Orientalism in Films

There have been many uses and abuses in Western view of the Eastern cultural and social concept of orientalism. This paper discusses how orientalism relates to the three films namely M. Butterfly, Madame Butterfly, and Lost in Translation. Like the title, "M. Butterfly" basically was playing about transformation. This is the first of the Giacomo Puccini opera metamorphosis that was famous, in which "Madame Butterfly" became the modern geopolitical argument to understand the culture. In this film, through love relations that really did not make sense between a French diplomat and the Chinese opera singer he believed the man became the woman, how could the failure for the wish to be separated from reality result in the deception and the tragedy. Gallimard changed Sole from "only humankind" in the "Perfect Woman". Due to his insecurity about his own masculinity, Gallimard needs to create Song in the image of the perfect Asian woman, which is exotic, sensual, and acquiescent, in order to feel wholly male. Although he seeks to confine Sole within the context of his fantasy, Gallimard poster vulnerability and need actually free Sole by providing her with an outlet to flee the Orientalist representation of Asian people. Gallimard transforms Sole into a butterfly, boots instead of transforming him into one of the butterfly. Whereas Gallimard, is actually the one who eventually ends up trapped by his own fantasy. Through an analysis of Gallimard practice cultural, sexual, and personal relationship with Sole Liling, this person is a reflection of the Western rape mentality toward the East, a philosophy that is ultimately self-destructive. Orientalism was the term that referred to the study about the East culture, but, according to the colonial theory of Edward Said, also could express the West strength and the East weakness - like that was seen by West like the strength and. The weakness was as intrinsic for Orientalism as them to show that divided the world in the public's big division. The West mentality rape was results of the west conviction in the domination and the superiority of the West culture. In a playing manner to racism and sexism that adhered in the Gallimard belief system on the Orientals, was not difficult for Sole to cheat him. According to Sole, she thought West personally as masculine, meaning big weapon, the big industry, big money and so as East feminine which is weak, fragile, poor. Japanese identity can also be understood as different through scenes in Lost in Translation movie, such as when Bob Harris is in the elevator and taller than every Japanese person in there or when he is in the shower and the shower head doesn't move to a tall enough height for him. Occident thinks that east, away in the heart, desire to be dominated. Because Song is from the East, he can never be fully masculine in Gallimard's eyes. The objective of this rape mentality is to serve as an imperialist reminder of the West's supremacy and an assurance of its power over the East. If the West feels it is by nature masculine and that the East is feminine, its power is viewed as natural, real, and justified. Furthermore, the moral compass of Orientalism is the duty to aid the East in becoming more like the West, while still retaining the aspects of its own culture that the West deigns to accept. Said writes, "The modern Orientalist was, in his view, a hero rescuing the Orient from the obscurity, alienation, and strangeness which he himself had properly distinguished". In a telling scene, Gallimard tells his colleague Toulon that the Asian people will always submit to the force of the greatest power. Therefore, by submitting to him, Song has given Gallimard the right to power. The cultural exchange between the East and the West is shown in "M. Butterfly" as a deconstructivist version of Puccini's "Madame Butterfly". The story initially starts when a BF Lieutenant Pinkerton from US Navy checked a house that appeared the Nagasaki port that he rent from a Goro, the marriage broker. The house was supplemented with three slaves and the wife geisha was named CIO-CIO-San that was known as Madame Butterfly. The notion that the beautiful Cio-Cio-San would commit ritual suicide because she has been abandoned by Pinkerton, a "not very good-looking, not very bright, and pretty much a wimp" of a Naval officer, seems entirely absurd. As the text of the master Orientalism, "Madame Butterfly" stressed the "eternal availability sexual the Asian woman for the West man in fact during his comfortable death delimits this connector." In the end, Cio-Cio-San's the face of the expendable Asian whose inevitable death confirms her marginality within dominant culture and history. The tragedy of Puccini's opera is in the destruction of Cio-Cio-San, an innocent and beautiful Japanese girl who is ruined by the one man she loved. While audiences cannot help but be moved by the helpless injustice of the situation, the circumstances under which it arises are still perceived as wholly believable, from the Japanese bride, to the American groom, to the painful termination of their relationship as Song tells Gallimard when they first meet, "because it is an Oriental who kills herself for a Westerner...you find it beautiful". If it were "a blonde homecoming queen" and a "short Japanese businessman", the play would be considered ridiculous. Puccini's popular opera is in many ways a foundational narrative of East-West relations, having shaped the Western construction of 'the Orient' as a sexualized, and sexually compliant, space that is ripe for conquest and rule. Because the East is seen as so innately feminine, any association between a blonde homecoming queen and a short, Japanese businessman would be impossible. Orientalism arose as a study, but its underlying racism developed in response to fear. Principally the fear of the East's potential, which is a very real threat to the power of the West. For example, a critical element in Puccini's plot is that Prince Yamadori , who is a rich, handsome, and royal, has loses Cio-Cio-San to Pinkerton, the poor American sailor. In true Orientalist fashion, Cio-Cio-San would rather kill herself than marry Prince Yamadori after experiencing the superior affections of Benjamin Franklin Pinkerton. Gallimard's reasoning for why most Asians hate "Madame Butterfly" is "because the white man gets the girl", but their distaste is due to more than merely hatred. The West's figurative castration of the East is a very real problem, a mindset that is advantageous to neither party and doomed to be fundamentally self-destructive. It seems improbable that anyone can remain ignorant about the sex of his lover for twenty years, but "M. Butterfly" is based on the true story of the French diplomat Bernard Boursicot and his Chinese mistress Shi Peipu, with whom he had a twenty-year relationship with before discovering his lover's true identity. Hwang attempts, in "M. Butterfly", to provide an answer for how such an incongruous relationship could have come about. While he intends the affair between Gallimard and Song to be a criticism of the West's xenophobic and supremacist perception of the East. The only probable reason why Gallimard and Boursicot could have been blind for so long is because they did not want to acknowledge the truth. Song explains to the Judge, when he is tried for spying, that men hear only what they want to hear, and that Gallimard believes he is a woman because he needs to accept that his fantasy woman is in reality female. As a consequence of Gallimard's profound insecurity about his own masculinity, he experiences considerable problems with communication in all of his relationships with women. Gallimard's desperate need for dominance exposes a vital weakness, which provides Song with the means by which to assert his freedom from the castration of the East by asserting his sexual power over a member of the elite West. From the start of the play, the audience already knows the entire story. The play is presented in a series of chronological flashbacks interspaced with personal commentary from the various characters. At times, both Gallimard and Song speak to the audience, calling upon the audience to attempt an understanding of the different motivations of the characters. The character of Gallimard is a tragic figure, as he readily admits to the audience, he does not wish to acknowledge the actuality of his situation, but chooses rather to continue to live in his imaginary world with his imaginary woman. Like Cio-Cio-San, who faithfully waited for three years without a word from Pinkerton, Gallimard's most pitiful quality is his dogmatic incapacity to concede the obvious truth. Even after the truth is presented beyond a doubt, Gallimard knows he cannot live with the weight of the knowledge. Just like the tragic heroine of "Madame Butterfly", Gallimard chooses to die with the death of a dream rather than live on with the acceptance of fact. Gallimard claims he dies for love, and to an extent he is right as he does love the woman he believed Song to be. However, Song is not Gallimard's Butterfly, but rather a strange man in Armani slacks wearing a cold chain and smelling of garlic. Hwang shows, through a geopolitical lens, that Gallimard's relationship to Song is a reflection of the Western rape mentality. The Orient of slender women in chong sams does not exist anywhere but in Gallimard's fatally misguided imagination, and his faith in such a self-serving, chauvinistic paradigm impels Gallimard to lose grasp of reality and ruin himself. Though it is only a dream, Gallimard's criterion for the "Perfect Woman" creates a very real wall between himself and Song, which eventually grows so ingrained that it cannot be breached. Monsieur Butterfly does not refer to Song, but to Gallimard. "Madame Butterfly" does not exist; the only Butterflies are the men who fool themselves into loving a product of their own imaginations. In my opinion, the writer of this film, Hwang, seems want the Western to know that East people also have pride, and if they don’t respect their pride, the Westerns will somehow get the compensation such as like Gallimard’s. While, in the film Lost in Translation there are many ways in which oriental doctrine is portrayed. The ways in which the Japanese culture and people are presented within this film are great examples of this, but in Modern century. For example, as advanced to the point of it not doing sense Japanese identity is portrayed. When Bob Harris is at his commercial shoot and the Japanese director was giving him direction to do the shooting was shown very complicated and long in Japanese but very little meaning when translated in English. Japanese men were portrayed as feminine in Lost in Translation movie through the character of the transvestite like the talc master of ceremonies show and the commercial director. The differences in height also seem to have the effect of feminizing Japanese men in this film. American identity in this film is shown as superior and almost as a saving grace. It seems as if it is assumed that if Americans weren't visiting Japan that the Japanese people would have nothing better to do with their time. The presence of the Americans gives the Japanese characters in this movie a sense of purpose in their serving them. This is definitely an example of Orientalism in this film. Stereotypically, this film departed from the Hollywood tradition about Orientalism by showing that Tokyo was the version of the fantasy of how Westerns want themselves to be treated like. Orientalism set the real boundaries between human beings, on which races, nations, civilizations were constructed; it forced vision away from the common, as well as plural, human realities like joy, suffering, political organization, forcing attention instead in the downward and backward direction of immutable origins. Nevertheless, the Japanese identity and America’s forged to understand to one another in the Lost film in Translation. Without the drafting of the Japanese culture as inferior with the American culture, America will not be seen as the superior. This was the effect from observation of the orientalist. The difference that was shown between the culture and film insiders this was used to produce the effect from the difference that created the position of the inferiority and the superiority.