Pacific Rim (2013) and The Wolverine (2013) Part 2 – Pacific Rim

NOTE TO THE UNWARY– THIS ARTICLE DEFINITELY CONTAINS SPOILERS!

In my last post, I started a comparison of a pair of films: Guillermo de Toro’s Pacific Rim and James Mangold’s Wolverine. Both of these were released in 2013, and both seem to articulate a shared fantasy space of the global realm, articulated around the Orient as a locus of desire and anxiety. The films, of course, were released at a moment when – at the very least in the Western imagination – the political and economic hegemony of the West, and of America in particular, were increasingly being challenged by the growth of China and the “Asian Tiger” economies. Recently, for example, it has been projected that the twenty-first century will be an “Asian Century” in the same way that the nineteenth century was British and the twentieth was an American one. [1]  I would bet good money that a search under the keyword “China” on any mainstream Western news site (the BBC for example) will easily confirm the pervasiveness of this as a media narrative, with articles dealing with China consistently focusing on its growth, industrialisation and supposed impending economic dominance over the West – peppered of course with criticisms of its human rights record – to produce an overall picture of a set of fears that perhaps hasn’t moved on enormously since the era when “yellow peril” was a frequent idea. Recently, however, more sober analysis in the New Left Review has highlighted the extent to which, in spite of the tectonic shifts in the global economy caused by the shock of 2008, such prognoses are a matter of the Western imagination rather than stark economic fact, with Peter Nolan and Jin Zhang, for example, showing just how far behind American dominance far-Eastern corporations are, and the extent to which the current markets are still stacked to perpetuate this situation. [2] (I use the metaphor of “tectonics” with Pacific Rim in mind, to which I will be turning shortly!).

The argument in my recent post, through a fairly basic analysis of Wolverine, has been to suggest that the plots of some recent American action movies are formed as a response to such anxieties. What ensues is a renewed sense of the East as a privileged object or space of desire and mystery, and the revivification of a hardly reconstructed orientalism. A further dimension is added to this by the way that Asia’s growth as an economic and political power has been mirrored by the arrival of popular-cultural and cinematic forms (we are concerned here in particular with action cinema) imported to the West. Such a process started, of course, with the arrival of the Japanese chanbara during the “economic miracle” of the 50s and 60s, followed by the kung fu movie at the height of Hong Kong’s 1970s electronics boom, the appearance of Korean cinema with the rise of the Four Tigers, and an interest in swordplay (wuxia) films such as Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon or Hero at the time when the PRC was coming to the fore as a global power. These genres, rising to compete with Hollywood, have had a decisive impact on global cinema – especially action cinema – and their tropes, images and ways of filming have started to permeate Hollywood’s language, creating a situation where a cultural as well as an economic hegemony seems to dissolve, and must be negotiated by Western directors such as Mangold and del Toro.

In this post, I move on to look at how the same factors play out in del Toro’s Pacific Rim.

Pacific Rim, to give a brief overview, is set in a future in which giant Godzilla-like monsters from a mysterious other dimension emerge from the intercontinental rift at the heart of the Pacific Ocean, to attack humanity. (The monsters are named, after the Japanese monster-movie genre, kaiju.) To fight these monsters, humanity unites and builds a series of hyper-technological giant robots, called in the film Jaeger (the German for “hunters”), each piloted by a pair of pilots whose minds are united to form a single consciousness through a psycho-cybernetic link. However, the war is not going well for mankind. The film’s hero, Raleigh Becket (played by Charlie Hunnam), is a washed up Jaeger pilot, who has lost his brother whilst on a mission. He has a chance to prove himself once more, and teams up with the mysterious Mako (Rinko Kikuchi) – a Japanese woman who was saved as a child by an African-American Jaeger pilot, Stacker Pentecost (Idris Elba), who now plays the role of a father-figure for her, but also the General in charge of what’s left of the Jaeger programme. Mako and Releigh are each suffering too much from a mental trauma to be fully trusted pilots – Raleigh’s brother has died whilst he was in an electronic “mind-meld” with him, and Mako’s parents were killed in front of her whilst she was still a child. This being a movie, earth’s last stand will, of course, be left to them.

The film’s Pacific setting – tying it to the concerns of Wolverine – seems, as the movie progresses, to slide further and further East: the first monster attack, shown at the very start of the film, is in San Francisco, and the final scenes are set around Hong Kong, which is imagined in the mould of 1930s Hollywood Chinatown: a dark and impenetrable world of criminal networks, money, and exotic black-market commerce.

Concept art for the Hong Kong scenes in Pacific Rim.

In many ways, del Toro’s film, then, reiterates a series of the tropes that we are offered in Wolverine. At its core is an image of a “Pacific Rim” culture that might, perhaps, stand in for the global and for contemporary processes of globalisation (and for a dream of global reconciliation), and that connects, on the one side the American Occident, and on the other the easternmost reaches of Asia. Like in Wolverine, the fantasised Asian city in which much of the film is set is a locus of crime, gangsterism and decadence. Like Wolverine, the film riffs on Asian (and especially Japanese) cinematic genres, in particular this time playing on and making a series of explicit intertextual references to the Godzilla movies of the 1960s, but also providing us with some spectacular – if CGI-heavy – martial-arts style choreography, with giant anthropomorphic robots fighting monsters, and even a “dojo”-type scene where the hero and heroine square off with staves. Like Wolverine, Pacific Rim has a white American male protagonist, with the exotic, oriental setting doubled by the prominence of an Asian female love interest.

Pacific Rim, however, seems nonetheless a rather different kettle of fish from Wolverine. It’s an altogether more subtle and complex cinematic experience, and much harder to run the kind of crude semiotic-style analysis I have recently performed on The Wolverine. Perhaps I’m being overly harsh on the film, (I’d ove to read any kind of counter-argument!), but I’m not sure that there is much to be found in The Wolverine that lies in excess of the kind of analysis that I have run on it, but del Toro’s offering would, I think, be far from exhausted by a similar exercise. This may well make the analysis I’ll try and set out here a rather more unsatisfactory one than previously, bit I’ll do my best to make some sense of it here, in any case.

The first thing that probably complicates the picture is the “authorial” nature of the work. I just admit to not knowing enough about de Toro as an auteur to really push this kind of analysis, but Pacific Rim certainly reiterates many of the themes and motifs that have interlaced his other work: for example, the opening of a portal between this world and a hellish and daemonic “other” reality, that might itself, especially in combination with del Toro’s surrealistic visual language, be equated with the dark zone of the id. And perhaps, as with for example Pan’s Labyrinth, the film is also concerned with the influences of such an id on the nightmare of modern history. There is certainly, then, a potential for reading a degree of critical intent, and even self-reflexivity in del Toro’s evocation of the Pacific Rim geography as the setting of his film. Perhaps, however, we might need to consider the nature of the very gesture of locating the id, and all the monsters of the mind, in the Far East – its alterity transforming it into a kind of space of projected Western nightmares.

In spite of the ways in which such a gesture might be retrograde, Del Toro’s vision of the future is nonetheless altogether more dystopian and critical in its relation to an American world order than Wolverine. When aliens attack, and humanity is finally united to fight them, the ensuing world, resembling as it does the current global order of media image and free-market corruption, is hardly benign. It is depicted as a militarised, quasi-fascistic order in a state of economic and military crisis, sustained through the infantilising media worship of a warrior class, and with war turned into a video-game spectacle. (Does this sound familiar anyone?) This order is underpinned by the hopeless and ultimately futile labour of a proletarian mass building walls against the aliens. The divide between an exceptional military elite and the wall-building workers is dramatised by the protagonist’s fall and subsequent rise between these two classes. This world-state seems, in many ways, the uncanny double of the monstrous kaiju that invade our reality from beyond, and the imperial dreams of their alien creators. We can, of course, turn such a formulation around and find in the hellish monsters the uncanny double of the imperialism of global capitalism. (An article I published on the cultural history of sharks, might suggest as much, in any case!)

It seems to me that the question of trauma – and of the forms of splitting or fragmentation that accompany this – lie at the thematic heart of the film. Such a split, in geopolitical terms, might be at the core of the film’s picture of Pacific space, with the global imagined as a space of fracture and conflict – an interdimensional war, no less, even if this is one imagined in terms of a battle between an “other” marked with an Asian name (kaiju) and a “self” marked with a European word (Jaeger). These figures of trauma are also mirrored in the psychic traumas of the protagonists, of course. In the film the Asian-American transcontinental divide is envisioned in the form of a volcanic fissure – the crust of the earth opening up where plates collide – which also doubles as a kind of a rupture in space and time through which the kaiju arrive. This is located in the Mariana Trench, a place of enormous depth. If the Pacific is a human place, the film seems to suggest, it is a place that exists only on a series of edges, and these have between them a black gulf of division, which in terms of the film’s imagery equates with the dark heart of the unconscious. The Pacific Rim, however, is also a place where humanity (its Eastern and Western halves) are brought together – with the ocean as much a space of interchange, trade and linkage as it is of division, separation and conflict. 

The Marxist in me would suggest that, of course, it is the traumatic nature of capital and its turbulent histories that might constitute the trauma that lies at the heart of the film. More specifically, however, it is, perhaps, the histories of Western colonialism and imperialism. Interestingly, the three central protagonists of the film, Raleigh, Mako and Pentecost, form a racialised trinity (African, Euro-American and Asian), and it is only in their uniting as a kind of a family that the kaiju can ultimately be defeated. (Though we might ask about the cinematic conventionality of the fact that this will also involve Pentecost’s sacrifice. As L L Cool J wryly notes in Deep Blue Sea [dir. Renny Harlin, 1999], in a moment of cinematic reflexivity, when being pursued by  giant genetically modified shark, “I'm done! Brothers never make it out of situations like this! Not ever!”)

Mako, Pentecost and Raleigh – three races working together in Pacific Rim. 

A further answer to the nature of the trauma in question, which once again propels the film into the familiar territory we found ourselves in with Wolverine, might be the suggestion that this trauma is a matter of the nuclear bombs dropped on Japan. The film’s key movie reference is, of course, the Godzilla story, which first hit the silver screen in 1954. This in turn, it is often argued, was an image that formed in response to the anxieties about radiation in Japan at a time when the memories of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were still fresh, and in the wake of the “Lucky Dragon 5” incident in which Japanese tuna fishermen were poisoned by the radiation produced by US atomic tests in the Pacific. It is perhaps, then, significant that in Pacific Rim the situation is only put right by the insertion of a nuclear charge into the intercontinental fissure from which the kaiju emerge – hence symbolically closing the circle of a set of anxieties stemming from the US atomic explosions of 1945. These explosions, furthermore, might also evoke a whole Cold War history – Korea, Vietnam and the like – which has also conditioned Hollywood’s vision of Asia as a zone of trauma.

The Pacific Rim also stands, however, not only as the image of trauma, but also as a potentially utopian image, of redemption and the restoration of wholeness and unity, an image of healing. Such wish fulfilment can be seen on the one hand as carrying with it a progressive wish, but it can also be understood as ideological in nature, staging a merely symbolic resolution of real conflicts that its catharsis ultimately supports. In a film named after an ocean, we might also think of this desire in terms of Freud’s “oceanic” wish, the desire to be one with the cosmos, a deeply ambivalent desire which is both about an absolute egoism in which the self swells to encompass the Universe, but is also about the desire for a complete loss of the self or ego.

This process of healing or uniting is thematised most strongly in the figure of the “mind-meld” which is necessary to control the giant Jaeger. Wired together through the neural “bridge,” the pilots find themselves “in” each other’s minds and fantasies, feeling each other’s emotions. It is an erosion of difference, and of the boundaries between self and other, an experience of absolute intimacy, and a thematic opposition to the oceanic “rift” from which the film’s monsters appear. The ability to form this bond between pilots seems to initially rest on forms of similarity, shared experience and shared biology – that is to say, by a form of shared identity. The film emphasises the importance of forms of “compatibility” between co-pilots. One can bond with the “other”, this is to say, only inasmuch as they are not really other at all. The first pilots we meet, Raleigh and Yancy, are brothers. The film’s antagonist, Chuck Hansen (Rob Kazinsky) is paired with his father (Max Martini), making a similar familial-genetic (and all-male) bond. The Russians, if perhaps not family, and if a male-female partnership rather than a homo-social one, are represented with emphasised ethnic uniformity, making much of their linguistic difference, and their shared “look”/haircut, etc. A Chinese crew, seen very briefly, also display marked facial similarities, and sport identical shaved heads.  

Two pilots in harmony - undergoing a bridging of minds to control the Jaeger - video still from Pacific Rim

Interestingly, then, the key neural “bridge” of the film is between characters with seemingly the most obstacles between their making this connection: with Raleigh and Mako, it is a bridge between people with very different experiences, races and a different gender, and even seemingly very different temperaments. What Raleigh and Mako, perhaps share, is their status as outsiders (i.e. their very difference) and, above all, their traumatised pasts – their very fragmentation. This movement in the film, then, between characters who bond through similarity (bond with “the same”) to characters who are able to bond with those who are different from them could be understood in a series of different ways. It might in some psychoanalytical readings equate to a certain maturation process, recognising and coming to terms with difference, the existence of the other, and the limits to the power of the self, and forming emotional and social (and, ultimately sexual) bonds with “others”. [3] (One question might be whether such a narrative, as presented in the film, is fundamentally hetero-normative.) such a narrative might also be read on the geo-political level – given the thematisation of such a space in the film, as marked by its very title. The trauma, the scar, the rift which must be bridged is the gulf between East and West. (As Kipling put it, back in the heyday of orientalism, “East is East and West is West / And never the twain shall meet.”)

Charlie Hunnam as Raleigh and Rinko Kikuchi as Mako in Pacific Rim. 

What Pacific Rim does, then, is collapse the social/sexual with the geopolitical – and again we might ask whether this is a matter of a kind of utopian wish in a split world, or an ideological image which actually amounts to a form of imperial culture. Perhaps the answer is not either/or, but both/and.

Such a recognition of the collapse between the psycho-sexual and the geo-political brings us to the character of Mako. In some ways, it is striking how the same kinds of stereotypes as we meet with in the case of Wolverine are replayed here, but it is also interesting the ways that del Toro’s film complicates the picture.

Mako, then, may seem at first to integrate the two figures of the Asian-woman-as-object-of-desire that are offered in Wolverine, Mariko and Yukio. Like Mariko. she is at points delicate, vulnerable and passive, especially as the girl who is rescued by Pentecost, and with regards to him she is dutifully submissive, as dictated by filial piety. On the other hand – as we see her, for example, in the “dojo” fight/training scene – she is also the lethal and phallic woman warrior like Yukio. She remains, as a character, almost entirely defined by the image of her suppoesd racial/ethnic/cultural characteristics. To a large degree, in spite of these contradictions, and despite having a complexity far beyond the Mariko/Yukio pair in Wolverine, Mako remains not a whole lot more than a cardboard cut-out character.

Mako strikes a martial arts pose during the "dojo" training scene in in Pacific Rim 

However, in spite of these limitations, Mako certainly has a lot more agency in the film than Yukio and Mariko do, becoming very much a partner and co-protagonist to Raleigh. In this much, we are already doing fairly well for Hollywood in terms of gender politics. It’s also interesting that Mako in fact becomes the only character actually endowed with the eroticised cinematic gaze, in a scene where she watches a shirtless Raleigh through the keyhole of his room, with the white male body turned into the erotic object for an Asian female looker – a scene that must be something of a rarity in the history of American cinema. In fact, Mako fits into a much longer standing fascination in del Toro’s films with active (if girl-like) female protagonists, such as, most obviously, Ofelia in Pan’s Labyrinth. This comparison might remind us to cast her as a kind of fairy-tale princess. The nuances of a gender analysis of this figure of the fairly-tale girl in del Toro’s work – and in film and literature more generally – are definitely beyond my present expertise, however.

Pacific Rim as fairy tale.

The ending, of the film, then, in which Raleigh and Mako journey together into the darkest depths of the Oceanic fissure (and, in fact, at the same time into the dangerous “drifts” of their shared unconscious minds) to destroy all monsters, and from which they emerge only by saving each other, to end in a triumphal embrace, marks a real “partnership” in a very different form from what we are offered in Wolverine. The fantasy that this final coupling entails is very much in harmony, overall, with the analysis that I have been presenting here: in many ways Pacific Rim hardly escapes the basic cultural structures or fantasies through which Hollywood has negotiated the collision of East and West. It is worrying, in terms of the film’s bid to do more than fall into clumsy racial stereotypes and retrograde orientalist fantasies, that ultimately its eroticised vision of the geopolitical hangs on the all-too-familiar pairing of a masculine occident and a feminine orient. (I wonder: how might the film be transformed if Raleigh were to be cast as a white woman and Mako an Asian man?) But Pacific Rim – even in offering us a different kind of partnership, and one that is at least more fully human – certainly seems to take a step towards working away at the contradictions of Western cinema’s fantasies of the orient, “traversing” them, and re-positioning us differently within them.

Raleigh and Mako at the end of Pacific Rim

I’m pretty sure that this post has hardly “cracked” the enigma of del Toro’s film, and I remain quite conscious that I’ve largely been dependent on a fairly literal reading of its narrative and said little about the cinematic and visual aspects that perhaps actually make it an interesting film to watch. I’m also rather aware that it’s been something of a rambling and over-long piece, so I hope that some readers get this far, to the very end! I hope, however, that it has been of interest to a reader, and helps in some way in furthering an understanding of, or the development of a critical angle on, the film in question.

I’d also be very glad to hear from anyone with other ideas about the film or if anyone has any comments on the argument I’ve made here.

Notes

[1] See for example Michael Elliott, “China Takes on the World,” Time (11 Jan 2007) http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1576831,00.html.]

[2] Peter Nolan and Jin Zhang, “Global Competition after the Financial Crisis,” NLR 64 (July/Aug 2010): 97-108.

[3] I'm thinking primarily of the kinds of analysis offered by Melanie Klein.

Pacific Rim (2013) and The Wolverine (2013) Part 1 – The Wolverine

Pacific Rim (dir. del Torro, 2013) and The Wolverine (dir. Mangold, 2013)

On this blog I've "started" a number of pieces of work with promises for continuation that have never been kept. Many of these are projects that are on the way to going elsewhere, possibly with views to future publication, so further posts on those projects here may well probably never  see the light of day. Especially with the loads of teaching and administration that I seem to labour under these days. However, with the article started below I really do promise (honest!) to get a "part two"out during the Summer. It's even mostly written. And I've no intention of publishing this material elsewhere.

This piece of writing starts with a co-incidence – or rather something that perhaps just seems like a co-incidence: a conjunction at the heart of which lies a complex tangle of motivation that is both my own but also that of the contemporary American movie industry. On a long-haul flight from the UK to America for a conference, I decided to dip into the in-flight movies. Over the hours on the plane, not wanting to plump for the more exhausting fare of the art-house offerings available, I found myself watching a couple of action movies, and the films that I landed on (out of an admittedly huge choice) were Guillermo del Torro’s distinctly auteurial spin on the popular generic effects movie, Pacific Rim, and James Mangold’s rather less directorially distinguished The Wolverine. What struck me was that in each of these films alike I had been thrown into a Hollywood vision of the global which revolved around the imaginary Far East as a locus of desire and a space of fantasy. Each (in their different ways) reclaimed and reworked iconographic and technical elements of Asian popular movies in their attempts to reinvigorate the phantasmatic space of American action cinema. Each, I think, is also involved in a negotiation of cinematic language itself, as this has been reconfigured by Hollywood's brush with Asian film production. (The conjunction perhaps has a renewed interest at the present moment when a new remake of Godzilla has just been released...)

First, them, The Wolverine.

The Wolverine takes us to Japan, rehashing an almost-unreconstructed set of orientalist stereotypes and, over the course of the film, reasserting white/Western symbolic ownership of the “action” genre, integrating motifs, from Asian genres, of the Yakuza, ninjas, samurai, and so on, into an all-American superhero spectacle, at the heart of which is the strong, masculine, “superior” white hero, who gets to out-action the action specialists of the East, quite literally picking up their weapons (the katana, etc.) and using them to defeat the “natives”. The ideological message is clear: the American Way is naturally superior to its alternatives.

Wolverine (played by Hugh Jackman), gripping the Japanese katana in The Wolverine (2013)

Over the course of the film, the eponymous hero wins the heart of not one but two Japanese women, each standing for one of the paired stereotypes through which Asian femininity is represented. One the one hand there is Mariko (Tao Okatomo): a delicate, vulnerable “butterfly”, marked out in the film’s narrative through an association with “traditional” ways of life and modes of femininity. She is the damsel in distress who seems for the body of the film its preferred erotic object. On the other hand there is the sword-toting, subculturally dressed bodyguard Yukio (Rila Fukushima), a “kick-ass babe” in whose company Wolverine in fact metaphorically sets off into the sunset at the end of the movie (flying West on a plane, rather than on horseback). But this, it seems, in the film, is an altogether more Platonic friendship than the association set up with Mariko. The movie gets it both ways: the hero gets the (exotic) girl(s), but returns to his monadic, asexual state (as is common in the superhero genre). In terms of its gender politics, the film gets to assert the triumph of the “empowered”, modern, phallic (Asian) woman over her castrated double, but only on the proviso that she becomes de-sexualised, turned into a “buddy”, perhaps a partner in some cross-gender, doubly sublimated “bromance” rather than “romance” per se… The threat to white-Western masculinity constituted by this fantasmatic object of desire is thus neutralised on a number of levels.

Rila Fukushima as Yukio, in The Wolverine (2013)

In the process of working out (winning and then rejecting) these romantic attachments, Wolverine is contrasted with a series of dysfunctional Asian masculinities – he defeats them through physical superiority and moral integrity. These misfiring Asian men include Mariko’s fiancée Singen. (This being a Hollywood representation of the East, this is an arranged marriage of course). Singen is a corrupt politician who, even when caught in a moment of heterosexual excess with two call girls, is nonetheless feminised, wearing a pair of red “panties”. (One of the aforementioned call girls is, of course, a blonde, raising the spectre of the yellow-peril “other” who threatens the Western/white male’s possession of a racialised “womenfolk”.) There is the tyrannical father who is jealous of the daughter’s inheritance and plots to kidnap and kill her in order to take this over. Then there is the young ninja and childhood sweetheart who is supposed to protect Mariko but in fact sells her out to her enemies, ultimately more connected to an ethic of “family” and “duty” than to one of personal romantic attachment and individuation, setting up a classic East-West binary. And finally there is the sick and dying grandfather, Yashida, the originary point of the film’s fantasy of the East as a decaying, monstrous patriarchy, which cannot fully present a core of masculinity from which to order its gender-space. It is from this network of representatives of corrupt masculinity that Wolverine rescues the heroine (and ultimately thus an invidious “tradition” involving duty, arranged marriages, and so on which they manifest). This, of course, is the frequent orientalist trope: we must invade country X to protect the women there from their misrule by primitive, corrupt, decadent, and thus improperly manly men.

Hal Yamanouchi as Yashida in The Wolverine (2013)

The sexism of the film (and the racism involved in its negotiation of gender) is doubled by a disturbing historical revisionism. The film’s narrative spur – the cause for Wolverine’s visit to Japan – lies in a story from the very close of the Second World War. Wolverine is held in a prisoner-of-war camp and the guards are releasing the prisoners, recognising that defeat is now certain. A guard lets Wolverine out of the bunker in which he is imprisoned, and in return Wolverine prevents the guard from committing hara kiri. (Again, then, we have an American saving the other from the barbarity of his/her own culture…) At this instant we see, across the landscape, the dropping of the atomic bomb on Nagasaki. Wolverine uses his mutant’s body – which has the power to regenerate in response to any harm done to it – to shield his new protégée, and when they emerge from the bunker, the entire landscape around is in ruin.

The main events of the film take place years later, and the one-time prison guard, Yashida, has become an industrial magnate, and it is his invitation to visit to say goodbye before he dies that brings Wolverine to Japan. At the heart of the film, then, is a complex of guilt and denial, with the all-American hero on hand to save the Japanese other, and to be marked as himself present at the scene as a victim (even a saviour) rather than an aggressor. It is obviously (though this is not stated) the radiation dose that the industrialist has received that is the cause of the cancer from which he is dying. Yet it turns out that in fact he is the film’s real (hidden) villain, who has set up the whole visit (including faking his own death) in order to trap Wolverine, and rob him of his immortality, which Yashida seeks to appropriate for himself. Turning the victim/perpetrator relationship around, Wolverine appears as the wronged party in the film, with Yashida taking on the role of a corrupt betrayer of American largesse – suggesting perhaps that the film constitutes an expression of anxiety about the growth of the East as an economic and political power in recent decades, marking a reversal and decay of American (neo-)colonial mastery. The quest for immortality takes on, in Yashida, the flavour of a sinister quest for power, in contrast to Wolverine’s “manifest destiny” as an immortal. For Wolverine, in contrast to Yashida, his special superpower is a “white man’s burden” that, unasked for, he must bear stoically – the mark of a natural right and duty to rule and take responsibility for others.

The film can be read as telling of a renewal of this (American) destiny. At the start of the film Wolverine has taken to the woods, living amongst animals, withdrawn from society and its purposes. Perhaps we might recognise the trope as an echo of the “Rambo-esque” retreat to the woods in a range of post-Vietnam Hollywood offerings. Wolverine is drawn back into the world of men first through his sense of justice: when a bear is killed inhumanely by hunters he goes into town to take revenge for it. (Is this, then also a vision of a corrupt order that needs renewal? A structuring trope of the film seems to be this renewal or regeneration of moral and social orders – akin perhaps to Wolverine’s own ability to heal his body. Wolverine taking his place of leadership back in the world is a matter of rejuvenating both his own society and that of the Asian “other”, with America unnaturally atrophied and the rise of the “other” appearing as a kind of excessive, disorderly, destructive cancerous growth, like Yashida’s illness.) But Wolverine’s sparking of conscience is reinforced with the arrival of Yukio, who adds to the “quest” the reappearance of an erotic dimension – the seduction of the orient. (Yukio, of course, serves only as a step that leads him to the film’s key object of erotic fascination, the wan Mariko.) This renewal of Wolverine’s warrior charter and his erotic attachment in the gendered and raced other could easily, of course, be read as a parallel to the return of an American interventionist policy in the late twentieth century, a reversal of the isolationism that has at other points marked its history.

The film, then – read at least in the rather crude ideology-critique/semiotic analysis terms above – seems to make a kind of a claim to the importance of the American hero’s warrior identity and destiny, as the natural leader and saviour of all the other inhabitants of the world. But what interests me is the way that this in its turn folds back into the very form of the film, and its relation to international genres. Can the film be better understood as a kind of an allegory of its own production, a fantasy of its own place in the landscape of global culture? Is it American action cinema whose destiny is reasserted in this film, which just like Wolverine within the work, seeks to pick up the tools of its other – the motifs and techniques of Japanese and Hong Kong cinema – and refashion them into an all-American genre? Is this a reinvigoration of a moribund superhero genre, which perhaps has had its period metaphorically isolated in the woods before its reinvention in the movies of the noughties? (Especially after Spiderman [2002], a film itself made in the wake of the highly significant moment of 9-11, and which reminded us, at a moment when America was stepping up as a global policeman, that “with great power comes great responsibility”.) Like Wolverine, part of what brings this popular-cultural genre back out into the light of day is the emergence of a set of oriental objects of desire. These objects are the films of the Japanese and Hong Kong New Waves of the eighties and nineties (and, before that, the trans-national phenomena of “kung fu” and “chanbara”), and the absorption of their action techniques and aesthetics into a mainstream Western visual/cinematic language. The “orient” becomes a space of fantasy, desire and identifcation through which such movies can re-articulate themselves. The only thing that is, perhaps, notable in Wolverine is the extent to which this becomes so visibly thematised within the film as well as forming its very form. Perhaps, however, it is not even unique here – think of the fetishisation of martial arts in Batman Begins (2005) or even Electra (1996).

The point behind this, too, of course, is the shift in power away from the West and the rise of Eastern economic, political and cultural power – a shift that has gathered momentum since the 60s and 70s when the superhero comics of Marvel first had their day. Film form, content and economic reality seem startlingly aligned in the anxieties that seem to be articulated within this film.

In the next instalment, I'll be looking at the somewhat more complex and nuanced way in which Guillermo del Torro's Pacific Rim – released the same year as The Wolverine.

Part 2 is now online - available here:
http://kungfuwithbraudel.blogspot.co.uk/2014/08/pacific-rim-2013-and-wolverine-2013.html

Chang Cheh via Baudrillard

Jimmy Wang Yu's sacrificial suicide in The Assassin (Chang Cheh, 1967). Entering a "symbolic" economy beyond the logic of rational exchange and accumulation. 

From the end of the first chapter of Jean Baudrillard's Symbolic Exchange and Death:

"Since it [the system of contemporary society] thrives on my slow death [in labour], I will oppose it with my violent death. and it is because we are living with slow death that we dream of a violent death. Even this dream is unbearable to power." (p.43)

Baudrillard isn't the most trendy philosopher any more, but the passage could be a way of interpreting the "dream of a violent death" proffered in, above all, Chang Cheh films. What matters in these, much more than beating the bad guy, or even winning history, is achieving a glorious death. And it is in such embrace of sacrifice that the films imagine the heroes – often class outsiders – as wresting back their subjectivity. It is also in such gestures that they keep alive the potential to reclaim the future from subjugation and domination. 

Here we are back, of course, in the logic of sacrificial expenditure in the mould of Marcel Mauss, set against the accumulative logic of the acquisitive villains of the movies. The gift economy is set against the economy of calculation. Kung fu training as Bataille-esque expenditure.

Kowloon Walled City

Photo from Greg Girard and Ian Lambot's series of images of Kowloon Walled city. 

Andrew Osborne recently pointed me to the following link about Kowloon Walled City.

http://curbed.com/archives/2013/04/19/mapping-the-horrors-of-hong-kongs-lawless-walled-city-1.php

Kowloon walled city grew up in the no-man's land between the People's republic of China and Hong Kong. It started as a walled fort built by the British, but, abandoned, it was taken over by thousands of the poorest of Hong Kong, and grew into one of the densest slums anywhere in the world. It constituted 500 buiudings, built into 2.7 hectares, and at its height by 1990, it had 50,000 inhabitants - a population density of 1.9 million people per square kilometer - putting Hong Kong's overall figure of 6,700 people/sq. km to shame, and even out-doing Mongkok's 130,000 per sq. km figure by a factor of over 10.

Outside the operation of the legal system, KWC was rife with drug-dealing and prostitution, and was dominated by armed gangs. Its streets mixed markets with unlicensed doctors and dentists. There were no organised refuse or sanitation systems. The building towered up, beyond architectural control, so that aircraft landing at Kai Tak airport had to alter their flight paths to avoid it. But in site of its lawlessness, according to a recent article in the South China Morning Post, marking the 20th anniversary of its demolition in 1993, "many of Kowloon Walled City's former residents remember it fondly. It may have been a City of Darkness to outsiders, but to thousands who called it home, it was a friendly, tight-knit community that was poor but generally happy."

The article (and that little sentence in particular) remind me of the "Tenement Film" genre in Hong Kong cinema, which celebrated the humour, solidarity and resourcefulness of slum communities. Most famously, of course, House of 72 Tenants, both Chor Yuen's film of 1973 (which kept Bruce Lee's Enter the Dragon off the top spot at the box office that year), and the original of which it was a remake ten years earlier.

Here's a trailer for House of 72 Tenants.

Of course, this in its turn is the basis for "Pig Sty Alley" in Steven Chow's Kung Fu Hustle (2004):

"In a time of social unrest and disorder the gangs have moved in to consolidate their power. The most feared of them all is the Axe Gang. Only in the poorest districts, which hold no interest for the gangs  can people live in peace ... PIG STY ALLEY"

I also spotted this rather interesting page discussing the Tenement Film and its influence on Kung Fu Hustle:
http://www.hkcinemagic.com/en/page.asp?aid=135&page=1


And Scott Spencer also shared this fascinating link about KWC:
http://99percentinvisible.org/post/36086263396/episode-66-kowloon-walled-city

It includes a link to a rather interesting documentary:

Diego Rivera, The Agitator, 1926. Fresco, 8 ft x 18 ft. Autonomous University of Chapingo.

Kung fu, Vampire and Capital (Part 1)

Still from Mr Vampire (dir. Ricky Lau, HK, 1985)

I have of late been reading David McNally's book, Monsters of the Market, a fascinating - if not methodologically unproblematic - exploration of the figures of the zombie and the vampire since early modernity, read in the light of the growth of capital. In McNally's reading, under conditions of capitalism, labourers are treated (and thus imagined in capitalist culture) as objectified, living-dead bodies, placed into a mindless, zombie-like regime of wage-slavery (or, in more recent days, consumption). Rather than such a figure of the zombie, other literature (and the literary texture of Marx's work in particular) registers and displaces the vampire-like qualities of capital, as dead labour dominating and sucking the life out of its subjects.

The rather unstable figure of the monster runs throughout the book, uniting these two figures of the undead – the vampire and the zombie – each forming an opposing pole of a single cultural complex. For McNally (at least as far as I understand the drive of his book), the 'monstrous' is an ambivalent category in modern culture, signifying on the one hand the monstrous and disordering powers of capital itself, but also projecting these onto the labouring classes as a formless, dangerous mass that threatens the law and the metaphysical order of the Universe and the social fabric. The monstrous body of the modern poor is a disordered, disarticulated, chaotic body, decomposing into its constituent parts. It's the body, of course, of Frankenstein's monster in Mary Shelley's famous book. Shelley's creature is itself a body – McNally's book insists – composed from the grave-robbed, undead, reanimated bodies of the criminalised working classes, subject as they were in the eighteenth century to being dismembered after death and set to work as objects of knowledge (and moral examples) at the hands of dissectors. Working class bodies were, furthermore, of course, already bodies 'dissected' and 'decomposed' into their constituent parts, by the processes of disciplined labour (the worker as a 'hand'), and by the processes of abstraction which robbed them of any organic unity.  

In the last and most interesting chapter of McNally's book he turns away from European history to consider the contemporary phenomenon of an explosion of zombie myths in Sub-Saharan Africa. These, McNally insists, cannot be understood simply as some form of pre-modern throwback, a survival of old modes of superstition. In fact, McNally discusses the ways that contemporary narratives of witchcraft in Africa are radically discontinuous with older varieties of this, and whatever superficial similarities there may be between old and new iconographies, the meaning of such stories is now something quite different. McNally proposes that modern witchcraft and zombie stories should be read as an attempt to figure – in however a transformed guise – the horrors of globalised, neoliberal economics, as this reconfigures African cultures and societies. As such a figuration, there is a certain resistant value in vampire myth, as it makes uncanny that logic which capitalism would like to make normal, and which it has succeeded in the West as normalising to a far greater degree.

Slaves in East Africa, c.1900

The zombie, in fact, he suggests is not an old figure in many of the cultures where it appears. Instead, it is a figure which arrives in the contemporary African vernacular primarily through Hollywood, and, in the longer run through histories of slavery in the West Indies (the slave as zombie - as a person without will or soul, reduced only to primary functions of work). What emeges in recent years in Africa are myths, urban rumours and popular literature or cinema about (poor) victims being resurrected by demonic (rich) sorcerers in order to be put to work, with the zombie-master accumulating all the wages earned by the possessed body. Other stories tell of enchanted bodies who open their mouths to vomit out coins, and are thus turned into "human cash machines" whose very material substance can be transformed into ready cash. For McNally, of course, these are to be read as allegories, metaphors or displaced expressions of fears about the exploitative nature of capitalism.

One of the questions that interests me is how McNally's schema might help us think about the rather different zombie/vampire bodies that became so popular in Hong Kong cinema during the late 1980s (and, I suppose, in the run-up to reunification with the mainland).

There are, of course, some small commonalities and some huge differences between Hong Kong in the 80s and twenty-first century Africa. The legacy of Western colonial and Imperial domination serving to form, to a certain degree, a baseline of shared experience, however different this historical trajectory has been in China and Africa. We might also note the 'belated' modernisation, industrialisation and urbanisation of both societies, with a significant load of cultural material being brought to Hong Kong in the 50s and 60s by its massive influx of immigrants, largely from still relatively 'traditional' rural societies. In both cases, and though at somewhat different moments, and with different effects, we are also dealing with the absorption of the culture in question with processes of globalisation and neoliberal accumulation. Hong Kong was an early 'globaliser', starting as it did as a colonial trading hub, and only then diversifying in the 60s and 70s as a manufacturing base. Hong Kong – even its poor inhabitants – also rapidly drew a large amount of wealth from its insertion into global markets, and by the 1980s was looking a quite different economic and social reality from the societies we would usually tend to imagine as 'Third World'... In this regard, the growth of cinematic stories of the supernatural in the eighties is interesting precisely with regard to this being a moment where a decisive distance is marked from 'traditional' culture, and (with a population largely born and raised on the island, quite probably for most people already at a generation's distance from mainland origins) in which Hong Kong's self-image is distictively 'urban', independent and autocthonous.

What to make, then of the films? Perhaps the place to start is with some more basic description of the genre in question - the 'hopping corpse' or 殭屍 (jiangshi in Mandarin / geongsi in Cantonese) movie. Jiangshi is usually translated into English as '(Chinese) vampire', or, somewhat less commonly, as '(Chinese) zombie'. The word, however, literally means 'stiff corpse' - and it is this stiffness (a rigor mortis that survives the reanimation of the dead) that determines the distinctive gait of the jiangshi, as it makes ungainly two-legged hops, hands rigidly outstretched in front of it - in pursuit of its victims.

Interestingly enough given McNally's typology, the jiangshi shares certain properties of both vampire and zombie, or exists within a continuum somewhere between the two poles of the figure of the monster. If the zombie is a will-less body controlled by another (or just rambling around without a master), and the vampire marks a kind of undead and absolute, demonic will, the jiangshi is both and neither. Uncontrolled, the jiangshi may be a kind of a terrible and monstrous demon; controlled it becomes a comic and ultimately pathetic tool, and the jiangshi switches easily from state to state (by applying or detaching a spell written on a sheet of paper to its forehead, for example). In this regard, it may at first sight seem to fit quite badly with a figure either of worker's body or the horrors of capital.

Jiangshi in Mr Vampire – the undead transformed into an army of docile, controlled bodies

In relation to the question of the particular moment in which the vampire films appeared, described above as one at which the relation to the past was being released, at which Hong Kong identity was being set up as modern and Western in opposition to an imagined 'backward' mainland, and at a moment of the dim rise of anxieties about reunification with Communist China, it's interesting that the hopping vampire – usually clothed in the archaic funeral clothes of a Qing-dynasty official – seems to mark a complex and ambivalent relation to a past that is at once desired and hated, owned and disavowed. In this much it's interesting that the Chinese title of the most popular and genre-defining of the Vampire films of the 80s, which is translated into English by its distributors as Mr Vampire, is in fact better translated literally as Uncle Vampire (僵屍先生). This is a genre of film, then, which is profoundly about a relation to patriarchy and tradition.

Indeed, the first of the Mr Vampire films (it was a film so popular it spawned a series of sequels as well as a flood of imitations) is clearly set around problems of descent and the relation to ancestors (not to mention land and money). The heroes of the film are a long-suffering Taoist priest, Master Kao (played by one of my favourite actors and martial arts performers, Lam Ching-ying), and his rather unruly apprentices. He is called by a client, a rich businessman who is having problems with his business, to examine the burial of his father. On examination of the grave, Kao comes to the conclusion that the businessman's father had been given very bad advice in laying out the feng shui for his chosen burial site and that this is causing a problem. When he probes the matter, Kao discovers that the land for the grave had been bought from the same fortune-teller who had advised on the burial – and that underhand financial means had been applied to force him to sell the land cheaply. The bad advice on burying the body was the fortune-teller's revenge, and it is this that causes the dead patriarch to return from the dead to pursue his own descendants - killing and making a vampire first of his son, and then pursuing his niece (who the film's heroes endeavour to rescue), hence becoming the 'Uncle Vampire' of the original Cantonese title. What we have, then is a relationship to the past, to ancestors, and to a legacy (one which is both financial and familial, magical and cultural) that has become unnatural and toxic through the intervention of the distorting powers of money. In this regard, we are very close to many of the metaphors which McNally values so much in Marx (and which Marx in turn seems to draw from Shalespeare and from a Gothic tradition of literature), whereby money makes live things into dead ones, and animates the inanimate; where traditions are destroyed; where hierarchies are inverted; and order made basely disorderly.

Lam Ching-ying strikes a pose as the Taoist priest in Mr Vampire

What perhaps complicates the picture here, however, is the relation to the 'mainland' and to traditional Chinese culture which seems to be set up. The Qing-dynasty costume of the undead seems to hint on the one hand at a history of colonial rule and foreign domination. The vampire in this sense is something 'alien'. However, it seems also to hint at an alienness which is intimately 'homely'. Might this remind us of  Freud's discussion of the odd collapse of the difference between the Heimlich and the Unheimlich – whereby what is most terrible and alien turns out to have at its core something repressed that comes from within, and from the most private, primal and forgotten parts of the self which have only become so emphatically foreign because we cannot, on the most terrible pain, admit them into consciousness as a core of the self and its formative history. The Qing-era costumes of the vampire – and all the evocation of even older ancient myth and superstition that surrounds the vampire – seem to evoke a more diffuse sense of Chinese tradition – a set of beliefs that have been left behind (certainly enough to make them an entertainingly comedic spectacle) but which still haunt to the degree that unease can amplify the power of laughter. What, I wonder is the relation of the mainland to this figure – I cannot also help reading in these films the presence of China itself (in the guise of the PRC) as a land of forefathers for the Hong Kong people that also threatens to swallow up and suck the life from the 'young' and 'modern' (and capitalistic) island-city. But how would this square with a reading of the unease figured in the film, too about what I take as capitalist values?

Wrestling with the Patriarch? Still from Mr Vampire

Any thoughts from anyone reading this would be gratefully received! Either pop them in the comments below or email me! Thanks!

(To be continued...)

Fashioning the Kung Fu Revolution? Flowing Robes, Zhongshan Suits and the "Army in Black Pyjamas"

This evening I attended a very interesting talk at Middlesex University (where I work), by Fashion Theorist / Design Historian Jane Tynan, whose research has mainly investigated military dress. Her talk was about the ways that the Irish revolutionaries of the abortive 1916 Easter Rising set out to create an identity for themselves through uniform. Though many of the leaders of the movement clearly had quite grand ambitions for fashioning their troops as a modern, disciplined force, in practice for activists on the ground uniform was necessarily a matter of sporadic, bricolaged elements, and the images that ended coming out of the rising were of a rather ragtag, motley, anarchic anti-colonial force.

The talk made me think of a paragraph that ended up on the "cutting room floor" of an article I've recently submitted to a journal. The paragraph was about the ways that dress in Hong Kong kung fu films, in the late 60s and early 70s, increasingly moved away from the flowing, aristocratic robes of the earlier wuxia films towards the peasant "black pyjamas" of Bruce Lee.  Vijay Prashad has suggested in his fascinating book Everybody Was Kung Fu Fighting, that in the context of the anti-colonial unrest of the era, Lee's outfit was powerfully loaded in terms of class and anti-colonial identity – for Prashad (who was himself at the time of the release of Lee's films a teenager starting to become involved in an Indian Marxism profoundly influenced by Maoism), Lee's attire could hardly but remind a viewer of the Vietnamese "army in black pyjamas" that also repeatedly graced the screens of the era with images of Asian underdogs kicking US imperialist butt...

(Bruce Lee in Fist of Fury, 1972 - kicking imperialist butt whilst wearing black pyjamas, the uniform of Asian anti-colonial resistance...)

This is also a kind of an imagining – or at least a re-imagining – of  the "fashioning" of early twentieth-century revolt...

A further sartorial figure within this 1970s Hong-Kong attempt to imagine – and re-enact – the style of revolution was, of course, the Zhongshan suit that was worn so stylishly by Bruce Lee in Fist of Fury (1972).  Lee's Zhongshan is white, which, of course, in China, is the colour of mourning. This, though, in the context of Lee's character's fury against the murder of his teacher by a foreign occupying power, is a peculiarly politicised, nationalist, anti-colonial kind of mourning.

(Bruce Lee's white Zhongshan in Fist of Fury)

The Zhongshan must have been  a profoundly loaded piece of clothing in the early 70s. The Zhongshan suit, in fact, is named after the nationalist revolutionary Sun Yat-sen, whose most popular name amongst Chinese is in fact Sun Zhongshan (zhong means centre, and shan means mountain). The Zhongshan was a suit designed by the nationalist revolutionaries to express their political values immediately after the revolution of 1912. (Sun himself is said to have had a hand in its design.) It was, first and most obviously, a rejection of the Manchurian styles of dress of the Qing Dynasty, which had been used very much as a form of social control. The style of the Zhongshan seemed to borrow much from the Western suit, but clearly gave it an oriental twist, both making a claim for modernity, but also marking a difference to the hated Western powers which had beset China over the preceding centuries. In fact, the suit made a clear reference to contemporary Japanese military cadet uniforms, which Sun would have seen during the years of his exile there, with Japan also serving as the model of a successfully modernising East Asian nation. (I can hardly but make a nod here to Jane Tynan's discussion this evening of the militarisation which must have pervaded Irish society at exactly this point in time, with the development of the militias who she discussed in her talk, and who went on to take part in the 1916 uprising. The zhongshan was also a means to bring a military iconography into the everyday.)

The Zhongshan, however, is better known in the West now as the "Mao suit" – the Chinese communists took up the style during their alliance with Sun Yat-sen's nationalist party, and the fashion stuck with them. One wonders quite how Bruce Lee's (super-sylish, minimal and perfectly tailored) Zhongshan would have been read at what was still the height of the Cultural Revolution, where the Maoist Zhongshan (rather less fashionable though this version may have been!) was very much the uniform of the day for mainland males, made to symbolise the unity of the Chinese proletariat. In the wake, still, of the 1967 disturbances, and in the shadow of a continuing student movement, how would this clothing have made sense in Hong Kong in 1972?

(Both Mao and Chang Kai Shek are pictured here wearing the Zhongshan.)

Interestingly, director Chang Cheh (discussed elsewhere on this blog, with regards to the ways that his work was intertwined with the 1967 Hong Kong riots, and the ways his films are haunted by this radical moment) has claimed that Lee took these suits from his own prior film, Vengeance! (1970). Indeed, in this, David Chiang also wears both black and white suits that Lee's own are very close to in style, and Chiang even perhaps outdoes Lee in looking dapper and stylish, the white Zhongshan, in Vengeance!, serving as a canvas for Chang's signature motif of a drenching in lurid red blood, the glamour of the garment gaining from Chang's tragic heroism.

(David Chiang's black Zhongshan in Vengeance!, 1970)

It's interesting that when Chang discusses the suit he (or at the very least his translator) calls it a "white student uniform (or Zhongshan suit)" [The Making of Martial Arts Films, p.22] - making a connection to student movements. In this regard (and in particular in the light of Chang's attempt earlier in the same essay to link his films to the student movements of the 60s), Vengeance! starts to become legible as a kind of a political allegory, with David Chiang's youthful hero figuring as a terrible force of retribution. His individual struggle against the corrupt system of power, wealth and authority that has murdered his brother and attempted to cover up the crime starts to signify a larger failure of established hierarchies, and a youthful, iconoclastic revolt against these.

(When David Chiang wears white, you know things are about to turn sour for all involved...)

(David, you'll never get the stains out of that!)

(Is anyone going to be left alive at the end of this film???)

Of course, Jane's talk sent me back to look at other images I've come across – the old photos of the "Boxers" of the Yihetuan (Righteous Harmony Society) that shocked the West at the very start of the twentieth century.

(images of the Boxer Rebellion, from Wikipedia)

Or the attempts in kung fu cinema to imagine the anti-Qing "Shaolin" rebels in the Shaolin cycle.

(lay students survive the burning of the Shaolin Temple, and prepare to spread out to start anti-Qing rebellion across China in Chang Cheh's Shaolin Temple, 1976.)

How do such films attempt to (re)imagine a past of revolution through costume, and how does this relate to the actual attempts of past radicals to figure themselves through dress? There could be a whole research project here...