Presentation Script: Yellow Future

Slide 2

Jane Chi Hyun Park’s book Yellow Future: Oriental Style in New Hollywood (2010) references East Asia as futuristic and technologized in a range of Hollywood movies since the 1980s. She contextualises these references within the social, economic, and cultural developments of this period. As you can see, Park explains that this a collective fantasy which is based on the national consciousness of East Asia and sustained through imagery, iconography, and modes of performance that conflate East Asia with technology in a global, multicultural context, constituting what Park calls “oriental style.” and it’s “conditional visibility” in contemporary Hollywood films.

Slide 3

In regards to conditional visibility, this is the ways in which certain bodies, objects, and images are sometimes visible and other times invisible in the dominant culture, that for Park: “defines how the Asiatic appears in U.S. commercial media and how people of Asian descent are seen—and just as often not seen—in the public sphere.”

It can be easy for the people of East Asia to condemn images of how they are projected in media as racist stereotypes due to the feelings of anger, disgust, and shame that may arise from seeing themselves distorted in such images on-screen.

Although, it is just as easy to celebrate openly or to consume secretly due to the recent proliferation of “cool” Asian tropes in more contemporary Hollywood films. For example the Rush Hour series, the Kill Bill volumes, and The Forbidden Kingdom (2008).

Slide 4

So what is Oriental style? For Park, it is “the process and product of the ways in which Hollywood films crystallise and commodify multiple, heterogeneous Asiatic cultures, histories, and aesthetics into a small number of easily recognisable, often interchangeable tropes that help to shape dominant cultural attitudes about Asia and people of Asian descent.” Thus, the 'oriental' refers to the racialisation of East Asians living in America, and the 'style' refers to the aesthetic product that appeals to multiple audiences due precisely to its seeming lack of depth, subjectivity, and history. These themes create the background and foreground of more contemporary Hollywood movies and implicitly structures the primary narratives and characters of these films.

Slide 5

As East Asian culture has developed, so has the industry’s use of oriental style. For example, Park’s refers to the current Asian imagery in Hollywood and how it seems to deviate from earlier, more explicitly stereotypical depictions of East Asians and Asian Americans. Oriental style can be depicted through elements of the film such as:

• Beautifully showcase Asian landscapes and cultures (from a Hollywood perspective) in high-budget films such as The Last Samurai (2003) and Memoirs of a Geisha (2005)
• The appearance of a desirable Asiatic masculinity embodied in glamorous action heroes played by stars such as Jet Li, Jackie Chan, and Chow Yun-Fat and performed through martial arts, now de rigueur in Hollywood action sequences.

Here is a short clip from Edward Zwick's film The Last Samurai which exhibits both these qualities of Oriental Style in New Hollywood cinema.

SHOW CLIP

From Park’s perspective, these signs seem to indicate that “East Asia, once abject and rejected, has become, or is very much in the process of becoming, attractive and even celebrated in U.S. popular media.” I'll now hand over to Marshall who will further explore Park's article on oriental style.