Cloud Atlas Review Part 2: Yellowface & Orientalism

So here's part 2 of my 3 part review of Cloud Atlas (click here for part 1).  Today's topic: the film's use of yellowface and other Orientalized aspects of Cloud Atlas.

There are many people who have written about the phenomenon of "yellowface," which is the Asian version of "blackface"--having white (although at times there have been black) actors and actresses portraying Asian and Asian American people in Hollywood films.  Racebending.com has a particularly astute and thorough accounting by contributor Michelle I.  I recommend reading her piece, "Yellowface: A Story in Pictures," to familiarize yourself with the LONG history of yellowface in Hollywood cinema.  But I think this photo of Mickey Rooney in Breakfast at Tiffany's probably says it all:

As I wrote about in yesterday's post, there's a certain narrative logic that the filmmakers had in mind for putting their non-Asian actors in yellowface (including the African American actor Keith David in a role that reminded me of Laurence Fishburne in The Matrix, if they had taped back Fishburne's eyes).  One of the themes of the narrative (film as well as book) is a repetition or eternal recurrence of experiences, of relationships, of people with a comet birthmark who show up across space and time.  To connect these otherwise disparate narratives, the filmmakers chose to have actors and actresses play various roles in all six segments/stories of the film -- so Halle Berry has a throwaway minor role as a woman dressed in a sari (she's supposed to be an Indian woman in London) but in two other stories she has a major role (as a Latina reporter in 1970s SF and in the future as a post-apocalyptic survivor who has access to technology).  One of the stories takes place in 2144 in Neo Seoul, a dystopic "corporocracy"where "pure bloods" are consumers and "fabricants" are the cloned humans who serve them.  So that brings us to the white actors playing Korean or Neo Korean men:

Jim Sturgess playing a Korean commander

Jim Sturgess without the yellowface

Hugo Weaving playing a Korean enforcer

Hugo Weaving as himself

James D'Arcy playing a Korean archivist

James D'Arcy as himself

I'm not sure whether to say that the film's makeup and special effects department did a "bad" job in the yellowface department.  I mean, given their task, this may have been the best they could do, although one would think that if you could turn Eddie Murphy into an old white Jewish man, you could do a better job with Hugo Weaving.  I didn't really find the yellowface all that believable with these actors.  Perhaps because I had been seeing them throughout the film in their non-yellowface roles.  While I understand the impulse to want to use the same actors in all the segments of the film, there are things I wondered about, for example:

1) In the first segment, which takes place aboard a schooner in the mid-19th C., the Polynesian/aboriginal "slaves" are portrayed by African American and Afro-British actors.  It could be that the film decided to transplant African slaves into the South Pacific, but I wondered about why the filmmakers didn't just hire aboriginal/South Pacific/Maori actors to play these roles?

2) While it's true that the racial masquerade isn't just inclined towards yellowface--that there are Asian and black actors who are in whiteface--Halle Berry plays a German Jewish woman, Bae Doona plays a 19th C. lawyer's wife in SF and she plays a Latina sweatshop worker in 1970s SF--no one in the film is in blackface (which I am glad about).  My point is this: while it's understandable according to the logic of the film to put both black and white actors in yellowface for the scenes taking place in Neo Seoul, why wasn't that same logic applied for the scenes depicting Polynesian slaves--that not one white actor or Asian actor was put into blackface I think is a recognition on the filmmakers parts that to do so would have been to have ignited a (pardon my language) shitstorm.  But yellowface they figured they could get away with.

3) Did they have to do this racial masquerade at all?  I understand that they wanted to have the theme of eternal recurrence, but since they made such a big deal about the characters in all 6 vignettes having the same comet birthmark, it seems like they could have emphasized THAT feature in all of the characters that are said to "recur" in the 6 different segments.  And/or isn't it possible that Neo Seoul is a cosmopolitan place where there are white and mixed race people?  They didn't change David Keith's skin color when he played a Korean resistance fighter--they just taped back his eyes and put him in white robes.  Seems like they could have simply had him be a black man in Neo Seoul and/or they could have also just kept Bae Doona as the 19th C. wife in SF with Hugo Weaving as her father.  They do this in theater all the time--you just suspend belief because you know this is artificial so why strain things to make a character "look" like the appropriate "race" according to the narrative when s/he can just play that character?  I know, film is different than theater, but Louis CK has had different women playing his ex-wife, including an African American actress.  Seems like they could have been more imaginative in this department.

4) This last issue isn't a yellowface issue, it's an Asian vs. Asian American issue.  Since the characters in the Neo Seoul segment are all speaking in English (many with a British accent, for some reason), why did the filmmakers cast a Chinese and a Korean actress in roles that they could have cast Asian American actresses in?  I have nothing against either Xun Zhou or Bae Doona, but verisimilitude doesn't seem to be top on the Wachowski's agenda (see my above point about using African American actors to portray Polynesians) and if it was for the Neo Seoul segment, why cast a Chinese actress--why not find two Korean actresses?  There doesn't seem to be a clear logic in the casting decisions of which actors are playing which characters.

So leaving aside the problem of yellowface (and I do think it's a problem--as Anthony Lane says in his New Yorker movie review, the use of yellowface "sure as hell doesn't work here, inching beyond embarassment into insult" and others are also protesting the yellowface as well), the other issue I found disturbing in Cloud Atlas was its depiction of Asian women.  In the novel, female fabricants come in various "models"--there's a Sonmi model and a Yoona model.  They have the same face/body but are designated with different numbers: Sonmi-451 and Yoona 939.  I believe in the novel there are 3 different models who are servers at a restaurant.  But in the film, the actresses are actually played by different women who are made to look like they are cloned.  In other words, rather than using CGI to depict the women in the restaurant looking the same, the film used various Asian female extras, gave them the same haircut, put them in the same skimpy outfits, and then said that they were all the same.  

In other words, the film seems to be counting on audiences not recognizing Asian female distinction and difference--they are expecting audiences to just believe that different Asian female extras actually all "look" the same--look like one another.  And apparently websites describing the film are also confused about the distinctiveness and individuality of various Asian women since they have confused the film's two Asian female actresses with random Asian extras from the film.  For example:

This is the Chinese actress Xun Zhou who plays Yoona-939 (couldn't find a still from the film, but this is taken from the movie's premiere)

IMDB claims that this woman is the actress above, Xun Zhou, but it doesn't look like her.

Another website claims that this is the Korean actress Bae Doona...but as you can see below

...these women don't look alike (this is Bae Doona playing Sonmi-451 in the film)

Asian women do not need to be distinguishable from one another, either in the film or outside the film when talking about the actresses portraying cloned Asian women.  Also, while Halle Berry does have a love scene where you see her naked back in one of the vignettes (the one where she is in whiteface), the Neo Seoul segments show the female fabricants either naked or in very skimpy clothing meant to sexualize them.  This is a HUGE problem in terms of the Orientalization going on in this film because there is a LONG history of Asian women depicted as sexually available and sexually evocative in Hollywood cinema.  And I didn't really see the point of depicting the women naked--perhaps the scantily clad part I get, but the film only seemed to reinforce all of the pre-existing stereotypes that we have about Asian women, especially as they've been rendered in celluloid.

But don't take my word for it, see Elaine Kim's documentary, Slaying the Dragon: Reloaded for a history of the sexualization of Asian women that has taken place in the past and still takes place in the present, with Cloud Atlas as the latest entry in the Orientalizing of Asian women.

Oriental describes rugs not people

Growing up, I often heard the word "Oriental" used interchangeably with Asian or even Asian American. It wasn't until I went to college and took my first Asian American studies course during my freshman year that I learned about the history of this word--that it was used as a sign of Imperialism against people from Asian (and Middle-Eastern) countries in order to objectify them and render them as objects of study, colonization, and/or plunder.

If you look at a dictionary definition, like the Oxford English Dictionary (and what better place to start than the OED), the first two definitions of Oriental are:

1) Belonging to, or situated in, that part or region of the heavens in which the sun rises

2) Belonging to or situated in the east of a country or place, or of the earth; eastern.

But here's the thing: it matters where you are situated to figure out what is "east." If I'm standing on the Great Wall of China, then what is technically "east" is the continent of North America (if we're talking in terms of continents")--so isn't "Oriental" all a matter of perspective?

At any rate, I begin here with Oriental because I have been thinking about the question of appropriation--which I brought up when talking about the film Rachel Getting Married. And one astute commenter asked whether or not the use of an Indian motif in this film was a matter of irony versus cultural appropriation, which is what I had written very directly in my initial post in response to the image below:

"A scene right before Rachel and her new husband are about to cut a cake that is in the form of a stylized Indian elephant--by the way, this was one element I definitely thought was odd because neither Rachel nor Sidney nor their families appear to be Hindi/Indian and this "theme" for their wedding is never explained--which raises another question about cultural appropriation, especially for weddings, but I'll save that for another post."

So why is this cultural appropriation? Or rather, why am I using the word "appropriation" versus noting that they had an Indian themed wedding?

Because in this case, I feel that appropriation--the act of taking something that doesn't quite belong to you--is the more accurate sense of what is happening, aesthetically, in this film for this fictitious wedding. Yes, it is perhaps part of the multicultural/bohemian/anything-goes-lets-throw-in-the-kitchen-sink-if-its-a-different-ethnicity "tone" of the film. But it also feels stylized in such a way that it made me feel like it wasn't simply another "additive" to their hodge-podge racial/ethnic/national mix of friends and family; the details of the saris and the elephant cake and the rehearsal dinner at an Indian restaurant was the dominant motif of the wedding. And yet, neither family revealed themselves to have any connection to India or Indian culture.

Indian isn't just what you have for dinner. And it's not a decorating choice for your living room. And unless you grew up with Indian culture or in an Indian home or in India, it seems like having an "Indian" wedding would mean you are taking part of someone else's culture for your own purposes--you are appropriating their culture--you are Orientalizing someone else's culture for the sake of being hip, cool, ironic.

But Indian culture isn't ironic--at least not for people who are in India or among the millions in the Indian diaspora. Indian culture is complex, multifaceted, segmented by region, religion, history, politics, sexuality, and a host of other things that can't be whittled down to a single cuisine or decorative choice. In terms of the overall feel of the film, the Indian-themed wedding seemed to be another "quirky" element, one signaling openness to multiculturalism, but only in a surface way--it's not as if they had a Hindi ceremony or chose any of the spiritual practices associated with various Indian sects (like Sikh, Buddhism, Jain, Islam or in Southern India, Catholicism).

Anyway, in my book, all this means is that it feels like cultural appropriation for the sake of achieving a certain tonal element in the film. And while I did like the movie, I found the "Indian" details to be unnecessary and a bit too precious and pretentious, especially due to the absence of actual Indian people/bodies in this film.

My politics stop at body lotion

I was shopping at Bath and Body Works for some body lotion and found a scent that I really enjoy. But I went back and forth about whether I should buy it. And finally, my sense of smell prevailed over my sense of politics.


You can't see the back, but this is the description of Japanese Cherry Blossom:

"EXOTIC. This exotic fragrance is a sensuous blend of Japanese cherry blossom, vanilla rice, oriental woods and delicate mimosa petals."

Really? An "exotic" frangrance composed of "oriental" woods associated with "Japanese" body lotion? And why sensuous?

Of course, perhaps this is the marketing tactic of this particular line of lotion (the "Pleasures" line of lotion--seriously, each bottle is labeled as "PLEASURES" right underneath the company logo). For instance, take Coconut Lime Verbena


"INVITING. Be whisked away to your own paradise with this luscious blend of fresh coconut, lime, and fragrant verbena warmed by vanilla and musk."

What IS Bath and Body Works exactly selling???

The many faces of "Orientalism"

Before I start writing about "Orientalism" and "Orientalizing" it seems like I should give a definition for people who haven't spent a lot of time thinking about this. Basically, it's a form of exoticization and objectification of all things Asian (this includes "West Asian" aka: Middle-East).

I could give a longer academic example, but I think everyday instances drive the point home better. Madonna's "Indian" phase is an example of Orientalism (I think it was during her "Ray of Light" album when she performed at the Grammys in a sari or something like that--am I remembering this wrong?). Or objects that depict Asian people or that use Asian people into this object way--I've seen lamps that either feature Asian people (usually in classical Chinese or Japanese clothing, and by classical I mean, ancient Chinese or ancient Japanese clothing) at its base. Or Buddha, depictions of which are on t-shirts and soap and action figures. All of these are examples of Orientalism. Orientalism, in large part, is about appropriation and the adoption of an "Asian" style/dress/fashion as a type of fetish object or as decoration--as rendering "Asian" into the "Orient" into an "object" rather than a SUBJECT (a person, a human).

So I'm starting here because two posts found on "Land of the Not-So-Calm" bring to mind different versions of Orientalism and the question of appropriation and (quite literally) adoption.

The first is the most recent post about a This American Life piece heard this past weekend about dolls sold at FAO Schwartz and the narrator's disturbing experience of the only dolls left for "adoption" (these high end dolls are not sold they are adopted by little girls who have to be "interviewed" before they can purchase a doll and the doll comes with a birth certificate!). Anyway, after a flurry of sales, the only dolls left for adoption are the non-white dolls. You can imagine the rest. Anyway, for very insightful analysis of this story and the issues surrounding transracial adoption, please go to the post (click here), where you can also find a link to the full story on This American Life.

One of the things to note about the piece and the commentary on the blog is that the first of the non-white babies to go were the Asian babies. That's right--if you can't have a white baby, the one that most white families were willing to go to were Asian babies. Then the Latino babies went next. And thus, the store faced incubator upon incubator of black babies. So much to say about this...so little time. But I'd love to hear your take on this, especially if you get a chance to read the blog link and to hear the entire piece. It does strike me, the first part of it--the way in which the Asian babies were the ones to go first of the non-white babies, that this could be seen as a form of Orientalizing--that an Asian baby becomes yet another accessory, like having a feng shui crystal in your home or putting chop sticks in your hair. I think it also says a lot about the model minority myth and the racial hiearchy at work in this country, but since this post is on Orientalism, I'm going to stick with this theme for now.

The second type of Orientalism that I want to talk about is a more benign form--which is the kind that happens with food. As in, Chinese Chicken Salad. Again, "Land of the Not-So-Calm" has written a post called "Asian Salad vs. Salad in Asia" in which she discusses ordering the Chinese chicken salad at The Cheesecake Factory. In the comment section that follows, I had written in and described this as a form of "benign Orientalizing" to which Sang-Shil rightly asked whether there is such a thing.

So I am asking you, my dear blog readers: Is there such a thing as benign Orientalism, and if so, do we find it in food? Like mandarin oranges. I love them--I eat them in my yogurt and granola. But what the hell is a mandarin orange? And I've also ordered Asian slaw and Chinese chicken salad in places like The Cheesecake factory--am I participating in my own objectification? What about Teriyaki burgers? If they came decked out in a little kimono I'd be horrified, but if it's just teriyaki sauce, is that just a descriptor or is it Orientalizing? Or what about those places like Kanki and Benihana with the grills and the chopping of the food--having never been to Japan (aside from a layover at Narita airport) I have no idea whether this is an American's idea of a Japanese steak house or whether perhaps this is the kind of kitchen theater that happens in Japanese cuisine (I'm inclined to think the former).

So there are two forms of Orientalism up for discussion, one which may (or may not) be benign and one not so benign. And if you want to throw out your own examples or to ask our panel of readers whether wearing a yukata in the privacy of your own home is a form of Orientalism (and is this different than wearing a sari for your wedding when you aren't SouthAsian?) then feel free to leave a comment, because I'd love to hear your own stories of encounters with "Orientalism."

Typical encounter

SCENE: Contemporary art gallery in downtown Southern city

PLAYERS: white female artist, mid to late 60s, Asian American female professor, late 30s

Artist: (upon learning that Asian American female is affiliated with Southern University) "Oh, what are you studying at Southern U?"

Professor: "Well, actually I teach there."

Artist: "OH! In that case as someone interested in education let me teach you something about silver jewelry"

[long exposition about merits of 99.9% silver jewelry vs. sterling silver ensues, as well as insistence on holding various pieces that artist has made and the artist talking about Mitsubishi having a patent on the alloy for the 99.9% silver jewelry]

Artist: "Let me find the piece with the Japanese face. Are you Japanese?"

Professor: (taking internal deep breath and big sigh) "No"

Artist: "Oh, are you Chinese?"

Professor: "I'm Chinese American"

Artist: "Oh, that's OK. I have Chinese friends too. They're nice."

???????!!!!!!!!!!!!

Why does this always happen? Can't I go into an art gallery without being confronted with this weird Orientalism? And why didn't I have the chutzpah to say back to this woman, "Oh great! I have white friends, and they're nice too. Don't you love white people? Their traditions are so rich, and I love the way a fork feels in my hand. Such a lovely people!"

My Precious

There is an article in today's NY Times about the proliferation of tea houses and tea purveyors in Portland, OR (it's in the Travel Section). And my first thought: it's all too precious. Of course this could also be a knee-jerk reaction to the subtle "Orientalism" of the whole tea fetish that seems to have swept through this section of the Pacific Northwest, with Moroccan inspired tea rooms, Japanese tea ceremonies, and people talking about the virtues of various Chinese white tea blends and Indian chais. Blah.

Is it just me or does it seem to be that certain things lend themselves to this type of preciousness--like tea--and that at the end of the day, what's so wrong with a bag of Lipton's? Of course, I am being hypocritical to a certain extent as a self-professed "foodie," but I also know that while I may prefer to have Creme Brulee for dessert when I'm out for a nice evening meal, there is also pure pleasure in a plate of Oreo cookies, and I actually prefer Log Cabin syrup to real maple syrup because that corn syrup/maple flavoring infused stuff is the taste I grew up on and therefore the taste I prefer.