Marvels and Monsters: Unmasking Asian Images in U.S. Comics, 1942-1986

Yellow Claw #1 (Atlas Comics, 1956) [taken from here]

Marvels and Monsters: Unmasking Asian Images in U.S. Comics, 1942-1986
The William F. Wu Collection at NYU Fales Library & Special Collections

I recently had the chance to visit this unique exhibit of comics at NYU's Fales Library. The stuff was culled from the collection of William F. Wu, whom I knew as the author of The Yellow Peril: Chinese Americans in American Fiction, 1850-1940. Wu noticed – and then began collecting – representations of Asian Americans in popular comics while growing up in 1950s Missouri. According to the exhibit's introduction, comic books were a phenomenally powerful medium from the 1930s into the 1950s: they were the number one printed medium in the United States, even outranking newspapers (70 million Americans read comic books vs. 50 million who read newspapers); a 1945 survey by the Market Research Company of America found that 95% of boys and 91% of girls read them. By all means, their content can no longer be considered marginal.

As Jeff Yang, the curator of the exhibit, explained in an NPR interview, the period covered in Wu's collection is particularly important because it spans the decades when the United States engaged in wars with Asian nations -- "from World War II, the war in the Pacific, through the Korean War, Vietnam War, and then the economic and political battles with Japan and China that followed. And so comic books, in a lot of ways, pick up a lot of this resonant energy around how Americans were thinking of Asians in ways that virtually no other medium does."

This "resonant energy" is something I've been thinking about too. How did the various wars affect the ways in which Americans understood Asians and Asian Americans, and how did it manifest itself in American culture? (Specifically, I've been working on this in the novels of Thomas Pynchon and in some women's writing from the 1950s and early 1960s.) Christina Klein's Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945-1961 offers a theory of mythic exchange and reciprocity, best embodied in the song "Getting to Know You" from Rodgers and Hammerstein's 1951 The King and I. "Getting to know you/ Getting to know all about you/ Getting to like you/ Getting to hope you like me": a discourse that allowed Americans to believe that their political and economic imperialism was actually a point of equal exchange and consent. Also interesting is Mari Yoshihara's Embracing the East: White Women and American Orientalism, which examines how white women achieved certain forms of socio-political power through their co-option of Asian materials or tropes.

"Marvels and Monsters" adds another layer to the Asian/Asian American presence in postwar popular culture. The exhibit includes some of America's most popular comic books: the ones I recognized included Spiderman and Wonder Woman, but I know pitifully little about comics. The stereotypes recurring here are the ones you'd expect, like as the Brain, the Lotus Blossom, the mysterious, seedy Chinatown, etc. The exhibit does a pretty good job of contextualizing how each of these stereotypes morphed over the course of Asian immigration, but I kept wonderfully specifically why comics proved to be a good medium for these kinds of racial anxieties. As Wu remarks in the video interview that is part of the exhibit, comic books are an already exaggerated genre, and Asians in America have always been marked as "aliens," the perpetual Other. This trope of inscrutability perhaps lent itself well to stories replete with villains and frightful superpowers that needed to be subdued. More explication on why specifically this genre was so potent would have been helpful. (As would have been more on the context of these Asian characters/plotlines in comic books in general. How common was this? What other kinds of villains appeared regularly? What about "girls' comics"? Or were they reading the same ones as boys? Who were the people creating these characters and storylines? The exhibit mentions briefly that they were fellow immigrants, primarily Italians and Jews. How did that influence the portrayal of Asians in comics?) Despite these gaps, the exhibit opens up a huge field for exploring the connection between the wars and the presence of Asians/Asia in the American imagination.

I found Wu's book The Yellow Peril helpful while working on my paper about Asians in the writing of Thomas Pynchon. Sadly (or not so sadly, really), Wu gave up his academic career to become a writer of speculative fiction. Finding this exhibit has helped me clarify some hunches I've had about Pynchon, and I'm itching to start re-reading his novels with comic books and these images in mind.

Classification of Young American Females According to Brian Wilson

Classic.
(from The Poke)

Catherine Breillat's "The Sleeping Beauty" (La Belle Endormie)

The Sleeping Beauty (La Belle Endormie). Dir. Catherine Breillat. France, 2010.

I wasn't familiar with Breillat's previous films and was looking forward to this feminist deconstruction of the classic fairy tale as my introduction to her work. It received a positive, if vague, review from Manohla Dargis in the NYT which spurred me to see it. Dargis posits the film as a road movie of sorts, making this one of the few quality films out there about solo female travel. I found The Sleeping Beauty pretty challenging, however, because I think Breillat's work is intellectually informed by a style of French feminism I'm not particularly attracted to. That's just a guess, though: many other American reviewers seemed to understand (but dislike) the film just fine. I suspect they are missing something though. So my review is speculative, based on the bits and pieces I could glean about Breillat's understanding of femininity, sexuality, and fantasy.

In this retelling of the tale, a trio of fairies augments the spell placed on princess Anastasia (played by Carla Besnainou) by a wicked witch. Instead of dying when she pricks her finger on a yew spindle, Anastasia will fall asleep at age six and wake up one hundred years later aged sixteen. Why? Because childhood is interminably long, and because “A little girl's life is really boring,” as she complains. (The slow-drip childhood is also the foundation of Terence Malick's recent Tree of Life, a film far more lucid, and far more American...I'll leave that for another post.) Breillat's princess does not merely fall asleep to wait passively for her prince to come. Instead of excising Anastasia from the film until the final act, Breillat chooses to follow her through her dreamland adventures.

As I said, I couldn't help but wonder if the cause of The Sleeping Beauty's opacity was cultural. In a move that seems more motivated by the Freudian underpinnings of French feminists like Hélène Cixous than American political liberalism, Anastasia disdains her girl companions in favor of being a boy, specifically a valiant knight named Sir Vladimir. This is not expanded by any means to the heights of Alain Berliner's 1997 child gender-identity study Ma Vie en Rose, nor is it meant to. Obviously, Anastasia merely wishes for the agency granted to boys and men; she argues that it is no use being a princess if she cannot do whatever she wants. This textbook reliance on penis envy is simplistic and trite, but reveals the unquestionably French psychosexual register this film operates upon.

Anastasia yearns to be freed from the restrictions of performative, mimetic femininity, embodied in an ballet scene put on by the princess and her friends. Anastasia will only perform this feminine masquerade for a man: despite the presence of her mother and grandmother, she refuses to go onstage unless her father, the king, is present. Angrily pulling out the chopstick placed in her hair as part of her Japanese costume (Breillat tiredly figures the Orient as the ultimate feminine), Anastasia pricks her hand and falls into slumber.

She is transported into the late 1970s – Joy Division graffiti gives this away. (Understanding why Breillat chose that decade requires more knowledge of French history than I have here.) She is taken in by a kindly woodland family consisting of a single mother and her pubescent son, Peter (Kerian Mayan). The mother dresses her in Peter's old clothes, while Peter dotes on the girl like a little sister. Soon, however, the line between stranger, sister, brother, and lover become confused. Breillat is brave to explore the confused sexual feelings between a six-year old and a slightly older boy; the two share an affection that is both fraternal and romantic. But when Peter feels his libido calling, he leaves home in order to accompany a malicious Snow Queen. Anastasia sets off on a knightly quest to retrieve her brother/not-quite-lover/crush.

This takes her through some fantastic scenes, such as an eighteenth century European kingdom ruled by albino children with a predilection for pastel colors and giant meringues; a romp with a knife-obsessed Roma girl who continually speaks of how “excited” she would be to slit Anastasia with her dagger (spoiler alert: it will come as no surprise when, as an adult, she seduces Anastasia); and a trip to Lapland on a doe, under the blazing northern sky. The young Carla Besnainou is a charming companion throughout, but the film lacks emotional and rhythmic centers: the cryptic dialogue did not do much to advance our adventure, nor did the film's pacing assure me of how long it would take to get there. This perhaps mimics the luxuriant passage of time for a six-year old, in which old friends are forgotten as quickly as new ones are met, and random occurrence guides the way. Yet despite Anastasia's abhorrence of girlhood, Breillat clearly treasures it in the delicate pinks Anastasia dons or via her fixation on the delectably crunchy toasts, biscuits, and gateaux that are high points in the film. Young Anastasia comes to learn that she cannot win Peter back, but that she has proven well her power by journeying successfully throughout the world befriending people and animals: though her prince may no longer exist, she is indeed a regal princess because she has become a citizen of the world. (A welcome message in cinema.)

With this, we enter the present day and the film's inexplicable latter third. Anastasia wakes up sixteen years old and staring into the eyes of the handsome Johan, who turns out to be Peter's great-grandson (though how is eighteen-year old Johan the great-grandson of Peter if Peter was a boy in the late 1970s?). The two embark on an exploratory sexual relationship, punctuated by the return of Anastasia's Roma friend, who convinces her that only other women can teach women about sex: it's better between women, she says, because it's “more mysterious.” The ineluctable enigmas separating men and women are reiterated here, with Anastasia confined to her castle, whalebone corset, and tightly-buttoned white dress; Johan wears black, lives in contemporary Paris, and comes and goes as he pleases. The two tussle and tumble and marvel at their intense connection: it comes as no surprise to Anastasia, however, since she has been waiting for Peter – and his goodness, courage, and intelligence – for a century. Yet Johan does not particularly possess these things; he comes off as a somewhat average young man. Anastasia doesn't mind, or is so blinded by physical desire she cannot tell: as she laments to Johan, who amateurishly desires to possess her, men cannot understand that women are continually in search of their originary girlhood loves. This is an another example of the large, supposedly obvious claims about femininity the film asks us to accept. In the end, Anastasia finds herself pregnant and (metaphysically) alone: a comment of bitter disappointment. The point is, I think, that though Johan eventually professes to love her, the purity of her first feelings for Peter cannot be requited by the metaphoric violence of her sexual relationship with Johan.

If this film is complicated, it is because it struggles to explore a topic very few have tread: the psychosexual development of a young girl, from age six to sixteen (considered a woman in the film). Were I a reader of Cixous, Irigaray, or Kristeva, I would hope that I could better understand the film's cloudy (to me) subtexts. Thus, for the moment, I'm considering my own ignorance more than the possibility of Breillat's bad filmmaking as the reason for my bewilderment at The Sleeping Beauty. I will certainly be watching her others, especially the retelling of Bluebeard, as a comparison.

The Rayanne Project

I recently contributed to the Rayanne Project, an online dialogue about adolescent girl identities that takes My So-Called Life's Rayanne Graff as its focal point. This kind of retrospection is important, especially given how superficially teenage girlhood is defined in the larger conversion about girls: mostly as a series of embarrassing moments, embarrassing questions, and romantic rejections. The anecdotes have been recycled and tweaked throughout the decades.

What I admire about the Rayanne Project is that it offers women currently in their twenties (an interesting age, I think: post-college, pre-everything else) a chance to think critically about their pasts beyond trite nostalgia and fashion throwbacks. The expression of this kind of cohort communalism has, at least in my generation, been largely ungendered and centered around Nickelodeon. It's remarkable, though, that Nickelodeon so successfully exemplified 1990s kid culture through a mix of girl and boy protagonists equilibrated to appeal to both sexes: I related to Doug as much as I did to Clarissa Darling. A closer look at our engagement with these specific ideas and objects offer an understanding of childhood and adolescence as historically contingent; not unchanging and cliche.