This month we celebrate 50 years of James Bond, so I went and saw “Skyfall” and I noticed several things: first that the Shanghai sequences were beautiful. Sam Mendes did an outstanding job of visualizing the city and how could he not? The city is a sudden modern miracle with incredible futuristic neon buildings that makevthe skyline in “Blade Runner” look dated and ancient. Quite frankly while watching the rest of the movie, I was stuck on how incredible Shanghai looked, just ebbing and flowing with not-so subtle economic power, and that power has translated itself into a Chinese middle class 300 million strong (that’s almost the entire population of the United States) who are looking to be entertained, and Hollywood has noticed and is responding in several different ways regarding content.
According to the China Film Producers' Association, by 2015 China will have built more than 7,000 new cinemas generating a whopping $5.9 billion dollars in sales
annually.
Hollywood Studios are increasingly adding Chinese actors and locations into blockbuster films:“The Dark Knight”- Batman goes to Hong Kong, “The Karate
Kid” remake moved to Beijing replaced Japanese Karate with Kung Fu. The “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen” opens with a rampaging robot war in
downtown Shanghai. Seth Rogen's “The Green Hornet’s” Kato was Jay Chou, a western actor unknown, but a bankable star from China and next year’s “Iron
Man 3” brings Tony Stark to China also to wage epic battles against his ultimate nemesis: The Mandarin being played by Academy Award winning actor Ben Kingsley. But some things have changed and this can be attributed to the changing times. The Mandarin, essentially a mystical wizard, the perfect foil to Tony Stark’s technology, was also a product of 20thCentury - Cold War- East vs. West attitudes. There has always been an underlying American-European superiority complex when it comes to the portrayal of Asian cultures in cinema. Which Ian
Fleming’s James Bond is a perfect example. Fleming was very much a product of an Imperial- Colonial Society and his beliefs of European superiority are found in
his stories, and which are carried into the cinematic versions of his novels.
You don’t need to go further for an example than 1967’s “You Only Live Twice.” While, this had the awesome ninja training school and super-duper cool SPECTRE volcano base, it is laden with underlying racism towards Asians. Really, dressing Sean Connery up in make-up to pass as Japanese? Bond asking his Hong Kong
lover in the beginning of the film; “Why do Chinese girls taste different?” Really? The Bond films did mature as time went on and moved away from the Fleming novels, in 1997 “Tomorrow Never Dies,” Bond teams up with a Chinese agent (setting the tone as rivals) to stop a rogue media monger from starting a war and in 2002’s “Die Another Day” he receives help from a Chinese Spy Agency in Hong Kong, to track down a mutual enemy. Again, the perception being that of equals and not secondary as in previous films.
Meanwhile back in 2012 China…
The Mandarin as the latest movie press releases state “(he’s) a more international
character,”so there are some obvious attempts here to distance the character
from equating Mandarin = China= bad guys. Which is going to be tough as the character’s name is The Mandarin. Sounds silly? Would a studio go to that much trouble in an attempt not to offend the Chinese movie going public? The answer is a big YES. Enter the “Red Dawn” remake of 2009. The update of the 1984 Cold War Communist paranoia classic.
This type of film captures the underlying tension in a society, and the remake is no different. Shot in 2009 and delayed due to MGM’s bankruptcy, the film focused on a Chinese led invasion of the United States, and the film featured propaganda (akin to the 1984 Soviet invasion version) pamphlets, banners, and posters featuring the Chinese People's Liberation Army with slogans like: "Rebuilding Your Reputation", "Repairing Your Economy", and "Fighting Corporate Corruption"
The film, despite not being released yet, did not go unnoticed in China, and
headlines there were "U.S.reshoots Cold War movie to demonize China"Global Times, (leading state-run newspaper) and "American movie plants hostile seeds against China". The negative press made the film producers nervous and with China increasingly becoming a bigger box office market than the United States, none of the major studios wanted anything to do with the movie, as it was possible that since the Chinese Government could retaliate against any studio releasing the film by denying the release of that studio’s films in China, as the Chinese Government threaten to do against Disney in 1997 over that studios release of “Kundun.” Still, the fallout was Universal Studios passed on distributing the film in China, and director Martin Scorsese, and other members of the production were banned by the Chinese government fromever entering Chinaas a result of making the film
In order to maintain access to China's golden box office, the “Red Dawn” producers had to spend over a million dollars to digitally change/reshoot the villains in “Red Dawn” from Chinese to North Koreans. On one hand, it’s probably not a good idea to bite the box office hand that feeds you. On the other hand, do you really want to bow to political pressure from another country? I think of Charlie Chaplin’s “The Great Dictator,” released in 1940. This was also was a product of it’s time, and did not get released in Nazi Germany. I’m not equating the Chinese to Nazis. But there are several discussions to be had. The sheer economic or political power of a market place which can force changes in art, film or publications. This struggle is not new. Shakespeare wrote many a play based in the political turmoil of his day, and set it in far- off lands. A more modernexample would be science fiction, which film makers in the 1960’s used to argue about the merits or travesties of the Vietnam War. Cinema is a snap shot of a society’s values and the ideals of its time. It becomes much more difficult when a filmmaker takes on a “political statement” head on as the “Red Dawn-2009” film makers did. Whether, their intention was exploitive or they actually saw the film as a political question for Americans to ponder is rather moot. Hollywood’s primary driver these days is to make money and not art. But then again you can argue it’s always been that way. I wonder what the original “Red Dawn” would have been like in 1984 if the Soviet box office was generating the nearly $3 billion in revenue that the Chinese box office is currently generating in 2012. Invasion from Canada?
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