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.

R.I.P.: Jennifer Jones, actress

Have any of you ever seen the 1955 film Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing? It stars the late William Holden as a war correspondent covering the Korean War. He also happens to be married but estranged from his wife, who is in the U.S. It also stars the now late Jennifer Jones, who plays a "Eurasian" doctor, Han Suyin. I put "Eurasian" in quotation marks because no one uses that term anymore, although it was quite popular (and more politic) back in the days. Now, we'd just say she is mixed-race--the daughter of a Chinese/Cantonese man and a British-white woman. The film is actually based on the memoir of Dr. Han Suyin--I'm sure that the romance between her and William Holden's character is really played up for dramatic purposes, but I've never read the memoir.


[A still from the film showing Jennifer Jones]

I begin with the film because Ms. Jones is my namesake. My mother LOVED (or maybe it should be the present tense LOVES) this film. And while "Jennifer" was the most popular name the year I was born (most folks either blame it on the film version of Camelot--Jennifer is a derivation from Guenivere or on the film Love Story--the tragic protagonist is named "Jenny"). And last week, on December 17, 2009 Jennifer Jones died of natural causes in her Malibu home at the age of 90.

I've always thought it was funny that I am named after a white actress who famously played the role of a mixed-race Asian woman. That a woman acting in yellowface essentially propelled my name into the world and that I ended up being someone who critiques yellowface and writes about issues of mixed race.

Anyway, rest in peace Jennifer Jones. I feel an odd sense of kinship and connection to you. And I must admit, I also have a certain fondness for this film...even though I wish they could have found someone who was actually Chinese or mixed-race Asian to play the lead.

Promoting more Asian American Artists

The New York Times has two articles prominently displaying two different Asian American artists involved in theater. Paul Chan, a video artist and political activist, recently staged performances of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot in two different location in New Orleans--with a cast that came from a Harlem production of Godot that had made Hurricane Katrina and the breaking of the levees the central setting/theme of Beckett's work.

David Henry Hwang, most famously known for his play M. Butterfly, has a new production opening at The Public Theater called Yellowface, which blends fact and fiction in describing the central character D.H.H., a playwright who protests Jonathan Pryce's "yellowface" casting/performance as "The Engineer" in Miss Saigon and who struggles with the realization that, years after his Saigon protest, he has cast a white man as a lead in one of his Asian American plays because he believed the man was mixed-race.

For more on the Godot/Chan piece click here.

For more on the Yellowface/Hwang piece, click here.

It's an interesting coincidence that two Asian American artists are featured in the headlined sections of The New York Times and that both pieces discuss the intersections of race, politics, and art.

In particular, there is a quote in the Hwang piece that basically sums up the questions I've been struggling with lately regarding race and how to talk about race in my upcoming book project:

"[H]ow do you talk about the nuances of race, both the desire to get past race and the awareness that racism exists. How do you balance these two?"

How do you indeed...does anyone know?

Little Buddha or Why Keanu Reeves should not be in this film

I finally got around to seeing the Bernardo Bertolucci film Little Buddha. Bertolucci's big American claim to fame was The Last Emperor, which won an academy award for best film in the late 1980s. Continuing his fascination with all things Asian, Bertolucci made an early 1990s film about an American couple in Seattle who are visited by a group of exiled Tibetan monks who believe that their son, Jesse, is the reincarnation of Lama Dogen, who is also the reincarnation of Sidhartha aka: Buddha.

The film features Bridget Fonda as the troubled white Mom. Rocker-singer Chris Isak as the troubled white Dad. Some Asian (perhaps American) actors as the beatific and wise Buddhist monks. And most inexplicably, Keanu Reeves, who plays Sidhartha through his pre-enlightenment days through his moment when he understands that he is "one" with the universe (ahhh...and how was Keanu to know that he really would be chosen to play "The One" one day).

I watched the film almost solely for the scenes with Keanu, which were all flashback scenes to Sidhartha's life in ancient Nepal. All other actors in these flashback scenes appear to be either South Asian or at the very least Southeast or even East Asian. Except for Keanu, whose skin is darkened and who speaks in this strange Indian accented English--sort've like a softened version of "Apu" on The Simpsons--but I mention Apu because it's almost that stereotypically bad an accent--as in, it's painfully bad.

So I suppose the question is this: Is Keanu in yellowface? Or maybe more accurately, brownface? When he was cast as the Buddha, and was interviewed about the appropriateness of a white man playing the enlightened one, Keanu busted out his Asian credentials and claimed a hapa identity for himself as half Hawaiian-Chinese and therefore uniquely qualified to play an Asian. And yet...watching him, there's something really wrong with his portrayal, and I'm not just talking about the bad acting.