The Camera is Doubtless a Boy (with a Fetish)

I watched Piccadilly while eating a banana in the library with Emma. We were hungry and anxious to get home, and watched the film in fast-forward in several parts (because we are children of postmodernity), particularly the bits involving Mabel's histrionics (tiresome), but we were compelled to hit play whenever Anna May Wong filled the screen; the camera demanded it of us. The vividness of her on-screen image - vividness, as if her edges were somehow sharper than everyone else's - caused me to pause mid-way through banana-chewery, long enough to get busted eating the illicit item by the particular AV librarian who frightens me.

I wrote an essay last year about Asian fetish pornography, and, perhaps a little perversely, recalled the material I had read for this assignment when I watched Wong's Shosho. Why? Because, somehow, the movie camera becomes the mind's eye, and as such guides thought. Therefore, in that first, memorable scene when we first see Shosho dancing in the scullery, and the camera glides up her body greedily and teasingly, I felt as if it were me regarding her, lingering desirously over her pointy and mesmerising movements as if savouring each upward-panning moment before the piece de resistance: her angular and beautiful Chinese face. Hence my jaw stopped working over my food, hence Em and I became very still and our faces edged minutely closer to the screen.

I wrote of Cornell's fixation on Rose Hobart in my last blog, and I find some similarities in the treatment of Anna May Wong's physicality and on-screen presence by Dupont. However, rather than Cornell's fixation - internal, private, dreamy - what I think we see here is a fetish, a public and masculine fetish. A shared Western fetish for the oriental woman. What I am interested in in terms of Piccadilly is the representation of the fetishised female object in film, and how the viewer experiences this object through a male lens. Let me explain.

According to Richard Fung in his "Looking for my Penis: The Eroticized Asian in Gay Video Porn”, the Western fetish for the Asian female is based on dominant representations of the Asian woman as submissive. “Because of their supposed passivity and sexual compliance,” he writes, “Asian women have been fetishised.” [1] He explains that these representations occur in two forms: “The Lotus Blossom Baby (aka China Doll, Geisha Girl, shy Polynesian beauty, et al.) and the Dragon Lady (devious madams)…" Thus, he goes on, "Asian women in film are for the most part, passive figures who exist to serve men – as love interests for white men (re: Lotus Blossoms)” [2]

In terms of Wong's Shosho, we see that this idea is highly applicable. She is indeed a vixen, a "Dragon Lady" of sorts, who holds a potent sexual power over the men she deals with in the film, even Dupont himself, judging by the way he has directed her - but I would argue that these men never lose control of her - with the exception of her Chinese counterpart, Jim, whose desire for her is rejected in favour of the tall, gentlemanly Valentine. She does not upset or disturb beyond what is narratively called for, but rather obediently stays within her frame and plays her assigned stereotype: an exotic and dark beauty with come-to-bed-bad-boy-almond-shaped-eyes.

Shosho's rejection of Jim in favour of Valentine is certainly worth comment in reference to Western representations of the Asian male. Fung writes, "Asians are collectively seen as undersexed" [3] through a Western lens. He continues, Asian men… have been assigned to one of two categories: the egghead/wimp, or – in what may be analogous to the lotus-blossom-dragon-lady dichotomy – the kung fu master/ ninja/ samurai. He is… almost always characterized by a desexualized Zen asceticism… defined by a striking absence down there. [4]

Jim is certainly not sexy in Piccadilly - he is relegated to "peripheral character" status, and in fact, he doesn't even get the dignity of being identified to the audience. We just assume he's some kind of ex-lover of Shosho's. All he really does is be shunted, ordered around and sort of - lurk. And then, at the end of it all, he's the sobbing wretch who murders Shosho out of jealousy. He's dark and small in the frame to Valentine's large whiteness; the camera does not like poor Jim. But is mad for Valentine, and even madder for Shosho.

Which leads me to the conclusion that the camera is undoubtedly male in Piccadilly; a Western male with a fetish for (and fear of) Asian girls. The first implication for this is that, as viewers being taken on a "strange adventure" over which we have no control, we experience being a man regarding a woman, for the camera lens attaches itself to our retinas and connects with our brains and this is all we know and see for a little while. Therefore we see the great power of a director, and the pressing need for other cinematic voices to be available, as these days they are. Cinema, which echoes the workings of the mind more precisely than any other medium, is beautifully, terribly influential.

What we see in the dismissal of Jim and Valentine's easy possession of her is echoed in an online forum called “ASIA’ZINE”, where a participant writes,

All this [cinematic representation] serves to convince the Asian fetishist that they have a good shot in landing an Asian female. What they perceive as the meekness of the Asian male boosts their own ego, since it removes them as a threat in the dating game. It makes the fetishist feel special, as if they have something to offer outside of what an Asian male could. They become convinced that they are Casanovas to the Asian female. [5]

However, perhaps the recent popularity in the west of films such as Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000) and Hero (2003) represents a Western desire to experience "exoticism" outside of a fetishising and masculine cinematic lens. Do have a look at this link (the men in Hero leave Jimbo for dead without succumbing to Western representations of the guy-that-gets-the-girl, while the female characters are truly powerful).

Works cited:

[1] Fung, Richard. “Looking for my Penis: The Eroticized Asian in Gay Video Porn” in Asian American Sexualities: Dimensions of the Gay and Lesbian Experience (1996). London and New York, Routledge, p. 183.

[2] Ibid, p.182

[3] Ibid, p. 183

[4] Ibid, p. 183

[5] ASIA’ZINE: The Hows and Whys Behind the Fetish: Opinions of an ABC. http://www.asiazine.com/dating/dat06011.htm Accessed 5/09/07