Wes Anderson and the Follies of Modern Orientalism
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- Опубликовано: 14 июл 2020
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Citations:
Justin Chang: Review: Wes Anderson’s ‘Isle of Dogs’ is often captivating, but cultural sensitivity gets lost in translation
www.latimes.com/entertainment...
Chouliaraki, Lilie. The Spectatorship of Suffering. SAGE, 2006, pp. 3.
David Fear: How Do You Solve a Problem Like ‘Isle of Dogs’?
www.rollingstone.com/movies/m...
Said, Edward W. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon Books, 1978.
Jonah Weiner: How Wes Anderson Mishandles Race
slate.com/culture/2007/09/how...
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Renegade Cut has a very similar take on this (we both took heavy inspiration from Jonah Weiner's Slate article), go check out his video!
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Hello! Just wanted to address this: Renegade Cut made a very similar video about this topic a couple years ago, and in our analyses we both cite an article by Jonah Weiner, which informed many of our criticisms (much of the literature surrounding Wes Anderson + race echo a lot of the same sentiments)! It was never my intention to copy Renegade Cut - he had this take first, and I really admire his work. But I do recognize our points about Darjeeling have a significant amount of overlap. Here is his video (you should check out the rest of his channel too, he's amazing):
At first I thought that the no subtitles was really clever because it was like we were watching from the perspective of a dog who wouldnt understand human language. And then the white character shows up and is inexplicably perfectly intelligible lmao.
I would also like to add that some of the Japanese spoken in Isle of Dogs is not comprehensible to Japanese people/speakers. I don't remember specifics but I remember there were several instances in which English words were simply spoken with a Japanese "accent". While there are 外来語(words "borrowed" from other languages and incorporated into Japanese) Anderson had Japanese characters speak in ways that a real native Japanese speaker/Japanese person would never do. Maybe it's because as a Japanese person I'm always hyper aware/sensitive at how Western media portrays Japanese culture, but that aspect just felt extra icky for me. I wish I could've enjoyed it because I do love the storyline and the dogs and the animation but the use of Japanese culture felt incredibly shallow and fetishistic at points :(
Saw this trailer with my husband at the theater and we both let out an audible "Yikes" at the mushroom cloud scene. One of the most culturally traumatic events of Japan having its' imagery presented for a film by a quirky western filmmaker just never sat well with us.
This is so interesting. I am half Japanese, and I speak Japanese, so my Japanese mother and I did not feel the distinct language barrier that other people might have while watching this film. We naturally would not "other" the Japanese elements or people in the film, and we both enjoyed the film quite a bit as a moment of representation of our culture in Hollywood, and we of course have already reflexively learned to give Westerners a pass on cultural accuracy or nuance since we rarely see it (sad but true). However, unpacking this for a non-Japanese audience who might have accidentally diminished the Japanese characters to a backdrop is a very interesting exercise. Thanks for sharing your analysis! There's so much to think about here.
I find it intriguing that every video essay that I’ve seen discussing colonialism has a bevy of people in the comments who either dismiss it or excuse it- moreso than any other topic. You can’t just divorce films of this type from their historical context. Yes, Anderson may have intentionally limited the audience’s understanding of the other culture to mirror the characters’ alienation from that culture. So what? There are plenty of movies that have been made showing alienation from society without shamelessly borrowing the aesthetics of other cultures- Fight Club and Priscilla Queen of the Desert come to mind. Hell, Anderson could just have easily as set these films in rural America or England and the same “fish out of water” element would have applied with a trio of elitist, snobby upper class Americans in a very poor area. Instead, he chose to borrow the aesthetics of another place and literally nothing else. (This also lessens the scope of the film, and restricts its appeal to Western audiences.)
Why does orientalism persist? A year ago my graduate class read Orientalism. None of the white PhD students understood what Said was talking about but all of them were critical of his argument and didnt see how it applied to our scholarship or literature. I facepalmed through our entire discussion of the text that night
I always felt uncomfortable with Isle of dogs but couldn't really explain why until now. This video's great!!
But it's not a Japanese movie. It's an American movie that pays homage to the robust and storied tradition of film in Japan. This argument delegitimizes japanese cinema by acting like it's up to Americans to make Japanese movies. The assumption that the Japanese characters are less important or less fleshed out, simply because you don't understand the words, implies that you, yourself, are assigning the status of "background" to these characters, not Anderson. Isle of Dogs is crafted with a clear love and respect for the culture. It can also serve to expose westerners, in a way that's accessible to them, to cultures beyond their own. I'm not going to pretend there isn't room for improvement, but vilifying someone who is working to normalize eastern aesthetics in western culture, is working against the kind of change it seems like you want to bring about.
As a Japanese speaker, the Japanese spoken in this movie is really off. Like, I can understand what characters like Atari and who else are saying, it seems artificial. Like how Japanese companies use English on their products that make no sense linguistically.
I think Wes Anderson sees other countries only for their stereotypical aesthetics and wants to employ them, but realizes the only appropriate way to incorporate them is to set the movie in said country and then forces himself into a corner where he must write a movie set in a country he actually cares very little about culturally. Like in The Isle of Dogs, I think he fell in love with Japanese symbols and the Japanese aesthetic, but then was faced with creating a non- stereotypical world and just couldn’t live up to the task.
Wes Anderson's non white characters always feel more like props or quirky accessories to white characters rather than actual people
I'm an MA Japanese Studies Student and have been studying Orientalism and Occidentalism in university for quite some time now. I think you did a really great job of explaining this complex topic. I'm glad more people get to learn about it. Sometimes I get so frustrated with stuff like this even (or actually especially) in daily life. People get real mad when non-Japanese people try on Kimonos in a museum but depictions like this in movies are just accepted as edgy and cool. Clearly some priorities off here, haha.
While this doesn't detract from the overall point, it's a bit ironic to illustrate the claim that "eastern men tend to be emasculated in [orientalist views]" with a snapshot from Lawrence of Arabia, which actually portrays Arabian men as more "authentically" viril and masculine than the "effeminate" and "decadent" British officers - a problematic trope with a long history in its own right for sure, but not very representative of the point being made here.
That's interesting, because when I watched this movie as a Slovenian, I heard two foreign languages. One that I understood (English) and one that I did not (Japanese). The lack of subtitles did not make my mind automatically jump to orientalism. I simply assumed that the parts of the movie that were in Japanese were not meant to be understood fully by me or by English speakers, but by a Japanese audience. I also felt that me not understanding exactly what the people were saying was a clever way to help the viewer experience what it must feel like to be a dog living in a world dominated by humans.
I am late to this vid, but let me recommend:
I think that the artificial aesthetic of wes anderson films also contributes to this detachment of the culture. He's a fan of old movies and uses the stereotypes and cliches of them on most of his movies, so when portraying a different culture this approach results insensitive.
I had always thought of Isle of Dogs as a peculiar blend of “old fashioned” exoticising orientalism and more “modern” orientalist narratives seen in the cyberpunk genre especially, following Japan and Taiwan’s tech booms in the 80s. Thank you for putting this into better words and theoretical context than I could, this definitely helped me organise my own thoughts on why, much like you noted, the movie rubbed me the wrong way. I can’t wait to watch more of your videos!
Wes Anderson has always been one of my favorite directors, and Isle of Dogs was one was my favorite movies of that year, so naturally I instinctively felt a bit resistant to this video's thesis when I saw it pop up in my feed, but I think you make a really compelling case.
Thanks for this. Darjeeling Limited is one of my favorite films and I always appreciate knowing every side of a film I enjoy from the good to the problematic. There is so much to think about here and it’s good to know for the future so we can have higher expectations for our favorite filmmakers.