“The commodification of Otherness has been so successful because it is offered as a new delight, more intense, more satisfying than normal ways of doing and feeling. Within commodity culture, ethnicity becomes spice, seasoning that can liven up the dull dish that is mainstream culture” (Hooks)
Michael brought up in class the connection to Cinema and Modernism last semester with primitivism and “otherness.” This made me think of the paper I wrote about the film The Sheik. In this romantic film, Rudolph Valentino (the sex-icon of his day) plays an Arab bandit who captures an English woman who travels to the desert for a journey one day. The film effectively “others” Arabs and other ethnic groups coming from the Middle East and Africa through its portrayal of the titular character and the other bandits in the film. Though Rudolph Valentino is the main love interest of the film, he only becomes desirable when it is revealed that he has been European all along. When he acts horribly (almost raping Diana or forcing her to wear revealing clothing), he is still identified as an Arab man. However, when he starts to become more humanized and Diana starts to fall in love with him, he is revealed to be European all along. In construct, the bandit that steals Diana from The Sheik and almost rapes her is still an Arab man. In the subtext of the film, a European-descended man is saving an English woman from the “other” Arab bandit. In essence, the character of The Sheik is a perfect combination of “mainstream white culture” with an ethnicity that adds “spice.” That’s what made him such a popular and romantic figure in the 1920s. Though I argue that the representation of ethnic groups has gotten better since the 1920s, The Sheik still offers an interesting insight into the “otherness” we still see in contemporary times.
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I am also reminded of Sessue Hayakawa and how he was used in a similar fashion to Rudolph Valentino. He starred in many movies that made use of him as the “foreign” love interest. Though this was progressive for a time where racial discrimination was rampant, he was still often portrayed as a violent aggressor who would diminish the purity of white women. Despite this, he was still very popular, because his role as the love interest was taboo and exciting. He was so popular, in fact, that he garnered enough money to start his own production company due to his dissatisfaction with being typecast. Sometimes he was able to star parallel to other Asian-American actors like Anna May Wong and Tsuru Aoki, but I would assume that, for white audiences, this serves compounds the exoticism. Being able to believably set the films in Asia would give audiences the impression that they were truly seeing what the culture was like. Not to imply that the actors were not talented individuals, but there is certainly a level of Asian fetishization when it comes to the roles they played in the movies they starred in. I want to believe that Asian representation has gotten better over the years, and there are many Asian characters who break these stereotypes, but many writers still fall into the same traps as writers of before. Asian characters are still highly exoticized and sexualized, even if they are whitewashed and the actor playing the character is not Asian themselves. The proliferation of Asian pop culture, like anime, manga, and pop music, has made this problem worse in fandom spaces, where certain people and things are valued on the basis of them being Asian. Commodifying people’s culture and appearance is extremely dehumanizing, and its upsetting that little has changed.
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