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bystudentanne · 5 years ago

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A Critical Analysis of Zhang Yimou’s The Great Wall Using the Theory of Orientalism

In Orientalism, Edward Said (1979:2) defines Orientalism as a style of thought that makes a distinction between “the Orient” and “the Occident”. This distinction is often used by writers from multiple fields as a source to create “theories, epics, novels, social descriptions, and political accounts” about the Orient and its people (ibid). The “fantasized perception” that the West has of the Orient is influenced by the sense of superiority that the former feels it has over the latter and the inaccurate representations of the Orient conveyed through clichés (Donzé-Magnier, 2017:2). In this paper, the theory of Orientalism will be used to analyse the 2016 film, The Great Wall, directed by acclaimed Chinese director, Zhang Yimou. The theory of Orientalism will be incorporated in this analysis to explain how the fantasy film paints China as an exotic and mystical region by analysing the stereotypical patterns and elements often seen in films about the region and the Orient. The key areas that will be discussed in this paper include the depiction of China as the Other; the inaccuracy in historical representations; the use of familiar and stereotypical patterns in portraying ancient China; the film’s presentation of the white saviour myth; and the concept of self-orientalism.

The film which is set in 11th century Northern Song Dynasty begins with the introduction of lead actor Matt Damon’s character, William Garin, who is part of a European group of mercenaries that head to China in search of black powder. As the mercenaries flee from a group of Khitan bandits and eventually seek refuge in a cave, they encounter and defeat a mysterious monster. Garin and his comrade Pero Tovar become the sole survivors and eventually stumble upon the Great Wall and are captured by General Shao and his army, known as the Nameless Order. The Nameless Order are a group of elite warriors responsible for defending the Great Wall and the areas within its confines from the invasion of the monsters known as the Taotie. The Taotie attack the Great Wall every 60 years and coincidently this occurs during the mercenaries’ venture into China. Initially, Garin and Tovar have no desire to stay and entangle themselves in the problems of the Nameless Order, and instead wish to complete their mission of stealing black powder. However, upon being educated on the principles of the army, Garin is ignited with a desire to fight alongside them despite Tovar being against it. The film presents multiple moral lessons, beautiful visuals and exciting combat scenes, but it does so at the expense of orientalising the Chinese culture.

Orientalism created binary oppositions between the West and East with the former being “normal” and the latter being “different” (Said, 1978:48). Although the film is helmed by a Chinese director and has the largest Chinese cast ever assembled, it is still a depiction of China within a Western gaze as this is confirmed by Zhang who says, “This script was written by American screenwriters. So the story is really told from an American’s perspective.” (McGovern, 2016). America’s film portrayals of China and the Chinese have consistently created divisions between the (American) Self and the (Chinese) Other through the use of binaries to differentiate between the two (Greene, 2014:11). These binaries not only create divisions between the West and East, but it also helps define the two as explained by Edward Said (ibid) who says, “the Orient has helped to define Europe (or the West)”, and vice versa.

The Great Wall, similarly presents binaries to differentiate between the West and East. By introducing the European Garin and Tovar to the Chinese, it naturally creates a chance for the two groups of people to find differences between one another. This practice of distinguishing between the Self and the Other is closely linked to Orientalism (Moosavinia et al., 2011:105) and is regularly seen in the film. Upon being captured by the Nameless Order and witnessing the, Toatie attack the Great Wall, Tovar questions what god made those creatures to which Garin replies by saying, “none that we know”. This can be denoted as a form of othering, as a religion can be othered when talked about from a dominant perspective (Dimitrova, 2016:8). Garin’s reply signifies that he believes the god he knows is not capable of creating such a strange and evil monster and whichever god created them, was not his. Therefore he manages to separate himself from the Chinese who believe their god made the Taotie and thus indirectly others them. Garin and Tovar are also astonished by the Nameless Order, describing them as an unusual army the Europeans had never seen of before. This description paints the Nameless Order as alien and perhaps even dangerous, both of which are adjectives regularly used to describe the Orient (Moosavinia et al., 2011:105).

In the film, the character played by Chinese actress Jing Tian, Commander Lin Mae of the Nameless Order, tells Garin, “I know very little of the outside world”. Unlike Garin who has travelled from Europe to China despite not knowing much about the region other than that it possesses valuable black powder, Commander Lin Mae has not ventured beyond her homeland. This oppositional characteristic between Commander Lin Mae and Garin further portrays the East (Orient) as an antipode of the West (Occident), as the former is unable or reluctant to leave its borders while the latter ventures off to explore. In the book Before Orientalism: Asian Peoples and Cultures in European Travel Writing, Philips (2013:2) suggests that a desire for information and for pleasure were the main reasons that the medieval European travel writers ventured to Asia. Similarly, Garin travels to China in search of information on black powder in hopes of gaining pleasure from the riches he will obtain from selling the stolen black powder. The element of travel itself is often discussed in the discourse of Orientalism as Said (Roan, 2010:3) introduces the concept of imaginative geography, which is “a conception of time and place”. This concept is regularly employed by film makers in films with Orientalist tropes such as The Great Wall, The Mummy films and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. The aforementioned films provide the audience with an opportunity to intensify their sense of self by “dramatizing the distance and difference between what is close to … [them] and what is far away.” (ibid). The Western leads are placed in the exotic East which is a land that clearly looks and feels distant from the West: there geography of the land is different, it is rare to find a native who speaks English, and the Westerners are constantly under some sort of threat be it from the natives themselves or from an evil plaguing the region. These films somehow present the idea that the East is an unusual and dangerous place to be in

The portrayal of the Chinese as the ‘Other’ is visible in the production process of the film as well. Although the film is a U.S.-China co-production, director Zhang describes it as an English-language film, a Hollywood blockbuster and ultimately a Hollywood monster film (McGovern, 2016). The angling of the film in such a manner can be due to the story being produced by American film writers and filmmakers. This is similar to the past where American scholars who studied Chinese culture relied on highly-educated native Chinese refugees to assist them in researching as they were specialised in the Chinese language and culture, but these assistants were deemed incapable of making important analyses and theories unlike the American scholars (Lary, 2006:6). This form of orientalism, parallels the relationship between the American writers of The Great Wall and its Chinese director, Zhang. Zhang as a native Chinese had the task of ensuring that the Chinese elements in the film felt authentic without changing the style of the movie set by the American writers. Therefore while the American (Self) plays the role of creating the main structure of a piece of work, the Chinese (Other) plays a secondary role which is often times less recognized. However, unlike the Chinese assistants of the Western Scholars, Zhang gained more recognition for his contribution to the film compared to the American filmmakers, but this is likely due to him having higher stature within the film industry and among filmgoers.

The film which is set around the actual Great Wall of China, regularly strays away from accurate historical facts, firstly by depicting the wall as a structure built to prevent the invasion of mythical monsters. The Hollywood writers of the film may have taken on the role of a tourist, simply viewing the Great Wall as a “historical playground for a white adventurer and for great cinematic fun”, (Ginneken, 2007:129). This inaccuracy supports the perspective of Orientalism which suggests that the question of ‘true’ or ‘false’ historical representations within Hollywood does not matter (Storey, 2012:177). Historically, the Great Wall was built to repel invaders and restrict the Chinese from foreign cultur, in order to preserve and strengthen their own (DuTemple, 2002:15). Although the Taotie in The Great Wall plays the role of an invader, historically, ‘invaders’ referred to the barbarians and rival tribes that the Chinese rulers and people within the wall saw as a threat or inferior to them (ibid). Rather than portraying the actual historical battles that took place at the Great Wall to accurately represent ancient China, the filmmakers instead merged the non-fictional Great Wall with the fictional Taotie. This imaginary pairing will likely misinform the audience with an inaccurate account of the history of the Great Wall, especially if the audience has little or no prior knowledge on that topic.

Similarly, the film’s depiction of the Northern Song Dynasty’s army was less than accurate. In the film, the Nameless Order consists of five different units that are differentiated by their specialisation and armour colour: the melee-specialist Bear Troop (black), the archer-specialist Eagle Troop (red), the acrobatic-specialist Crane Troop (blue), the siege engine-specialist Tiger Troop (yellow), and the horse-mounted Deer Troop (purple). This film’s army resembles the Qing Dynasty army more than the Northern Song Dynasty army. The Qing Dynasty was the 3rd dynasty after the Song, and was founded by the Manchus who developed a system of social and military organisation known as the ‘Eight Banners’ (Elliott, 2001:xiii). The soldiers of the Qing army dressed in uniforms with jackets that were either white, yellow, blue, or red, according to the “Banner” they were born into (ibid:178), bearing a close resemblance to the units of the Nameless Order. Although the portrayal of the army is similar to what was present in ancient China, there is still a lack of coherence in portraying a specific period of its history.

The historical accuracy of the weapons used in the film can also be questioned. The film relies heavily on black powder, possibly one of China’s most valuable inventions, as the element that drives the progression of the storyline. During the Northern Song Dynasty, weapons such as strong steel arrow tips, devices that launched fire, throw bombs and gunpowder were manufactured and utilized by the army (Li, 2012:416). These historical inventions are seen in the film, however the combat method used by the Crane Troop that bungee jumps off the side of the Great Wall has no historical presence during that period and just acts as a unique embellishment to the film’s army. Similarly, the Nameless Order was featured using hot air balloons to travel. However, the first hot air balloon was invented by the French and only took flight in 1783. It can be argued that the film is a work of non-fiction and therefore should not be used as factual reference, however, as a form of mass media, films inevitably provide a major source of information for people (Green et al, 2003:xi).

The film’s inclusion of a unit within the Nameless Order that solely consists of female soldiers, the Crane Troop, was not historically accurate as well. Throughout the history of the ancient Chinese armies, there have been records of female soldiers fighting alongside their male compatriots such as Fu Hao (Shang dynasty), Xun Guan (Jin dynasty), Princess Pingyang (Tang dynasty), and probably the most widely known being Hua Mulan (Northern Wei dynasty) (Chenxi, 2011). These women were a rarity unlike what is portrayed in The Great Wall. However, this feature was not the idea of the film’s American writers, but instead was created by Zhang, who likes having strong female characters in his films (McGovern, 2016). In the case of the film, it is not possible to collectively say that the West (Occidental) was solely responsible for portraying the East (Oriental) inaccurately, as Zhang, a native Chinese and Oriental, plays a role in misrepresenting his the history of his own culture.

Like every movie that is centred on the depiction of a culture or race, it is common that stereotypes are presented. Stereotypes allow the audience to categorize reality or a group of people, in most cases in a form of negative evaluation (Brandston and Stafford, 2006, cited in Viruega, 2011:3). For example, the China of The Great Wall is stereotyped as a mysterious and dangerous place; a place with monsters and unknown armies. This portrayal is essentially a representation fuelled with orientalist stereotypes of the East. Edward Said explains that the European’s Orient was a place of “romance, exotic beings, haunting memories and landscapes, remarkable experiences” (Richardson, 2010:65). Said’s explanation, minus the romance, is precisely how the film paints China and Garin’s experience there. Romance instead is substituted with the development of a foe-to-friend type of relationship between Garin and Commander Lin Mae.

China was indeed a land of ingenious weapons that experienced multiple dynasties, emperors, invasions and wars. This narrative, although valid historically, has become a generic depiction of ancient China within Hollywood films. In their study, Hammond and Cimpian (2017:612) concluded that generic beliefs play the primary role in the structuring of stereotypes because they are cognitively easy. Generic beliefs pair features with a collective group of people, without considering how prevalent those features are within that group (ibid:608). For example, The Great Wall, Mulan, The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor and Outcast provide similar depictions of ancient China in their films: there is an emperor, an army, and often times a Westerner trying to aid the plight of the Chinese. This one-dimensional portrayal paired with the scarcity of Hollywood movies set in that period, leads to the audience outside of China forming generic beliefs and consequently structuring stereotypes about ancient China and its people. However, Chinese audiences may not be as susceptible to this generic depiction as unlike Hollywood, the Chinese film industry regularly produces periodical films with various storylines. Stories, are a source of information and films as “public narratives” are capable of greatly influencing what we know, believe and remember (Green et al, 2003:xi). Therefore sticking with a generic storyline and depiction, The Great Wall is unable to provide the audience with new pieces of information on the multi-faceted history and culture of ancient China.

The portrayal of Emperor Renzong as a child emperor in The Great Wall is also quite stereotypical. Two other movies about ancient China, Outcast, a French-Canadian-Chinese production, and The Last Emperor, a British-Italian production, similarly included portrayals of the Chinese emperors as juveniles, although the latter is based off the actual last emperor of China, Pu Yi, who took the throne at the age of two in 1908 (Cavendish, 2009). Child emperors were not uncommon in ancient Chinese history with even an heir being declared Emperor of China during infancy. In The Great Wall, Emperor Renzong, played by the then 16-year-old Karry Wang, was portrayed as a naïve young emperor who was foolish enough to allow his imperial officer to bring an unconscious Taotie into the palace, only for it to wake up and signal the rest of the Taotie herd to attack. When Garin and the rest of the Nameless Order arrive to defeat the Taotie at the palace, Emperor Renzong is found hiding behind his throne and berates the Nameless Order for only just coming to his aid. In both The Great Wall and Outcast, the young emperors are helped by Western soldiers. This pattern of the West in choosing to portray Chinese emperors as weak young children despite there being capable adult emperors in Chinese history, further encourages the construction of stereotypes among audiences.

The Great Wall is loaded with Chinese elements. However, as the film is a U.S.-China co-production, it can be viewed as Hollywood writers stereotypically adopting Chinese elements into their films merely to successfully enter the large Chinese market. Like The Great Wall, Kung Fu Panda, a Hollywood animation film about a lazy panda that lives in ancient China who turns into a legendary dragon warrior, is filled with Chinese cultural elements and symbols (Chao, 2012:4). Although not becoming a U.S.-China co-production until it’s third instalment, Kung Fu Panda managed to break Chinese box-office records with Chinese film director Lu Chuan calling it a “film with a fresh take on Chinese culture”, (The Telegraph, 2008). However, Lu criticised The Great Wall, which similarly includes many Chinese elements, for not being a “natural movie” as it felt like an attempt at Hollywood merely looking for Chinese actors to achieve the status of a U.S.-China co-production without first having a story written for the actors (Keegan, 2017). Although The Great Wall and Outcast similarly depict Chinese elements, the two films did not manage to get good reviews from the Chinese market. This stereotypical method of trying to enter the Chinese market with a movie filled with Chinese elements may or may not work depending on how the films are crafted. Co-productions tend to produce narratives that reflect the culture of each participating co-producer in order to satisfy the requirements of the participating countries (Baltruschat, 2002:10), however this method may not fully satisfy neither of its audiences.

Even prior to release, The Great Wall was met with harsh criticism with many questioning the casting of white Hollywood actor Matt Damon as the movie’s lead character (Wong, 2016). Zhang put these accusations to rest by stating that the role was never written for a Chinese actor, therefore Matt Damon’s casting was acceptable. However, the need for the movie to present a white character as the person who saves the day is a classic presentation of the “white saviour” trope which has long history in Hollywood. A “white saviour” film is defined as a genre in which a white person saves a non-white character from a sad fate (Hughey, 2014:1), similar to orientalist tropes that present the Occidental as the rescuer of the Oriental. These films present a white character who crosses colour and cultural lines, saves non-white groups, and experiences some suffering (Bucciferro, 2016:189). In The Great Wall, the Western Garin goes through an experience similar to the ones experienced by “white saviours”. When Garin first arrives, he is treated with hostility and taken captive by the Nameless Order. With time, he learns the values of the Chinese through Commander Lin Mae, and eventually aids the Nameless Order in combating the Taotie. Tovar accuses Garin of trying to be a hero when in fact he was “a thief, a liar, and a killer”. Garin’s ability to so easily change from a “thief” to a “hero” projects the idea that a Westerner merely needs an ill-fated group of foreign people and a few fight scenes to easily achieve nobleness, a nobleness he could not have so easily achieved in his own home country.

In his book, Screening Difference: How Hollywood’s Blockbuster Films Imagine Race, Ethnicity, and Culture, Ginneken’s description on the “Helpers” (Westerners/Occidentals) experience in their colonial adventure is drastically similar to the experience of Garin in ancient China. Like Garin, Ginneken’s “imperial adventure hero” has to confront the odds alone or at times with a comrade, and is shown as an obvious equal to the non-white military commanders (2007:129). Despite only just arriving at the Great Wall with Tovar and slowly gaining the trust of the Nameless Order, Garin manages to prove himself as an expert on killing the Taotie despite the Nameless Order having more experience dealing with the monsters. Garin also manages to outshine the high ranking male members of the Nameless Order who play supporting roles throughout the entire movie, despite well-known and accomplished native Chinese actors playing these characters. The “Helper” as the protagonist helps achieve justice and receives huge rewards as an effect of his noble actions, but the reward was never a motive for his actions (ibid). Throughout the film, Garin is still set on stealing black powder and escaping, however as time he realises his higher purpose and decides to fight alongside the Nameless Order. He eventually manages to help the Nameless Order defeat the Taotie and is rewarded with black powder for his efforts, however this was never the motive behind his decision to stay and help them.

The “white saviour” film as a genre became widely popular in the Hollywood during the 1980s and can be categorised into seven different sub-versions: crossing the colour line; his saving grace; white suffering; the saviour, the bad white, and the native; the colour of meritocracy; white civility, black savagery; based on a true story (Bernardi and Green, 2017:915). Garin’s portrayal of the white saviour in The Great Wall can be classified as two versions, “crossing the colour line” and “white suffering”. In the film, Garin, despite being held captive, starts showing his knowledge and prowess to help the Nameless Order. However, his relationship between Commander Lin Mae, who educates him on the principles of the Nameless Order, plays a vital role in him coming to admire the Chinese army, its peoples and its cause. This is a classic example of a “crossing the colour line”, as similarly seen in The Last Samurai. The Western outsider in this genre starts appreciating the way of life of the local people, just as how Garin, a man who has fought his own share of wars, describes the war being fought by the Nameless Order as a war worth fighting for unlike the ones he fought in previously. Whereas the element of “white suffering” is seen in Garin who is conflicted internally when questioned about what he fights for. In the past he fought wars in the name of god while being driven by greed, however it is in the Nameless Order that he finds the “true” meaning of fighting, and by fighting alongside them he manages to find his own way. The existence of these genres within the film ultimately provides valid reasons for The Great Wall to be classified as a “white saviour” film. Although the Nameless Order did not completely rely on Garin to “save” them, it is with Garin’s arrival and support that they finally succeed in killing the Taotie.

In discussing how The Great Wall orientalises the ancient Chinese, it is important to bear in mind that there were Chinese people involved in the production of this film therefore the American/non-Chinese parties participating in the film cannot be solely held accountable for depicting ancient China in such a manner. The concept of self-orientalism or re-orientalism is based on the act of a person with an Eastern background who comes to accept the orientalised East (Lau and Mendes, 2012:1). These Easterners (Orientals), who are at times cultural producers, choose to comply with the Western audience’s expectations of the East (ibid). In the case of The Great Wall, Zhang can be viewed as a Chinese director that self-orientalises his own culture and race in his work. Zhang willingly accepts the story written by American writers about one of China’s most recognisable historical symbols, the Great Wall. Thus Zhang aids in creating Hollywood’s version of the Great Wall’s history, one which has inaccuracies, orientalist tropes, and stereotypical Chinese elements. Even if the exact story with its “Hollywood monster movie” style had been completely produced by Chinese filmmakers without any outside involvement, it would still be a product of self-orientalism as the film is written with the Western audience’s expectations in mind. Western audiences expect to see certain Chinese elements in films about the region and storytellers write stories to fit those expectations.

Another way in which the East self-orientalises itself is by taking Western orientalist images and changing them from something negative to positive (Telmissany and Schwartz, 2010:187). The products of this self-orientalising process benefits power structures both internationally and within the country being orientalised (ibid). In the case of The Great Wall, the film presented the Hollywood film industry an opportunity to break into the Chinese market while allowing Chinese producers to make a film about Chinese cultural myths and popularise it outside China. It is through self-orientalism that “cultural traits are turned into cultural assets, and merchandised as such”, (ibid). In trying to share its culture to the West, China manages to turn its culture into a product to be made popular. Chinese martial arts for example is a Chinese culture that has successfully become an asset to the region. Hollywood has grown fond of and Americanised the Chinese martial arts culture for many films such as, Kung Fu Panda, The Karate Kid, Birth of the Dragon and Rush Hour to name a few. The popularisation of Chinese martial arts has benefited China’s economy in the form of martial arts tourism with travel agencies even offering travel packages that include receiving martial arts training from native practitioners.

To conclude, although The Great Wall does not completely downgrade ancient China as incapable and backwards, it still presents it as a mystical, magical and mysterious region like a typical Orientalist film would. By continuously providing the audience with a one-dimensional depiction of ancient China, Hollywood is stereotyping it into a land of myths, emperors and ancient armies, which is only a portion of what Chinese culture and history has to offer. It is up to the filmmakers to regularly find different aspects of a culture to showcase in their films to continuously provide entertaining and informational content to their audiences. This not just prevents audiences from stereotyping China, but provides an opportunity for originality to be prioritised rather than to feature the same old clichés of the region. However, the field of co-productions cannot be easily conquered as audiences of different backgrounds decode films in their own ways, and different storytellers bring their own unique style and culture to the story. It is with continuous trial and research that filmmakers will better understand how to appease all audiences without being accused of misrepresentation.

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njawaidofficial · 7 years ago

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“Isle Of Dogs,” Jared Leto, And Our Problem With Talking About Orientalism

https://styleveryday.com/2018/04/04/isle-of-dogs-jared-leto-and-our-problem-with-talking-about-orientalism/

“Isle Of Dogs,” Jared Leto, And Our Problem With Talking About Orientalism

Atari Kobayashi (Koyu Rankin) in Wes Anderson’s Isle of Dogs.

Fox Searchlight Pictures

In 2001, Sarah Silverman told a joke on Late Night With Conan O’Brien that incurred the wrath of Asian American activists and, in a perverse way, also became her breakout moment. The bit involved trying to get out of jury duty, with Silverman recounting a friend’s suggestion that she write something “really inappropriate” on the form — something like “I hate chinks.” But, Silverman said, she didn’t want to cast herself in such an ugly light, so she opted to instead write “I love chinks. Who doesn’t?”

The network that aired the show, NBC, apologized for the slur a few days later. But Silverman refused to, opting instead to fight it out with Guy Aoki, the cofounder of Media Action Network for Asian Americans, on Politically Incorrect. The comedian, who in more recent years has shifted her perspective on — and moved away from — the sort of meta-bigot comedy that marked her rise, insisted at the time that Aoki was a humorless scold who’d missed the point: “It’s not a racist joke,” she said on Politically Incorrect, “it’s a joke about racism.”

She never seemed to hear Aoki’s own point that a slur is still a slur, and that the reason Silverman settled on the one she did was because it was seen as permissible and more acceptable as the stuff of humor. Looking back at this particular sorry-not-sorry moment, and how little the conversation has progressed since, what really rankles is not just the implication that racism against Asians is less serious and less real. It’s the familiar proprietary ease of it all, the sense that it could be gotten away with because Asianness is colonizable enough as an identity that anyone can gain in-group joke privileges. Silverman didn’t intend her chipper punchline (“Who doesn’t?”) to also work as an orientalist slogan, but it did, and still does — a handy summation of the fact that a lot of anti-Asian racism gets presented through a lens of warped, acquisitive affection, and then denied or defended on the basis of it.

It’s not news that orientalism exists, but it still seems like news to many that there’s anything wrong with it.

When Edward Said wrote the book Orientalism in 1978, he focused on the long arc of Europe’s paternalistic conceptions of the Middle East. The term has since been expanded in scope into a broadly useful one for the West’s selective seeing of the East — especially, for the purposes of this piece of writing, East Asia — with many sins included under its umbrella: exotification, condescension, appropriation, othering, and general treatment of Asianness as a cultural buffet from which people feel welcome to help themselves to whatever they’re inclined to take and reject what they aren’t interested in.

Orientalism surfaces in the New Age commodification of Eastern spirituality, in the predilection to glom separate cultures into a blurry whole, in the freedom that still seems to be felt in making open declarations about having a fetish for Asian women or dismissing the sexuality of Asian men. And orientalism shows up onscreen — in films, on television, in music videos — with so much more regularity than good faith representations do that pushing back against it has been a steady drumbeat in Asian American activism for decades now. It’s a thread that runs through the history of American movies, especially, from the early studio days when trailblazing star Anna May Wong’s career was curtailed by stereotypes up through the present, when the likes of Wes Anderson, Jared Leto, Anna Wintour, and Scarlett Johansson are still providing plenty to fight about.

On one level, the fact that this regular stream of distorted images persists speaks to how unaware creators seem to be about what they’re doing, but on another, it shows how little they seem to care. It’s not news that orientalism exists, but it still seems like news to many that there’s anything wrong with it, or that there is, indeed, a difference between, say, objectifying homage and legitimate cultural exchange. Which might be why it’s been so hard to push back.

When racism — in the minds of many — still means open hatred, the idea that it can also come couched in the guise of fandom or fondness is a reality people really don’t want to acknowledge. Orientalism is ultimately about power, which may be why it has taken the rise of international markets, and of China in particular, to force Hollywood to try to see the continent through something other than a scrim of Western assumptions.

Boss (Bill Murray) in Isle of Dogs.

Fox Searchlight Pictures

The most telling thing about the conversations that have followed the release of Wes Anderson’s latest film, Isle of Dogs — a movie that, whatever you think of it, is inarguably about Western assumptions about Japan — is the gap between the thoughtful and measured criticism (much of it from Asian American writers) and the outraged, outsized response to that criticism online. It’s as if the very implication of racial insensitivity is worse than any offense itself could ever be. These commenters were an odd alliance of Anderson devotees and the usual internet complainers who love to call out “identity politics” and “snowflakes,” but most, judging from their Twitter avatars, were white men or sentient anime characters.

But Anderson himself, a filmmaker who has always been clumsy with anything to do with race, has functionally described his own feature as orientalist. At the film’s debut at the Berlin Film Festival in February, he explained that he and his regular collaborators Roman Coppola and Jason Schwartzman had wanted to make a movie about a pack of dogs, and also “something in Japan,” and the two ideas were then just combined: “The story could’ve taken place anywhere, but it came together when we realized it should take place in a fantasy version of Japan.”

And it does, in a near-future Japan that’s also decidedly analog, and home to a dual-species adventure that takes some of its cues from the work of Akira Kurosawa and Hayao Miyazaki. Most of the acting talent is from the US — the dogs, voiced by the likes of Bryan Cranston, Edward Norton, and Scarlett Johansson, speak English, while the humans speak Japanese, which frequently goes untranslated. Most of Anderson’s movies take place in overtly imaginary renditions of actual places, from the outsider’s dream of New York (as drawn from J.D. Salinger and back issues of the New Yorker) in The Royal Tenenbaums to the invented Eastern Europe republic of The Grand Budapest Hotel, a Stefan Zweig–inspired wonderland where real historical horrors lurk behind whimsical imagery. In that sense, the similarly fictional city of Megasaki in Isle of Dogs, along with its adjoining trash- and canine-dump island, is no different.

Tracy Walker (Greta Gerwig) in Isle of Dogs.

Fox Searchlight Pictures

What is different is the real-world cultural context: the tradition of Western othering of Japan that Anderson seems blithely indifferent toward, even as he participates in it. Because it’s stop-motion, the film uses scaled-down puppets to represent its characters onscreen, but it also diminishes them in more figurative ways, with a gaze that’s detached and dispassionate when it comes to most of the humans, aside from 12-year-old Atari Kobayashi (Koyu Rankin) and foreign exchange student Tracy Walker (Greta Gerwig). Tracy, who leads the resistance against Megasaki’s oppressive anti-dog leadership, is the human who gets the bulk of the English-language lines and, with them, the big shows of emotion. She’s the American girl brave enough to take initiative when no native Japanese resident dares — a regrettable foil for stereotypes about Asian compliance.

There’s no overt malicious intent to Isle of Dogs‘ cultural tourism, but it’s marked by a hodgepodge of references that an American like Anderson might cough up if pressed to free associate about Japan — taiko drummers, anime, Hokusai, sumo, kabuki, haiku, cherry blossoms, and a mushroom cloud (!). There’s a plot development in which poisoned wasabi is hidden away in sushi, and a scientist character named Yoko-ono, who is voiced by Yoko Ono. This all has more to do with the (no doubt intricately designed and decorated) insides of Anderson’s brain than it does any actual place. It’s Japan purely as an aesthetic — and another piece of art that treats the East not as a living, breathing half of the planet but as a mirror for the Western imagination.

It’s not the idea of creating a fantasy Japan that’s Anderson’s problem — it’s the underlying sense that he wouldn’t be able to conceive of a real one.

In the wake of Isle of Dogs‘ opening weekend, there were multiple headlines wondering whether the film was an act of appropriation or homage. But the question is rhetorical — the two aren’t mutually exclusive, and the former is not automatically off the table just because the creator’s intent was the latter. More importantly, it’s possible for Isle of Dogs to be both a charming story about humanity’s rapport with canines (try saying the title out loud) and an act of erasure; it can showcase both what its director has traditionally done well and how he’s opted to lean directly into one of his most evident blind spots.

The online reaction to criticism of the film has been filled with blind spots, too, with people unfairly painting the discussion as a call for cultural purity, insisting that “actual Asians” aren’t bothered by any of this, and brandishing cowriter Kunichi Nomura — whom Anderson brought on to advise on cultural specifics as well as provide the voice of his villain — as some kind of human shield against this entire topic. In the space between these two sides of the conversation, you can see how threatening some people find the suggestion that their intent might not matter as much as the reaction of those seeing themselves onscreen. It’s not the idea of creating a fantasy Japan that’s Anderson’s problem — it’s the underlying sense that he wouldn’t be able to conceive of a real one.

Jared Leto in the Netflix movie The Outsider.

Netflix

Of course, it’s very possible for a film to be imbued with fantasy even when it attempts to put a real version of Japan onscreen. The new period drama The Outsider, in which Jared Leto plays an American GI who joins the yakuza in post–World War II Japan, received less attention than Isle of Dogs when it premiered on Netflix earlier in March, but is even more entrenched in the idea of the ownable East. Over years in development, The Outsider tumbled from a potential prestige project — with a Black-Listed script, a perch at Warner Bros., and Michael Fassbender and Tom Hardy bandied around as possible stars — to streaming’s equivalent of direct-to-video. You could interpret that as Hollywood reluctantly waking up to what, exactly, they would be peddling. But that didn’t stop the movie from getting made, with slick production values and an Oscar-winning star.

The relative lack of coverage of The Outsider is partially a function of it being a Netflix original, but it also hints at exhaustion that films like this still get made without any deeper consideration. The premise is one that stretches from Lawrence of Arabia to Avatar: A white man gets dropped into a community alien to him, becomes a part of it, then becomes a better embodiment of the culture than those born into it. It’s an assertion of supremacy The Outsider makes no move to subvert or diverge from as it fits the yakuza genre around its foreign expat, who’s welcomed into an Osaka clan after coming to the aid of a high-ranking member (played by Tadanobu Asano) while they’re both behind bars. Everything else goes pretty much exactly as you’d guess, especially if you’ve seen and remember the beats of The Last Samurai, right up to an ending that affirms Nick as a truer manifestation of yakuza honor than the resentful rival who’s been a lifelong part of the family.

Projects like The Outsider tend to get labeled as acts of whitewashing, but the term doesn’t quite fit; whitewashing is meant to describe white actors getting cast to play nonwhite characters or in place of characters originally written as nonwhite. There was never an Asian lead at the center of The Outsider — it was always, as the title affirms, about a foreigner, and that foreigner was always (given the reported casting efforts) white.

The Outsider would be better described as the latest iteration of an unabashed orientalist fantasy that’s not just about trying on a particular idea of Asianness like an outfit, but establishing dominance over it as well (filmmaker Aaron Stewart-Ahn claimed that in an earlier version of the script he read, “Page 2 actually mentions Caucasians having bigger penises”). Maybe that’s why Leto plays Nick with uncharacteristic reserve, as if he’s not a character so much as the audience’s avatar. It is not the Japanese characters the film expects its audience to relate to, but Leto, a beautiful blank onto which viewers can project themselves.

Rihanna, in a gown by Chinese designer Guo Pei, arrives at the Met Gala benefit in honor of the exhibit “China: Through the Looking Glass” in May 2015.

Timothy A. Clary / AFP / Getty Images

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