drawn more and more to ways that we commodified, coming to signify local, can defamiliarise and decentre the national and regional tastes and West. The idea of a monolithic ‘West’ is identities as much as ‘American’ ones just as dangerous but far less critically (Chua 2000; Wang 2012). examined than its necessary counterpoint, the Orientalist notion of a The different forms of cultural homogenous ‘East’. This impulse also translation that were used to make arose, in part, from my move to sense of, justify and resist these Australia where I had to adapt to a new encounters with the West engendered culture, institution and discipline. new ways of seeing and imagining Through the questions and challenges one’s place in the world for coloniser that arose in attempts to translate my and colonised alike. We can see these work to colleagues and students, I cosmopolitan perspectives reiterated – became aware of my own privileged always with a twist – in the highly and limited position as a scholar who paradoxical forms of mixed modernity had been trained to see race and lived and constantly created in many analyse the problem of racism in contemporary non-western nations. specifically American ways. In her reading of Walter Benjamin’s As Kuan-Hsing Chen suggests in Asia essay, ‘The Task of the Translator’, Rey as Method: Toward Deimperialization, Chow used the metaphor of transport one way to decentre the West is by to emphasise the movement that looking at ongoing processes of underlies and enables any act of decolonisation around the world (Chen translation – from one language, 2010). Chen, Chua Beng-Huat, culture or medium to another – and Meaghan Morris, Soyoung Kim, Koichi the ways in which the original text, Iwabuchi and others in the Inter-Asia doubled through this movement, is Cultural Studies group have examined thus transformed and its authenticity how this process plays out in the Asia questioned (Chow 1995: 248-254). 2 www.cf.ac.uk/JOMECjournal @JOMECjournal According to Homi Bhabha, ‘colonial geographically closer to and mimicry’ is subversive and generative economically dependent on East Asia, precisely for this reason – because it is especially China. Yet despite its a deliberate mistranslation of the economic ties to this region, Australia coloniser’s words that occurs in and aligns itself, culturally and politically, with through their repetition by the the US and the UK. This emotional colonised which produces ‘a subject of disconnect, or ‘distant proximity’ that Ang difference that is almost the same, but suggests (white) Australians feel toward not quite’ (Bhabha 1994: 86). Yet as Asia, for which China often serves as a Paul Bowman shows in his work on the metonym, seems to be echoed in the mediated dissemination of mixed disproportionately low number of martial arts and the continued trans- narratives about people of Asian descent national appeal of Chinese American in Australian media. I would add here martial arts star, Bruce Lee, that even more significant than the postcolonial binaries of coloniser/ number of Asian representations (which colonised, East/West and core/ to some extent, reflects the international periphery are also challenged when marginalisation of the Australian popular culture is transported and entertainment industry) are the generally translated through different media, to clichéd nature of these depictions – in different audiences, around the globe which Asians as tourists, migrants, (Bowman 2013: 100-124).