Defacing Renée Zellweger

If you’ve been surfing the Web these last four days, you’ve undoubtedly had at least a glancing encounter with the negative buzz over Renée Zellweger’s new appearance.  You know that she attended Elle magazine’s 21st annual Women in Hollywood Awards on October 20, exhibiting a face that had obviously been retouched by plastic surgery, retouched to the point where it was virtually impossible to recognize the star of such popular movies as Jerry Maguire and Chicago.  The 45-year-old actress doesn’t seem to have had an enormous amount of work done — merely eyelid surgery, Botox injections, and a brow lift, according to one plastic surgeon — but the work that she did have done altered what was most distinctive about her face.  

I haven’t been following the controversy (if that’s the right word for it) very closely, but my takeaway is this: lots people on social media criticized her new appearance (many of whom, inevitably, used snarky and tactless comments), and others responded to these critics, blasting them for “shaming” the practice of cosmetic surgery per se.  Zellweger herself has responded in a way that neither confirms nor denies that any facelifting occurred.  However, the idea that she may not have had plastic surgery brings to mind clichés about bridges in Brooklyn.

The “shaming” brouhaha raises once again the issues of how society views the aging female body in general, and of Hollywood’s adoration of the youthful female body in particular.  Observers “shame” Zellweger’s new appearance, and her defenders shame the shaming.  The defenders ask what a Hollywood female star past the first flush of youth, a star who hasn’t been seen on the screen for quite some time, must do to keep her career afloat.  And the discussion unearths the entangling root issue of women’s objectification by men.  Anne Helen Petersen writes in BuzzFeed:

Hollywood is horrible to aging women, broadly, but it’s particularly horrible for women [such as Zellweger] whose images are rooted in a youthful form of themselves. It’s not just Lindsay Lohan, in other words, who has to struggle with expectations pinned to a much-younger version of herself. That’s why Julia Roberts and Reese Witherspoon keep playing variations on the same roles, praised for their apparent agelessness, and why Demi Moore and Nicole Kidman struggle to reinvigorate their stardom. Indeed, the most flattering form of praise for a longtime female star isn’t “Look at their varied and complex career!” but “[Insert Star Here] Doesn’t Age!” ...

The last time we really “saw” [Zellweger on screen], she was [her youthful] image. Now she’s labeled a distortion of it, even though, in truth, it’s society’s reaction that’s the dark mirror of our expectations — not Zellweger’s still beautiful face. 

However, without contradicting the insightful observations that several writers have made about the predicament of female stars in Hollywood, and what this says about the predicament of women in the larger society, I think this focus on “shaming” cosmetic surgery overlooks the obvious.  I think that Renée Zellweger’s surgically altered face has become such a big story precisely because she looks so radically different.  In particular, the surgery removed her face’s most distinguishing characteristics — especially her hooded eyelids and full cheeks — which gave her on-screen persona its unique personality.  Instead of Zellweger’s familiar attractive-in-a-slightly-quirky-way face, we now see a sculpted face lacking any truly special features.  Yes, as Petersen says, Zellweger is still beautiful, but she’s beautiful in a bland, uninteresting fashion.  She looks more like Daryl Hannah than the Renée Zellweger we’ve all come to know and appreciate.  

By altering her appearance so drastically, I feel as though Zellweger defaced a national treasure, a treasure that would not have been defaced by time, a treasure now forever gone.  I get the idea that a lot of other moviegoers feel the same way, and that is what touched off the social-media frenzy, much more so than criticisms of plastic surgery in general.  This isn’t a matter of shaming.  It’s a matter of mourning.

Remembrance of things past

Is Hollywood Hedging Its Bets?

Given how far this actress has come in such a relatively short time, nothing but congratulations are due all around — both to her and the Hollywood studio that has boosted her into that rarefied celebrity status of movie star marqueed only by surname.  Where there was once Garbo, Crawford, Schwarzenegger, and Stallone, now comes (no first names, please) McCarthy. 

No, not the 1950s senator from Wisconsin.  That last name belongs to Melissa McCarthy.  Although fans of that consummately scripted TV series Gilmore Girls (2000-07) have long admired McCarthy’s bubbly presence on that show as Sookie St. James (as, I suspect, do followers of her current sitcom, Mike and Molly, which I have not seen), the actress truly grabbed the movie-going public’s attention in the role of the single-minded Megan in the unexpected hit Bridesmaids (2011).  From there, more quickly than you would expect from an actress busy with a sitcom, she landed the co-starring role of the title character in Identity Thief (2013).  Now appears her single-name, above-the-title co-starring credit in the upcoming Twentieth Century Fox release The Heat (2013).  For any thespian, this would be a meteoric ascent. 

But it seems especially true for a plus-size actress. 

I’m sure I don’t need to tell anyone that Hollywood is notorious for turning its cameras on leading ladies whose body-fat ratio is well below average.  The last time that Hollywood had a major female star who was something other than svelte was in 1930, when the matronly Marie Dressler rose all the way to the top of the box office.  But this was back in those years when movie-going was seen as a family affair where the mothers chose which titles to attend, mothers who apparently identified with Dressler’s world-weary matriarchs.   (While venerated headliner Meryl Streep’s figure wouldn’t exactly be described as willowy these days, the adjective applied back when she first broke into Hollywood.) 

Yes, as an overweight female film star, Melissa McCarthy’s career so far seems to have some predictable perimeters: she has only been featured in comic roles; she hasn’t broken above second billing.  But this early in her big-screen career, I’m willing to trust the cinematic fates to exceed those usual boundaries. 

And yet, something bothers me a bit when I see Fox’s movie posters for The Heat.  Why is top-billed (and trim) actress Sandra Bullock standing in front of McCarthy in the way that she is?  I’m not annoyed by the idea that a well-established box-office luminary might take some precedence ahead of a second-billed player fresh to Hollywood’s star-making machinery.  No, I’m bothered by the idea that Fox is using Bullock’s image to obscure McCarthy’s ample dimensions. 

Shades of racism? 
Movie posters for ‘The Replacement Killers’ and ‘Romeo Must Die’

This reminds me of those two times when two stars of the Hong Kong film industry, Chow Yun-Fat and Jet Li, broke into Hollywood with their first starring vehicles.  Chow’s movie was The Replacement Killers (1998) and Li’s was Romeo Must Die (2000).  In the posters for these two action films starring male leads from East Asia, both were wearing sunglasses.  Perhaps the Foster-Grants were primarily there to instill an aura of coolness.  But the sunglasses did something else: conceal the eyes of two new male stars from Asia whose eyelids are shaped differently than those of the male stars in Hollywood. 

‘The Heat’: Which is Melissa McCarthy and which is Sandra Bullock?

In the poster for The Heat, Bullock’s body seems to be doing to tyro movie-star McCarthy’s corpulent physique what the sunglasses did to tyro movie-stars Chow’s and Li’s eyes: not scare away filmgoers resistant to the idea of leading men and women who look different than the others.  With The Heat, Hollywood once again seems to be hedging its bets on whether cinema audiences are ready for a different kind of movie star. 

Granted, this early in the game — several weeks before The Heat’s release — is too soon to be nitpicking at the picture’s politics.  And I wish the movie and its stars well.  But this tendency for Hollywood to downplay a newfangled star’s variance from the Tinseltown norm is worth mulling over for a minute.

‘Miss’-ing the Point

My last two blogposts about controversies over casting in the entertainment industry bring to mind Miss Saigon.  The furor that erupted in 1990 over casting a white actor in the Broadway musical’s Asian male lead remains, to me, the mother of all casting controversies.  It sticks in my mind because the press and public discourse at the time barely recognized Asian American performers as a group that did not have equal opportunities in the entertainment industry — and the reason they didn’t have those opportunities was because of their race.  For this post, I have reprinted a slightly modified version of an article that I wrote about the controversy in 2000, marking the dispute’s tenth anniversary:


Ten years have now passed since the tumultuous casting controversy over the musical Miss Saigon.  Back in August 1990, many Asian Americans exploded with anger when the powerful British theatrical producer Cameron Mackintosh (Cats, Phantom of the Opera) cast a white British actor, Jonathan Pryce, as the Asian male lead, the Engineer, in the Broadway transplant of the original London production.  (Pryce had originated the role on London’s West End wearing eye prosthetics to make him look more Asian.)  The Asian American actors took their grievance to their union, Actors’ Equity, saying that they were not seriously considered for a rare Asian male lead on Broadway.  Equity agreed and denied the British actor approval to obtain an H-1B visa and play the role in the U.S., saying that Mackintosh hadn’t cast his net wide enough and that a white actor in a lead Asian role was “an affront to the Asian community.”  Mackintosh then indignantly claimed that Equity had denied Pryce a visa “on the basis of his race” and announced the cancellation the Broadway production.  (Mackintosh had the option of taking Equity’s decision to arbitration but chose not to.)  By then, Miss Saigon had already racked up a then-record $25 million in advance ticket sales, and New York City was hoping that the musical would bolster a financially lackluster season on Broadway.  Here is how I describe the events elsewhere:

The response by the press and the Broadway elites [to Mackintosh’s cancellation] was swift and severe: Equity was being “racist” against Pryce. Little mention was made of Asian American actors routinely denied the opportunities to star on the mainstream stage. All the punditocracy could see was a white man victimized by “reverse discrimination.” Equity eventually backed down. Pryce opened the Engineer on Broadway in 1991 sans prosthetics, and he was awarded the Tony for Best Actor in a Musical, perhaps as an apology by the Broadway establishment.

Jonathan Pryce wearing eye prosthetics as the Engineer in
the 1989 London production of ‘Miss Saigon’.  Pryce discarded
the prosthetics when the musical moved to Broadway in 1991.

The Miss Saigon controversy erupted in an effort to raise awareness about the paucity of opportunities for Asian American performers.  A decade later, it may be said that Asian actors have a somewhat higher profile in the American entertainment industry, and producers appear to be more conscientious about casting Asian roles with ethnically Asian thespians.  Still, outside the Asian American community, the Miss Saigon dispute is widely remembered as a clear-cut case of “anti-white racism.”  Meanwhile, within very vocal parts of Asian America, it’s considered to be either a “war” that was won or a “battle” not worth fighting in the first place. 

To some, the musical’s most important issue isn’t its casting, but its stereotypical characters, for Miss Saigon is merely an uncritical re-telling of the opera Madame Butterfly with the setting transposed from early-1900s Japan to wartime Vietnam.  The musical’s title character, Kim, is a Vietnamese prostitute who falls in love with a (white) American G.I., bears his child, and kills herself when she realizes that she and her love can never be together.  

The history of the Miss Saigon controversy is covered in Helen Zia’s book Asian American Dreams (2000; no longer in print), and her excellent chapter on the contentious dispute deserves a wide readership.  In her book, Zia quotes actor B.D. Wong, one of the prime movers behind the grievance against Pryce’s casting, as saying,  “We may have lost the battle, but we won the war.”   Apparently, Wong is referring to the fact that after Pryce stepped down from playing the Engineer in 1992, the role has been filled only by ethnically Asian actors.

But in an article for (the now-defunct website) aOnline, Oliver Wang writes: “Miss Saigon’s very plot — regardless of who is cast in the roles — is already problematic, forcing Asian characters into the role of either victim (Kim) or villain (The Engineer).  One wants to ask B.D. Wong, what war are we winning when our actors and actresses are only afforded these kind of roles to play?”  Implying that Asian American performers should avoid playing characters like those in Miss Saigon, Wang concludes by saying: “[N]ow that Asian America is in its third decade as a political entity, isn’t it time we stopped capitulating to simple economics? Asian American actors deserve to find work, but Asian Americans as a whole deserve to have cultural productions that are free of racism and stereotypes.”

However, this exchange raises two important questions: First, was the “war" over Miss Saigon, in fact, “won” by the Asian American community?  Second, how will not “capitulating to simple economics” guarantee “cultural productions that are free of racism and stereotypes”? 

Asian Americans protest ‘Miss Saigon’s’ racial stereotypes on the opening
night of the musical’s Broadway premiere in 1991.  Photo by Corky Lee.

Was Miss Saigon a victory for Asian Americans, as B.D. Wong says?  Although Pryce has been succeeded on Broadway exclusively by Asian actors, he was largely viewed by the press and the public in 1990 as the victim of “reverse discrimination.”  Coverage of the casting controversy seemed to assume that Asian American performers have just as many opportunities as white performers to open lead roles on Broadway.  Therefore, it was implied, any objection to a white actor in Miss Saigon’s Asian male lead was unreasonable.  (The Miss Saigon creative team called the Engineer “Eurasian,” I believe, solely to accommodate a white actor in an otherwise full-blooded Asian lead role, because nowhere in the musical’s original lyrics is any reference made to his European ancestry.)  However, the Engineer was, in actuality, Broadway's first Asian male lead (non-supporting) role in 15 years (since Stephen Sondheim’s Pacific Overtures in 1976).  And Asian American actors decried Pryce's casting not so much because he was white, but because no other actor was seriously considered for this rare Asian male lead on Broadway.  Still, as Zia succinctly summarizes: “The news story became focused on ‘less qualified’ Asian actors who were insisting that they should get the part held by a white male star, solely because they were Asian and he was white.”  Meanwhile, Mackintosh was portrayed “as a besieged white male who did not cave in to racist demands by Asians.” 

Editorials were overwhelmingly against Equity and the Asian American performers, and some opinion pieces used the issue to argue against affirmative action in general.  But their obloquy obscured more subtle aspects of the controversy.  “Remember this name: Cameron Mackintosh,” opined conservative columnist George F. Will.  “He is the British producer who, by standing up for artistic freedom and against today's trendy racism [i.e., affirmative action], told some American liberals that he will not be party to their traducing of this American...principle: It is wicked to allocate opportunity on the basis of race.”  Given this rhetoric, one wonders what role Miss Saigon played in other rollbacks against affirmative action, such as the passage of Proposition 209 in California in 1996. 

But it’s hard for a critical reader not to detect some hypocrisy in championing Mackintosh as the defender of a “colorblind” world.  To the contrary, the producer had indeed used race as a criterion in casting the role of Kim.  After all, only ethnically Asian actresses were considered eligible to audition for the part.  The musical's official coffee-table book, The Story of Miss Saigon, openly says that the show’s creative team “were determined to have as many real-life Asians in the cast as possible; Madame Butterfly-type make-up, though suitable enough for opera, would, they knew, be inadequate, especially for the female members of the cast.  Also, the physical demands made on performers in Miss Saigon required an authentic Asian litheness and grace.” 

The book, however, never says exactly what an “authentic Asian litheness and grace” is, or why Asian makeup was “inadequate” for the female performers but adequate enough for Pryce, who opened the role of the Engineer in London wearing prosthetics to give his eyes an epicanthic almond shape, a kind of make-up that critics call “yellowface.”  Yellowface is viewed very negatively among Asian Americans because the make-up has historically been used to allow white performers to play Asian roles, thus diminishing opportunities for ethnically Asian actors, while no commensurate tradition has allowed Asian actors in the West to play roles of another race.  The controversy’s coverage in the press obscured this important question: Why is it acceptable to have a racial criterion for casting an Asian female lead, but “racist” to have one for casting an Asian male lead?  Why the double standard?  No one in the press bothered to ask because they were too busy attacking the “ethnic separatism” of the Asian American community. 

‘Miss Saigon’ producer Cameron Mackintosh in a recent photo

In fact, Mackintosh and Equity’s official position is that Pryce “never wore ‘yellowface’” for his role as the Engineer — even though photos and films of the actor in the London production clearly show him in Asian make-up.  After the union reversed its decision barring Pryce, Mackintosh and Equity met behind closed doors to hammer out a “Statement of Mutual Understanding” regarding Miss Saigon’s casting.  Asian American representatives were actively excluded from the negotiations.  The resulting statement acknowledged that Pryce had indeed worn eye prosthetics, but it asserted that such make-up did not constitute “yellowface.”  To most Asian Americans, a white actor portraying an Asian is considered to be yellowface whether make-up is used or not.  But in this situation, it was Mackintosh who had the power to define just what the word “yellowface” meant. 

The ten years since Miss Saigon have marked a noticeably higher profile for Asian American actors, but one which could be higher still.  Subsequent years have seen the emergence of performers such as Lucy Liu, Russell Wong, Jason Scott Lee, Margaret Cho, the women of The Joy Luck Club, and a few other Asian American thespians to near-star status.  And in the wake of Miss Saigon, producers and casting directors seem more conscientious about casting ethnically Asian actors in Asian parts.  For example, one wonders if Disney would have made such a concerted effort to cast Asian voice actors — performers who aren't even seen by the audience — in most of the animated feature Mulan’s Chinese roles if it hadn't been for the casting controversy.  So, to a certain extent, something may very well have been gained from the imbroglio over a maudlin Madame Butterfly knock-off.  If the role of the Engineer needed to be sacrificed in order to ensure that Asian American actors could play characters who are less stereotypical, then the sacrifice was well worth making. 

But despite Miss Saigon’s high profile ten years ago, the U.S. entertainment industry has still not acknowledged any binding responsibility to cast minority roles with minority actors, who are usually underemployed compared to their white colleagues.  Whether a non-white character is played by a non-white actor is still seen as a decision solely at the creative team’s discretion.  In fact, in 1992, two years after the Miss Saigon dispute, a Hollywood production company cast a white actress as Frida Kahlo in a biopic of the revered Mexican painter.  When Latina actresses — deprived of yet another rare opportunity to play a Latina lead — protested the casting, the production was canceled, and the aggrieved Latinas were castigated in the industry press as “reverse racists.”  To many, the studio’s intransigence suggested a replay of Mackintosh’s tactics in Miss Saigon.  Clearly, if the industry can keep non-white actors out of “bad” non-white leads, like the Engineer, it can keep them out of good ones, like Frida Kahlo, as well.

Granted, as an art, the freedom for a producer to cast a role with the performer of his or her choice should be protected under the First Amendment, and no legislation should interfere with this freedom.  But as a business, the entertainment industry has the responsibility to make sure that arbitrary obstacles do not artificially restrict the advancement of an entire racial group.  Indeed, the question that the Miss Saigon controversy ought to have posed to the public is this: How do we reconcile free-speech rights with equal-opportunity rights when the two come into conflict?  Unfortunately, the press's focus on Mackintosh’s side of the dispute and the presumption of “reverse racism” against Pryce prevented the question from being asked in any meaningful way.     

For there to be a real “victory” in the casting dispute, the entertainment industry will need to stop using yellowface as a means to exclude Asian American talent from the spotlight.  In an article for A. Magazine in 1996 (which has since ceased publication), Hugh Son wrote of the Miss Saigon controversy: “To many, this public outcry served as yellowface's obituary — a declaration that the practice wasn't acceptable, period.”  But even as he wrote, Son acknowledged that the revived Kung Fu television series (Kung Fu: The Legend Continues), starring David Carradine, was perpetuating the exclusionary tradition. 

Alex Borstein as Ms. Swan on ‘Mad TV’

Today (2000), on the Fox comedy series Mad TV, non-Asian comedian Alex Borstein may occasionally be seen as the recurring character Ms. Swan, a nail-salon owner whose sketches all revolve around her inability to speak and understand English in a competent manner.  There are no Asian American actors in Mad TV’s regular cast.  To play Ms. Swan (originally named “Ms. Kwan” but mysteriously rechristened after her first sketch), Borstein dons a black wig, and while she doesn’t wear heavy prosthetics, she still makes up her eyes to look more almond-shaped.  Responding to complaints from Asian American viewers, Mad TV’s producer Dick Blasucci said of Borstein: “She's not in ‘yellowface.’  We do not do that.  They keep telling us we do, but we don’t.  She does not get into yellow makeup.”  Although Borstein is clearly altering her appearance to look more Asian, the meaning of “yellowface” is once again being decided by producers outside the Asian American community. 

Blasucci doesn't deny that the Ms. Swan character is supposed to be Asian, but he says: “[W]e’ve never come out and said it.”  This seems to be the lesson of Miss Saigon to entertainment producers: keep practicing yellowface, just don’t be up-front about it.  So, by these measures, it’s doubtful that the “war” over Miss Saigon was really won at all.  Reports of “yellowface’s obituary” are evidently exaggerated.  

However, some Asian American media critics — those who think that the “war” over Miss Saigon wasn't worth waging — would simply say that they wouldn't want to see an Asian American actress playing Ms. Swan any more than they’d want to see an Asian American actor playing the Engineer.  Both characters, to these critics, are mere stereotypes.  But this is missing the point.  As long as yellowface is passively accepted by American audiences as just another theatrical convention — while blackface, by contrast, has fallen into disrepute — few will question the racial politics of such an exclusionary practice.  And as long as white actors continue to play prominent Asian roles while Asian American actors are not extended commensurate opportunities to play leads of any race, the Asian presence in American culture will remain marginal.  More importantly, if white actors are unquestioningly accepted in Asian roles, this will only make stereotyping more pervasive: Asian American actors will not have the opportunity to bring their first-hand understanding of Asian culture to an Asian character. 

For all of these reasons, the barring of Asian American actors from playing Asian roles in the U.S. must be challenged whenever it arises, regardless of how “one-dimensional” a role might seem.  Also, the misrepresentation of equal-opportunity rights for Asian Americans as “anti-white racism” must always be exposed as the fraud that it is.  This isn’t to say that the issue of stereotyping is unimportant — quite the contrary — but the routine exclusion of Asian American actors from the spotlight won’t increase an audience's awareness of Asian people.  And Asian American indifference to the racial politics of casting won’t make Asian stereotypes go away. 

*          *          *

So, what do I think now, 12 years on?  Opportunities for Asian American actors have gotten markedly better, but they could be better still.  Thanks in part, I think, to the economic power of the Asian American demographic market, Asian faces are now much more conspicuous in American advertising — especially being shown as average, everyday U.S. citizens — and I think that this has done much to blunt the once-pervasive perception that Asian people are perpetual, unassimilable foreigners in America.  Similarly, Asian faces are now widespread on U.S. network television, with many (but not enough) primetime TV series including at least one Asian character among its ensemble — epitomized by Korean Canadian actress Sandra Oh’s scene-stealing supporting character in the medical drama Grey’s Anatomy (2005- ).  Oh, yes, and the character of Ms. Swan is no longer on the air.

However, most of these Asian parts are still supporting characters, or secondary co-starring roles at best.  We haven’t yet seen a breakthrough that would put an Asian American performer on par with his or her white colleagues.

One positive development has been the appearance of Asian action stars from abroad in Hollywood productions: Jackie Chan, Jet Li, Chow Yun-Fat, and Michelle Yeoh.  But this phenomenon was largely restricted to the action genre (especially kung-fu) and relatively short-lived.  Plus, the Hollywood productions starring these overseas celebrities were of varying quality.  For example, if one compares the excellence of Jackie Chan’s Hong Kong movies to the usually execrable quality of most of his Hollywood starring vehicles, it appears that Tinseltown’s investment in the star was only halfhearted.  And the current fading of these personalities from the U.S. media spotlight confirms that their Hollywood careers were a mere flash in the pan.  It’s a bit sardonic that the single most enduring overseas action star of this generation — who owes his Hollywood career in part to the Asian influence on the U.S. entertainment industry — is the English actor Jason Statham.  But more important, from my perspective, is that the brief trend of Asian-national action stars in Hollywood didn’t enable the emergence of any Asian American stars.  

Lucy Liu

The one big exception to all of this is the career of New York-born Lucy Liu, who, since my article was written in 2000, became the unexpected breakout star of the TV dramedy Ally McBeal (1997-2002).  This enabled her to receive above-the-title co-starring roles in the Hollywood action movies Shanghai Noon (2000), Charlie’s Angeles (2000), and Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever (2002), as well as a number of supporting roles in high-profile films like Chicago (2002).  But when her 2003 Charlie’s Angeles sequel disappointed industry executives and her one solo starring vehicle for the big screen, Rise: Blood Hunter (2007), vanished as soon as it appeared, Hollywood seemed to lose interest in her.  She has since returned to TV but hasn’t yet repeated her initial success in that medium.

And a semi-exception to this are the careers of John Cho and Kal Penn with their Harold and Kumar trilogy.  But outside of this comedy series about two Asian American stoners — a series that only came about due to the persistence of its white creators, Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg — both Cho and Penn have had trouble playing anything other than supporting roles in Hollywood.  Also, while the many independent Asian American films have facilitated the careers of some behind-the-camera talent, such as director Justin Lin, they haven’t done the same for their in-front-of-the-camera talent.  

But perhaps the Asian American presence is greatest in the new media of the twenty-first century.  Such phenomena as YouTube and computer-streaming video are redefining exactly what is meant by “entertainment industry” now that audiences can easily produce videos on their mobile phones and upload their images onto the Internet.  YouTube has allowed the emergence of such high-profile Asian American video creators as KevJumba, HappySlip, and Wong Fu Productions.  And this has considerably increased the visibility of Asian Americans in audiovisual media.

So, in short, the Asian American presence in the U.S. entertainment industry is a mixed bag.  But it’s currently much more conspicuous than it was back in 1990, during the Miss Saigon controversy.  And despite what appears to be resistance from the front offices, there’s every reason to hope that this presence will be even more conspicuous in another 12 years.  Perhaps we will finally see the emergence of the first A-list Asian American Hollywood star to stand alongside the Brad Pitts and the Sandra Bullocks.  But I believe that this will take longer to come about without public outcry whenever the industry — however unintentionally — snubs its Asian American talent and relegates them beneath a racial glass ceiling, as it did during Miss Saigon.



A Wong Fu Productions video on YouTube


Update, September 26, 2013: Lucy Liu is back on series television in the successful Sherlock Holmes update Elementary, which begins its second season tonight, with the actress as Dr. Joan Watson.  Is this the first time that Dr. Watson has been portrayed as a woman?  As far as I can tell, Liu is the first to play the doctor him-/herself as female.  However, a Watson figure opposite a character who mistakenly believes himself to be Holmes has been played by actresses twice: Joanne Woodward as Dr. Mildred Watson in the feature film They Might Be Giants (1971) and Jenny O’Hara also as Dr. Joan Watson in the TV movie The Return of the World’s Greatest Detective (1976).  Both characters were psychiatrists to the deluded men whose belief that they were Holmes (George C. Scott in the former and Larry Hagman in the latter) endowed them with superior sleuthing skills.  (Incidentally, movies that updated the character of Holmes from the Victorian and Edwardian eras to contemporary times had been the norm until the 1939 version of The Hound of the Baskervilles.)  However, Liu’s performance appears to be the first time that Watson has been portrayed as Asian to a Western audience.  (But she is not the first ethnically Asian performer in the West to play the role in a mainstream production: a white-passing Ben Kingsley [born Krishna Bhanji] played Dr. Watson in the 1988 Holmes comedy Without a Clue.)  I don’t think that mainstream U.S. media creators would have cast such a character as ethnically Asian back in the days of Miss Saigon.

Film Noir, Part Three

Here is a post that I originally wrote on the Internet Movie Database:

Still from the trailer for ‘The Big Sleep’ (1946)

Stylistically speaking, The Big Sleep (1946) is not the most exemplary film noir. The best noir films seethe with hard, stark shadows and heroes (or anti-heroes) feverishly unraveling under ominous circumstances. And The Big Sleep is missing this kind of visual and narrative delirium. The cinematography, compared to other film noirs, is relatively even-toned, and the lead character is too self-assured, and too reassuring to the viewer, to allow the story to spiral into uncertainty.  In fact, Foster Hirsch, author of the book Film Noir: The Dark Side of the Screen, considers The Big Sleep to be the most overrated film noir.

However, The Big Sleep boasts something that no other film noir can: the ultimate film-noir actor — Humphrey Bogart — playing the ultimate film-noir character — quintessential hard-boiled private eye Philip Marlowe. And this distinction more than makes up for any stylistic shortcomings. 

I wish that Bogart had done more films as Raymond Chandler’s creation. Wouldn’t it have been terrific if Warner Brothers had shortly afterwards adapted Chandler’s The High Window (a.k.a. The Brasher Doubloon) and The Lady in the Lake with Bogart playing Marlowe, instead of the adaptations that were ultimately made with other actors by other studios? In such a case, maybe Robert Montgomery’s noble experiment of a Hollywood movie seen almost entirely from a subjective camera — which his Lady in the Lake (1947) was — could have been based on a less canonical hard-boiled book. (But Dick Powell’s turn as Marlowe in Murder, My Sweet [1944] is so good that I wouldn’t want to erase it from the history books.) 

Some might say that Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade, also played by Bogart in The Maltese Falcon (1941), was the more definitive film-noir private eye and wish that Bogart had done more movies as that character instead. But Spade only appeared in that one novel and a few short stories, while Marlowe appeared in a series of novels by Chandler. 

Since the actor’s death in 1957, Humphrey Bogart has become an icon, a true star of the cinema whose image and mannerisms are indelibly ingrained in our popular consciousness — so much so that the American Film Institute named him the greatest male screen legend of all time.  Bogart has come to define the postwar Hollywood hard-boiled hero as much as John Wayne has come to define the western-movie hero.  Even now, when a mystery movie depicts a streetwise sleuth, that character — however tangentially, however unconsciously, and often deliberately — evokes Bogart.  And yet, he played fewer investigators in his varied career than his popular image would suggest.  


I can’t help wondering what it would have been like if Bogart’s filmography did more to live up to that image of the definitive hard-boiled private eye.  And I think that our popular conception of this kind of fictional figure owes more to the character of Philip Marlowe than it does to Sam Spade, whose name is usually invoked in summoning up this kind of detective.  For these reasons, I think that a handful of big-budget films with this archetypal actor as this archetypal character would do better justice to the standings of both Bogart and Marlowe in our popular culture and our collective unconscious.  



The trailer for ‘The Big Sleep’ (1946)

Westerns

John Wayne in ‘Stagecoach’ (1939)

Here is a recently rediscovered Internet article that I wrote back in 2001 for a website no longer on-line, an article that I thought was lost forever.  I wrote it not long after reading several books about western movies, among them The B.F.I. Companion to the Western and Sixguns and Society.  I also included some thoughts derived from Robert B. Ray in A Certain Tendency in the Hollywood Cinema, 1930-1980.  I wasn’t as thorough with my ideas as I hoped to be (I have added some observations in brackets), but at least I got my comments back from Internet oblivion:

Movies deal with myths. And myths are a way for peoples and cultures to set up and play out the problems of life, survival, and sheer existence. For the full panorama on the importance of myth and its role in making sense of who we are as humans, I refer you to the books of the late, great Joseph Campbell. 

The genre of the western arose, I believe,  because Americans of European ancestry needed to make sense of their (our) existence in a “New World.” In particular, Euro-Americans were living in a land in which they were not the original inhabitants. So, Euro-American culture needed a mythology to shape and make sense of the conflicts of European survival in the New World. And in doing so, the ideology of such a mythology functioned, in part, to confirm the rightness of Euro-Americans to inhabit the North American continent over that of the indigenous people, the Native Americans. 


Why did Americans of European ancestry need a mythology? Because, I imagine, when North America started to be settled by white immigrants, they were not certain of their identity or the possibility of their survival on the continent. These uncertainties are best illustrated by Wener Herzog’s German film Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972), the story of an ill-fated mission by Spanish conquistadors in the Amazon jungle. Although the context is Latin American, Aguirre’s concerns are just as applicable to those in a North American context. Herzog’s film portrays a world where European culture seems inherently incompatable with the American continent. In the end, the American wilderness crushes the party of European adventurers, who are portrayed as petty and corrupt, unworthy of survival. Aguirre is the ultimate anti-western. If it was to survive, the European presence in America needed stories that affirmed the goodness and justness of white American culture and its worthiness to flourish. This is what the mythology of the western provided. 


As it arose and developed in both literature and film, the western taught its audience that the important problems of existence occupied a rural context, and that these problems needed to be solved through physical action, intelligently employed. Consequently, westerns are marked by their rural settings and their action-filled climaxes. Therefore, an action story set in an urban setting would have difficulty claiming to be a “western” as the gere is commonly understood (e.g., Coogan’s Bluff, Death Wish). And a story with a Wild West setting that is not resolved through a violent climax would likewise have trouble being seen as a western (e.g., The Ballad of Cable Hogue, The Good Old Boys).   


[In other words, the western is an action genre.  If the movie’s central problem isn’t solved by a shootout, a fist fight, or some other form of physical struggle, it’s not an action film — and hence not a western film.  I roll my eyes every time I hear Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain (2005) described as a “gay western.”  Since the film doesn’t end with an action scene — in fact, there’s hardly any violence in it at all — the label “western” doesn’t do justice to this drama.  Now, if the film had been about Jesse James getting it on with Billy the Kid...]


[Although there are exceptions, the typical western is set in some place (specific or non-specific) on the North American continent west of the Mississippi River sometime between the end of the Civil War and the turn of the 20th century.  Why this time period?  Like other film critics, I believe that the overwhelming majority of westerns are set after the Civil War because the United States needed to overcome its founding flaw of slavery and the national disunity that schismatic issue provoked.  Only afterwards could the mythology of a truly unified country develop.  In many westerns, lingering resentments over the “War for the Southern Confederacy” emerge, only to be resolved by the end of the story.  And the 1890s marked the end of the Indian wars.  Afterwards, the continental United States was officially settled.]

Gary Cooper in ‘High Noon’ (1952)

Another intriguing aspect of the genre is that the classical western hero, usually a cowboy or gunfighter, exists at the intersection of civilization and the wilderness. He (the western hero is almost always male, of course) is seen to embody the best of both worlds: the intelligence and expansionism of civilization, and the instinctiveness and brute strength of the wilderness. He can’t be completely one or the other. This is why the sixgun is so important to the wilderness-dwelling western hero: it marks his primary connection to and reliance upon Western civilization, of which he is a harbinger on the frontier. 

It’s very interesting, for example, that the mythology of the western did not develop to privilege “going native” narratives, where Europeans or their descendents completely cast off Western culture and adopt Native American culture (even James Fenimore Cooper’s Hawkeye in The Last of the Mohicans remained resolutely tied to his white identity). To do so, of course, would have suggested that Western culture was somehow inherently suspect, and the purpose of the western genre was to convey exactly the opposite. The classical western hero needed to be bound to his European roots. So, even though there have been a few successful “going native” westerns — particularly Little Big Man (1970), A Man Called Horse (1970), and Dances with Wolves (1990) — this is not the mainstream of the western movie.

In fact, Little Big Man and A Man Called Horse were made during the Vietnam era, when many Americans were questioning the very validity of Euro-American culture, and these films are a reflection of that crisis of identity. Apparently, the “going native” mythology was so threatening to the legitimacy of Euro-American culture that America’s most successful and enduring rendition of the “going native” myth — Tarzan — had to be set on another continent. 

Although the western, at its core, affirms that white people are more deserving to live in America than the Indians are, this isn’t necessarily to say that all westerns are overwhelmingly racist — no more so than other mythologies that seek to affirm the European presence in the non-European world. Because he exits at the crossroads of Western culture and the wilderness (to which that culture stands in contradistinction), the western hero may be seen as an implicit critique of Western civilization, as well as its harbinger on the frontier. The western hero may stand as an ideal symbol of rural Euro-American culture before it became “corrupted” by the more impersonal forces of urban civilization. Therefore, not only can the western hero be the uncritical champion of Euro-American civilization, but he may also function as a figure of resistance to it. 

Because of this, it’s not all that surprising that when American culture reached its greatest identity crisis of the second half of the 20th century — the quagmire of the Vietnam War and the counterculture that crisis spawned — the outfits and hairstyles of the counterculture drew largely from the western: blue jeans, denim jackets, cowboy hats, long hair, droopy moustaches, etc. For example, the two main characters of that exemplary “counterculture” movie Easy Rider (1969) were both named after western icons: Wyatt (as in “Earp”) and Billy (as in “the Kid”). So, the Vietnam-era “counterculture” was at least as beholden to the western mythos as it was critical of its expansionist ideology, of which the Vietnam War was seen as an extension. At the same time, the Vietnam Era (the 1960s and ’70s), marked an upsurge in revisionist westerns: Lonely Are the Brave (1962), The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), The Wild Bunch (1969), Soldier Blue (1970), McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971), The Culpepper Cattle Company (1972), The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid (1972), etc. — films which criticize the western myth, but also may be seen to affirm it in other ways. 

‘The Wild Bunch’ (1969)

I think the primary reason why big-screen westerns aren’t being made as often as they used to is because American ideology now views contemporary problems primarily in an urban and technological context. Also, the crisis of the Vietnam War may have tarnished the rugged “purity” of the frontier setting: in light of the war, the American frontier of the 19th century came to look increasingly like just another European military expansion into the Third World, rather than the mythic landscape for the triumph of white American culture. In other words, the western lost its innocence.

In any event, Euro-American culture no longer seems to be uncertain of its legitimacy to inhabit North America, so that crisis of identity may now have been played out and resolved — at least in a rural, pre-computer-age context. This would explain why the urban/gangster thriller and the science-fiction adventure have now displaced the western as Hollywood’s primary action genres.  However, the mythic images of the western — the idea of a rugged loner drawing upon his best resources and physical strength to resolve a great crisis in an “unspoiled” landscape — remain too powerful to die out completely, even in the imaginations of those who aren't white, aren't American, or aren't male. Westerns are still being made, though primarily for television. And the occasional big-screen western still makes its appearance, such as this year’s [2001]  American Outlaws. Because it is so basic to the shaping of the American identity, the western — in some way, in some form — will always be with us.