Week 9 [Reading Notes] - Global Hollywood

Recommended Reading 1:

Park, Jane Chi Hyun (2010) Yellow Future: Oriental Style in Hollywood Cinema, pp. vii-xv.

In this book, Chi Hyun looks at the similarly fleeting references to East Asia as futuristic and technologized in a range of Hollywood movies since the 1980s, when such references became prevalent in the film industry and in U.S. popular culture more generally. She contextualizes these references within the social, economic, and cultural developments of this period, considering the ways in which East Asian peoples and places have become closely linked with various forms of technology in recent years to produce a collective fantasy of the futuristic, high-tech Orient—or East Asia as the future.
p. viii

This fantasy is imprinted in the national consciousness and exported to the rest of the world through media. It is based on and sustained through imagery, iconography, and modes of performance that conflate East Asia with technology in a global, multicultural context, constituting what Chi Hyun calls oriental style.
p. viii

Central to her exploration of oriental style is the idea not only of technologized Asiatic bodies and spaces but also of conditional visibility, or the ways in which certain bodies, objects, and images are sometimes visible and other times invisible in the dominant culture. This conditional visibility 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. 

 p. viii

It is easy for Asian Americans to condemn images like those I just de- scribed as racist stereotypes due to the feelings of anger, disgust, and shame that may arise in us from seeing ourselves distorted in such images.

On the complementary flip side, it is just as easy to celebrate openly—or to consume secretly with guilty pleasure—the recent proliferation of “cool” Asian tropes that constitute the background and increasingly the foreground of more contemporary Hollywood films such as the Rush Hour series (1998, 2001, 2007), the Kill Bill dyad (2003, 2004), and The Forbidden Kingdom (2008).
p. viii

“Oriental style” describes the process and product of the ways in which Hollywood films crystallize and commodify multiple, heterogeneous Asiatic cultures, histories, and aesthetics into a small number of easily recognizable, often interchangeable tropes that help to shape dominant cultural attitudes about Asia and people of Asian descent. It is also part of the ongoing historical process of the racialization of East Asians in the United States (“oriental”) and as an aesthetic product that appeals to multiple audiences due precisely to its seeming lack of depth, subjectivity, and history (“style”). By explicating the relationship between process/context and product or text, Chi Hyun tries to show the ways in which oriental style matters culturally, particularly in its reflection and shaping of American popular attitudes toward East Asia in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.
p. ix 

As of yet, no book-length study has appeared that looks closely at what I am calling oriental style: the sometimes unsettling and often quite illuminating ways in which Asian tropes and themes occupy the background of Hollywood movies and how these tropes and themes implicitly structure the primary narratives and characters of these films.
p. ix,x

style cannot be separated from content, just as aesthetics cannot be separated from ideology. But why do certain cultural trends, styles, and narratives resonate strongly in certain periods and places for certain groups of people? 
Lawrence Grossberg calls a coherent, recurring grouping of such resonances a “cultural formation,” which Thomas Foster sums up as “a historical articulation of textual practices with ‘a variety of other cultural, social, economic, historical and political practices’ [that] cannot be reduced to ‘a body of texts’ but ‘has to be read as the articulation of a number of discrete series of events, only some of which are discursive.’" *1
p. x

At first glance, current Asian imagery in Hollywood seems to deviate from earlier, more explicitly stereotypical depictions of East Asians and Asian Americans. High-budget films such as The Last Samurai (2003) and Memoirs of a Geisha (2005) beautifully showcase Asian landscapes and cultures (albeit from a decidedly Hollywood perspective), while more and more Asian North American actors such as Lucy Liu, Ming Na, Sandra Oh, and Russell Wong grace the big and small screens.
p. x

This "Oriental style" can be observed in the Asiatic look of cinematic cityscapes and 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. 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.

p. x

The Asiatic bear the traces of the uniquely orientalist forms of racism that have structured Asian American histories and identities even as some representations, regardless of the time periods and the racial constraints in which they have appeared, have moved beyond expected stereotypes.2  For instance, Long Duk Dong (Gedde Watanabe), the Japanese exchange student in Sixteen Candles (1984), and Mr. Miyagi (Pat Morita), the Japanese American mentor in The Karate Kid, are both marked “oriental” through their narrative roles in these movies as well as by the deliberately self-orientalized performances of the actors who play them. However, the former is reduced to a stereotype, whereas the latter is a racialized type that becomes a humanized process. In other words, although both characters fall broadly under the category of Hollywood oriental stereotype, the differences in how the characters are developed within the narrative, or not, and how this affects the other characters’—and implicitly viewers’—relationship to the Asiatic suggest the need to look more carefully at how stereotypes are deployed in Hollywood.
p. xi

An Asian actor’s top billing in a film does not at all ensure that the film will not use racist stereotypes or that these stereotypes will be diminished. In fact, those stereotypes continue to be played to the hilt, often for spectacular and comic effects. Produced and consumed with an ironic, postmodern “wink,” such effects detach cultural signifiers of race, gender, and sexuality from the often brutal histories of power and subordination they have traditionally referenced. Played fast and loose on the big screen, these ostensibly emptied signifiers relegate racism, sexism, and homophobia to the past and, in the process, elude their present-day manifestations. Indeed, the role of such stylized racial images in the larger cultural trend that Lisa Nakamura calls “cosmetic multiculturalism”—a trend that characterizes the casts and mise-en-scène of films by younger male American directors such as Quentin Tarantino, Brett Ratner, Robert Rodrigeuz, and Justin Lin—epitomizes the complexities and contradictions of representing racial and ethnic difference in contemporary Hollywood.3
p. xi

The readings of racial imagery that comprise Yellow Future offer a preliminary framework for investigating "cosmetic multiculturalism" by considering oriental images and iconography as formal, creative conventions that draw on and influence socio-political representations of East Asia and Asian America. Using in-depth case studies of Blade Runner and The Matrix as critical flash- points, Chi Hyun studies the development of an oriental style that has taken root most deeply and flowered most visibly in Hollywood movies, but that has also begun to permeate U.S. media and popular culture at large. 
p. xii

The Matrix

The Matrix presents a depressing picture of the future in which technology plays a major role in turning people into machines—this time, quite actively and literally. However, the racial difference suggested by the “oriental” robot and dwarves in the dream scenes of an otherwise all-white British world have been replaced by a multiracial crew boasting mad martial arts skills. The Matrix passes as a celebration of the once marginal, now stylishly visible elements of multicultural America. In a turn that suggests we have come very far with respect to representing difference in the dominant U.S. culture, we are supposed to identify with these elements and cheer for them against the global threat of an alien enemy technology.

p. xiv

As many film historians have pointed out, the assimilation of nonwhite and non-American filmmakers, writers, cinematographers, financiers and dis- tributors, actors and actresses into the melting pot of American film has been and continues to be a defining element of this necessarily transnational national cinema. Most fans know that The Matrix was shot in Sydney and Chicago, choreographed by Hong Kong film veteran Yuen Wo Ping, directed by American brothers Larry and Andy Wachowski, and coproduced by Warner Brothers and Village Roadshow Pictures, a subsidiary of the Australian distribution company Village Roadshow.
p. xiv

The Matrix stands out not simply for its innovative combining of Eastern elements such as wire-fu, manga and anime styles, but also for its Chinese philosophies incorporated with Western ones, such as Hollywood three-act structure and poststructuralism. For something which had been so shameful in 1980s America, 'oriental style' had become the template for such a slick, hip Hollywood vision of the future. What follows is the story of how this particular vision has become so commonplace in such a short time in the United States—and some thoughts on why we should care.
p. xv

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Reading 1:Moretti, Franco (2001). “Planet Hollywood”. New Left Review, May/June, pp.90-101.

Of course, the future of the Hong Kong film industry is not clear: it may be stunted by the incorporation into the People's Republic of China - or the exact opposite: the larger market may be a boost to production and inventiveness. Be that as it may, in the last generation or so, films from the likes of Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan and beyond, Hong Kong films have very efficiently caught the wake of Hollywood's greatest export staple: the films of action and adventure. 
With its many fuzzy internal divisions, but quite clear external borders, this is by far the most successful form both inside the US and abroad (with the exception of Europe).
Page 95

These stories will travel well and have international diffusion because they are largely independent of language. Almost like a ballet, their style, plots and narrative context can be translated/carried across. This is a throwback to 1920s Hollywood films, the pre-talkie era
Page 98

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Reading 2:Klinger, Barbara (2010) “Contraband Cinema: Piracy, Titanic, and Central Asia” Cinema Journal 49: 2, pp. 106-124.

Abstract: 

This essay examines piracy as a powerful means of circulating films transnationally. Titanic’s worldwide success, and in particular its underground popularity in Afghanistan, prompts consideration both of the impact of unlawful distribution on Hollywood cinema’s global reception and of theoretical issues raised by discourses that invariably surround cases of media piracy.

According to the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), the studios it represents lost $6.1 billion in revenue to film piracy in 2005, with approximately $4.8 billion of that sum resulting from piracy abroad.1 While illegal trafficking in cinema is a problem in the United States, it represents the largest losses and arouses the deepest industry anxieties in relation to lucrative foreign markets, where US films can gross more than double the domestic take.

p. 106/7

Due to a continuing lack of regulation and ineffective enforcement of copyright laws abroad, international black markets often operate with impunity, making progress in this arena difficult. Hollywood officials have indicated in no uncertain terms the gravitas with which acts of piracy are to be regarded. In 2002, the late Jack Valenti, then MPAA President, stated that “[w]e’re fighting our own terrorist war.” In this war, scores of films are “kidnapped or abducted by unscrupulous forces” on a daily basis. This post-9/11 rhetoric, along with other developments such as the passage of legislation that makes theater camcording a federal felony, defines piracy as a serious criminal activity. Indeed, the MPAA describes the involvement not only of organized crime, where profits from media piracy fund prostitution and drug trafficking, but of terrorist organizations that use gains from pirated goods to finance their attacks

p. 107

In the Ukraine, one of Europe’s largest sources of illegal media, producers, and distributors of such goods see themselves as modern-day Robin Hoods who save their low-wage constituency from the “high prices set by avaricious US” companies. In this context, the making and selling of intellectual property “liberated” from Hollywood and other Western media centers is a matter of national pride.

- Jack Boulware, “Pirates of Kiev,” Wired Magazine, September 3, 2002, 110–115.

p. 107

In the literature on copyright, intellectual property, and piracy, some scholars too view the illegal media trade as a weapon against Hollywood’s attempts to ensure “domination of the world market” through “monopolistic distribution schemes.”*5 In these arguments, piracy becomes a mode of “nationalism and resistance” to US-style globalization.*6

p. 107

*5 - Shujen Wang, Framing Piracy: Globalization and Film Distribution in Greater China (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Little- fi eld, 2003), 2. 

*6 - Michael Strangelove, The Empire of Mind: Digital Piracy and the Anti-Capitalist Movement (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005), 74–75.

In the Global Hollywood volumes, Miller et al. argue that the industry should recognize that piracy comes under “fair use in areas where traditional forms of distribution/exhibition result in market failure” (e.g., where movie theaters are few or nonexistent; where the citizenry is too poor to afford tickets or commercial video rentals). Further, piracy plays a significant “role in creating audiences and demand for media products” via the “cultures of anticipation” it inspires for US films worldwide (ibid.:256).

p. 108

- Miller et al., Global Hollywood 2, p.223.

In conceptualizing transnational interactions, we can ask whether pirated US films, despite their illicit status, represent a form of imperialism in foreign markets; whether they, conversely, attest in particularly graphic terms to the power that local conditions exercise over the meaning of imported goods; or whether they raise other questions not fully addressed by the imperialism and localism positions.

p. 108

Titanic’s appearance in Afghanistan presents a charged meeting under highly vexed political circumstances of a Hollywood juggernaut and a foreign audience that illuminates piracy’s importance to grasping the intricacies of cinema’s international impact. As the first film in history to gross more than $1 billion in legitimate worldwide distribution and as a remarkably hot property in the piracy market, Titanic is an exemplary global cinematic phenomenon. Cameron’s fi lm, winner of eleven Academy Awards (including Best Picture and Best Director), was regarded as a pinnacle of Hollywood’s epic storytelling and special effects wizardry.

p. 109

- Kevin S. Sandler and Gaylyn Studlar, Titanic: Anatomy of a Blockbuster (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1999).

The Global Titanic Phenomenon

From the beginning Titanic was promoted as a major event abroad: its theatrical premiere was held in Japan in November 1997, with a London premiere following later that month. The film opened officially in the United States in December, and then in more than forty other countries from January through April 1998 (save for Pakistan, where it opened theatrically in August 1998). 

p. 110

Although the Titanic’s sinking was not a part of most global audiences’ history or popular lore, the film based on its story earned substantially more money abroad than it did during its domestic theatrical run. Taking in $600 million in the United States, it grossed an extraordinary $1.2 billion in initial foreign distribution, making it the first film to hit the $1 billion mark at the overseas box office.

p. 110

In the process of achieving this distinction, Titanic broke box-office records in some locales such as:

- When it was released in the Middle East and in Indonesia (the country with the world’s largest Muslim population), it became the top-grossing film of all time.

- It was also the most profitable movie in Israel’s history, with one out of five Israelis going to see it.

- In New Delhi, Titanic was the first film to break the language barrier between English and Hindi, attracting substantial non–English speaking audiences. 

p. 110

Coupled with its global polysemy, Titanic’s extensive success in international markets allowed it to attain the status of a common experience among communities within different world populations.

p. 112

Titanic’s popularity in Afghanistan and elsewhere would represent Hollywood’s expertise in controlling world markets and colonizing the imaginations of audiences, including those with anti-Western attitudes. The information we have of responses from abroad seems to indicate the triumph of Hollywood storytelling methods and stars against the backdrop of a familiar narrative, the ill-fated romance sprinkled with sex. Audiences also reacted favorably to another widely promoted aspect of Titanic, the verisimilitude of the special effects. Through this lens, global fans appear to have fallen under the sway of Hollywood’s seductive imperial power, taken in by, among other things, the smoke and mirrors of its dream machine and the “shock and awe” of its technological displays.

p. 117

As Titanic sailed back onto Afghan cinema screens and into video stores and markets, it is clear that piracy had successfully fomented “cultures of anticipation,” keeping alive, even stoking a taste for, Titanic and Hollywood—both in the legitimate and black markets—long after the fi lm’s theatrical premiere. Without denying the significant resonances the fi lm may have had in vernacular registers (as a means of subverting state authority during the Taliban and as a springboard for a blissful media experience in the aftermath of their overthrow), attention is also due to its operation as a visible marker of the nature of transnational exchange. In this case, as media are represented in press and online accounts as synonymous with free speech rather than hegemonic control, the manner of fathoming the impact of US cinema on global popular culture attains a heroic sheen. 

p. 124

The description of the apparently free market in Kabul continues to demonstrate that, lurking behind substantial cultural, religious, and political differences, are national impulses informed by an unstoppable consumerist and capitalist spirit—a spirit that the West would have no trouble recognizing as an old, reliable friend in the midst of Central Asian and Middle Eastern wars representing a far more agonistic relationship.

p. 124