Performing the Oriental Woman in The Handmaiden And Audition
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Performing the Oriental Woman in The Handmaiden and Audition: Interrogating Modern Orientalism and the Representation of Asian Women Sarah Schneider 11622253 MA Comparative Literature June 12, 2018 Dr. Esther Peeren Schneider 2 Table of Contents Introduction: Subverting the Controlling Image of the “Oriental Woman” 3 1 Imperialist Desires: Declining the Oriental Woman Stereotype in The Handmaiden 13 Imperialism and Patriarchy 15 Female Solidarity 23 2 Oriental Woman Meets Female Avenger: A Feminist Reading of Audition 33 Audition in the Age of #MeToo 38 The Oriental Woman and the Female Avenger 48 Conclusion: Normalizing Images 59 Bibliography 62 Schneider 3 Introduction: Subverting the Controlling Image of the “Oriental Woman” The history of the representation of Asian women in the West has been uneven to put it lightly and blatantly discriminatory to put it more accurately. It has moved from yellow-face with taped-back eyes, notably on Luise Rainer as “O-Lan” in The Good Earth (1937) and Katherine Hepburn as “Jade” in Dragon Seed (1944), to the submissive, exotic “lotus flower” as seen in Sayonara (1957) and The World of Suzie Wong (1960), among others. The current iteration—which is also an erasure—takes two main forms: an actor of Asian descent is cast but either barely speaks or does not speak at all (as seen in When Harry Met Sally, Babel, Looper and Ex Machina, to name a few examples); or Caucasian actors are cast as characters initially conceived of as being of Asian descent in a process of whitewashing. While the latter renders Asians invisible, the first ensures that stereotypical, wildly reductive images are still widely circulated. It is tempting to list every example of racially egregious representations of Asian women, and while there have been some high-profile exceptions (Sandra Oh in Sideways or more recently Kelly Marie Tran in Star Wars: The Last Jedi), the phenomenon persists and the excuse many Hollywood executives turn to—that Asian stars simply are not bankable—does not add up. In 2016, the New York Times released a feature on representation in Hollywood that included the article “Asian-American Actors Are Fighting for Visibility: They Will Not Be Ignored”, which cited whitewashing examples including Cameron Crowe’s Aloha (Emma Stone plays a quarter-Chinese, quarter-Native Hawaiian woman) and Marvel’s Doctor Strange (Tilda Swinton plays an ambiguous “Eastern mystic”–type character). Actor George Takei, known for playing Mr. Sulu on the original Star Trek, commented: “[We] can’t keep pretending there isn’t something deeper at work here” (quoted in Hess). Keith Chow, founder Schneider 4 of the website Nerds of Color, wrote in the NYT about Hollywood’s circular logic, which seems to confirm that there is indeed something deeper at work: If Asian-Americans—and other minority actors more broadly—are not even allowed to be in a movie, how can they build the necessary box office clout in the first place? To make matters worse, instead of trying to use their lofty positions in the industry to push for change, Hollywood players like [Max] Landis and [Aaron] Sorkin take the easy, cynical path. (Chow, emphasis in text) His comment regarding Landis, a screenwriter who, despite not being associated with the 2017 Ghost in the Shell adaptation starring Scarlett Johansson, released a YouTube video addressing the casting choice by saying that there “are no A-list female Asian celebrities right now on an international level,” and adding that viewers complaining about the whitewashing simply do not understand the industry (Chow). Putting aside the fact that box office returns for films with diverse casts like the Fast and the Furious franchise are some of the highest and that plenty of films starring A-list Caucasian stars flop on a regular basis (including Ghost in the Shell), the reluctance of Hollywood to cast Asian actors, and specifically Asian women, indicates a bias that likely harkens back to the controlling imagery and rhetoric of Orientalism. There seems to be a blind spot specific to Asian women in Hollywood and white consciousness in general that makes it especially difficult to perceive them as anything but the Other. During the recent Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, after US figure skater Mirai Nagasu landed her historic triple axel, NYT op-ed editor Bari Weiss tweeted, “Immigrants: They Get the Job Done,” even though Nagasu was born and raised in California. Also in the news, the film Annihilation (2018), adapted and directed by Alex Garland from the novel by Jeff VanderMeer, was accused of whitewashing when the Asian and Native American Schneider 5 identities of two major characters were erased by casting Natalie Portman and Jennifer Jason Leigh. Garland has defended his decision by explaining that he based his adaptation solely on the first book in the series, where VanderMeer intentionally omits the names, backstories and race of all characters, instead calling everyone by their function, e.g. “the biologist” and “the psychologist”. As Mimi Wong points out in her article on the controversy, not only does Garland miss the whole point of the series, which engages with questions of “perpetual otherness” and colonization, but his choice brings up a crucial issue: “Why, when faced with two racially ambiguous characters, did Garland imagine them as white?” (Wong). The question is further complicated when Garland’s previous film Ex Machina is taken into consideration. In that film, a reclusive computer genius has built androids so human-seeming that when his Japanese servant Kyoko is revealed to also be an android, it is played as a startling reveal. Which begs the question: Why, when casting a silent, sexually compliant female robot servant, did Garland imagine her to be Asian? While Garland is not the focus of this project, his unconscious bias—which is structural and extends beyond him personally—is. I will examine the perpetual othering of Asian women in film, specifically through the Oriental Woman trope and its function as a controlling image. The characteristics typically ascribed to an Oriental Woman, which evoke ideal femininity, include “submissiveness, subservience, obedience, passivity and domesticity,” and present her as also “strikingly sexed, defined in relation to men” (Uchida 162). As other critics have already shown in detail how the Oriental Woman trope works and what its characteristics are, I will look at two cultural objects that engage with this fictive, stereotypical figure and subvert it, breaking down the controlling image: the films The Handmaiden (2016), co-written and directed by Park Chan-Wook, and Audition (1999), written and directed by Miike Takashi. As two films produced in the East, in Korea and Japan Schneider 6 respectively, and starring entirely Asian casts, I argue that they utilize Western and otherwise globally recognized markers (camera work, staging, costume and set design) to critique and counter the othering—i.e. objectification and oppression—of the female characters. I take the idea of the “controlling image” from Aki Uchida’s study of “Orientalization,” the objectification of Asian women as the “Oriental Woman”, which uses the theoretical framework laid out by Patricia Hill Collins’s analysis of the objectification of black women (Uchida 161). Collins found that this objectification was perpetrated through stereotypes such as “‘mammies, matriarchs, welfare mothers, whores’ that reflect the oppressor’s interest to sustain and reinforce their oppression; controlling images are therefore stereotypes that oppress and objectify” (Uchida 171). The sexist and racist objectification of Asian women through the trope of the Oriental Woman is also a controlling image, one that has been normalized in cultural texts and social interactions. While situating my project as following the work of Uchida and others, its innovation lies in my focus on two Asian films that engage critically with the Oriental Woman image, which shows that the image has not remained uncontested, especially in the East. In his seminal work Orientalism, Edward Said explains that Flaubert, in detailing his encounter with an Egyptian courtesan named Kuchuk Hanem in the mid-1800s, produced “a widely influential model of the Oriental woman” in which there is tellingly “very little consent to be found” (Said 6). Instead, Flaubert “spoke for and represented her. He was foreign, comparatively wealthy, male, and these were historical facts of domination that allowed him not only to possess Kuchuk Hanem physically but to speak for her and tell his readers in what way she was ‘typically Oriental’” (Said 6). While Orientalism was written in response to France and Britain’s colonial presence in the Middle East, my project will focus, like Uchida’s, on East Asian women. Uchida traces Schneider 7 the Oriental Woman to anti-immigration laws and rhetoric starting in the late 1800s in America, when Asian women were seen as corrupters of Western/Christian values. The figure then transformed with the country’s military industrial complex in Asia, when the domination of geographic territory was equated with the domination of the local women. Legal scholar Peter Kwan also studied the construction of the Oriental Woman figure and puts forth that the corporeal conquest depicted in the seduction of the Oriental Woman corresponds with geopolitical conquest. Sunny Woan, another legal scholar, similarly traces the