White Savior with a Camera pt II
Model minorities, ideal scapegoats: Tarantino and Asian racism
In one chapter of Samurai Executioner, written by Kazuo Koike of Lone Wolf and Cub–an enormous influence on Quentin Tarantino and countless Western filmmakers, artists, and novelists–the Shogun’s executioner is asked by an artist to be allowed to paint him doing his grisly work: decapitating convicts. She claims that her paintings are meant to celebrate life by depicting the extreme passions people feel when confronting death.
Then she offers the samurai a gift: with no ink on hand, she takes a small scalpel and cuts deep into her arm. She dips her brush into the would and paints a quick sketch of the man using her own blood. At the sight of this, the executioner resolves never to let her paint another execution. He recognizes in her actions the lies in her words: someone who truly wanted to depict life would not so casually use blood as materials.
All her claims of loving benevolence, passion, and humanity, could not hide the underlying bloodlust, the sickness, that shone through her craft. Just as the lack of ink was her excuse to draw blood, her art was merely an excuse to get close to the gore and carnage at the extremes of the criminal justice system.
While it would be a pretty straightforward story if it ended there, Koike shows himself to be a true master of human psychology with what he has the noble executioner do next:
He proposes to make her his bride.
Extreme Romance
One of the undeniable driving factors for Tarantino’s success is his love of extremes.
This is also, ironically, one of the driving reasons why he’s been able to get away with Asian appropriation.
Tarantino’s early outings were pulp thrillers about gangsters featuring witty dialogue that popped against a background of shocking and explosive violence. His formula is one that has been repeated to great success by many writers and directors to follow: take a schlocky genre long considered trash by the ‘serious’ purveyors of the art form, and elevate it through big-budget action, clever dialogue, intricate plotting, and–most importantly–top-notch, immaculate aesthetics. Each factor of the film aside from the source material is undeniably masterpiece-level, as a result, there’s something for the film-school-graduated and film-industry-failed critics to love as well as the spectacle-craving public.
It’s a key reason why Tarantino has continued to make big-budget films that get global distribution alongside the comic book fare that Martin Scorsese recently dismissed as ‘theme park rides’. When I say that the formula is oft-repeated, I mean it. HBO based its entire business model around it. Game of Thrones took fantasy, a genre of doorstop-thick novels that were once embarrassing to be caught reading, whose most common association involved furry speedo-clad buxom barbarians air-brushed onto white vans, and turned it into something Shakespearean (for the first few seasons anyway). High and low art, Large Hadron Collided, generates pure gold.
Tarantino instinctively knows this. He used to be a video store clerk who used to watch every kind of video that would come through the shop. I believe this combined was assimilated into his prodigious dome and processed into shots, cuts, and scenes that we love to recognize and engage with. A kind of game that makes us feel smarter in our seats while simultaneously dropping our guards to the misanthropy that lies behind the celluloid. Whether the movies corrupted Tarantino or whether he was always a mean sonovabitch I cannot say for certain, but the well-publicized fetish this auteur has for feet is definitely just the tip of his iceberg of weirdness.
How Corruption Actually Works
Whatever made him the hurt and mean maker of movies he is today, you can’t deny that he’s extremely deft with culture and a master manipulator of it. I guess you would have to in order to get paid to indulge in your degeneracy. He started with widely-acceptable movies, Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction are lower-budget, artistic action-thriller films compared to the ones which came after, each being more niche, less widely appealing, and more indulgent of Tarantino’s quirks. It would have been hard for the director to secure funding for a massive WWII movie, for example, without having proven himself as a modern moviemaker. Take the following clip, he’s wrong about Superman, but the words Tarantino puts into Bill’s mouth are a pretty accurate summation of his own view of the human race and you, the moviegoing audience.
After all, what’s common to all his films is a love of gore, violence, and cruelty. And he knows that in order to get away with it, in order to make money recreating it, to get you to indulge in it, he needs the excuse of a just cause. Hence, the other Tarantino formula: take a downtrodden minority or genre type, and build a movie around them getting justice.
When it comes to African American culture, Tarantino took the blaxpoitation morality plays which often ended in the deaths of their main gangster protagonists, and let them win. Jackie Brown not only gets out alive, but she also gets out rich. The Jews of Inglorious Basterds not only survive the Holocaust, but they also kill Hitler and his top lackeys. Guys like Butch, the working-class boxer paid to take a dive in Pulp Fiction, usually end up punch-drunk and broke. But in Tarantino’s fantasy, he gets his freedom and he gets the girl. The original Django featured a white protagonist, the remake features a black slave liberator. In each movie, Tarantino finds a historical victim and uses his godlike creativity powers to help them triumph through a maelstrom of bullet wounds, blood spatters, and severed limbs. Right-wing solutions for left-wing pet causes.
A love of extremes.
Two Sides of the Same Yuan
But when it comes to the Asian genre, Asian culture, and Asians in general, why did Tarantino flout his formula? Why did he choose to make a white actress with no martial arts experience the star of an homage film to Asian cinema? There are two major reasons, one you could understand with enough backstory. The other you aren’t going to like.
And no, it’s not the typical copout of, ‘there just aren’t that many good Asian actors for him to build an Asian American martial arts duology’. I don’t buy that one, because many of the Asian stars around today–from Ming Na to Michelle Yeoh–were also around then, he just didn’t want to glorify them the way he did blacks and whites.
First, Quentin Tarantino loves the aesthetics of Asian genre films but dislikes many of the makers of these films. His own works are rife with references to chanbara sword duels, John Woo gunplay set pieces, and kung fu moral philosophy. He helped bring Sonny Chiba’s Street Fighter back to America. But male characters played by real Asian men, like Hattori Hanzo or Pai Mei, are relegated to mystical honor-bound Asian supporting cast stereotypes.
Instead, the main character is a white woman known as “The Bride”.
Why? Perhaps because he isn’t flouting his formula at all, he’s just letting his bias shine through. Perhaps it’s actually clear what race and gender Tarantino thinks are the ‘real victims’ of Asian history and cinema worthy of his rescuing.
Old Hollywood, Immortal Lies
It’s hard to imagine after over a century of meek, geek, and weak brainwashing by Hollywood cinema, but when Asian men first appeared on western movie screens in the 1910s they were undeniably seductive. The Yellow Peril wasn’t just about losing white working-class jobs, but losing white women, too. Counter to what filmmakers had intended, Japanese actor Sessue Hayakawa became Hollywood’s first heartthrob after starring in a movie portraying him as a sexual predator. Despite playing a villain and rapist, women across America felt the onscreen magnetism and turned out to swoon at his feet.
This no doubt stoked the fears of inadequacy and rage of the white establishment. Fears that manifested themselves as rumors of white women getting hooked on opium (a drug introduced to the Chinese by the British) and sold into Chinatown sex slavery by devious Asian lotharios.
Around this time another iconic Asian villain arose–Fu Manchu and his Yellow Horde. An impossibly cultured aristocrat with arcane wisdom and occult knowledge in the arts of murder, poisons, hypnosis, and sex. The scheming gentleman immortal with his harem of assassins, around which Tarantino built his chief villain played by David Caradine in Kill Bill.
Unlike the historical propaganda against blacks and whites, when it comes to Asians, Quentin believes the old lies or at least likes to use them to his advantage. During a recent appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience, Tarantino told an anecdote about the Hong Kong film industry to dampen sentiment against his former patron, convicted sexual predator Harvey Weinstein. Trotting out studio theatres with built-in bedrooms where he claimed Run Run Shaw took starlets, implying that the legendary owner of the Shaw Brothers was worse than his “father figure”, Harvey Weinstein.
To be fair to Tarantino, white female characters in Hong Kong fared little better than their Asian sisters did in Hollywood for many years. Relegated to little more than pretty faces and oversexed objects who fawned over the male lead(s). However, you could make the same argument for the portrayal and treatment of white women in blaxpoitation flicks, and old war movies. Hell, if we’re using individuals in the entertainment industry as the bar for who most deserves Uma Thurman’s wrath, has there been any more heinous an offender than Bill Cosby?
In this lies the crux of why I think Tarantino is a racist even if he occasionally makes films that champion the badassery of colored protagonists–he plays favorites, and his ire towards a particular group is betrayed not only in his work but in his words and actions.
But whether the axe Tarantino has to grind with Asian cinema on behalf of white women is legitimate or not, it is still a revenge epic about an aggrieved white woman. A very specific white woman, one who many people feel was particularly wronged by the Hong Kong film industry. Beatrix Kiddo, aka “The Bride” has a real-world analog, whose identity will be revealed in the next installment.
As for the second reason why Tarantino chose to star a white woman in an Asian ‘homage’ movie? Because Tarantino knew that you, the culture, the average moviemaker, would not only let him get away with it, you would 100% allow yourself to be complicit in it.
Happy Asian American Heritage Month.
To Be Continued…
NEXT WEEK: 88 Deaths to Kato!
The ease with which Tarantino objectifies and scapegoats Asians may be a subconscious bias, but his hatred for Bruce Lee is pretty explicit. Kill Bill isn’t a tribute to Bruce Lee’s legacy so much as it is a chopping-up of his body of work, dressing up the white lead in what is most beloved about Lee’s oeuvre, and killing off what Tarantino most detested. Next week, we’ll delve deeper into what exactly makes Kill Bill a work of appropriation over one of appreciation.
Yes, this is indeed the crux of it: “Because Tarantino knew that you, the culture, the average moviemaker, would not only let him get away with it, you would 100% allow yourself to be complicit in it.” The audience drives the maker too—and there’s a tie to all sorts of other unsavory aspects of our culture at large.