The Japanese in Contemporary Australian Screen Stories
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WHAT HAPPENS NEXT? “Telling” the Japanese in Contemporary Australian Screen Stories by Cory Taylor B.A. (Hons.) Thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the School of Film and Television, Creative Industries Faculty, QUT in 2006 KEYWORDS Japanese, Australian, screenwriting, representation, stereotypes, Orientalism, film, cinema, narrative, whiteness, multiculturalism, identity, ethnicity, Clara Law, John Doyle, Mike Leigh, Changi, Heaven’s Burning, The Goddess of 1967, Japanese Story, Secrets and Lies. ii STATEMENT OF ORIGINAL AUTHORSHIP The work contained in this thesis has not previously been submitted to meet requirements for an award at this or any other higher education institution. To the best of my knowledge and belief, the thesis contains no material previously published or written by another person except where due reference is made. Signature ___________________________ Date ________________________________ iii I wish to thank my supervisors, John Hookham and Cheryl Stock for their generous help and advice throughout this study. iv The problem with clichés is not that they contain false ideas, but rather that they are superficial articulations of very good ones. They insulate us from our real emotions. As Proust himself put it, we are all in the habit of ‘giving to what we feel a form of expression which differs so much from, and which we nevertheless after a little time take to be reality itself ’. This leads to a substitution of conventional feelings for real ones. Christopher Lehman-Haupt (quoted in Bogart, 2001, p. 91) v ABSTRACT This study investigates the challenges facing screenwriters in Australia who set out to represent the Japanese on screen. The study is presented in two parts; an exegesis and a creative practice component consisting of two full length feature film screenplays. The exegesis explores how certain screenwriting conventions have constrained recent screen images of the Japanese within the bounds of the cliched and stereotypical, and argues for a greater resistance to these conventions in the future. The two screenplays experiment with new ways of representing the Japanese in mainstream Australian film and aim to expand the repertoire of Asian images in the national film culture. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS THE SCREENPLAYS: SYNOPSES…………………………………… vi THE EXEGESIS: SYNOPSIS…………………………………………….vii PREFACE: PROJECT BACKGROUND……………………………… viii 1. Introduction: Lovely Corpses………………………………………… 2 2. Aso and Yukio: Typical Japanese Savages…………………… …….11 3. Sam Nakadai: Criminality Comes Home……………………………34 (It is proposed that the screenplay My Australian Life be read here) 3. J.M. and Hiro: The Japanese as Tourist…………………………… 41 5. Setsuko Forrester: The Japanese as Traveller……………………….71 (It is proposed that the screenplay The Rushworth War be read here) 6. Living Bodies……………………………………………………………80 7. Conclusion……………………………………………………………….91 LIST OF REFERENCES…………………………………………………...97 vii THE SCREENPLAYS: SYNOPSES My Australian Life tells the story of a retired Japanese businessman who, having migrated to the Gold Coast in the late eighties, now lives there with his Australian wife and their two adult children. A series of tragic mishaps sees his comfortable lifestyle utterly transformed until he winds up in prison for attempted extortion. My Australian Life is a black comedy intended to disclose some of the perils of early retirement. The Rushworth War is a love story within a love story. When Setsuko arrives in Brisbane to bury her estranged father she stumbles upon the real story of what happened between him and Frank Chambers in the Rushworth camp for enemy aliens where they spent the war years. David, Frank’s son, is convinced that the love of Frank’s life was Setsuko’s grandmother Hanako, but the truth is far more disturbing. A Note: The two screenplays presented here as my creative practice research are polished drafts for proposed films and should be read as speculative pieces. They are scenarios, in a literal sense. They suggest stories and ways of telling, but implicit within them is the knowledge, even the hope, that better stories and ways of telling might emerge from a future collaborative rewriting and production process. viii THE EXEGESIS: SYNOPSIS A close examination of four recent works for the Australian screen, Heaven’s Burning (1997), The Goddess of 1967 (2000) Changi (2001) and Japanese Story (2003), reveals a tendency for Australian screenwriters to limit Japanese characters to a very narrow range of expression. This results in Japanese screen characters conforming to certain conventional representations of the Japanese: as savage, as fugitive from an over-disciplined culture, as post-modern tourist. These conventional representations are based on orientalist assumptions about the Japanese and serve in their turn to perpetuate these assumptions. One way to break free of these conventions is to write Japanese screen characters that are richly imagined individuals with hopes, needs and desires complex enough to invite identification across ethnic and cultural divisions. In order to do this it is necessary to cease to perceive Asia and Asians as peripheral to ‘Australianness’ as it is constructed in our films. The exegesis argues that the diversity that is our everyday reality as Australians would be given better expression if Japanese and other Asian screen characters were sometimes placed at the centre of a cinematic construction of who we are. As a white Australian, married to a Japanese who has lived in Australia for over twenty years and with whom I have two children, I have both a personal and a professional interest in seeing ‘Australianness’ redefined in our screen stories. A screen culture that continues to speak of and to an audience assumed to be innocent of intercultural experience can only ever be narrow and of limited interest. As a contributor to Australian screen culture I aim to tell stories in which ‘Australianness’, rather than implying a racial anxiety to differentiate ‘us’ from ‘them’, tries to express a deeper desire for connection across barriers of all kinds, including that of race. ix PREFACE: PROJECT BACKGROUND ‘So natural is the impulse to narrate, so inevitable is the form of narrative for any report of the way things really happened’, according to Hayden White (1980, p. 5), that it might be described as ‘a panglobal fact of culture…a solution to a problem of general human concern, namely the problem of how to translate knowing into telling’. Screenwriting is as concerned to translate knowing into telling as any other form of narrative, and is just as implicated in all of the difficulties and dangers of that process. For, while the ‘why’ of storytelling might be simply that all human cultures do it, the ‘what’ and ‘how’ of knowing and telling are as complex and contested as any human activity can be. This study explores the problem of ‘telling’ the Japanese in Australian film stories, that is both in the produced films I discuss in the exegesis, and in the unproduced screenplays I present as the creative practice component of this thesis. For the purposes of this study I have not made a distinction between film narratives that exist as finished products and film narratives that exist only on the page. If I have attributed sole responsibility for the ‘what’ and ‘how’ of the narratives I discuss in the exegesis to the screenwriter, it is with the x understanding that the collaborative nature of filmmaking blurs the lines of responsibility. The story that is told on the page is never exactly the same as the story that is told on the screen. Nevertheless if the screenwriter has been content to be credited for the screenplay in the finished product, I have assumed that he or she is happy to be held responsible for the story that appears on the screen, and for how it is told. In selecting which produced film narratives to discuss in the exegesis component of the study I have been concerned to narrow my focus to those recent narratives that specifically represent Japanese characters in major roles. There are two related reasons for this decision, the first being the unique connotations that Japan and the Japanese have for Anglo-Celtic Australia and the implications of these connotations within a narrativisation of an Australian identity, and the second being the need for my exegetical insights to directly inform my creative practice. What I needed for the purposes of the study was an understanding of the existing repertoire of specific images of the Japanese in our films so that I could devise ways to move beyond that repertoire. In this sense I was less concerned with the general question of multiculturalism in Australian cinema, as with the particular way notions of Japaneseness are constructed within our film culture. xi The motivation for this study was both personal and professional. As a practicing screenwriter I have been engaged with the problem of ‘telling’ Japanese screen characters since the late nineties. At that time I was commissioned by SBS Independent to write a television drama series dealing with the influx of Japanese migrants to the Gold Coast. It was a story I was in a position both to know something about, and to tell in dramatic form. I was married to a Japanese who had migrated to Australia in 1983, I had lived on the Gold Coast since moving there during the so-called ‘bubble economy’, and I was an experienced screenwriter. This was a combination the then commissioning editor of drama at SBS Barbara Masel felt was probably unique and she encouraged me to start work. The result was a four part series called Paradaisu that remains unproduced and was therefore, in a professional sense, a failure. In a personal sense however, the writing of Paradaisu was revelatory. The main character in the series was a retired Japanese businessman. I did not at the time think this a particularly odd choice.