Australia: Orientalism, Whiteness, and the Transnational Hollywood Blockbuster

To say that Hollywood has won the global image war surrounding identity; or, put another way, to say that Hollywood’s films have become the norm of cinematic representation, is largely a redundant gesture.

But recent Hollywood cinema’s explorations of other nations, ethnic minorities and alternative identities seem to reaching heretofore unscaled heights of uneasy stereotypicality. Take Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay (dirs. Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg, 2008). On the surface the films affords two skilled comedic actors from non-white backgrounds almost unprecedented screen time and character agency. As protagonists, Harold (John Cho) and Kumar (Kal Penn) do in fact work towards the deconstruction of contemporary stereotypes of Asian-ness in a narrative that equally ridicules perceptions of Asian cultural conservatism alongside testing the boundaries of “good taste” within American gross out comedy. Scatalogical humour to one side though, the film often focuses on the potential of white-on-non-white violence, sexual or otherwise, and positions its protagonists as hapless victims for the majority of the film’s action. In doing so, the stereotypes, while challenged on one level, remain in place on a deeper one, bringing into focus American mainstream cinema’s problematic relationship to non-white heroes.

Since Edward Said wrote Orientalism in 1978, academics have had a well-known tool by which to analyse the power relations in images and text flowing from the west to the east. Indeed, one of the most useful aspects of Said’s work is his emphasis on the fact that Orientalism describes nothing so well as the West’s understanding of itself in view of its Others. As the Harold and Kumar film franchise suggests, American cinema remains deeply ambivalent about its status as a “melting pot” of national and ethnic identities that are both constantly in flux and under negotiation.

Baz Luhrmann’s paean to, and mytholgisation of, Australian history is a fascinating departure from either the assimilationist comedies or exoticised otherness models of recent Hollywood filmmaking.

This is not to suggest that Hollywood’s deployment of cultural otherness in its films is standardised. Memoirs of a Geisha (dir. Rob Marshall, 2005), for instance, provides a fascinating inverse to the Harold and Kumar films, showing the flip side of the Orientalist coin. While Harold and Kumar are deeply Americanised “others” who function within the American mainstream, but at its margins, Memoirs of a Geisha offers characters crystallised as historical stereotypes of foreign otherness. Exoticised, sexualised and commercialised (as can be seen both in the film’s selling of virginity in the mizuage ceremony, and through Max Factor make-up adverts from the time) the Orientalism of Memoirs of a Geisha works both at a textual and extra-textual level. The pan-Asian casting of actors and actresses, on the one hand, demonstrated Hollywood’s attempt to create a transnational blockbuster, a blockbuster that denied Asian national borders and differences and showed America’s capacity to present its cultural others back to themselves. On the other hand, Memoirs of a Geisha also demonstrated Hollywood’s willingness to deny cultural difference. While the cast may be pan-Asian, the dialogue is delivered in heavily (and differently) accented English, the film was made on American sets and the story was based on a book by a Western man. Therefore, in many ways Memoirs of a Geisha was never a “Japanese” text, but rather a treatise on Western understandings of Japanese traditions and culture.

Australia (2008), Baz Luhrmann’s paean to, and mytholgisation of, Australian history is a fascinating departure from either the assimilationist comedies or exoticised otherness models of recent Hollywood filmmaking. Framed as a story told by a young Aboriginal boy, Nullah (Brandon Walters), Australia is a highly postmodern remaking of largely American mythic films and genres, featuring an Australian internal other that is depicted as external and exotic to American culture. Borrowing heavily from the iconography of the Western genre and from specific film texts like Gone with the Wind (dir. Victor Fleming, 1939) and even showcasing scenes from The Wizard of Oz (dir. Victor Fleming, 1939), as well as repeated performances of “Somewhere over the Rainbow”, it becomes hard to argue that Australia is a film about Australia at all. The transnationality that the narrative embraces, through Nicole Kidman’s English aristocrat, and scenes showing (imagined) Japanese invading troupes, for example, is balanced carefully against a set of Australian characters intended to display a presumably authentic sense of Australian nationality. However, Nullah, his grandfather King George (David Gulpilil) and various other Aboriginal characters sparked controversy.The tension between the transnational and the national caused a storm of nationalist pro-sentiment for the film (Marcia Langton, 2008 provides an exemplar) and a backlash against the inaccurate romanticised stereotyping of Aboriginal life (Greer, 2008; Buckmaster, 2008). Luke Buckmaster, for example, went as far as to proclaim

“It’s as if Australia… was built with one under riding intention: to amalgamate as many national clichés and stereotypes as is humanly, cinematically, possible [and] this time around, outside the auspices of comedy, veering dangerously close to ‘historical’ epic, the ramifications are dire.… Luhrmann presents a time that never happened, in a place that never existed, with a people light years away from embodying, or even suggesting, what it means to be an Australian. (Buckmaster, 2008)

So, despite the fact that the film offers a mythogisation of Australian history through the lens of American genres, it was not this but the reduction of complex Australian political issues into a solvable romantic and familial story of a multi-ethnic and multi-national family that seems to have driven criticism Luhrmann’s refusal to engage with the “real” history of Australia, in its sometimes inglorious and probably unfilmable ignominy (Greer, 2008), offers an echo of the problematic and highly contested nature of Native American representation in American cinema and film. To be clear, Luhrmann’s film is guilty of pandering to stereotypes of Australian-ness, in much the same way as a repertoire of national and ethnic clichés can be seen in Memoirs of a Geisha or in the Harold and Kumar films, but it is not unusual in doing so.

The distinction seems to lie in the expectation from Australian commentators that this would be a truly Australian film, and not a transnational, Hollywood-funded blockbuster film designed to present a romanticised myth of (American) Australian history to its viewers. Moreover, the tension between the white heroism of protagonists the Drover (Hugh Jackman) and Lady Sarah Ashley (Kidman) and their supporting cast of “good” and “magic” Aboriginal stock characters forces Australia to problematise whiteness (making white Australia the villain), while at the same time absolving white Australia (creating the multi-ethnic happy family). Australia then, offers a problematic “story”, told by an Aboriginal boy, of a land that is myth, but seemingly more an American than an Australian one.

References

Buckmaster, Luke. “Review: Australia (2008).” In Film (27 Nov 2008). http://www.infilm.com.au/?p=604 (last accessed 06 June 2009).

Chipperfield, Mark. “Baz Luhrmann’s Australia: the epic Outback.” The Telegraph. (05 Sep 2008) http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/artsandculture/2682398/Baz-Luhrmanns-Australia-the-epic-Outback.html (last accessed 04 June 2009).

Greer, Germain. “Once upon a time in a land, far, far away.” Guardian.co.uk. (16 Dec 2008). http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2008/dec/16/baz-luhrmann-australia (last accessed 04 June 2009).

Langton, Marcia. “Faraway Downs fantasy resonates close to home.” Theage.com.au (23 Nov 2009). http://www.theage.com.au/news/entertainment/film/faraway-downs-fantasy-resonates-close-to-home/2008/11/23/1227375027931.html (last accessed 06 June 2008).

Said, Edward. Orientalism. 1978