This week we were asked to reflect on how racial relationships, discrimination or racism affects film & TV output and how/why it changes over time.
That got me thinking about orientalism in art, a topic that has long been of interest to me. Being of Chinese descent myself though I was born in and live in Singapore, I am in a unique position to notice how Asian cultures are handled in Hollywood media, how we have been portrayed in visual art throughout the ages and what effects we are seeing from that. Orientalism has indeed given us some beautiful art and design, but it is important to be able to acknowledge that that does not make orientalist depictions any less harmful.
Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, The Turkish Bath, 1862. This highly eroticized depiction of Turkish women showed a general impression held that women of the Orient were viewed as more sensually open and exotic.
Orientalism in films is arises where media portrays Asian cultures often from imagination rather than from educated research and ends up exoticizing the geographies of the countries represented, along with the people. In many of these films, the foreign landscape is often a stage for heroic white characters to do battle with villains from the East (The Mummy - 1999, Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark - 1981), while indigenous women are often portrayed in an overly sexualized manner (Princess Jasmine in Aladdin, and Chiyo Sakamoto in Memoirs of a Geisha).
These films may not be overtly racist or discriminatory against Indigenous characters portrayed in them, but they do give rise to some harmful tropes based off the exoticization and fetishization of “otherness”.
One of these tropes is termed the “born sexy yesterday” trope, often used nowadays to depict alien women (Leeloo in The Fifth Element - 1997), sinisterly appeals to the allure of exotic, sexual yet ignorant women, often with the intellect and naivete of a child but in the body of an adult character. The way the female character is framed is similar to how indigenous women are often viewed through a colonial lens, with the narrative similarly driven by traditional masculine ideologies.
Another is the “white saviour” narrative– (Gran Torino - 2008, Avatar - 2009). Typically seen in American films, these narratives elevate the morality of the white protagonist by having them do something heroic and/or self-sacrificial to the benefit of the non-white characters in the film. While not racist in of itself, the narrative often misrepresents the reality faced by most non-white cultures, and often erases actual problems faced by the people of these cultures.
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