Brian Locke Book Abstract

Racial Stigma on the Hollywood Screen:

The Orientalist Buddy Film
(Palgrave Macmillan, 2009, paperback 2012)

Locke grabs the reader with an intensity that is personal . . . subtle and powerful . . . brilliant . . . 100
percent solid, 0 percent sermonistic -- CHOICE (August 2010).

Through an interdisciplinary approach that emphasizes an understanding of texts within their historical,
social, and cultural context, Locke weaves a compelling argument -- American Quarterly (Dec. 2012).

Racial Stigma on the Hollywood Screen: The Orientalist Buddy Film is one of the few, if not the only,
books to answer a fundamental question for Asian American Studies. From the beginning, the topic of
exclusion from representations of US identity has structured the field. For example, Aiiieeeee! An
Anthology of Asian American Writers (Frank Chin, et al., 1974), Strangers from a Different Shore: A History
of Asian Americans (Ron Takaki, 1989), Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics (Lisa Lowe,
1996), and Orientals: Asian Americans in Popular Culture (Robert G. Lee, 1999) focus to varying degrees
on the alienation of the Asian American subject in relation to national identity. None of these key works,
however, explains American cultures tendency to portray the Asian as foreign in the first place. In
comparative and interdisciplinary terms, Racial Stigma tracks from WWII to 9/11 the history of a wholly
unexamined type of movie. The Orientalist buddy film offers a scenario in which two American men, one
white and one black, transcend an initial hatred for one another by joining forces against an Asian
menace. By depicting the Asian villain as foreign, white and black bond as Americans. By depicting the
Asian villain as racist towards African Americans, even more so than the white characters, the Orientalist
buddy film transfers the stigma of American racism from white to yellow, achieving what Ren Girard calls
the scapegoat effect. This vilification of the Asian emphasizes what the two American buddies share,
thus dissolving the differences between them. Such a rendering of race, the book shows, ameliorates the
longstanding historical contradiction between democratic ideals and white Americas persistent
domination of blacks. Six chapters cover a variety of Hollywood genres: the combat movie, the
interracial buddy movie, Blaxploitation, the detective film, and science fiction.
Chapter 1 analyzes Tay Garnetts 1943 WWII combat film, Bataan, an important precursor to the
Orientalist buddy film that pits white and black Americans against Japanese forces who have invaded
the Philippines. Bataan exhibits two distinct tropes that subsequent movies will fuse into the white and
black buddy portion of the Orientalist buddy film. Two white men begin the film as enemies, but
eventually they bond in the face of the common foe. This standard version of the buddy dyadwhat Ed
Brian Locke Book Abstract 2

Guerrero calls the white male buddy moviecovers nearly the entire history of film from, for example,
What Price Glory? (Raoul Walsh, 1926) to Mississippi Burning (Alan Parker, 1988) and beyond. In addition to
the buddy dyad that drives the narrative, the film includes, for the first time in Hollywood history, a
sympathetic black American character as part of its combat unit. Even though the American military did
not desegregate until well after WWII, Bataans black soldier appears in a few key scenes in response to
the eras emphasis on building a faade of national racial unity.
Chapter 2 addresses the Cold War era, showing how three more combat moviesChina Gate
(Samuel Fuller, 1957), Pork Chop Hill (Lewis Milestone, 1959), and All the Young Men (Hall Bartlett, 1960)
repeat Bataans triangulation of race in response to the same need to mend, at least cinematically, the
gap between American democratic theory and practice as it relates to race. Like the WWII war movie of
the previous chapter, these films include a lone black figure as part of a mostly white combat team,
which they set against an Asian communist enemy. The chapter focuses on the relationship between the
black figure and the buddy dyad that propels the narrative. In the 1943 Bataan, two white male
characters constitute the buddy dyad. With a change that reflects the 1948 American military
desegregation, however, these three war movies incorporate the black soldier into the buddy dyad,
putting racial tension, and eventually the transcendence of that tension through what I call racial
brinkmanship, at the center of the story. By promoting blackness from a token to a central role, the
movies depict the reconciliation of two men, one white and the other black, in the face of an Asian
threat, making them three of Hollywoods earliest Orientalist buddy films.
Chapter 3 sharpens my profile of the Orientalist buddy film by analyzing what I call the
Blaxploitation buddy film, a derivative of the standard Blaxploitation genre that surfaced in the wake of
the civil rights movement and Hollywoods financial crisis of the early 1970s. Al Adamsons The Dynamite
Brothers (1974), Chuck Bails Cleopatra Jones and the Casino of Gold (1975), Cirio Santiagos TNT Jackson
(1975), and Chih Chens Way of the Black Dragon (1978) repeat the triangle of an interracial buddy dyad
set against a common enemy. Instead of the formula of white and black buddies fighting an Asian
threat, however, the political and cultural solidarity between African American and various Asian and
Asian American groups generated by black Americas push for equality at home and an unpopular war
in Southeast Asia forces a reconfiguration of the Orientalist buddy films racial assignments, such that
black and yellow buddies bond in the face of a racist white villain. Thus, in the Blaxploitation buddy film,
the racist villain who functions as the scapegoat, the one who bears the stigma of Americas racism
toward black people, is white instead of Asian.
Chapter 4 focuses on Flash Gordon (Mike Hodges, 1980), the Lethal Weapon series (Richard
Donner, 19871998), and Rising Sun (Philip Kaufman, 1993) to illustrate how the Orientalist buddy film
evolves near the end of the century. Rising Sun repeats several key aspects of the previous chapters
movies. Like the Cold War era combat films in chapter 2, it features a white and black dyad, two men
Brian Locke Book Abstract 3

who distrust each other initially but eventually bond in the face of a common Asian threat. Like All the
Young Men and Bataan, Rising Sun represents that enemy as even more racist against African Americans
than the white characters in the diegesis, thereby transferring onto the Asian the stigma of white
Americas history of racism toward African Americans. In other words, the common Asian foe to both
white and black functions as a scapegoat. The film registers the historical particularities of its time by
changing its representation of the Asian enemy to reflect the widespread paranoia in the United States
during the 1980s and 1990s of a Japanese industrial conquest. Rising Sun resurrects Bataans WWII enemy
by depicting the mutual threat to white and black Americans as yet another invading samurai force. But
rather than a military peril of sword-wielding soldiers, the film represents its villain as an economic one, an
army of model minority businessmen who work for a wealthy Nipponese multinational corporation.
Chapter 5 argues that Sir Ridley Scotts science fiction classic Blade Runner (initially released in
1982 and re-released in 1992 and 2007) fits the Orientalist buddy film formula as I have characterized it,
even though the film contains no black bodies. The film depicts a bonding between two men against the
backdrop of an Asian cultural and economic invasion of Los Angeles. The movies absence of black
actors, however, seems to disqualify it as an example of the trope as I have defined it. The chapter shows
that, instead of using actual black bodies, the film codes one of its two white male leads, the rogue
replicant Roy Batty, as black by making him a slave. Oftentimes in the postcivil-rights era, Hollywood films
disguise their use of race, signifying it indirectly through metaphor rather than directly through bodies that
conform to our traditional notions of biological race. Important critics such as Toni Morrison (race as
metaphor), Michael Omi and Howard Winant (race as code words or race in disguise), Stuart Hall
(inferential racism), Tali Mendelberg (implicit racial appeals), Claire Jean Kim (color blind talk), and
John Fiske (nonracist racism) exhort us to pay particular attention to the metaphorical deployment of
race. In the postcivil-rights period of equality, white supremacy persists largely by means of racial
metaphor despite the disappearance of older forms of de jure racism.
Chapter 6 argues that, like Blade Runner, Andy and Larry Wachowskis popular science fiction film
The Matrix (1999) advances the project of the Orientalist buddy film by signaling race, in particular the
Asian, indirectly through metaphor. The movies computer-generated villains are racially ambiguous
signs. White actors fill the villain roles, but, in a form of rhetorical recycling, the film represents them
according to the formulas of the WWII yellow peril Japanese enemy and the 1960s Asian model minority.
This multivalence enables the film tacitly to scapegoat Asians for white mistreatment of black Americans,
in particular, the 1991 Rodney King beating and the subsequent acquittal of his LA police assailants in
1992.
The epilogue of the 2012 paperback version suggests that the figure of the Middle Eastern terrorist
will replace that of the Asian enemy as one of Hollywoods principal vehicles for bonding white and
black, allowing the Asian male to enter the American patriarchal fold, at least on the screen.