After
bearing witness to the racist insanities of the Bronson film
Kinjite: Forbidden Subjects, I became curious about the other 80s American films addressing Asian and American relations, see what they share. Turns out they're of a piece.
Black Rain (Ridley Scott, 1989)
I'm surprised anyone complained this was hard to follow, because the movie is such a tissue of cliches that you always know exactly what's going to happen at every turn. Much of what's inauthentic about the movie has to do less with the condescensions of
Kinjite than those very genre cliches. This is meant to be a fish out of water buddy cop actioner, but the movie has no proper characters, so it has to force the dynamic, in the process twisting both Japanese
and American culture out of shape to make its cliched premise work. The movie needs an uptight/slob odd couple pairing, so it makes the NY cops wild and the Japanese uptight. Ok. But it doesn't just make this true on the job, it makes it true even off duty. So the NY cops have to teach the Japanese how to let loose and party
in their own country. This would be absurd even if you didn't know Japan has a corporate culture with a notorious 'word hard, play hard' mentality where office workers are expected to go out after work and get shitfaced with their colleagues regularly as part of office culture. The idea that a couple Americans need to show the Japanese how to let loose after work is non-sensical and ignorant. They also need to show the Japanese how to do karaoke properly, apparently, even tho' Japanese and American karaoke is very different (Japanese people don't sing in front of a room full of strangers, they have private booths). This swings the other way, too: Michael Douglas needs some obasan to show him how to use chopsticks properly, expecting us to buy that a veteran New York cop wouldn't know how to use chopsticks. The cliches and forced dynamics produce wrongheaded cultural stereotypes in both directions for the same reasons: the movie isn't interested in culture or people--American, Japanese, whoever. It's only interested in repeating bits from more popular movies.
There is one trope that all three movies share: the lead character is a broken, unlikable, racist police officer that the movie seems to want to hold up to criticism, but just can't help itself from excusing and valorizing, so that the things he ought to be criticized for become positives. Here, it's Michael Douglas, who perpetually looks like shit, treats everyone in the same dickish manner, is plainly corrupt, and spends his whole time arguing with the Japanese characters. One of his defining characteristics is his refusal to make himself comprehensible to the Japanese, always making his point with vulgar slang that his partner, Andy Garcia, has to endlessly explain. And Andy Garcia is a real problem for the movie, because his character is so charming and likeable, and he's so observant and empathetic, that it throws Douglas' unlikeableness constantly into relief. It also make the buddy dynamic with Douglas and Ken Takakura incoherent, because it's
Garcia that Takakura actually bonds with. Douglas just fucks up Takakura's life with his poor decisions, but the movie needs them to bond, so it just has them bond over their mutual appreciation for Garcia I guess. This would've been a much better movie if it had dropped Douglas entirely and had Garcia as the lead.
There is a hamhanded attempt to criticize America through the figure of Douglas, trying to tie together the atom bond (hence the titular black rain), American cultural imperialism, and capitalism into some overarching criticism that doesn't make any sense. But it does end up raising another trope you find across these movies: Americans only care about money, but the Japanese are devoted to big concepts like duty, honour, tradition, blah blah blah. This from the mouth of a yakuza trying to set up a couterfeit money operation. In reality, he owes his whole business to this Americanization he randomly spits back in Douglas' face. But reality doesn't enter into things: the movie would have you believe that the young upstart trying to muscle out the old guys is a fundamentally American product, because the movie sees the Japanese as being
old, doing things in accord with age old traditions, backed by ancient values that form their essence. The Japanese just do things differently because they're tied to all these old traditions and values that Americans just can't understand, and that leaves them prey to the modern world. The movie doesn't make too much out of this, thankfully. It leaves that kind of thing to Cimino. Speaking of...
Year of the Dragon (Michael Cimino, 1985)
Another movie that top to bottom lacks authenticity. All its parts are made from other, better movies. Mickey Rourke's character seems lifted right out of noir, so he walks around 1980s New York in a fedora and trench coat spitting bad tough guy quips. It's such a bizarre choice, but then the movie is full of those, not least in its decision to focus almost entirely on Rourke's failing marriage, old neighbourhood friendships, and love affair with a reporter extraneous to the plot. Chinatown itself is rarely on screen. We're given no inside look at how it operates, what the people are like, how they live, nothing. Hell, when the movie finally shifts more to John Lone's character in the second half, we immediately head off to Thailand in some attempt to become a kind of Asian
The Godfather. I got a better sense of how the drug trade in Thailand works than in the Chinatown the movie's ostensibly about. That's the trouble, the movie is far more interested in its American characters and working class NY setting than in the Chinese or Chinatown. You can feel it. So the only real Chinese characters with any screen time are all gangsters. The only exceptions are Ariane and Dennis Dun, but neither seem a part of Chinatown, and Dun is a tertiary character in a movie where even the leads go underdeveloped. Authentic social and political drama isn't possible, because there isn't a persuasive social reality here. It's cops and gangsters cliches within an exotic setting the movie is uninterested in aside from the colour it adds.
Like the two above, Rourke's cop is unlikeable, self-involved, and a racist. Again, there's a level on which this is meant to be a criticism of America, but it doesn't survive the movie's genuine admiration for Rourke's drive, determination, and self-righteousness that brooks no compromise, especially not compromise with the terms of the world. These movies can't seem to commit to their criticisms because the things they want to criticise are so goddamn American. The filmmakers know they ought to find these cops repulsive, but they can't help enjoying how these gruff, confident, socially indifferent men discomfort all these inscrutable Asians with their weird traditions and buttoned up attitudes. These movies just love to watch presumptuous Asians be cut down to size by arrogant Americans. So it's doubly unconvincing when Cimino, Stone, and co. try to turn this culture clash film of theirs into a Vietnam war commentary. The movie would have us believe Rourke's traumatic experience in Vietnam colours his (and I guess Americas?) view of the Chinese. But aside from some dated un-PC language, it can't bear to show Rourke's character actually do something outright racist. No, the whole Vietnam angle is a generalization: his character just refuses to lose another Asian war. The war he wages against the triads is a just war, one in which he refuses to compromise his values tho' he stands to lose everything, and does so in the face of ever louder calls to compromise himself so that the ugly, but comforting status quo can be allowed to continue. It's a Vietnam allegory, with Rourke as America. Except the movie authentically admires Rourke, and his intervention into Chinatown is righteous: he's battling organized crime that murders innocents left and right. The movie would like to be
The Deer Hunter but ends up as
The Green Berets.
And here again is another American movie that uses the shackles of tradition and history to essentialize the Asian character. There's a whole long scene at the beginning where the triad bosses explain over and over to Mickey Rourke that things are the way they are because of "thousands of years of tradition". Over and over they say that, thousands of years. Exactly what traditions they mean, or why these traditions should be true despite the great variety in ethnicity, language, and culture within China itself, or even why anything they're talking about should be old Chinese traditions as opposed to the more recent traditions of an immigrant community surrounded on all sides, who knows. Chinese people are all the same, bound by centuries of tradition that dictates their actions and values, and against which the white world either has to throw up its hands in incomprehension, or else dash its brains out against in a doomed attempt to fight it. A monolith of inscrutible ancientness that a modern, reasonable, free-thinking American can't help but despise. So this movie too takes great delight in having another uncouth, rule-defying cop show these Asians how the modern world works. (That the movie has no sure grasp of Chineseness is shown by one character's decision to save face by committing a more honourable suicide--you know, that stereotypically
Japanese thing).
But, funnily, the conservative bedrock of these kinds of cop stories introduces a confusion. While these films see Asian cultures and values as ancient (ie. binding), homogeneous, and intolerable, they also can't help feeling that abandoning tradition brings chaos and evil. So even as the movies delight in watching their main characters defy Asian traditions and cultural norms, they still have villains whose defining badness is their refusal to follow those same traditions. There is undoutably a racism in this double standard: the worst thing an Asian can do is act like an American and forget his place (see: John Lone's desire to expand outside Chinatown and compete with the American mafia, or Yusaku Matsuda's get-ahead attitude and lack of respect for his elders being attributed to American influence in
Black Rain). But that's not the whole of it: the films are divided by their nature, A. the need for a cop drama to reassert the status quo and justify its institutions, figuring crime not as a feature of those institutions but a perversion of them; and B. the need to assert positive American values of freedom, individuality, and a sense of personal destiny against cultures that don't outwardly share those same values. The films can't decide if they want to defend traditional Asian societies and values or break them down in an anarchic fit.
None of these movies are good, for reasons both related and unrelated to their cultural anxieties. But they're kinda fascinating to watch together like this and see the reverberations.