Otherness in Hollywood Cinema

273 Pages·2010·1.411 MB·English

by  Michael Richardson

Otherness in Hollywood Cinema
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Otherness in Hollywood
Cinema
Michael Richardson
2010
The Continuum International Publishing Group Inc
80 Maiden Lane, New York, NY 10038
The Continuum International Publishing Group Ltd
The Tower Building, 11 York Road, London SE1 7NX
www.continuumbooks.com
Copyright © 2010 by Michael Richardson
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying,
recording, or otherwise, without the written permission of the publishers.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Richardson, Michael, 1953–
Otherness in Hollywood Cinema / by Michael Richardson.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-0-8264-4352-6 (hardcover : alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 0-8264-4352-4 (hardcover : alk. paper)
ISBN-13: 978-0-8264-6311-1 (pbk. : alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 0-8264-6311-8 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Exoticism in motion pictures. 2. Minorities
in motion pictures. 3. Outsiders in motion pictures. 4. Motion pictures--United States--
History--20th century. I. Title.
PN1995.9.E95R53 2010
791.430973--dc22
2009047736
ISBN: 978-0-8264-4352-6 (hardcover)
978-0-8264-6311-1 (paperback)
Typeset by Newgen Imaging Systems Pvt Ltd, Chennai, India
Printed in the United States of America
CONTENTS
List of Illustrations vi
Preface viii
Acknowledgements xii
Introduction Hollywood Cinema and the ‘Other’ 1
Chapter 1 The Other and the Wilderness 18
Chapter 2 The Myth of the Frontier 32
Chapter 3 Chasing Chinese Shadows: The Yellow Peril
Reconsidered 51
Chapter 4 The Exotic as Spectacle 68
Chapter 5 Otherness in the Night: Film Noir 84
Chapter 6 Of Monsters and Cold Wars 103
Chapter 7 The Myth of the Zombie 121
Chapter 8 A pocalypse Now on a Borderline of
Consciousness 137
Chapter 9 R efi gurations of the Exotic in
Contemporary Cinema 156
Chapter 10 S teven Spielberg and the Sanctifi cation
of Difference 173
Chapter 11 Jim Jarmusch or Communication in Crisis 192
Chapter 12 The Persistence of King Kong 212
Epilogue 225
Notes 230
Filmography 238
Bibliography 248
Index 255
v
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Chapter 1
Figure 1 The coming of the Europeans in The New World. 20
Figure 2 C olin Farrell and Raoul Trujillo forming an
uneasy rapprochement in The New World. 23
Chapter 2
Figure 3 J effrey Hunter and John Wayne losing the track
of the Comanche in The Searchers. 40
Chapter 3
Figure 4 A nna May Wong and Marlene Dietrich waiting
for embarkation in Shanghai Express. 61
Figure 5 G ene Tierney offering her soul to Victor Mature
in The Shanghai Gesture. 64
Chapter 4
Figure 6 M erian C. Cooper (left) and Ernest B. Schoedsack
communing among the Baktiari. 73
Figure 7 T he primitive as spectacle: King Kong. 76
Chapter 5
Figure 8 J oan Bennett ensnaring Edward G. Robinson
from both sides in The Woman in the Window. 96
Figure 9 D ressed to Kill: Jane Greer appears from out of the
sunlight in Out of the Past. 98
Figure 10 D eath comes from the city in the form of
Charles McGraw and William Conrad: The Killers. 99
Figure 11 T he hands as Other: Humphrey Bogart in
In a Lonely Place. 101
vi
List of Illustrations vii
Chapter 6
Figure 12 C ontemplating the aliens in The Thing from
Another World. 109
Figure 13 K evin McCarthy learning the meaning of
fear in Invasion of the Body Snatchers. 111
Figure 14 Shirley Yamaguchi initiating Robert Stack into
cultural difference in House of Bamboo. 117
Chapter 7
Figure 15 B ela Lugosi making an unexpected
appearance in White Zombie. 124
Figure 16 F rances Dee and Christine Gordon take
the zombie walk in I Walked with a Zombie. 127
Figure 17 T he zombie walk in Dawn of the Dead. 129
Figure 18 B rub the Zombie begins to re-learn social
skills in Day of the Dead. 133
Chapter 8
Figure 19 Martin Sheen fi nally gets out of the boat
in Apocalypse Now. 139
Chapter 9
Figure 20 B ill Murray above the crowd in
Lost in Translation. 169
Chapter 10
Figure 21 T he welcome to the United States in Amistad. 184
Chapter 11
Figure 22 G ary Farmer and Johnny Depp contemplate a
legend in the making in Dead Man. 198
Figure 23 G host Dog and The Samurai in Camoufl age
exchange greetings in Ghost Dog, the Way
of the Samurai. 203
Chapter 12
Figure 24 M erian C. Cooper dreaming his dream. 213
Figure 25 A ceh village after a massacre by the Dutch (1901). 220
PREFACE
This book offers an analysis of aspects of how questions about
‘otherness’ have been historically addressed in Hollywood cinema.
By ‘otherness’, as will be discussed in the introduction, a myriad of
different elements are involved, but central to the study is the
relationship between Hollywood as a manifestation of American
society in its relation with the rest of the world.
As major constituents of how the United States presents itself to the
outside world, the fi lms of Hollywood have an important place in the
memory traces, doubts and assurances of the Twentieth Century. Its
memory is our memory; it is a memory of the world, cast before us as
irrevocable evidence of a century that has passed. It is about ‘America’,
not as a place but as a complex amalgam of hopes and desires –
constituting a central aspect of what we call the ‘American dream’ –
but also about something much broader which implicates us all. Films
both refl ect and feed back into a larger socio-cultural landscape and,
if we accept, with Walter Benjamin, that Paris was the capital of the
nineteenth century, then surely Hollywood served a similar role in
the twentieth.
Grounded in American society while being international in its scope
and in many of its values, Hollywood offers fascinating source material
for an examination of what, in the modern world, we understand by
‘Otherness’. To the extent that very few, if any, Hollywood fi lms have
ever been made for an exclusively American audience, they may be
seen as a means - perhaps even the principal means - by which America
has projected itself to the world. Such a projection is, however, far
from being monolithic. Indeed, precisely because Hollywood fi lms
needed to appeal to a wide and diverse audience, they could not afford
to convey a monolithic message even if their need for broad appeal
viii
Preface ix
may in other respects incline them towards homogeneity. As the
predominant popular cinema aimed at an international audience,
Hollywood movies, as a condition of their very popularity, have needed
to give expression to the desires and anxieties of a wide public, such that
they inevitably incarnate and refl ect the social and cultural determinants
of the era in which they were made. What is especially interesting is the
fact that if American fi lm culture is a form of representation that
refl ects tensions within US society in its relationship with the rest of
the world we are all implicated in the experience of Hollywood, even
if only as viewers. Even within the framework of a system which has for
most of its history sought to impose a strict regularity on its modes of
production, the sheer scale upon which Hollywood functions has
generally given scope for aberrant or personal expression and at times
to violate or contradict the logic of its own rational as a dream factory,
producing a commercial yield as a product of what Adorno aptly called
the ‘Culture Industry’. Although it functions within certain (political,
ideological, aesthetic and above all fi nancial) parameters which limit
its room for manoeuvre, Hollywood cinema as a whole has historically
offered a rich setting for understanding cultural interaction that
provided a key herald of what would become, by the end of the
century of cinema, a global world.
A very revealing internal memo in the fi les of the Motion Picture
Producers & Distributors of America (MPPDA) of 1928 shows that
the cultural impact of cinema was on the agenda early in the history
of Hollywood:
Motion pictures are the most conspicuous of all the American exports. They
do not lose their identity. They betray their nationality and their country of
origin. They are easily recognised. They are all pervasive. They color the minds
of those who see them. They are demonstrably the greatest single factors in
the Americanization of the world and as such may fairly be called the most
important and signifi cant of America’s exported products.
They are such indirect and undersigned propaganda for the purveying of
national ideas, modes of life, methods of thought and standards of living as no
other country in the world has ever enjoyed’ (quoted in Vasey, 1998: 43).
Furthermore:
Good motion pictures necessarily have an appeal to all men because good
motion pictures, just as good literature and all good art, appeal to the basic
human motives. Love of home, love of family, love of children, love of husband