Under the Veil

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The representation of race in Hollywood cinema has been a widely discussed topic in film analysis since the medium’s inception. Historically, non-caucasian ethnicities have been underrepresented and/or misrepresented on the silver screen. It was normal for a white actor or actress to adorn themselves in black or yellowface to represent these races and further alienate them into the category of “the other”. This exclusion has been used time and time again as a tool for distinguishing not the race being alienated but those who are doing the alienation. In the following essay I aim to assess this phenomenon specifically in relation to representation of Asians in Hollywood cinema. To support my theory, I will put into conversation both Gina Marchetti’s essay, “White Knights in Hong Kong” and Anne Cheng’s essay, “Beauty and the Ideal Citizenship: Inventing Asian American in Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Flower Drum Song (1961)”. It was when asked to consider the question of national identity projected upon the bodies on screen as written about by Marchetti and Cheng that I came across my own thesis. Through their in depth analysis I was able to code an underlying theme in the historical representation of Asians in cinema. The theme in which Asian identity is derived through strategically situating them as “the other” in order to explain what it truly means to be an American.
I would like to begin my analysis first with Marchetti’s essay, “White Knights in Hong Kong” taken from her book Romance and Yellow Peril: Race, Sex, and Discursive Strategies in Hollywood Fiction. In this piece she studies the two films Love is a Many-Splendored Thing (Henry King, 1955) and The World of Suzie Wong (Richard Quine, 1960). Her main argument ...

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...ro level forum. She revealed the layers in the plot that tend to get overlooked when viewing a Hollywood musical. Also, her Freudian insight of Linda Low’s character, in which she explains the ego formation and narcissism, mirrors Marchetti’s view of the white knight. Hollywood narrations have notoriously reflected the white male, who I perceive as a representation of American national identity, as a highly narcissistic character. He is portrayed as the hero with patriarchal discourse and male privilege. Overall, both essays dive into the role these films took in constructing a national identity under the veil of a romantic narrative. Both speak to a political subplot on an unconscious, rather than diegetic level. In providing such an in depth analysis, they uncloak the racial and national assimilation that these films depict in relation to the East and West.

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