Yellow Future: Oriental Style in Hollywood Cinema
2011; Wiley; Volume: 34; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
1542-734X
Autores Tópico(s)Asian Culture and Media Studies
ResumoYellow Future: Style in Hollywood Cinema Jane Chi Hyun Park. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010. Yellow Future: Style proposes that oriental - both images and racialized performances function to link Asian peoples and places to a hightech Orient, but also to Orientalize (non)white bodies. The book discusses Asiaphilia and Asiaphobia that operates as two sides of same ideological coin masking whiteness as norm, and provides a compelling genealogy of late nineteenth through to early twentieth century Hollywood films portraying East Asia as [italics original] (viii). Significantly, author's work is first to analyze Orientalist backdrop in Hollywood films that profoundly shape filmic narrative and characters in movies, including Batman Begins (Ch. 2) and The Matrix (Ch. 5), although it also raises important questions, including: What kinds of stories and attitudes about Asia and its relationship to West are these movies telling and selling? And how do these images and narratives influence way nonAsians see Asians and way people of Asian descent, in United States, see themselves? (162). Yellow Future consists of an introduction, along with six chapters, an afterword, and an index. Chapter one reviews and introduces techno-orientalism that became prevalent during 1980s, when Japan posed an economic threat to United States, and is still used in contemporary films to project an inhumane, violent, and not-so-bright yellow future. Park superbly connects techno-orientalism, as coined by media studies critics David Morley and Kevin Robins and discussed by technocultural scholars Wendy Chun and Lisa Nakamura, with sociopolitical impact of racialized representations, as advanced by cultural theorists Etienne Balibar, Homi Bhabha, Stuart Hall, and bell hooks. Chapter two opens with an example of techno-oriental style and provides a concise history of development of American in film. As Park argues, movie Batman Begins (2005) utilizes representation^] of tropes through discourses of technological advancement [e.g. Batman's weapons and gadgets] and racial progressivisim [that] undergirds primary ideological conflicts in (29). Yellow Peril's body chapters offer insightful, close readings of imagery in Hollywood films of 1980s and 1990s, when industry commodified and obsessively repeated Asiatic tropes set against larger backdrop of a de facto mixed race (165). Chapter three analyzes the perilist aspects of Orientalism in Ridley Scott's 1982 Blade Runner (based on Philip K. Dick's novel) that displaced Other onto spaces of a and dirty American metropolis (over)run by merchants operating fast-food stalls (66). Stylistically, portrayal of a ghettoized American metropolis of future is reinforced by ominous taiko drumming and by quick shots of bicyclists in Asian straw hats. Park further suggests that, the appeal of film noir lies in viewer's identification with usually male protagonist as he makes a series of bad choices that pull him into psychological states of paranoia, cynicism, and emotional numbness not unlike those experienced by war veterans suffering from shell shock (60). Harrison Ford's embodiment of lead character, Rick Deckard, extends category of Richard Dyer's dark white male, which Park discusses in her analysis of The Matrix (1999) in Chapter six. Chapter four, titled Oriental Buddies and Disruption of Whiteness discusses critically comingof-age classic The Karate Kid (1984). Yellow Future identifies The Karate Kid as a US-centric, biracial buddy marketing transcendence of national, racial, and cultural differences through mythologizing of Japan, whose culture? especially those traits associated with honor, integrity, and productivity - serves to resuscitate (Anglo) American spirit (8586). …
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