Desire
and Dissolution by Laura U. Marks
Filmmakers
are beginning to take up the challenge of presenting complex sexual pleasures
while critiquing sexist and colonialist relations. This is in contrast to
Orientalist art and literature, much of whose thrill has depended upon
exploitive Western representations of “Oriental” sexuality. These
representations stereotype, selectively appropriate, fetishize, and otherwise
use the sexuality of the other to reflect upon Western fears and desires.
Simultaneously they universalize Western cultural ideals by denying their
historical contingency and connection to other cultures. Thus “American” sexual
cultural works both to create a naturalness around particular sexual convention
and to contain interloping sexual cultures.
Some
postcolonial texts, however, suggest that the sexual expressions of women and
men exiled/emigrated to North America, and the rrepresentation of these
expressions, do not only reinforce but may actually denaturalize national
conventions of sexuality and sexual relations. This denaturalization is an
instance of the noton of the “performative,” as it is used by Homi K. Bhabha.
Bhabha sees the performative as one of the ways a nation narrates itself into
existence as a closed and coherent entity. It is also at the performative level
that individual acts can derail a nation’s discourse about itself, even in the
process of enacting that discourse. Rather than simply being assimilated into a
“dialectical” definiton of nation, the resistant cultural subject disrupts the
very boundaries that allow the nation to define itself.1 This disruption is
often accomplished through the condition Bhabha calls “hybridity,” which,
although he does not describe it as such, appears to take place in the moment
of the performative. While fetishism plays an indispensable role in colonial
power relations (the disempowered colonial subject may be valorized for his or
her “beauty” or “exoticism”), the notion of hybridity poses a threat to these
power relations.
The
hybrid object in colonial culture looks like an authoritative symbol, but its
contents subvert the meaning of that symbol. “The display of the hybridity…
terrorizes with the ruse of recognition, its mimicry, its mockery.”2 Thus, to
return to the example of sexual culture, postcolonial characters may work to
make “American” sexual conventions their own, filling existing forms with new
content, or resist them by persevering in their original culture, postcolonial
characters may work to make “American” sexual conventions their own, filling
existing forms with new content, or resist them by persevering in their
original culture’s mode of sexual expression. Either way they disturb
“American” notions of sexuality and sexual relations. Whether this disruption
change dominant representations of sexuality or is absorbed by the culture as
an unthreatening novelty depends upon whether the characters become subjects or
remain objects that throw back the dominant subject’s narcissistic gaze.
All this
is a preface to a discussion of Sally’s
Beauty Spot (1990) by Helen Lee, a short film that carries its theory
compactly within it. Lee’s film wittily traces a character’s move from
stereotypical object to sexual subject. The fast—paced collage explicitly
challenges fetishistic and colonialist forms of representation, acknowledging
Bhabha among the closing credits.
The
protagonist of Sally’s Beauty Spot
exemplifies Bhabha’s notion of the post—colonial object who, by resisting
comprehension or containment, threatens to becomes a subject. By contrast, the
character she struggles against throughout the film—Suzie Wong—is a woman whose
sexuality is fetishized and who is continually constructed to reassure the West
of what it is not.
Sally’s Beauty Spot is about a Chinese Canadian
woman’s attempt to come to terms with herself as an object and subject of
sexual desire. The twelve minute film’s elliptical plot intertwines with
fragments taken from The World of Suzie
Wong (1960 by Richard Quine). This movie, about the relationship between an
American painter living in Hong Kong and a Chinese prostitute who models for
him, typifies the stereotypes that the contemporary protagonist must confront.
Throughout the film dialogue between painter and model is heard over images of
the protagonist/narrator, Sally, trying to get rid of a black mole on her
breast. We see her in the shower anxiously scrubbing at the spot, or applying
makeup to it. She converses offscreen with a friend about the marks and about
her white boyfriend. Her friend reassures her about her (typically “Oriental”)
beauty—“Your skin’s very smooth. AND your hair, so silky and black.”
The term
for a woman’s mole used in the title, “beauty spot,” already raises questions.
Why are these spots of black or brown on pale skin, these localized melanomas,
alternately so prized and so abhorred? As presences of the other, a sort of
contained grotesque, they are often prized in whit e women—stars have built
careers on them. Lee seems to suggests, however, that they are less desirable
in someone who is not—white, sullied to begin with.
A complex
series of intercuts sets up parallels and contrasts between the fetishistic
love affair in Suzie Wong and the contemporary version. Sally gets a haircut,
and she reports to her friend, “HE said he liked it—still shiny and black. And
that I looked different.” “Different from what?”, asks Sally’s friend. The
answer is suggested in a scene from the Movie. Suzie Wong waits expectantly for
her American boyfriend, wearing a smart Western drss and hat. He arrives and goes
into a rage. “Take that terrible dress off! You look like a cheap European
streetwalker.”
Clearly
the “European” is what infuriates the painter. The fact that his consort is a
prostitute is overcome by the exoticism of her Oriental image. But when Suzie
Wong blurs the outlines of her exotic stereotype by wearing Western dress, she
threatens the American by underlining the fact that their relation is the
sordid one familiar to him from “home,” and by imposing her subjectivity on his
ideal image of her. In Hhabh’s term, Suzie Wong becomes a hybrid (like her
name) reinvesting the images of both prostitute and Oriental with a
discomfiting content. Lee creates a parallel in which Sally’s boyfriend in
desiring Sally’s long hair, shows his need for a stereotypical Asian
woman—feminine, submissive, and traditional—and feels threatened when her
haircut emphasizes the difference between his desires and her subjectivity.
As the
montage sequence continues, the narrator’s friend asks, “Have you considered
having it surgically removed?,” and the painter continues to shout at Suzie
Wong, “Why don’t you put a ring in your nose too?” He strips her and pushes her
onto the bed. The original movie cuts to the next scene, in which, to the
painter’s delight, Suzie is wearing traditional costume. This is intercut with
a scene of Sally in bed with her whit e lover. In this sequence the image of
self—mutilation occurs first, to Sally, as a matter—of—fact suggestion—minor
corrective surgery—then, to the painter, as an abomination—a nose ring. The
American painter is furious at the notion that Suzie Wong might “denaturalize”
herself in some way, becoming grotesque by revealing to him how her
“naturalness” is a Western projection onto Asian women. The reference to a nose
ring in particular indicates the painter’s fear of specifying their colonial
relationship, since brass rings traditionally signify slavery. By contrast, the
friend’s reference to surgery seems to refer to Sally’s fear of the grotesque
in herself. Seeing herself through her boyfriend’s eyes, and through the lens
of North American culture of which she is a part, Sally sees herself as other.
The temptation is to cut off the offending part and to suppress the difference
she poses: more perfectly to inhabit the stereotype.
Not
content simply to “apply theory,” Sally’s
Beauty Spot works synthetically with theory to suggest new ways of
looking—and listening. At a couple of points during the narrative, different
voices—Sally’s “North American” accented voice, an “upper—class British” male
voice, and that of Sally’s friend, whose English is Chinese—accented and a bit
hesitant—repeat phrases from articles by Bhabha and Tania Modleski. The use of
the three voices sets up an interesting dynamic. The patrician male voice,
speaking first, is doubly authoritative in its masculinity and its
Anglo—Saxonness. The seeming neutrality of ht traditional male voice—over and
its ability to represent authority depend in part upon its being disembodied.
Additionally, this British accent of this particular narrator plays on
associations of class and learning (and has perhaps even greater authority in
Canada, where this film was made, than in the US). Such a voice appears to be
the “neutral” medium for relaying dense, academic writing.
The other
voices are doubly removed form such easy assumption of authority. Both are
female and are either that of a non—native speaker or of a first—generation
speaker of English (as we know Sally to be). While seeing Sally’s person on the
film endows her voice with specificity, we don’t see her friend, whose
“immigrant” voice has perhaps the least authorized relationship to the word she
reads. However, the irony in the contrasts among these three voices is that
they demonstrate how an authoritative discourse is transformed through
individual acts. Multivocality is the wrench in the works that destroys a
seemingly unilinear discourse. The “content” the two women’s voices bring to
the words—their gender, one’s visible body, another’s audible
foreignness—embodies the critical theory they are reading. Their presence as
specific subjects, rather than abstracted voices, makes us reflect upon how the
theory might affect them: we wonder what investment they have in reading it.
The power of their specificity diminishes the male speaker’s authority and the
neutrality his voice had assumed. The three voices open up the possibility of
different ways of inhabiting the same theory. At one point the three voices
overlap as they all read the same sentence (from Bhabh’s essay “The Other Question”):3
“They will always conceive of difference as that between the preconstituted
poles of black and white.” The difference among the voices, as they stumble
over each other, negative the preconception criticized in the text.
Several
times throughout the film we see a sentence haltingly being typed on a
typewriter: “bl”; “blac”; “black”; “black I”; “black is”; “black is b.” That’s
as far as it gets: it emphasizes how difficult it is for Sally to accept the
black part of herself. While the three voices are negating the polarities of
black and white, we see close—ups of Sally’s lipsticked lips, then a black
man’s lips, slowly smiling. The scene in which the American painter strips
Suzie Wong of her Western clothes rushes by, played upside down and backwards,
returning Suzie to the hybrid identity she desired. Sally crosses over to the
black man, and they kiss. The bottle of makeup she used to cover her beauty
spot falls to the floor, and the “skin—coloured” liquid spills.
Sally’s Beauty Spot has an overtly happy ending,
which perhaps gives it an edge over the guarded optimism of the theoretical
works form which it draws. It confronts fetishism as a mechanism for containing
sexuality within the norms of dominant culture. At the beginning of the story
Sally is sexually defined from a white North American point of view—her
boyfriend’s. Her difference is valued, but in a stereotyped form; the beauty
spot seems to represent a vestige of suppressed sexual/cultural identity.
Accepting her spot and her difference opens the way to a sexual relationship
that is not built on a Western/Oriental, subject/object dyad. Rather, two who
have been objects of sexual stereotyping are able to claim subject—hood. Sally
and her lover show it is possible to inscribe a form of sexuality that resists
“the poles of black and white.”
Notes
Originally
published in Afterimage, Vol. 19, No. 9, April 1991.