Pacific Rim (dir. del
Torro, 2013) and The Wolverine (dir. Mangold,
2013)
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...)
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.
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| 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
Part 2 is now online - available here:
http://kungfuwithbraudel.blogspot.co.uk/2014/08/pacific-rim-2013-and-wolverine-2013.html
