Romance and Power in the Hollywood Eastern

Nalini Natarajan

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9783030609931
• eBook ISBN:
  9783030609948
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

This book develops the idea of the "Eastern" as an analytically significant genre of film. Positioned in counterpoint to the Western, the famed cowboy genre of the American frontier, the "Eastern" encompasses films that depict the eastern and southern frontiers of Euro-American expansion. Examining six films in particular—Gunga Din (1939), Lawrence of Arabia (1962), Heat and Dust (1983), A Passage to India (1984), Indochine (1992), and The English Patient (1996)—the author explores the duality of the "Eastern" as both aggressive and seductive, depicting conquest and romance at the same time. In juxtaposing these two elements, the book seeks to reveal the double process by which the "Eastern" both diminishes the "East" and Global South and reinforces ignorance about these regions' histories and complexity, thereby setting the stage for ever-escalating political aggression.

 

© The Author(s) 2020

N. NatarajanRomance and Power in the Hollywood Easternhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-60994-8_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Nalini Natarajan¹

(1)

English Department, University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras, San Juan, PR, USA

A correction to this publication are available online at https://​doi.​org/​10.​1007/​978-3-030-60994-8_​8

End Abstract

This book is written for the everyday viewer in order to dismantle, through scene-by-scene analysis, stereotypes and false images of the East/Global South which circulate in the minds of the viewing public of Hollywood and other dominant cinema. Generally, films depicting the East/Global South or the internal other (American Indians, Asians, African Americans, and Latino minorities) lack significant historical or cultural context within which the viewer may form a more complex view. As a result, the same static colonially created images continue to be reinforced, paving the way for more such images, until in the end, these images constitute for many viewers the “truth” rather than ideological constructs. It is only by examining how impressions are built block by block that they may be dismantled. Equally important to Unthinking Eurocentrism is Provincializing Europe (titles by Ella Shohat and Robert Stam; Dipesh Chakraborty). In the case of reading these films, I use the latter to mean an exposing of the “white” subject, male and female, as equally open to scrutiny, unprotected by their hegemonic colonial armor. This move is essential if the stereotyping of “otherness” is to be properly exposed.

The objective of this book is to draw attention, through film analysis, to a genre of films which I collectively call the ‘Eastern’ (see Footnote below). I choose six representative films: Gunga Din (Dir. George Stevens. RKO Radio Pictures, 1939); The Moonstone (Dir. Robert Bierman. BBC, 1996/7); Lawrence of Arabia (Dir. David Lean; Horizon Pictures, 1962; The English Patient (Dir. Anthony Minghella; Tiger Moth Productions, 1996); A Passage to India (Dir. David Lean; Thorn EMI, 1984); A Handful of Dust (Dir. Charles Sturridge; London Weekend Television, 1988); Indochine (Dir. Régis Wargnier; Paradis Films, 1992); and Heat and Dust (Dir. James Ivory; Merchant Ivory Productions 1983).¹

An epilogue looks at a few examples of contemporary transformations in the ‘Eastern.’ While there are hundreds of films that are set in the East, my choice reflects both literary origins, and general cultural influence. All of the films I chose were major cultural influences in their day. In some ways, they stood for landmarks whether exemplifying ‘the white man’s burden’ (the film drew from Kipling’s poem, Gunga Din 1890), or the first detective novel (The Moonstone), whether the famed legendary life of a white man who took common cause with Arabs, or a bestselling novel that went on to Oscars as cinema (The English Patient). The other choices also reflect literary classics. Therefore, while my selection is by no means exhaustive it offers enough examples of powerfully circulating stories involving the East or other parts of the Global South as backdrop.

The term in this study—the ‘Eastern’—needs justification (see para above). Eisele first used the term in reference to Middle ‘Eastern’ locales, in counterpoint to the Western (68–94). I use it as a concept to include the Global South. ‘Eastern’ is used to indicate a ‘fractal’ (in the sense of reflecting it in fragments) mirror image to the western. The East is the site of the West’s oldest colonies and ‘Eastern’ used here as shorthand (see Footnote 1, p. 2).

Similarly, ‘Hollywood’ represents not just studios located in California, but a form of films dominated by the Global North. It too is a shorthand rather than to be taken literally. Hollywood/Pinewood/PBS/BBC series occupy a hallowed position in cinema. They share European protagonists, the normativity of a European way of life, and any locations outside the Anglo-Americas are marked as strange. The films I discuss are not all technically out of Hollywood. Some are shot out of Pinewood, others in France or its colonies. However, often these films ended up being shot in Hollywood or completed there. But in formulaic elements, they can be justifiably placed under the signifier ‘Hollywood.’ If in English, or with English subtitles, they are likely to be viewed by English speaking audiences. I choose the term for its catchy appeal. Like Ella Shohat and Robert Stam, I use ‘Hollywood’ as a “shorthand for … dominant cinema” (Shohat and Stam 7). ‘Hollywood’ is not used literally but as a powerful signifier and as indicating “a state of tension and contradiction” (Shohat and Stam 7). They also discuss Hollywood’s world hegemony and its attempt “to initiate generation after generation into the European paradigm” (62). Shohat and Stam pointed out the normativity of Europe (leading to the phenomenon called Eurocentrism) in Western culture and media. They probe what narrative and cinematic strategies have privileged European perspectives:

we use the term Hollywood not to convey knee jerk rejection of all commercial cinema, but rather as a kind of shorthand for a massively industrial, ideologically reactionary, and stylistically conservative form of dominant cinema. (7)

Thus, the two terms in my title indicate a less literal approach and I have used the two terms as connotative signifiers, rather than strictly denotative terms. In today’s globalized world where borders leak into each other—as seen tragically by the coronavirus—we must admit the porous reality we live in. Hollywood is not ironclad geographically, any more than Eastern is. They are both ideological categories rather than strictly geographical ones.

Shohat and Stam were among the first to point out that the rise of cinema coincided with the huge epoch of Empire, that while cinema and psychoanalysis, cinema and nationalism, cinema and consumerism have been noted as coincident, Cinema and Empire has not been as much (100). They discuss the hegemonic representation and power of the Eurocentricity which has so infected us. Their point is compelling. The world has been remade to allow no space for the deconstruction of such Eurocentricity. Even alternative movie empires like Bollywood, while inserting a totally different value system, still distort Indic phenotypes to make them appear Caucasian thus doing nothing to dislodge those long-held stereotypes that over a century of Eurocentric portrayals have established, to shore up white ‘superiority.’

My approach, while influenced by their discussion of Eurocentrism, is more interested in generic workings of the Western, the ‘Eastern,’ the Adventure film, and Romance. My book attempts to look closely at narrative and filmic ways in which the Hollywood Western’s redrawing of geography, and the way the Western psyche was framed in relation to this geography, is transposed on to the genre I call the ‘Eastern.’ In Shohat and Stam’s narrative, audiences were diverted by the grand narrative of imperial film, exotic locations where the discourse continued to be constructed.

Shohat and Stam have described the ideological process at work in the Western, summarized thus by Dana Oscherwitz:

Shohat and Stam have also read the Western, one of the earliest film genres to evolve, as a filmic cousin to the imperial adventure. They suggest, for example, that westerns and colonial films shared basic narrative and ideological characteristics, with the primary difference being that colonial films were set in Africa, India, or other European colonies, whereas westerns told the story of imperial-style adventures on the American frontier. (114)

The myth of the frontier is itself intimately bound up in colonial ideology, according to Shohat and Stam, both because it emerged in the colonial era and because it valorizes the hierarchical, competitive logic that justifies imperialism (115). Shohat and Stam, he says, discuss the Western’s “genre’s ideological premises,” its procedures for fostering identification, and consistency; also, as showing Native Americans as “intruders in their own land” (119). Finally, the Western’s imperial narrative was compounded by the existence of a temporally condensed representation of history and a spatially condensed setting, both of which are also typical of the colonial film (115). Therefore, the Western, like imperial cinema, constitutes “a hegemonic colonial discourse” that encourages “non-Europeans to identify with the West and against their own interests and people” (see Oscherwitz).

‘Eastern’ deliberately refers to these films in counterpoint to the Western, the famed cowboy genre of the American frontier (see Footnote, pp. 2–3). While those films pushed the Western American border, these similarly pushed the ‘Eastern’/Southern frontier of Euro-American expansion. The films are both assertive and seductive, depicting conquest and ‘romance’ at the same time, and it is this process I wish to explore.

‘Romance’ as a term is used in an unstable sense.² It is not fixed in meaning but changes contextually. Romance can be used generically, meaning a legacy inherited through epic, literature, culture, and art; it can refer to human gender relations, as in a love story; or relations between man and nature (as in the Romantic poets); it can also vary profoundly cross-culturally. It is thus the quintessential unstable signifier—its instability itself throwing light on the ‘Eastern.’ Owing to my extended context in using both terms, henceforth I will refer to the texts considered in my book as the ‘Hollywood’ ‘Eastern.’

These films have been selected as examples set off from the hundreds of colonial ‘romantic’ Adventure films. Brian Taves has discussed these films’ formulaic elements as subsets of Adventure films dealing with swashbuckling heroes, pirates, James Bond films, and the like. Hollywood, Taves argues, produced these films, like Lives of the Bengal Lancer (1935), King of the Khyber Rifles (1953), Four Feathers (1939), and others because they followed a cookie-cutter model. They usually had a hero whose exploration took him to the other side of the world, a world whose primitivism yet warmth he viewed with an ambivalence that reflected his own inner conflicts. Faced with internal law and order or human cruelty issues, he ends up saving the situation by freeing the “natives” whose own rulers/oppressors were worse than the colonizers (Taves 172–199). These formulaic films make for static films which while portraying history, do not really interact with it. As Taves says, the colonial powers in these formulaic films were interchangeable, and the hero remained the same type as did the despotic rulers, the brigands, and other “natives.”

The films I have chosen are typical of more complex productions, (even Gunga Din which is classed by Taves as an Adventure film, forms the first rung in the set I am looking at). They allow for a clearer excavation of socio-historical patterns behind the formula. These patterns reveal more of the complex ideological specificities, varying by region, colonial power, stage of colonization, gender advances, or regressions both at home and the colonies, the difference in kinds and levels of “othering” of natives as well as historical events such as wars, rebellions, insurrections and so on. In this they are like the Western which, despite its formulaic elements is often linked to specific stories and real border wars, however crudely or inaccurately represented. The Western hero too, like the protagonist of the ‘Eastern,’ does change and evolve.

The films I have picked transcended the formula adventure films. Because of their superior cinematographic quality, the relative reality of their locales (many were shot on location), the specificity and details of the histories they portray, their all-star casts and more broadly “human” rather than stereotyped formulaic appeal, they are both richer and more insidious in their Orientalist messages. How and why this is so is what I set out to explore. Like Adventure films their effects rely on romance: in its loosest sense as both a generic cultural convention/tradition and the timeless human propensity to dream. The nuances of romance are ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. The Western and the Eastern
• 3. Treasure and Thugs: The East as Mystery and Disorder
• 4. The Eastern Desert and the Lone Hero
• 5. The Colonial Gaze, Modernism, and the Trauma of the Tropics
• 6. The East and Love in the Time of Decolonization
• 7. Conclusion
• Correction to: Romance and Power in the Hollywood Eastern
• Back Matter