Hollywood Goes Oriental: CaucAsian Performance in American Film PDF
Preview Hollywood Goes Oriental: CaucAsian Performance in American Film
Hollywood Goes Oriental contemporary approaches to film and television series A complete listing of the books in this series can be found online at wsupress.wayne.edu General Editor Barry Keith Grant Brock University Advisory Editors Robert J. Burgoyne Wayne State University Caren J. Deming University of Arizona Patricia B. Erens School of the Art Institute of Chicago Peter X. Feng University of Delaware Lucy Fischer University of Pittsburgh Frances Gateward Ursinus College Tom Gunning University of Chicago Thomas Leitch University of Delaware Anna McCarthy New York University Walter Metz Southern Illinois University Lisa Parks University of California–Santa Barbara CaucAsian Performance in American Film Karla Rae Fuller With a Foreword by Tom Gunning wayne state university press detroit © 2010 by Wayne State University Press, Detroit, Michigan 48201. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without formal permission. Manufactured in the United States of America. 14 13 12 11 10 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Fuller, Karla Rae, 1958– Hollywood goes Oriental : CaucAsian performance in American film / Karla Rae Fuller ; with a foreword by Tom Gunning. p. cm. — (Contemporary approaches to film and television series) Includes filmography. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8143-3467-6 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Asians in motion pictures. 2. Stereotypes (Social psychology) in motion pictures. 3. Ethnicity in motion pictures. 4. Minorities in the motion picture industry—United States. 5. Racism—United States—History—20th century. 6. Motion pictures—United States— History—20th century. I. Title. PN1995.9.A78F75 2010 791.43'652995—dc22 2010006422 Typeset by Alpha Design & Composition Composed in Dante MT To my daughter, Kelsie, and my mother, Gladys No one is free until everyone is free. This page intentionally left blank contents Foreword: Constructing the Alien in Hollywood’s Classical Era tom gunning ix Acknowledgments xvii Introduction: East Meets West: Performing the Oriental 1 1. Figures of the Imagination: Hollywood’s Orient/al 33 2. Masters of the Macabre: The Oriental Detective 71 3. Creatures of Evil: The Wartime Enemy 123 4. Comics and Lovers: Postwar Transitions and Interpretations 173 Conclusion: The Fading Oriental Guise? 231 Notes 247 Bibliography 259 Select Filmography 267 Extended Select Filmography 275 Index 277 This page intentionally left blank foreword Constructing the Alien in Hollywood’s Classical Era In 1915 the U.S. Supreme Court in a case brought by the Mutual Film Company against the Sate of Ohio decided that the movies as a com- mercial business should not enjoy the First Amendment rights granted print media and public speech. Film, the court declared, was a “business, pure and simple, originated and conducted for profit,” not a means for conveying information and ideas. Furthermore, film’s unique power of visual presentation powerfully affected its audience, especially those the court felt were most susceptible to undue influence: children, women, and recent immigrants, all of whom attended the movies in great numbers. Therefore, the court opined, film had a capability for evil influence and deserved regulation. This ruling, which allowed film censorship at least on the local level, stood until 1952, when the issue was raised again over the banning in New York State of Roberto Ros- sellini’s film The Miracle, which had been denounced by the Catholic Church as blasphemous. I open this preface to Karla Fuller’s important book with this bit of Hollywood history because the controversy over the influence of the movies (and now, of course, television, the World Wide Web, and the media in general) continues, both for contempo- rary politicians and film historians. Do the movies influence people in different ways than journalism, the novel, or theater? Is the medium of moving pictures more powerful and, because it is more direct and popular than the printed word, a dangerous influence? Certainly any- thing as powerful as the movies has a possibility of being dangerous, but the deeper question may still be to what degree do the visual and dramatic representations that make up the movies create stereotypes that we should struggle to overcome more intensely than other media? And to what extent do we, as viewers, not only gather our images of
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