Sex, Violence and Japaneseness: The Orientalist Gaze in

Contemporary Hollywood
Hegemony is about the mastering of history. That is to say, it is about praxis: the use of
people's will and agency to drive their own history into the future; and it is about the weight (or
lightness) of the past, carried on the shoulders of the present. (Smith 2007, 217)

Smith's statement illustrates the significance of dominating the production of meaning,

discourse and knowledge in order to control history and govern people. Since power is
connected to the exercise of knowledge, the study of meaning and representation takes on an
ever-increasing role within postmodern studies. Thus, drawing on but also deviating from
earlier structuralist theories of language and representation, Foucault explains his
constructionist theory in the following way:

Here I believe one's point of reference should not be to the great model of language (langue)
and signs, but to that of war and battle. The history which bears and determines us has the
form of a war rather than that of a language: relations of power not relations of meaning.
(Foucault 1980, 114-115)

Viewed as such it is clear that truth is not merely a matter of language or meaning, but rather
it is about interpretation, and about dominating history, and with it, signs and meaning. It is
about how thoroughly and permanently discursive meanings are constructed and shaped in
the human mind.
It is within this framework that literary, cinematographic and artistic representations
receive an even more pressing relevance within sociology, media and communication studies.
Thus, depictions of certain ideas, values, stereotypes and prejudices in literature and cinema
shape people's imaginations and conceptions of the world. And it is within this framework that

Edward Said's notion of 'Orientalism' occupies a central position within the context of analyzing
race-based representations.
Despite ongoing theoretical debates about notions like Orientalism and/or 'political
correctness', Hollywood as the most important site maintaining its monopoly over the
production and circulation of symbolic meanings insists upon stereotypical depictions of
Asians in a very traditional and Western manner. The aim of this paper is thus to examine one
such example, namely Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill 1 (2003), in contemporary American cinema
and to illustrate its effects on society. By showing how old prejudices about sex, violence and
race are conformed and by presenting the main meanings and messages disseminated
through the movie, I will argue that the Orientalist gaze is still omnipresent in Hollywood and
in postmodern and postcolonial Western civilization.
The fact that Tarantino is one of the most popular and commercially most successful
movie directors of our times shows that his movies and characters contribute to a large part to
people's imaginations and popular culture. The fact that only the most famous actors and
actresses only the biggest names in Hollywood play in his movies also highlights the fact
that his movies are guaranteed to be watched by an even greater international audience, which
means that racial, sexual and/or national prejudices are not only circulated in America or in
the West, but all around the globe, i.e. in the East as well.
Before beginning to look at the main points of criticism in Kill Bill, it is important to
analyze Said's notorious and much-discussed notion of Orientalism again. Said's study focus
here is on
the representation of other cultures, societies, histories; the relationship between power and
knowledge; the role of the intellectual; the methodological questions that have to do with the
relationships between different kinds of texts, between text and context, between text and
history (Said 1985, 89)
argues that the Orient is not only a geographical location but it occupies also a specific
cultural and ideological position based on the Western experience:

The Orient is not only adjacent to Europe; it is also the place of Europe's greatest and richest
and oldest colonies, the source of its civilizations and languages, its cultural contestant, and
one of its deepest and most recurring images of the Other. In addition, the Orient has helped
to define Europe (or the West) as its contrasting image, idea, personality, experience. (Said
1978, 1991)
Thus, the Orient is the direct counterpart of the Occident, helping the latter to construct a
seemingly natural antithetical binary. Despite the claim to natural or material objectivity, Said
points out that the Orient is a European invention:

Yet none of this Orient is merely imaginative. The Orient is an integral part of European
material civilization and culture. Orientalism expresses and represents that part culturally and
even ideologically as a mode of discourse with supporting institutions, vocabulary, scholarship,
imagery, doctrines, even colonial bureaucracies and colonial styles. (Said 1978, 1991)

Like Foucault, Barthes and other post-structuralists, Said maintains a constructionist view of
representation, and emphasizes the role of institutions. One of these institutions is of course
cinema, which creates fictional images that (may) later become real facts (Said 1985).
In the context of fictional images, the aesthetics of violence and sexual attraction play
a major role in Kill Bill. The main protagonist of the movie is tall, blue-eyed, blonde Uma
Thurman aka The Bride. The entire plot revolves around her revenge story, while Japan is
only an exotic background location and the Japanese characters only play minor (and mostly
enemy) roles. The only comparatively bigger part is played by Lucy Liu, who is in fact an
American with Chinese roots. This can also be tied back to Said's critique of the Orientalist
gaze, which tends to make frequent usage of over-generalizations and over-simplifications.
Consequently, culturally, socially and politically extremely diverse countries such as China,
Japan, Korea, etc., are thrown into the same pot and treated as one geographical area and
culture, namely Asia or the Orient. The same applies to Uma Thurman's dressing up in what
strikingly resembles Bruce Lee's famous yellow uniform. While Tarantino may have thus

intended to pay a respectful homage to Bruce Lee, it does not change the fact that he conflates
the Chinese culture with the Japanese, presenting the Western audience with an overly
generalized view of Asian culture. With regards to Asian presence in American cinema, it is
furthermore important to note that despite the rise in prominence of some Asian actors and
actresses in the last decades, their number is still strikingly small in Hollywood's culture
industry (Leung 2012, 166).
Lucy Liu's depiction of O-Ren Ishii (or Codename: Cottonmouth) as the venomous
female yakuza boss is based on 1970s conventions of Japanese sexploitation movies which
feature the so-called sukeban (bad girl boss) (Leung 2012, 161). The close interrelationship
between the Orientalism and sexuality derives from colonial times, when imperial expansion
itself was derived from the export of male sexual energy (Stoler 1991, 54). As Stoler poins
out, [s]exual domination has been carefully considered as a discursive symbol, instrumental
in the conveyance of other meanings, which means that sexuality came to serve as a loaded
metaphor for domination (Stoler 1991, 54). As a result, Said describes Orientalism as a male
perception of the world, a male power-fantasy, an exclusively male province, (Said 1978,
207), in which the Orient is penetrated, silenced, and possessed (Stoler 1991, 54).
However, the representation of the Orient is evolving with time, and as such it is
particularly important to note these developments in terms of sexuality symbolized through the
figure of O-Ren Ishii. In her case, we see how the long existing racial stereotype of the Asian
dragon lady/femme fatale is recreated as a desexualized and ultraviolent Asian female
avenger in a process of transnational cultification that caters to the 'Orientalist' gaze (Leung
2012, 161). This transformation emphasizes that symbolic representations remain an abstract
and flexible construct where differences are available and accessible for appropriation (Leung
2012, 162).
Tarantino additionally employs clichd images, characters and dialogues. In the final,
climactic sword-battle in Kill Bill, the kimono-clad yakuza chieftess O-Ren remarks: ''Silly
Caucasian girl likes to play with samurai swords.'' O-Ren's characterization, like all other Asian
characters in Kill Bill, remains limited: the spectator does not understand her motivations, she

remains a flat, undeveloped character until her assassination by the heroine. The heavy use
of images such as katana swords, in the entire movie the Japanese do not own any other
weapons kimono and manga, as well as samurai and ninja references points to an extremely
high level of reductionism concerning the perception of Japanese culture and history. Even
more importantly, however, Japanese culture is reduced to a) an ancient civilization (cf. the
exclusive use of pre-modern weaponry), b) a spiritual/religious population, which is portrayed
through a high sword master in Okinawa, who teaches Uma Thurman the rules of Zen
Buddhism and the ways of the Bushido honor code in order to master the art of sword-fighting.
Yet most importantly, in Kill Bill, the image of Japan is primarily connected with violence.
Despite the fact that O-Ren already appears in the first half of the movie, which takes place on
American soil, in the second half the Bride goes to Japan to execute her revenge act. The
(deliberately exaggerated) blood and gore scenes connected with the sword fights give the
impression that they better fit with the exotic Japanese setting. Thus, there seems to be a
persistence on the notion of the dangerous and cruel Other, which is implied through the
images of Oriental violence (of which martial arts are another important theme). In fact, in an
interview Tarantino himself admits to his perception of Japan as being more relaxed with
images of violence: when asked about the reason why there are two versions of the movie,
the bloodier one was only shown in Japanese theaters his reply was that Japan can handle
this stuff better. They just think it's funny (qtd. in Hunt, 220). Thus, it is possible to state that
this suggests a kind of innate desire for cruelty and extreme violence as a typical trait of
Japanese film audiences (Needham 2006, 12).
According to Gerbner, representations of violence on the TV screen are not violence
but messages about violence (qtd. in Hall 1980, 169). The same can be stated about other
messages concerning race, nationality, history or sexuality. As Hall states, [r]eality exists
outside language, but it is constantly mediated by and through language: and what we can
know and say has to be produced in and through discourse (1980, 169). If we read movies as
texts that produce discourse through images and language, we can observe the dangerous
messages that are disseminated through Orientalist representations, namely that knowledge

is produced at the expense of the Other. The internalization of such fictions may then lead to
their establishment as facts, which is dangerous because it not only shapes definitions, but
also self-definitions of communities, and so contributes to the consolidation of stereotypes and
prejudices between them.

References