Can Orientalism Lead to Understanding...?

On a Possible Positive Effect of "Orientalism", Being a White Male Liberal Fan of Anime, Chambara, Wuxia, and Bollywood...and When I'll Have to Start Paying Noah Berlatsky for Ideas!

How did it get to be months later…?

The genesis of this piece, to anybody who’s still reading this, comes from, yes, Substack writer Noah Berlatsky…again. This time it’s not a piece he wrote so much as a comment he made to M.E. Rothwell’s post “What Place do you Associate Much with The Faraway?” Noah responded in a note that what Rothwell was asking sounded like “Orientalism” to him, and said it’s a Colonialist representation of Asian culture. I quickly responded with a quote from W. Sommerset Maughm’s translation of the fable “Appointment in Samarra”, which I had first come across in a scene in Peter Bogdanovich’s first full feature, Targets, as recited in its entirety by Boris Karloff as aging horror film star Bryan Orlok:

After that, I started thinking about what Noah had said in his note, and of my own personal experiences with Orientalism. As a smart but not wealthy White Boy who got picked on a lot growing up, as so many like me did, I retreated a lot into novels, movies and fiction. Not as much as my former wife did, but I read and watched movies about King Arthur, Robin Hood, Ivanhoe (where Robin Hood was a supporting character), Alan Quatermain, She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed, and especially Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson. The whole “God is an Englishman”, British civilization fighting off the endless assaults of the unwashed wo—Persons of Color, was secular writ as holy to me as the selectively-chosen parts of the Bible I got taught growing up.

The first chink break* in my Anglophile armor also came from Karloff; specifically, his performance as the title character in the pre-Code movie The Mask of Fu Manchu. It’s not that the movie is in any way progressive towards this well-educated scion of the Chinese Imperial Family—far from it! But the movie’s White heroes are incredibly, excessively bigoted—if Fu says “Good morning” to one of them, he’s greeted with a string of anti-Asian invective so vicious that I found myself going, “You know, he kind of has a point about Whites’ treatment of Asia and Asians….”

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That’s when I started noticing how many major Asian characters were played by White people in yellow makeup, with actual Asian actors being silent bits or very much Americanized supporting roles (Charlie Chan’s revolving door of “Number One Son”s). This isn’t something in the distant past, either—David Carradine shot to television fame playing a half-Chinese martial artist in the Seventies series KUNG FU (a role Bruce Lee originally wrote for himself!) and in the Nineties revival KUNG FU: THE LEGEND CONTINUES, with Chris Potter playing his quarter-Chinese son. The stage play Miss Saigon co-starred Jonathan Pryce as the mixed-race Engineer, and the premiere of STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION had, as an East Asian torturer,

Peter Dinklage with a Fu Manchu Mustache and Semi-Vulcan Eyebrows! At Least His Co-Star is East Asian….

For that matter, Cameron Crowe’s 2015 film Aloha had part-Korean Captain Allison Ng played by noted mixed-race actor Emma Stone(!); while Khan Noonien Singh, a Sikh warlord, was played in 2013’s Star Trek Into Darkness by that noted desi performer Bandersnatch Cabbagepatch Balderdash Cumberbund Eggsbenedict Englishmuffin Benedict Cumberbatch. (I KNEW I’d get it right eventually!)

So a lot of English-language plays, movies, and television shows have engaged in Yellowface and Racebending for, well, centuries now. There’s a lot of bad to that, and to the colonialist attitudes which still exist that it’s a part of. I don’t want to say otherwise, and I wouldn’t because it still enrages me when I see it….

However—would I be angry now if I hadn’t grown up with Orientalism and its colonialist baggage, and been fascinated in the first place with a culture so Other than my own Midwestern America by way of the U.S. Military upbringing? As I’ve gotten older I’ve discovered the entertainment of different cultures, and how it’s different from our own—and how everybody still has similar loves, hates, needs, and desires.

Is there that much difference between blind swordsmen/women and one-armed boxers, and Robert Vaughn’s haunted gunslinger in The Magnificent Seven (an Americanization of Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai) or Spencer Tracy’s one-armed ex-soldier in Bad Day at Black Rock? You could accuse samurai in movies of killing indiscriminately, but is that any different than the cowboys in Westerns? You could point out the numerous musical numbers cheek-by-jowl with tragedy or action in Bollywood movies—which are, of course, not at all like the musicals of Rogers & Hammerstein, Lerner & Lowe, or Andrew Lloyd Webber! You could mock Hindipop, J-Pop, K-Pop and their “Idol Singers”…which they got from American and British short-lived pop stars.

While I’m glad to see Orientalism and Colonialism interrogated and, somewhat, shamed out of existence? I wonder if I would care so much if I hadn’t grown up loving those “Orientalist” tales from people who often oversimplified and patronized, but still deeply loved cultures not their own….

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* I wrote that sentence, and upon reading it back went

While I (obviously, I hope!) meant “chink” as defined by Oxford Languages as “a weak point in someone's character, arguments, or ideas, making them vulnerable to attack or criticism”, it highlights just how pervasive bigotry is in the English language because it also means, according to Wikipedia, “an English-language ethnic slur usually referring to a person of Chinese descent, but against people of East Asian, North Asian, Southeast Asian appearance.”