Response to “Simulacra and SimulAsian: The Culture of Hollywood’s Yellow Peril” by Angie Wong

Abstract

Response to “Simulacra and SimulAsian: The Culture of Hollywood’s Yellow Peril” by Angie Wong Chinelo Ezenwa, Respondent Angie Wong’s article “Simulacra and SimulAsian: The Culture of Hollywood’s Yellow Peril” addresses the subtle ways in which two recent acclaimed Hollywood films reinforce cinematic violence against Asian women, who are either hypersexualized, rendered mute, or shown as carriers of deadly diseases that disrupt the Arcadian world of the whiter Westerner. The article shows that in Venom (2018), the two pre-action Asian women are depicted as disease-ridden bodies, whose main role, it seems, is to deliver the disease from Malaysia to San Francisco. Their transference of disease to the white world also conveniently takes place at an airport, at the border where non-white peoples are often designated as non-beings. Kyoko in Ex Machina (2014) is similarly subjugated by Nathan, her white creator; she represents the white male exploitation of the body, labour, and sexuality of the Asian woman by a hypermasculine white society. Wong points out that in both films, there is neither character development for those women nor any escape for them as soon as they serve the perverse purposes of their “creators.” Perhaps this is because, on the aggregate, they are simulations of real people (“SimulAsians”). But, based on Edward Said’s notion of Orientalism, Wong argues that using the fragmented prism of a technological form of Orientalism (techno-Orientalism) and creating such “SimulAsians” allows these movies to violate and exploit the Asian female characters. Kyoko, the Asian housekeeper-mistress figure in Ex Machina, is the ultimate “Simulacrum” and “SimulAsian,” as Wong demonstrates. This is because, for most of the film, one is uncertain if Kyoko is a cyborg created to look Asian, or if she is [End Page 232] an Asian deliberately presented to look like a cyborg. Whatever reality exists for her is premised on Nathan’s (her manufacturer’s) stereotypical perception of the Asian woman as cold, silent, and sexually available (Wong 9). But it is not even Kyoko’s poor development that bothers one most about Ex Machina. Instead, it is how the film manages to minimize Kyoko when shown against Ava, the Caucasian cyborg. The latter in fact becomes triumphant by exploiting both Kyoko and the unnamed Asian woman’s body. Ava’s only means of escape, it seems, is by literally cherry picking the skin off the bones of the unnamed female Asian figure in order to achieve “humanity.” Therefore, after their final “battle,” only Ava is triumphant while Kyoko remains a victim of the liberation march. Yet, as Wong equally observes, though the film seems to criticize the “dehumanization” of the Asian cyborgs, it is only able to achieve this critique by presenting them as sacrificial lambs, without any will and ability to achieve liberation. This double subjugation is not uncommon for “women of colour.” In my discussion of Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions, for instance, I show how the Zimbabwean women are double yoked under colonial and traditional patriarchies. The difference is that where the Zimbabwean girls and women are deliberately portrayed in Nervous Conditions with critical voices, Ex Machina and Venom do not allow the Asian women any such power. They are stereotyped as figures of annihilation, while the extreme physical violence against them is masked under the notion that they are not human. The horror of that form of cinematic occlusion of violence is perhaps clearer when one considers the implications of the two Asian diseased bodies in Venom, as Wong does. They are pitted against the white heroic journalist, Eddie Brock, and his lawyer girlfriend, Anne Weying. Despite their flaws, the latter two characters are somehow found the acceptable bodies of the “future” who are able to not only achieve symbiosis with the alien but still maintain their societal moral codes, act out their heroisms, and rescue their world from the threats of the extraterrestrial disease embodied in the Asian women and the equally Asian-looking genius inventor, Riz Ahmed. In both films, the viewer is encouraged to ignore the scenes of violence against the Asian women because the action is conveniently set in the magical world of the movies. Wong rightly points...