Cloud Atlas Review: Yellowface And Orientalism
By Guest Contributor Jennifer; originally published at Mixed Race America
This post is the second installment in a three-part review. See parts one and three.
There are many people who have written about the phenomenon of “yellowface,” which is the Asian version of “blackface”–having white (although at times there have been black) actors and actresses portraying Asian and Asian American people in Hollywood films. Racebending.com has a particularly astute and thorough accounting by contributor Michelle I. I recommend reading her piece, “Yellowface: A Story in Pictures,” to familiarize yourself with the looooong history of yellowface in Hollywood cinema. But I think this photo of Mickey Rooney in Breakfast at Tiffany‘s probably says it all:
As I wrote about in yesterday’s post, there’s a certain narrative logic that the filmmakers had in mind for putting their non-Asian actors in yellowface (including the African American actor Keith David in a role that reminded me of Laurence Fishburne in The Matrix, if they had taped back Fishburne’s eyes). One of the themes of the narrative (film as well as book) is a repetition or eternal recurrence of experiences, of relationships, of people with a comet birthmark who show up across space and time. To connect these otherwise disparate narratives, the filmmakers chose to have actors and actresses play various roles in all six segments/stories of the film–so Halle Berry has a throwaway minor role as a woman dressed in a sari (she’s supposed to be an Indian woman in London) but in two other stories she has a major role (as a Latina reporter in 1970s SF and in the future as a post-apocalyptic survivor who has access to technology). One of the stories takes place in 2144 in Neo Seoul, a dystopic “corporocracy”where “pure bloods” are consumers and “fabricants” are the cloned humans who serve them. So that brings us to the white actors playing Korean or Neo Korean men:
Jim Sturgess without the yellowface
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