By Alicia Yau
If you’re the type of person that can access stunning insight in your first run through a piece of media I salute you— I am your braindead antithesis. Even so, watching Dune II did have my eyebrows skirting upwards at the whiteness of the main cast set against a backdrop of MENA actors playing a people who are broadly forgettable (IMO) beyond their disposition towards zealotry. I don’t claim expertise on the quality of Dune’s engagement with its overtly Islamic considerations, but it recalled an age old conversation about appropriation and rampant exoticism that the high-profile and release date of this film reminds me is present and accounted for still.
Why does Sci-Fi always seem to be at the scene of the crime? A couple years ago telling people to cast Scarlet Johansson if they ever do a biopic of me was still a new jibe because her casting in Ghost in a Shell was freshly riding off the coattails of Blade Runner and the Matrix and Cloud Atlas and you get the gist. Cyberpunk in Hollywood tends to manifest in a neon infested amalgamation of Shanghai, Tokyo, and Hong Kong, masking fears of Western decline by entrenching the West as the architect and sole inhibitor of East Asian megalopolis. That’s me saying it’s really weird that as a cultural response to being afraid of a new hegemon in the East they either empty our cities of us or create us in those unflinching cyborgs that steal all the darn jobs and castrate society’s human core. These depictions draw on American panic towards Japan’s post-war boom and later the Chinese economic miracle but really, it’s the refurbished version of much older preoccupation— Orientalism.
The Orient is a hazy, alluring vision of the East, a mythical ‘other’ in Western conception. Given that it is predominantly defined by the dreams, fascinations, and conquests of the Occident rather than inherent characteristics belonging to the region, the notion of Orientalism appears an academic courtship of a colonial epoch. It does, however, conceptually saturate geopolitics, sociology, history, and numerous other fields despite its politically awkward origins. Historically there has been a paternalistic tendency of the West to create binaries on our behalf, ostensibly in-absentia of Eastern intellectual ability in identity creation. This is the “assumption that the eternal, uniform Orient is incapable of self-definition” that Edward Said cites in his seminal thesis on the topic. The West is civilized, enlightened and holy; in juxtaposition, the East is barbaric, backwards, and heretical. In the words of Lord Macaulay, maybe moments before imposing English education on the British Raj, “a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia.” It’s a tale as old as time- or rather, white supremacy. By exaggerating the exotic, you widen the chasm between our two spheres, and by illuminating the inferiority of Eastern cultures you legitimize the position of the Western conqueror.
Assumptions about Western cultural superiority continue to legitimize questionable foreign policy, but at least in the media, Orientalism has been declawed somewhat from an assertion of dominion to what is mostly a fantasy of Eastern practices and aesthetics. Yoga is a multibillion dollar industry, chai lattes do great at the tills, movie scenes set in Southeast Asia invariably get the Sepia filter treatment, and the underpinning phenomenon isn’t some great big mystery unravelled– there existed these undertones in importation of Japanese cabinets in 19th century France the same way it presents for a Dallas based company “respectfully refreshing” mah-jong (that is, removing every recognizable feature that felt fresh enough for centuries). Although the tantalizing mystique of the East sells, people unsurprisingly have gripes with the commercialisation of their cultural relics. Some of it is possessiveness, a lot of it is indignance towards the butchery, the bastardisation. People get justifiably annoyed when you don’t stop at distilling the richness of their cultural ancestry into marketable soundbites but then go on to make a mockery or profit– you can even double dip. That is not to say I think it’s worth crucifying people who Chinese concubines secret techniques from Gwyneth Paltrow peddles (don’t look up yoni eggs on school Wi-Fi), possibly because her entire person is just a little bit camp, but mostly because in this age of information, as long as people can be dissuaded from skeevy cultural misconceptions by members of that community, we can let it be a great big joke. Even more than that, it can be unexpectedly beautiful– Chinese people liked Kung Fu Panda so much we had a nation-wide crisis of faith about our inability to reproduce the likes of it.
In its nascence, the Orient was a fiction, but by taking root in popular imagination it has actualised itself and created performance for inhabitants of that fabrication. There is something of a self-perpetuating quality to the concept. I’m of course referring to the self-fetishization that inhabitants of ‘the Orient’ both knowingly and subconsciously engage in. On a wider level, soft-power hinges on cultural exports in film, music, and that may tokenize aesthetics with nary an acknowledgement of complex repercussions in real culture. It works so well these countries can hardly be faulted for it. For instance, the shadow cast by Japan’s brutal imperialist regime has been overridden drastically by the barrage of gleaming cultural commodities that have poured out since. The pop-culture industrial complex that has emerged to transform Japan’s warmongering spectres into the vibrant, eccentric, and cutesy avatars of today has been hard at work. On a more condensed, individual scale, American Chinese restaurants ubiquitous in their offerings (largely Cantonese in taste profile, greasy, fragrant, and definitely “not-too-spicy”) make themselves identifiable through a constrained profile of branding. The Washington Post analysed the names of 40,000 Chinese restaurants in 2016, determining that the words golden, garden, imperial, panda, and dragon appeared the most frequently– emblems meant to evoke a grandiose, exotic element, and a shorthand to understanding the culinary experience they’re shilling. I used to feel a little bit derisively about what I saw as a gaudy mishmash of the diaspora. Why are you as a dim sum place draping your entrance hall in Sakura and anime plushies next to Buddhist statues and fortune cats? But understanding it from a marketing angle is like a great inside joke so really, I applaud these restaurant owners and hope in earnest that they get that bag.
Clearly there’s a line to walk. I can’t, as an Asian, give everyone a free pass because I think Western parodies of Asian culture can be mildly bemusing. In an increasingly sensible age, creatives, particularly those looking to profit, are beholden to the input of volatile combinations of ingenuity, faithfulness, and goodwill. Still, there’s not really an objective measure of how deserving something is of cultural reproach, and you’re never going to have enough time in the world to force people to hold hands, sing kumbaya, and stop misunderstanding each other’s personal histories– that doesn’t mean we can’t still try (after all, we’re no longer nominating actors for yellowface Oscars, wins are wins).