In recent weeks, the trailer for Matt Damon’s next film, “The Great Wall”, has raised a furor over its depiction of Damon defending “The Great Wall” of China…among legions of medieval Chinese warriors. Constance Wu hit the nail on the head when she tweeted, “We have to stop perpetuating the racist myth that [only a] white man can save the world” – along with many others, she has pointed out the obvious: the casting of Damon as a literal white savior of China is nothing short of absurd.
Absurd, because there are so many prominent and emerging East Asian actors who could have done the role justice, and consequently helped to remedy the lack of East Asian representation that remains endemic to many sectors of society; absurd, because despite all the uproar that has accompanied the whitewashing of international media (see: The Ghost In The Shell, Doctor Strange, and Aloha), Hollywood still doesn’t seem to have gotten the message; absurd, because the West has never, in its history, saved China.
In order to be palatable and beautiful, people of color are the ones who must change, to suit the tastes of the white West
Instead of repeating all of the excellent points that other activists in the East Asian community have made, however, I want to shift the focus from Matt Damon. When I first heard about this film and Damon’s role in it, I jumped immediately to the conclusion that it was the brainchild of a white Western filmmaker, interested in profiting off the mystical Orient through Damon’s superstar status. When I looked it up, however, I realized that the director was Zhang Yimou, one of and perhaps the most prominent Chinese filmmaker currently in the business, with a penchant for portraying Chinese people’s resilience in spite of hardship and most recently, inserting random white people in Chinese people’s narratives (see: “The Flowers of War”).
On the topic of casting “The Great Wall”, prior to the release of the trailer, Zhang said the following: “What I really want is to bring Chinese color and cultural background to the worldwide audience through a film language that they are familiar with […] We are using Hollywood film-making to introduce Chinese culture.”
Above all, this is what angers me about this debacle. Not Zhang himself, but his fervent belief, echoed all across the world, that in order to be palatable, acceptable, and, in the rarest of instances, beautiful, people of color are the ones who must change – who must, perhaps, evolve to suit the tastes of the white West. Make no mistake: the “worldwide audience” Zhang speaks of is the audience which is able to contribute the most capital to the industry – the West. And the film language that the West is most familiar with is the entrenched patriarchal vision of the white man saving the damsel in distress. In light of Chinese men’s constant derogation as “effeminate”, undesirable, and apparently unable to save their own historical structures, “The Great Wall” proves not to be that complex a modulation of the same old tired story.
Throughout the 90 second trailer, Damon is the only person to speak
Granted, we only have a minute and a half of directorial and marketing choices to go on. Perhaps it is unfair of me to make this judgment. The critics of the activists who have spoken out would have you think this way, would have us wait until the damage has been done to actually say anything.
But I’ll point you to one thing about the trailer that proves my point: throughout the 90 seconds, Damon is the only person to speak. Despite the appearance of hundreds of actors and actresses, Damon’s American accent pierces the ear of the listener, declaring his character’s devotion to a war he was “born into”, a war “worth fighting for”. The submissive subordination of Asia to white mankind’s beck and call is consummated with a bang and a boom – Damon’s voice is the only one we need to penetrate the Orient, whose people cannot speak for themselves.
Whether this silence was a directorial or a marketing choice, it’s a telling one. What “The Great Wall” is saying, what Zhang is admitting, is that whiteness sells. And the reality that whiteness sells, in today’s capitalist world, is more important than filling Chinese roles with Chinese actors, more important than promoting Chinese artistic creation, more important than providing young Chinese people with heroes who look like them. Money rules over integrity, any day of the week, even at the cost of ourselves.
It matters that we tell our own stories about our own people
Zhang has mentioned in interviews that he has no interest in politics. What he fails to see is that art is always political. His orchestration of the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics was political. His casting of white male leads for “The Flowers of War” and “The Great Wall” is political. His basing of “The Great Wall” off of a story by Franz Kafka is political. Perhaps it is not political in the typical sense: it does not take the form of a sit-in or a protest, or a white paper or a speech. But it is a reckoning with of power dynamics between characters, who serve as metonyms for larger conflicts than those that play out on screen. In that way, his artistic acts are inevitably tied up with the contingencies of history.
There’s nothing wrong with adapting a story by a foreign author. But if Zhang really wanted to tell a story about the Great Wall of China, surely it would not have been that difficult to find a Chinese person to write it for him? Kafka’s 11-page short story is full of beautiful and evocative imagery, but surely there would have been value in bringing to life a native artist’s vision of the Wall and putting it on stage for the world to see?
I agree that culture is transmittable and grows stronger only because of meaningful exchange. But I don’t agree that sharing the same stories from the same white perspectives, with a diversification of the personnel, is enough to constitute an equal plane of sharing. A white director with no experience of China could not have told the story of Zhang’s “Not One Less” (1999), an exploration of education reform, the urban-rural divide, authority and the media in contemporary China – it’s not enough that stories are being told about us, it matters that we are telling our own stories about our own people.
I’m tired of people saying that orientalism no longer has damaging effects. Tell that to the young women who spend hours every day experimenting with eyelid tape to make their eyes bigger
If it’s true, on the other hand, that “The Great Wall” is meant to “examine the enclosure and protection of Europe by a complex and growing system of walls, fences and systems of exclusion”, why is an invaluable piece of Chinese history and heritage being used as a backdrop? Even in a film made in our own country and directed by a prominent Chinese individual, we are reduced to exotic props and settings.
I’m tired of people, Chinese people included, who forget that the Western incursion into China was not a benevolent one. What began as a religious mission turned quickly into an economic galette des rois (“cake of kings”), with the First and Second Opium Wars serving as senselessly violent examples of the extent to which Western countries were and are willing to go to profit off of yellow lives. And now Zhang and his team are trying to sell us the story of a white man’s heroic rescue of one of our greatest World Heritage sites?
I’m tired of arguments that say that the economic success of places like China and the Four Asian Tigers means that orientalism, even if existent, no longer has damaging effects. Tell that to the young women who spend hours every day experimenting with eyelid tape to make their eyes bigger, to look like the white women whose delicate, damsel-like features still represent the highest standard of beauty today. Tell that to the young men who spend their lives being told they are unattractive by international standards, and so have to settle for perpetuating patriarchal strongman dynamics in the home. Tell that to the East Asian children who grow up without internationally-recognized heroes that look like them (unless you count the whitewashed, romanticized Disney version of Mulan).
In the hostile environment of a government threatening people’s basic rights, it is even more important for us to pursue an intersectional politic
I’m also tired of people telling me that we would never have witnessed the success that we currently enjoy without the influence of the West. Lest we forget that one of the primary reasons China experienced dynastic decline was because of the Western introduction of opium on our shores, and that China’s contributions to the Allied success in WWII, which led to its own internal depletion and chaos, was and remains severely underestimated.
It may be said that the discourse surrounding identity politics is not widespread in most of China, and so whitewashing is a non-issue: when the government is threatening people’s basic rights to food and security for speaking out of the party’s line, there are more pressing things to be worried about.
But I would argue that in this kind of hostile environment, it is even more important for us to pursue an intersectional politic, both personally and publicly – on one level, as a claim to autonomy, on the other, as an attempt to achieve a more meaningful liberation. We need to see ourselves as politicized beyond our individual selves – we need to see that pursuing representation for ourselves is bigger than profit, is a statement of defiance against whiteness, against patriarchy, against colonialism. We need to scrutinize Zhang’s optimism about the West’s apparent welcoming of our culture, observe whether it is sincere or simply a repetition of the same old orientalist gaze that has made us objects of the Western imagination for hundreds of years. I’m banking (ironically) on the latter.
Representation will not be enough, but it’s a good place to begin to mobilize.
Showing the world our culture means doing it on our own terms. We as Chinese people, as East Asian people more generally, deserve better than to constantly feel like we have to carve out a space for ourselves, in terms intelligible and satisfactorily complacent enough to fulfill white hegemonic society’s visions of yellowness. This is not a nationalist call for patriotism – this is a call for reclaiming our humanity.
And representation will not be enough. We need, concurrently, to stand in solidarity with other people of color (see: Letters for Black Lives), to fight until we’re all equal, which means moving beyond the seen to the heard. But representation is a good place to begin to mobilize.
What we all need to remember is that whiteness will not save us. It never has.
And it’s a sham anytime someone tries to show us the opposite.
Image: Jonathan Corbet
