Words by Rena Hoshino
Despite the success of recent blockbusters with Asian casts, Hollywood is still very much hung up on the idea of ‘the Orient’.
With the exception of the pandemic years, the film industry has been continually growing since 2005. Alongside the rise of streaming services, film media often reflects the ideologies of the time, resulting in historical media that has reflected badly on the acceptable derogatory treatment of minority groups, even straying into Orientalism.
In the past, the West referred to themselves as the Occident and the East (the Middle East, North Africa, and Asia) as the Orient, accentuating a dynamic of the former ruling over the latter. Those who wrote Orientalist texts believed the Occident were inherently wiser and more civilised and could thus liberate the supposed ‘savage’ and ‘exotic’ Orient. Published in 1978, Edward Said’s Orientalism explains that “Orientalism, which is the system of European or Western knowledge about the Orient… becomes synonymous with European domination of the Orient”.
Within the last year, there are two action movies in particular that seem to participate in this presentation of Japanese culture.
Adapted from the Japanese novel Maria Beetle by Kōtarō Isaka, David Leitch’s Bullet Train stars Brad Pitt as Ladybug, an anxious assassin who considers himself unlucky. The film grossed over $230 million worldwide, but organisations such as the Japanese American Citizens League criticised the film for the clash of its Japanese setting with non-Japanese characters.
Responding to criticisms of the cast being whitewashed, Isaka noted that his characters are not real and therefore “ethnically malleable”. However, the main issue taken with the move isn’t necessarily the novel’s heavily Westernised composition, but the representation of the setting and of Japanese characters who take a backseat in their own story.
Ladybug’s reactions to the setting around him are largely based on stereotypical assumptions of Japan, from quips about expecting the public to be “polite”, to being unable to work a bidet toilet. Brad Pitt may pull off the movie’s absurd humour well, but this doesn’t hide its bad aftertaste. His character, translated into film as Western, becomes an unsavoury parallel of the West’s long history of looking down on the East.
This sentiment is only reinforced by the film’s main plot being centred around the betrayal of a Japanese clan by a Russian supervillain called “The White Death”. Amongst this turmoil, Brad Pitt’s Ladybug saves Andrew Koji’s Kimura and his father who are presented as helpless, reminiscent of a fantasy of an Orient that badly need to be rescued by the supposed saviour Occident.
Another example of the problem is John Wick: Chapter 4, similarly directed by David Leitch, albeit in a co-director capacity this time. Grossing over $400 million, the film opens with John Wick (Keanu Reeves) chasing three men clad in linen through the Moroccan desert. Wick is immune to the climate, dressed a simple suit and setting the tone for a film that relies on the idea surrounding cultures rather than sufficiently-researched aesthetics.
Hiroyuki Sanada stars as Shimazu Koji, manager at the Osaka Continental, a setting that leans into the realm of techno-orientalism with neon lighting and shiny surfaces that combine with jarring sakura tree decor akin to the visuals of Blade Runner 2049.
When the Continental falls under attack, Koji calls his guild to arms and, in a bizarre contrast to the futuristic setting, their armouries are revealed to be full of bows, arrows, throwing stars, and samurai swords. This echoes a creative choice made in Bullet Train: there’s a flashback sequence in which swords are brought to a gunfight in a cheap bid to poke fun at Japanese culture. Although Hiroyuki Sanada has a history of correcting American directors’ misperceptions of Japanese culture, David Leitch and co-director Chad Stahelski seem to nevertheless construct a very particular caricature of Japan in John Wick, as if the only way Japanese characters could be involved in any action movie is by appearing as they may have in the 16th century.
When movies with a wide global reach recall dynamics of Orientalism, they reinforce the unsettling ideology that countries beyond the West are places of archaic tradition that can only become ‘civilised’ through contact with Western protagonists. The characters in these stories are only permitted a minority space even though these films are exploring their home countries. It seems that despite movies such as Everything Everywhere All At Once and Parasite proving that Asian casts and stories do not isolate the Western viewer, Hollywood seems to still think they do.
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