Performing the Oriental Woman in
The Handmaiden and Audition:
Interrogating Modern Orientalism and the Representation of Asian Women
Sarah Schneider 11622253 MA Comparative Literature
June 12, 2018 Dr. Esther Peeren
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Table of Contents
Introduction: Subverting the Controlling Image of the “Oriental Woman” 3
1 Imperialist Desires: Declining the Oriental Woman Stereotype in The Handmaiden 13
Imperialism and Patriarchy 15
Female Solidarity 23
2 Oriental Woman Meets Female Avenger: A Feminist Reading of Audition 33
Audition in the Age of #MeToo 38
The Oriental Woman and the Female Avenger 48
Conclusion: Normalizing Images 59
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Introduction: Subverting the Controlling Image of the “Oriental Woman”
The history of the representation of Asian women in the West has been uneven to put it lightly and blatantly discriminatory to put it more accurately. It has moved from yellow-face with taped-back eyes, notably on Luise Rainer as “O-Lan” in The Good Earth (1937) and Katherine Hepburn as “Jade” in Dragon Seed (1944), to the submissive, exotic “lotus flower” as seen in Sayonara (1957) and The World of Suzie Wong (1960), among others. The current iteration—which is also an erasure—takes two main forms: an actor of Asian descent is cast but either barely speaks or does not speak at all (as seen in When Harry Met Sally, Babel, Looper and Ex Machina, to name a few examples); or Caucasian actors are cast as characters initially conceived of as being of Asian descent in a process of whitewashing. While the latter renders Asians invisible, the first ensures that stereotypical, wildly reductive images are still widely circulated. It is tempting to list every example of racially egregious representations of Asian women, and while there have been some high-profile exceptions (Sandra Oh in
Sideways or more recently Kelly Marie Tran in Star Wars: The Last Jedi), the phenomenon persists and the excuse many Hollywood executives turn to—that Asian stars simply are not bankable—does not add up.
In 2016, the New York Times released a feature on representation in Hollywood that included the article “Asian-American Actors Are Fighting for Visibility: They Will Not Be Ignored”, which cited whitewashing examples including Cameron Crowe’s Aloha (Emma Stone plays a quarter-Chinese, quarter-Native Hawaiian woman) and Marvel’s Doctor Strange (Tilda Swinton plays an ambiguous “Eastern mystic”–type character). Actor George Takei, known for playing Mr. Sulu on the original Star Trek, commented: “[We] can’t keep pretending there isn’t something deeper at work here” (quoted in Hess). Keith Chow, founder
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of the website Nerds of Color, wrote in the NYT about Hollywood’s circular logic, which seems to confirm that there is indeed something deeper at work:
If Asian-Americans—and other minority actors more broadly—are not even allowed to be in a movie, how can they build the necessary box office clout in the first place? To make matters worse, instead of trying to use their lofty positions in the industry to push for change, Hollywood players like [Max] Landis and [Aaron] Sorkin take the easy, cynical path. (Chow, emphasis in text)
His comment regarding Landis, a screenwriter who, despite not being associated with the 2017 Ghost in the Shell adaptation starring Scarlett Johansson, released a YouTube video addressing the casting choice by saying that there “are no A-list female Asian celebrities right now on an international level,” and adding that viewers complaining about the whitewashing simply do not understand the industry (Chow). Putting aside the fact that box office returns for films with diverse casts like the Fast and the Furious franchise are some of the highest and that plenty of films starring A-list Caucasian stars flop on a regular basis (including Ghost in the Shell), the reluctance of Hollywood to cast Asian actors, and specifically Asian women, indicates a bias that likely harkens back to the controlling imagery and rhetoric of Orientalism.
There seems to be a blind spot specific to Asian women in Hollywood and white consciousness in general that makes it especially difficult to perceive them as anything but the Other. During the recent Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, after US figure skater Mirai Nagasu landed her historic triple axel, NYT op-ed editor Bari Weiss tweeted, “Immigrants: They Get the Job Done,” even though Nagasu was born and raised in California. Also in the news, the film Annihilation (2018), adapted and directed by Alex Garland from the novel by Jeff VanderMeer, was accused of whitewashing when the Asian and Native American
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identities of two major characters were erased by casting Natalie Portman and Jennifer Jason Leigh. Garland has defended his decision by explaining that he based his adaptation solely on the first book in the series, where VanderMeer intentionally omits the names, backstories and race of all characters, instead calling everyone by their function, e.g. “the biologist” and “the psychologist”. As Mimi Wong points out in her article on the controversy, not only does Garland miss the whole point of the series, which engages with questions of “perpetual otherness” and colonization, but his choice brings up a crucial issue: “Why, when faced with two racially ambiguous characters, did Garland imagine them as white?” (Wong). The question is further complicated when Garland’s previous film Ex Machina is taken into consideration. In that film, a reclusive computer genius has built androids so human-seeming that when his Japanese servant Kyoko is revealed to also be an android, it is played as a startling reveal. Which begs the question: Why, when casting a silent, sexually compliant female robot servant, did Garland imagine her to be Asian?
While Garland is not the focus of this project, his unconscious bias—which is structural and extends beyond him personally—is. I will examine the perpetual othering of Asian women in film, specifically through the Oriental Woman trope and its function as a controlling image. The characteristics typically ascribed to an Oriental Woman, which evoke ideal femininity, include “submissiveness, subservience, obedience, passivity and
domesticity,” and present her as also “strikingly sexed, defined in relation to men” (Uchida 162). As other critics have already shown in detail how the Oriental Woman trope works and what its characteristics are, I will look at two cultural objects that engage with this fictive, stereotypical figure and subvert it, breaking down the controlling image: the films The Handmaiden (2016), co-written and directed by Park Chan-Wook, and Audition (1999), written and directed by Miike Takashi. As two films produced in the East, in Korea and Japan
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respectively, and starring entirely Asian casts, I argue that they utilize Western and otherwise globally recognized markers (camera work, staging, costume and set design) to critique and counter the othering—i.e. objectification and oppression—of the female characters.
I take the idea of the “controlling image” from Aki Uchida’s study of
“Orientalization,” the objectification of Asian women as the “Oriental Woman”, which uses the theoretical framework laid out by Patricia Hill Collins’s analysis of the objectification of black women (Uchida 161). Collins found that this objectification was perpetrated through stereotypes such as “‘mammies, matriarchs, welfare mothers, whores’ that reflect the
oppressor’s interest to sustain and reinforce their oppression; controlling images are therefore stereotypes that oppress and objectify” (Uchida 171). The sexist and racist objectification of Asian women through the trope of the Oriental Woman is also a controlling image, one that has been normalized in cultural texts and social interactions. While situating my project as following the work of Uchida and others, its innovation lies in my focus on two Asian films that engage critically with the Oriental Woman image, which shows that the image has not remained uncontested, especially in the East.
In his seminal work Orientalism, Edward Said explains that Flaubert, in detailing his encounter with an Egyptian courtesan named Kuchuk Hanem in the mid-1800s, produced “a widely influential model of the Oriental woman” in which there is tellingly “very little consent to be found” (Said 6). Instead, Flaubert “spoke for and represented her. He was foreign, comparatively wealthy, male, and these were historical facts of domination that allowed him not only to possess Kuchuk Hanem physically but to speak for her and tell his readers in what way she was ‘typically Oriental’” (Said 6).
While Orientalism was written in response to France and Britain’s colonial presence in the Middle East, my project will focus, like Uchida’s, on East Asian women. Uchida traces
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the Oriental Woman to anti-immigration laws and rhetoric starting in the late 1800s in
America, when Asian women were seen as corrupters of Western/Christian values. The figure then transformed with the country’s military industrial complex in Asia, when the domination of geographic territory was equated with the domination of the local women. Legal scholar Peter Kwan also studied the construction of the Oriental Woman figure and puts forth that the corporeal conquest depicted in the seduction of the Oriental Woman corresponds with
geopolitical conquest. Sunny Woan, another legal scholar, similarly traces the harmful stereotype that has followed Asian women around the globe—as being equal parts demure and hypersexual—to the “White, heterosexual male presence in East Asian wars” and specifically white sexual imperialism (278). Uchida focuses on the effects of the Oriental Woman on the identity of Asian-American women, while Woan considers their treatment. Her study of race and gender posits that the lingering effects of Western imperialism in Asia present the greatest source of inequality for diasporic Asian women today. The most
persistent lingering effect is the hyper-sexualized stereotype, which Woan ascribes specifically to White sexual imperialism and which she argues has helped facilitate the “over-prevalence of Asian women in pornography, the mail-order bride phenomenon, the Asian fetish syndrome, and worst of all, sexual violence against Asian women” (275). In other words, as a result of America’s military presence in countries including the Philippines and Thailand, which ignited the local sex entertainment industries, Asians and members of the Asian Diasporas “have existed and still exist through a colonized experience” (Woan 284).
A study released at the end of January 2018 by the Center for WorkLife Law at the University of California’s Hastings College of the Law showed that Asian American women working in STEM disciplines are consistently held back because of expectations of how they
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should act based on their race and ethnicity. They are expected to be “worker bees” and keep their heads down; if they assert their authority, they are labeled Dragon Ladies, accused of having “personality problems” and given poor performance evaluations (Williams). On the other hand, earlier the same month, the New York Times reported that white supremacists on the far right appear to have “yellow fever”—“an Asian woman fetish”—and quoted one commenter on an alt-right forum who wrote that “‘exclusively’ dating Asian women is practically a ‘white-nationalist rite of passage’” (Lim). The article posits that this confusing standpoint exists at the intersection of the myth of the model minority and the myth of the “subservient, hypersexual Asian woman.” It is a myth also fueled by the $2 billion Chinese mail-order-bride industry.
In 2015 sociologist Monica Liu released her study on commercial intermediaries who broker relationships between men in Western countries and women in China, examining how the commodification of intimacy and sexuality affects migrant women in the context of global capitalism. As the companies help to create and translate the women’s online profiles for Western consumption, the intermediaries “reaffirm existing Western stereotypes of Asian women as innocent, submissive, domesticated, and yet exotic and sexually eager.” Liu continues:
[T]hese hyperfeminized images mischaracterize the female clients, given the fact that many female clients are jaded rather than innocent, rebellious rather than submissive, career-minded rather than domesticated, and unaccustomed to dressing or speaking in an erotic manner. . . . I suggest that the commercial intermediaries empower women to compete on the global dating market, although this is achieved at the cost of compromising their authenticity and perpetuating global racial and gender stereotypes. (30)
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Liu sees this hyperfeminization as a combination of Western pop culture and Chinese youth culture, indicating that current Western depictions of Asian women are still globally
perpetuating the idea that Asian women are unambitious and entirely male-serving. Both domestic and international patriarchal structures consistently cast Asian women in this light. Recent reports of the #MeToo movement being cut short, censored or scrubbed from the internet in China by the government’s intervention are just one example of the current 1 struggle for the visibility of Asian women in other than stereotypical ways, which extends to Asia.
When it comes to Asian women in film, the focus of this study, it is telling that the only time a woman of Asian descent won an Academy Award for acting was Miyoshi Umeki in 1957 for her supporting role in the aforementioned Sayonara. As Katsumi, Umeki commits suicide with her American GI husband rather than be parted from him. The Asian women depicted in Madame Butterfly, Miss Saigon and, famously, The World of Suzie Wong—in Suzie’s last line of the film, she says, “I will love you until you let me go”—all put their lives in service of white males, and without them have no purpose in the narrative. The depiction of the ever-doting, consumable and disposable Oriental Woman “is a fictive creation, an invention of the western imagination deployed to justify sexual exploitation, dominance and not infrequently, violence to Asian women” (Kwan 100). The persistence of this and other controlling images has silenced Asian women and has had “a political effect on the
distribution of power” (Uchida 161). One notable example, the “paucity of Asian women in the [entertainment] industry,” behind as well as in front of the camera, has made coming forward to report harassment and problematic behavior—to say, “Me too”—especially difficult (Cheng).
1 Yuan, Karen. “#MeToo With Chinese Characteristics.” The Atlantic, Atlantic Media Company, 5 Feb. 2018,
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To investigate how the power may be redistributed, I will examine how the two films I have chosen construct and subsequently subvert the image of the Oriental Woman.
Although the films do this in very different ways, they both start by allowing the female characters to take advantage of the stereotype to manipulate other characters, before shaking off the controlling image to exert dominance in other ways. I will explore how these films, directed by Asian men, intervene in the stereotypes endorsed by the hetero-patriarchal and Western-viewpoint-dominated world in which the films were made.
In my first chapter, I will conduct a close reading of The Handmaiden. The film is told in three chapters, starting with Sook-Hee, a young female pickpocket recruited by a con-man known as Count Fujiwara to help defraud the wealthy, reclusive heiress Lady Hideko, who is so naive and child-like that she asks Sook-Hee what one is supposed to do with a man. Through several narrative turns, Lady Hideko is ultimately revealed to be the mastermind behind the plot, seeking to escape her evil Uncle Kouzuki’s clutches. Set in Korea during Japanese imperial rule in the 1930s, the film shows how Kouzuki, a Korean man, helped Japan annex Korea in exchange for Japanese citizenship. Significantly, he builds a house in the Korean countryside that combines Victorian and Japanese architectural styles since he considers the local Korean style ugly. With Kouzuki embodying a patriarchal and colonizing force—he keeps his niece prisoner in the house and plans to marry her—the film brings up questions of the female colonized experience, but also defies hetero-patriarchal privilege as Sook-Hee and Lady Hideko find strength in each other and escape the patriarchal forces through their emotional and sexual relationship. This subverts particularly the Oriental Woman construction, as Lady Hideko initially seems to exemplify not just hyper-sexuality but “hyper-heterosexuality, male-centered and male-dominated” (Woan 279). The lesbian love story—updated from its source novel Fingersmith (2002) by Sarah Waters, which is set
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in Victorian England and has a more tragic, ambiguous ending—acts as a subversion by removing and triumphing over the male gaze and the corrupting power of male lust, and by celebrating female sexuality and redirecting the viewer’s gaze. I will use The Handmaiden and the way it uses its inter-Asian colonial setting to parody the Orientalist gaze to
interrogate the imperialist, hetero-patriarchal treatment of Asian women.
In my second chapter, I will turn to Audition. Although it is widely considered a horror film, its inciting incident seems innocent enough as we watch the protagonist, a
widowed film producer named Aoyama, interview potential romantic partners. His friend has convinced him that they should set up a fake film audition in order to screen for a new wife for Aoyama, and given this particular scenario and power dynamic, the women are eager to be as accommodating as they can—wearing only a bikini, strutting back and forth in the room, answering inappropriate, invasive questions. As Aoyama watches them, we watch him assess the women and craft an image of his ideal partner, commenting that it feels like he is buying a car. Audition engages with the construction of the Oriental Woman through the medium of film itself, literalizing the male gaze, as the women are viewed not only through the film’s camera lens, but also through the lens of the video recorder the men have set up to tape the auditions.
Previous scholarship on Audition has emphasized the light-hearted tone of the film’s first half, and the narrative rupture of the second when the soft-spoken woman chosen by Aoyama, Asami, drugs and tortures him; I argue that the supposed light-heartedness in fact underscores the casual sexism displayed by the male characters. Because the first half is perceived as tender and Aoyama’s indiscretion seems minor, the torture he endures is considered disproportionate. However, I argue that past scholars underestimate and
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in light of the recent allegations against several Hollywood executives, and I will consider Audition in the context of scholarship on and accounts of the #MeToo movement, arguing that the violence Asami perpetrates is in fact reciprocal, coming after a lifetime of
accumulating physical and discursive violence against her as a woman. I posit that the film is an allegory of the quest to undermine patriarchal control and that Asami uses the Oriental Woman guise to mask her true role as a female avenger.
A motif in both films is the performance of ideal femininity on the part of the Asian women characters to manipulate the male gaze. To explore the implications of this male gaze in film, I will use Laura Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1975) and its association of women with a “to-be-looked-at-ness” that occurs when, in the gaze of the male fantasy, the female appearance is “coded for strong visual and erotic impact” (809). Mulvey, writing in 1975, adds that the presence of woman as an exclusively sexual being is an
“indispensable [film] element of spectacle,” but that this presence also works against the narrative flow as the action freezes in “moments of erotic contemplation” (809). In my project, the erotic spectacle—or the feminized, sexualized spectacle—is at the center of the narrative, as is women’s to-be-looked-at-ness. To fully explore how this spectacle both manifests itself and is undermined, I will address The Handmaiden’s explicit lesbian sex scenes and how they complicate the consumption of sexualized images of Asian women.
Taken together—The Handmaiden as a period piece that presents the imperialist oppression of women, and Audition as an early account of pervasive, casual systemic sexism in the film industry—the films offer an account of the ways the Oriental Woman is used as a controlling image by the patriarchy and of how such a controlling image can be subverted.
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Chapter 1
Imperialist Desires: Declining the Oriental Woman Stereotype in The Handmaiden
To begin my investigation into the subversion of the controlling image of the Oriental Woman, I will analyze The Handmaiden as a film that first depicts colonized womanhood and then gives its female protagonists the agency to escape the oppressive forces. Adapted for the screen from the Sarah Waters novel Fingersmith by Park Chan-wook and Jeong
Seo-kyeong, and directed by Park, the film is divided into three chapters. I will start by looking at the fictional world of the film, which is defined by imperial and patriarchal forces—both Eastern and Western—embodied through the setting and the male characters. I will then turn to the female characters and the ways in which they move within these confines and ultimately break free. Through historical and more contemporary markers that
demonstrate the workings of sexual imperialism and fetishization, The Handmaiden builds its image of the Oriental Woman. By the second chapter, the film is subverting the trope, and by chapter three, the female characters triumph over the trope and its enforcers.
The film is set in Korea during the Japanese rule in the 1930s and tells the story of Sook-Hee (played by Kim Tae-ri), a young woman raised in an orphanage to be a thief, and Lady Hideko (Kim Min-hee), a rich heiress held captive by her uncle. At the start of the film, Sook-Hee is recruited by a conman known as Count Fujiwara (Ha Jung-woo). Count
Fujiwara is the son of a Korean farmer posing as a Japanese aristocrat to ingratiate himself with Hideko’s uncle Kouzuki, collector of antiquated books. Kouzuki (Jo Jin-woong), a Korean man who helped the Japanese annex Korea in exchange for Japanese citizenship, lives in seclusion on a grand estate and intends to marry Hideko for her fortune. Hideko mostly spends her time in reading practice with her uncle. Fujiwara seeks Sook-Hee’s help in
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seducing Hideko by having her work as Hideko’s new handmaiden, sowing the seeds of suggestion that might make her believe Fujiwara is legitimately in love with her. Once Hideko has been convinced to elope and Fujiwara has gained control of her wealth, he will commit her to an insane asylum. Chapter one ends with Sook-Hee being forced into the mental institution, crying out that she is not Lady Hideko. In chapter two, we see the events from Hideko’s perspective, and we learn that the readings she performs for her uncle and his guests are of erotic literature, describing explicit sexual and fetishistic scenarios. It is also revealed that she and Fujiwara are in fact working together and that the plan was to have her handmaiden committed to the asylum under her own name so that Hideko could escape her uncle’s estate. Her plan changes, however, as she and Sook-Hee fall in love. In chapter three, Fujiwara and Kouzuki both realize they have been deceived by the two women, who board a ship to Shanghai.
I argue that the imperialist dynamic of The Handmaiden, represented by the relationship between the male Japanese subjugator and female Korean subjugated, can be read as a stand-in for the global oppression of Asian women. Although produced in Asia by a largely Korean and Japanese cast and crew (with no Caucasian-appearing actors seen on screen), the film nevertheless engages with signs of Western colonialism. Historically, this makes sense; as Bang-Soon Yoon writes with regard to Japan’s history of sexually enslaving Korean “Comfort Women”, the Japanese government was “armed with the Western model of modernization” when it colonized Korea from 1910 to 1945 (459). I posit that this model, of which the controlling image of the Oriental Woman is part, serves to build the context in which The Handmaiden’s Korean female characters are objectified and oppressed.
The construction of the Oriental Woman as a controlling image is a global effort that, to borrow from Yoon, exists at the intersection of nationalism, race, sex and gender. In the
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film, the language with which the men discuss the women and the way the Lady Hideko character is portrayed are markedly similar to Orientalist treatments of women, which “reinforce the subjugation of the Oriental Woman and posit her as an object for western consumption” (Kwan 100). Although neither of the male characters in question (Fujiwara and Kouzuki) are actually Japanese, they have assumed Japanese identities in order to attain a higher level of authority. This authority is expressed through the engagement of Orientalist language to objectify the women, who either are or identify as Korean. Legal scholar Peter Kwan looks at filmic representations of the Oriental Woman to track the correlation between cultural iterations of the figure and incidents of sexual violence against Asian women. He writes that the figure is “meek, shy, passive, childlike, innocent and naïve,” and that “in contrast to the actual bodies of women from Asia, the Oriental Woman is . . . an invention of the western imagination deployed to justify sexual exploitation, dominance and not
infrequently, violence to Asian women” (Kwan 100). The framing of Lady Hideko in the film establishes her as a body to be consumed, and even as we are made privy to her private thoughts through the use of voiceover in the film’s second chapter, in scenes with men, Hideko is mostly silent unless she performs the readings for her uncle.
Imperialism and Patriarchy
In an interview with the trade publication Screen International, Park explains that he chose the film’s historical setting because “we needed an era with a caste system employing
handmaidens, but also with the modern institution of insane asylums. My producer suggested bringing the story to Korea, during the era under Japanese imperialist rule” (Noh). Indeed, the film’s very first shot is of Japanese soldiers marching through a village. A group of children run after them until we hear a sword be unsheathed and someone yell in Japanese, “You little
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brats, beat it!” The imperial and military presence of the Japanese is thus made immediately apparent, before the camera moves from the soldiers to Sook-Hee preparing to leave for Kouzuki’s mansion. Although the soldiers are not seen again, the decision to set the film during this time period, and to open it in this way, means that the stage for the film’s story, which at its core is about two women falling in love, is a time when Korean women were systematically forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese military and government. Although this historical fact is never demonstrably explored in the film, I posit that the world of the film is nonetheless established as one in which women are commodified and objectified. As Sook-Hee moves from the village to Kouzuki’s estate, she moves from one patriarchal space to another, both operating under the same imperial banner. When she arrives at the estate, she is also as per house policy assigned a Japanese name: Tamako (in this analysis, I will
continue to refer to her as Sook-Hee). Kouzuki, as will become clear, seeks to repress as much of Korea as he can.
Rewinding slightly, following the opening credits, a title card informs the viewer viewing it with English subtitles that Japanese dialogue will be denoted with yellow subtitles, and that all other subtitled dialogue is Korean. For the English-reading viewer, this device provides a visual demarcation between the colonizer’s and the colonized language. There are several moments when this device provides a visual insight into the power dynamics at play in a scene. An enlightening example comes at the end of the film when Hideko delivers Fujiwara to Uncle Kouzuki, who wastes no time before torturing him in his dungeon. As far as Kouzuki knows, Fujiwara and Hideko are married and have consummated their union. The self-proclaimed “old man who likes dirty stories” cannot help but ask every lurid question about the woman he was planning on marrying in order to live vicariously through the Count. He asks in Korean, “Where did you touch first? Her face? Her breasts? Or straight for her [in
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Japanese] c . . . cunt?” The switch to Japanese when asking about Hideko’s vagina is both a verbal and, because of the subtitles, visual indication that Kouzuki embodies an imperial force that seeks to dominate the female body. Similarly, during their first meeting, Sook-Hee is surprised at first to hear Hideko speak Korean. She explains to Sook-Hee that she is sick of speaking Japanese; all the books she is forced to read from are in Japanese. When we get Hideko’s perspective in chapter two, she is reading in Japanese on screen, but in her voiceover she continues in Korean. Again, the language of the colonizer is used as a verbal and visual marker of control, and the language of the colonized as one of rejecting control.
In regards to the imperial presence, the film takes a clear stance—the two male leads, and the film’s two villains, are Korean men who assume Japanese identities and thereby reinforce the heteropatriarchal, colonialist system. Uncle Kouzuki bribes his way to Japanese citizenship and takes his Japanese wife’s name; Count Fujiwara, a Korean farmer’s son, poses as Japanese aristocracy to gain the respect and authority this affords him. Fujiwara further tells us that Kouzuki used to be married to Mrs. Sasaki, the housekeeper, before leaving her to marry his Japanese wife:
Fujiwara: You went so far as to abandon your wife, why this urge to become Japanese?
Kouzuki: Because Korea is ugly and Japan is beautiful.
Fujiwara: Some Japanese say Japan is ugly, and Korea is beautiful
Kouzuki: Beauty is cruel by nature. Korea is soft, slow, dull, and therefore hopeless. Fujiwara: Does that include Mrs. Sasaki?
Kouzuki does not answer this last question, but the implication is that the women are equated with their countries. The urge to become Japanese is satisfied by marrying a Japanese
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the US military igniting sex entertainment industries in Asia, which find that geopolitical conquest is congruous with corporeal conquest (Yoon; Uchida; Woan). In the film this is further allegorized as Fujiwara paints the figure of a woman onto the paper of his cigarette, taking special care to add the nipples before rolling and lighting the cigarette. As he exhales, he says to Kouzuki, “My particular way of possessing beauty,” implying again that Kouzuki possesses beauty through Hideko. As the cigarette paper burns and Fujiwara again inhales, it becomes clear that he may well have meant that it was his particular way of consuming beauty.
Kouzuki’s desire to control Hideko is corollary to his perverse desire to be Japanese. As Park explains in an interview with Film Comment:
There’s a Korean term, sadaejuui, that is used to uniquely express this notion, where the people of a smaller nation are so drawn to the power of a larger nation, and become subservient to that power. They internalize it so much that they are not worshipping the bigger power by force, but are doing it voluntarily. (Topalovic) More than worshipping Japanese power, though, Kouzuki seeks to appropriate that power for himself, going to great lengths to become as Japanese as possible. In the same interview Park also says of the film’s male characters that “all the men are villains and all the men are pathetic.” Kouzuki’s “pathetic” character reveals itself in his awareness that even after marrying a Japanese woman, he will never truly be Japanese, and so he combats his own sense of inferiority by controlling his estate and niece with a totalitarian patriarchal rule.
Kouzuki’s reverence for empire is externalized through the estate he has built, which confines and oppresses Hideko physically and mentally. When Sook-Hee arrives at the mansion late at night, Mrs. Sasaki gives her the tour:
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The property has three buildings. A Western-style wing by an English architect and a Japanese wing form the main house. Not even in Japan is there a building combining two styles. It reflects Master’s admiration for Japan and England. Next is the annex, which Master had furnished as a library.
Sasaki’s comment that there is no such estate even in Japan implies that the addition of the Western-style wing makes the house superior even to Japanese culture, thus confirming the status of the West at the top of the global (imperial) hierarchy. In her study on the role of architecture in Park’s filmography, Minhae Shim Roth writes that the Western wing is elaborately furnished (“candelabras everywhere, cherry wood–paneled ceilings, blue and white floral wallpaper, and classical portraits”), while the Japanese-style wing is more modest, “communicated through screen doors and walkways covered with pagoda roofs” (222). Park created this hybrid East-West design with the help of green screen and CGI, turning a two-storey building with a turret into a four-storey, tripartite mansion with a hexagonal tower. The foreboding structure that Sook-Hee enters was thus purposefully constructed by the film production to symbolize the looming presence of empire—the British and the Japanese—and to emphasize that Sook-Hee is entering a world with its own
particular power dynamics that put her at a disadvantage.
While the estate represents Kouzuki’s desire to be an imperialist, the library houses his fetishistic desires, which truly confine Hideko, and her aunt before her. In the film’s second chapter, we see Hideko arrive at the house as a young girl (she says later that she arrived in Korea at the age of five, but the actress in these scenes is eleven). Soon thereafter, Hideko’s aunt (her mother’s sister and Kouzuki’s second wife) begins to teach her, per Kouzuki’s instructions, to read aloud from the collection of sexually graphic literature. During these teaching sessions, a large table of dark wood sits in the middle of the library,
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with Kouzuki on one end, sitting in profile to the viewer, and Hideko and her aunt across the table with a reading stand in front of them. The readings are awkward, as the child is told to read aloud and articulate, “Nipple. Navel. Penis. Vagina.” A reverse shot shows the viewer the page of the book they are reading with detailed drawings of the genitalia.
The library and what it houses become more of a prison than the rest of house, and in one scene literally so. Kouzuki explains his “training” of the young Hideko with a warning:
I know you are a bit insane, it runs in your mother’s family. That’s why I’m training you. To set your mind right. If I fail, there’s a place called a “mental hospital” in Japan. Established by the rational Germans, it’s very effective in treating lunacy. They dig holes in the dirt, put a patient in each one, and put lids on top. If patients improve, they get a leash, so they can crawl around like dogs.
Again invoking his admiration for the West, Kouzuki threatens Hideko with another form of prison, one which would be even worse by dehumanizing her completely. After this speech, Hideko’s aunt cannot bear it any longer and tries to escape the library, running down the hallway lined with bookshelves holding Kouzuki’s collection. As she reaches the exit, a caged door slides across in front of her, locking her in. She silently turns around and walks back to the table. The next scene shows the first reading before an audience; Hideko’s aunt sits at the far end of the library, which has been rearranged to create a theater setting. In the scene following the reading, she is shown having hanged herself from the estate’s cherry blossom tree, which was imported from Mt. Fuji.
At this point, the film moves forward in time to Hideko in adulthood, as the library is being prepared for another reading, the first time we will see Hideko perform. A few of the floor’s tatami mats are removed, and bonsai trees and decorative stones are arranged in their place; an indoor pond is also revealed, all elements that “sensualize the space for the erotic
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readings” (Roth 226). The audience, made up of Japanese aristocrats in formal white tie, sits on the stairs Hideko’s aunt just a few minutes earlier in the film ran up to escape this very situation. Roth writes that both the library and the theater are hierarchically organized spaces—the library defined by the student and teacher relationship, and the theater by the relationship between the audience and the performer. Here, the library-theater is confined within the unique hybrid estate, reinforcing the power dynamics of these relationships by Kouzuki’s worshipping and emulating of empire.
Part and parcel of this is the casting of Hideko and her aunt as the female conquests of this world. Significantly, while the male guests are dressed in Western formal wear, Hideko and her aunt are dressed in formal kimonos with bright red lipstick. Hideko also wears a shimada wig, traditionally worn in Kabuki theater or by geishas (Scott 130). Although Hideko wears more Western dress when not performing, it is revealing that Kouzuki, for all his admiration for Western modernization, requires her to wear traditional Japanese clothing when reading for the audience. The dress becomes more of a costume, highlighting her Japanese-ness and therefore underscoring the performativity of her Oriental-ness.
Furthermore, the men in Western dress watching Hideko reinforce the hierarchy that places the West at the top, above Japan. The kimono later becomes a literal tether when she is physically tied to an apparently masculine wooden mannequin with the obi sash of her gown.
Framed by the camera on the library’s stage, Park has created the perfect image of the Oriental Woman. Hideko performs the sexually explicit readings—in one case acting out a sexual position with the help of the aforementioned mannequin—while kneeling, evoking an essential myth about the Oriental Woman; that she is submissive, subservient and obedient (Uchida 162). The stories Hideko reads of fetishes and sado-masochism, and the detailed descriptions of genitalia, evoke two more Orientalist myths about Asian women. As Edward
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Said writes, “Women are usually the creatures of a male power-fantasy. They express unlimited sensuality . . . and above all they are willing” (207). Peter Kwan elaborates on Said’s work by writing that the othering of Asian women through the figure of the Oriental Woman “normatively permits acting out such desires such as” sexual aggression and sexual violence “upon the bodies of Asian women” (101). The film engages with this phenomenon, and more specifically the role of pornography, when Kouzuki instructs Hideko to straddle and tie herself to the mannequin to physically manifest the pornographic text.
After Kouzuki reveals to his guests that the book Hideko is reading from, Pain is a Garment, had originally included an illustration that was unfortunately torn out (much to the disappointment of all the men), Kouzuki implies he can do them one better, indicating to Hideko to act out the missing illustration. Hideko and the wooden man are then hoisted into the air, suspended before the audience. The physical tether of the kimono in the reenactment speaks to a troubling reality—the prevalence of pornography in which Asian women are victims of torture and violence. Many scholars have posited that there is a “direct connection between racial-sexual stereotyped pornography and actual violence against Asian women” (Woan 292-3). In other words, Kouzuki forcing Hideko to act out the pornographic text is eerily similar to the disturbing trend of men reenacting pornography that victimizes Asian women (Tu 267). 2
From Hideko’s reading, the film cuts to a scene that opens with a shot of her naked buttocks, bruised and lashed. Kouzuki is taking off a glove to run his palm along the whip marks, and he quotes the story Hideko was reading in the previous scene: “Now, my brave knight. When you see these old scars and the fresh pink wounds, what do you feel?” The
2 In 1985, Penthouse magazine ran photos depicting Asian women in “various poses of bondage and torture,
including hanging bound from trees” (Zia 133). Two months later, an eight-year-old girl from Hong Kong was discovered raped and lynched in North Carolina; the perpetrator admitted that pornography significantly influenced his behavior.
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camera first reveals he is speaking with Fujiwara and then moves down to show Hideko, still in her performance gown and makeup, tied to the table. The orientalization paired with the fetishization of Hideko in these consecutive scenes play up the ways in which her being made to perform within Oriental parameters is as much her prison as the house itself. However, unlike countless other fictional submissive and sexually pliable Asian women, Hideko ends up rejecting the role.
Female Solidarity
Due to the three-chapter structure of the film, which reveals another perspective with each restaging of a scene, the viewer first witnesses Hideko’s situation from the outside, which makes her seem naive, before becoming privy to her motivations. In this way, Park leans into the Oriental Woman figure before revealing that Hideko is fully aware of the role she is playing and does not plan to stay in it. To be clear, after knowing only a life in which the Oriental Woman role was forced upon her, Hideko chooses to engage with the stereotypical submissive and docile characteristics of the figure in order to escape her prison.
When Sook-Hee first arrives at the house in chapter one, Hideko is the picture of doe-eyed innocence. She asks Sook-Hee what the Count has said about her, and Sook-Hee concocts a lie about how “every night in bed he thinks of your assets . . . your face,” to which Hideko responds with (as becomes clear in retrospect) put-on cluelessness, “Why in bed, I wonder?” Her guilelessness comes to the fore again when, lying in bed with Sook-Hee, she asks what one is expected to do with a man, prompting Sook-Hee to teach her. The irony of Hideko’s display of innocence, as the viewer will learn in chapter two, is that she is in fact very familiar with what one is expected to do with a man. While the act is meant for
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the Western viewer is also fooled as the character embodies the expected passivity of the Oriental Woman seen in figures like Katsumi in Sayonara (1957), Cio-Cio-San in the opera Madame Butterfly (1904) or Kim in the musical Miss Saigon (1989, based on Butterfly). Unlike those characters created by Caucasian men, Hideko reveals that not only is she fully aware of the role she is taking on to manipulate Sook-Hee, but she also wishes to break free from the confinement of her uncle’s orientalizing cage. In essence, what Hideko does is embody the stereotype she is forced to embody in order to reject it ultimately.
It could be said that Hideko is engaging in what Mireille Rosello has called “declining the stereotype”. Rosello puts forth that “to decline” can mean to either reappropriate or reinhabit the stereotype through “ironic repetitions, carefully framed quotations, distortions and puns, linguistic alterations, double entendres, and self-deprecating humor;” or an
“ambiguous gesture of refusal and participation at the same time . . . both the stereotype and its critique cohabit so intimately” (11, 13). Hideko more closely engages with the former possibility—after having the role of Oriental Woman forced upon her, she inhabits the figure in new ways in order to manipulate those around her. The ways in which she “declines” the stereotype are less about changing hearts and minds, and more about escaping the prison that the role represents for her. Both Hideko and Sook-Hee are able to take advantage of the assumptions the male characters have made about them to orchestrate their final escape. In the same way that Kouzuki falls for Fujiwara’s con simply because he believes him to be a Japanese aristocrat, Fujiwara never suspects the women of duplicity, even though he is playing them both against each other, because they are women. He assumes he is not only smarter than them, but that, as a man, he possesses an authority neither would dare to defy.
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When Fujiwara first speaks with Hideko alone, following the readings and the whippings, he begins by telling her, “You are mesmerising.” He is surprised when she responds, still in her soft tone but demonstrating quick wit, confidence and self-awareness:
Men use the word “mesmerising” when they wish to touch a lady’s breasts. I’m familiar with Western conversational etiquette. I do a bit of reading, you know. Hideko’s awareness of her sexualized characterization points to her personal delineation between Hideko the performer and Hideko the woman. The conflation of the two figures parallels how Asian female performers have been historically regarded, as Mari Yoshihara investigates in “The Flight of the Japanese Butterfly.”
In this article, Yoshihara looks at the origins of Madame Butterfly as an echo of existing European Orientalist texts and an overt symbol of “America’s power in creating its own Orientalism at a time when the geopolitics of East-West relations underwent a rapid change” (975). Miura Tamaki, the most prominent Japanese performer of Butterfly, found worldwide acclaim in the early 20th century, but Yoshihara shows that Western reviews of Miura’s performances erased the distinction between the character and the actress: “The same exoticizing and Orientalizing discourse about the character of Cio-Cio-San was used to describe Miura the performer” (Yoshihara 981, emphases in text). According to Yoshihara’s research, Miura was repeatedly referred to as “the dainty little Japanese singer,” and, rather than noting that Miura was embodying a diminutive and fragile character, reviewers instead wrote she was “so dainty, so Japanese [that] we were reminded of a cute, quaint little doll” (981). Particularly evocative of the image of Hideko on Kouzuki’s stage, the Honolulu Advertiser reviewer wrote in 1922 about Miura:
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I prefer to remember her standing kimono-clad in the midst of a bower of Honolulu blossoms . . . [her song] pouring out of her mysterious Far Eastern soul. (quoted in Yoshihara 982)
In the same way that Miura’s reviewers were unable to recognize her as an actor, The
Handmaiden’s male characters and viewers believe Hideko’s performance at different stages of the narrative. As is dramatically revealed about Hideko, and as Miura demonstrated in her personal life, neither was the diminutive figure audiences took them for; Miura was “far from the dainty, self-sacrificing creature that she impersonated on stage” (Yoshihara 982). The use of “impersonate” is apt when considering Hideko’s performance as well, since the word implies deception and also that there is a person or figure being mimicked. In both Miura and Hideko’s case that character is the Oriental Woman, the exoticized, racialized stereotype of the Asian woman.
Yoshihara argues that, as indicated “by the choices she made in her personal life, [Miura] conformed neither to the Western Orientalist fantasy of exotic, delicate femininity nor to the Japanese ideal womanhood . . . propagated by the state” (Yoshihara 982). She instead lived out a “‘modern’ view of womanhood” and was “remarkably savvy about the creation and performance of her role on stage” (982). Moreover, she also demonstrated a sharp understanding of the Orientalist nature of the Butterfly opera. Before embarking on her career performing the opera around the world, she published an introductory guide to opera for Japanese readers in which she commented on Butterfly as follows:
Seen from our Japanese eyes, the Japanese culture and customs that appear in this opera are not merely extremely strange but rather infuriating. . . . This first act is almost thoroughly absurd to the Japanese, and one can see this as an unfiltered
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expression of the fantasies of the foreigners who have no understanding of Japan. (quoted in Yoshihara 982-3)
The awareness Miura demonstrates in her writing is at odds with the soft-voiced character Western reviewers took such delight in. Hideko, in her sarcastic comment to Fujiwara that she “does a bit of reading” also demonstrates a keen attunement to the implications of the role of the Oriental Woman and its performative reenactment.
A further parallel between Miura and Hideko is the doll imagery. Sook-Hee refers to Hideko as such (“Ladies are truly the dolls to maids”), while Hideko’s performance echoes the reviewer who called Miura a “quaint little doll, wound up to act and sing for several hours, then, after being dusted to be put back on the shelf” (quoted in Yoshihara 981). The image of the wind-up doll suggests a well-cared-for exterior with no interior life and only one specific function (to be wound up to perform). Hideko is visually and verbally compared to a doll, but as her con begins, the doll is deployed as a piece of dramatic irony. Hideko sleeps with a porcelain doll dressed strikingly similar to the costume she wears when performing the readings: a kimono, bright red lips and porcelain skin. She clutches this doll at two key moments in the film—when first arriving at the estate as a child, when her dress and physical stature are most similar to the doll (indicating her uncle’s imminent “training”); and when Sook-Hee first arrives at the estate. Told from Sook-Hee’s perspective, she first meets Hideko as she is having a nightmare, screaming so loudly that Sook-Hee runs to comfort her. We later see this scene from Hideko’s perspective. She spies on Sook-Hee’s arrival through a peephole in her door, watching her climb into bed. Hideko then calmly gets into her own bed and, holding the doll close to her chest, begins to fake a bad dream by thrashing and
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Hideko’s introduction to Sook-Hee and to the viewer is inextricably tied to the doll, allowing Hideko to equate herself with it so she appears to be an easily manipulated target.
The women, however, are quickly fascinated by each other, leading to exchanges in which they resort to the male language they are familiar with in order to seduce each other. Recalling Sook-Hee’s earlier line about Fujiwara thinking of Hideko’s face each night in bed, Hideko shyly tells her, “I think I know what the Count meant. Your face . . . each night in bed, I think of your face.” One can assume that this is not part of her act to deceive
Sook-Hee, since the mission is to feign falling in love with Fujiwara. The film’s sex scenes (one encounter shown twice) are initiated when Hideko asks Sook-Hee what is expected of women on their wedding night. Sook-Hee begins to teach her by moving her hands down Hideko’s body, saying, “And he’ll touch you like this…” I will elaborate on the sex scenes—and whether their explicitness undermines a feminist reading of the film—later.
Significant to the moments of intimacy the women share is the power relation of looking and being looked at. A revealing exchange occurs when, during a walk, Hideko tells Sook-Hee that she wishes she had never been born because her mother died in childbirth, “It’s as if I strangled her myself.” Sook-Hee, in the tenderest gesture the viewer has seen Hideko receive, takes Hideko’s face in her hands. Looking intently into her eyes, Sook-Hee says, “No baby is ever guilty of being born. If your mother thought you could understand, this is what she would have said. That she was so lucky to have you before dying.” In voiceover, Hideko wonders, “Is this the companionship they write about in books?” The physical and emotional closeness shown here stand in stark contrast to Hideko’s relationship to the audience of gentlemen, who voyeuristically watch her from a distance at the readings. And although certain physical acts are enacted upon Hideko’s body (e.g. the whipping scene), she has never experienced physical contact that implied companionship. Following this
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exchange, we see another one of Hideko’s readings, this one involving a story of lesbian sex. The film again plays with the dynamics of looking in this scene. As Hideko reads the story in which one woman instructs another on sexual matters, the bulbs in the room begin to flicker before a blackout cuts off the light entirely, almost as if a lesbian love story is destabilizing the world itself. Hideko, now in darkness, closes her eyes, a slight smile on her face, and continues to read the story from memory, revealing that this is a story she is willfully invested it. Although the men are still listening, the dark protects her from their exploitative gaze. The lights come back on as the story ends and the audience applauds.
This scene, and the sex scene between Sook-Hee and Hideko that follows, engages in interesting ways with the theory of female “to-be-looked-at-ness” in cinema, as famously laid out by Laura Mulvey in “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1975). Mulvey writes:
In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female. The determining male gaze projects its phantasy on to the female figure which is styled accordingly. In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness. (808-9, emphasis in text)
The lights going out during Hideko’s reading plays with the active/passive dynamic of looking as the male audience’s active gaze is briefly castrated, removing Hideko from the display. However, even this moment in which Hideko is shown enjoying the reading as she closes her eyes to fantasize for herself is still claimed by the male audience, who intrude upon her fantasy when the lights come back on. Not until the following scene, when she is in bed with Sook-Hee, does Hideko get to be both the active and the passive player, both the one
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who looks and the one who is looked at. This is a key private moment, one which does not transpire as a spectacle for men. That is, unless one takes the film viewer into account.
As Sook-Hee brings her face down to between Hideko’s legs, adoringly regarding her vagina, the camera lingers on Sook-Hee’s face in a close-up. More than lustful, the look on Sook-Hee’s face suggests amazement at the sheer beauty she is beholding. Rather than repeating the comical squirming of the male audience at the reading, Sook-Hee’s highly intimate gaze and position—which is reciprocated by Hideko—problematizes the
objectifying gaze of the men. The most striking images of the sex scenes are those in which the women pleasure each other in tandem, becoming mirror images of one other, and appearing as equals, sometimes interchangeably so. The scene has been criticized for this very reason, because it “sails so close to traditional girl-on-girl porn,” making it, for some, uncomfortable to watch in its entirety (Armistead). The question remains, then, how to interpret these highly sexualized images of two women who appear to be acting out the very pornography the male oppressor forces on Hideko. This is a question perhaps more easily answered by way of the film’s source novel Fingersmith.
In her analysis of Fingersmith, Claire O’Callaghan puts forth that author Sarah
Waters was intervening in the traditionally dichotomous debate surrounding pornography—in which one camp “places male sexuality on a continuum of violence” and the other camp, championed by the Feminist Against Censorship collective, challenges “the central assumptions about sexuality that shape sexual ideology and contemporary culture”
(O’Callaghan 561). With that in mind, O’Callaghan contends that “Waters reassesses lesbian engagement with pornographic materials and reclaims heteropatriarchal pornographic images for lesbian-feminist reappropriation” (561). The women in the novel and the film look for and create spaces in which they can be alone, away from the male exploitative gaze. In so doing,
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the film is true to the novel’s narrative, in which the women appropriate male pornographic traditions as means to explore their own desires. It might also be seen as an act of sterilization to suggest that Sook-Hee and Hideko should not be shown having sex in order for the film to retain its feminist message. The sex scenes therefore do not in and of themselves exploit the female bodies on screen. Instead, the film has already condemned male voyeurism through its narrative and has marked female to-be-looked-at-ness—regarding women as objects for male consumption—as harmful. A male viewer watching the scenes in a voyeuristic way,
therefore, will be placing himself in the similar position as the oppressive male presence in the film plot. Ultimately, I argue that lust and desire depicted between women is not harmful, but male objectification of women is.
The film also establishes that the violence of to-be-looked-at-ness is not exclusive to visual media: Hideko is just as oppressed by the stories she is made to read, which place her isolated before a group of men lustfully consuming her performance. It follows, then, that the true climax of the film is not simply the women escaping the grounds of the estate, but rather the cathartic scene in which Hideko shows Sook-Hee the library. Their bags are already packed and (because of the film’s non-linear timeline) we know that these are the previously unseen moments before they run away from the house. Hideko hands Sook-Hee a book, and Sook-Hee comments that she cannot read Japanese as she flips through the pages. She comes upon an illustration of a woman being penetrated in several orifices by an octopus. The camera, and Sook-Hee’s shocked gaze, zooms in on the woman’s earring, which is
recognizable as Hideko’s. Sook-Hee looks up in disbelief and asks, “Did that bastard draw this? Is this what you’ve been reading to that dirty old man and those gentlemen?” Tears stream down Hideko’s face. Sook-Hee tears the book apart and then continues to destroy the rest of the library, taking a knife and stabbing or scratching at the pages and scrolls before
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removing the tatami mats covering the indoor pond, and kicking the collection into the water. Hideko watches at first but then joins in, throwing ink over the books and pushing them into the pond. In voiceover she says, “The savior who came to tear my life apart. My Tamako. My Sook-Hee.” Hideko first calls her by her assigned Japanese name before shedding the
imperial label. Fittingly, Sook-Hee is called a savior over the scenes in which the library is being destroyed, and not as the two women run away from the estate. The true escape for Hideko was not from the imperialist estate, but from the sexualized and orientalized characterization it forced on her.
Having outlined the markers of Orientalized femininity, which include deference, modesty and sexual submissiveness, in the next chapter I explore how these markers are engaged with in a contemporary context. The male characters in the film Audition reward the recognized qualities of the Oriental Woman, while the female lead, much like Hideko, embodies them for her own agenda. Taking The Handmaiden and Audition as narrativizing the subversion of the Oriental Woman, the former establishes the imperialist subjugation of women, while the latter portrays how that subjugation has morphed into pervasive casual sexism.
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Chapter 2
Oriental Woman Meets Female Avenger: A Feminist Reading of Audition
Japanese director Miike Takashi is considered one of the pioneers of both “J-horror” and “Asia Extreme” cinema . In fact, his film 3 Audition (1999), the focus of this chapter, is “arguably . . . the flagship title of Asia Extreme” (Martin 41). Known for including lengthy torture sequences in his films, one reviewer recalls that ahead of a screening of Miike’s 2001 film Ichi The Killer, “the press was issued a promotional barf bag” (Tobias). Audition also incited strong reactions; Miike recalls one woman coming up to him at a London screening and saying, “You are sick,” then walking out (Baskin). But now, almost twenty years after its release, its cult status firmly cemented, the debate still surrounding Audition is whether or not it can be considered a feminist film. The answer, I will argue in this chapter, has taken on new nuances in the light of 2018’s #MeToo movement.
Set in Japan in the 1990s, Audition opens with the protagonist Aoyama (played by Ryo Ishibashi) grieving at his wife’s deathbed. The film then moves seven years into the future, when Aoyama’s teenage son Shigehiko (Tetsu Sawaki) tells him it may be time for Aoyama to remarry. Aoyama, a film and television producer, confides in his friend and colleague Yoshikawa (Jun Kunimura) that he is considering remarrying but is unsure how to go about meeting the right kind of woman. Yoshikawa, with expertise that suggests he has done this before, sets up a casting call for a film needing a female actress in her early 20s to early 30s. While reviewing the written applications at home, Aoyama is immediately taken with Asami (Eihi Shiina). A former dancer who had to give up ballet following a hip injury,
3 “J-Horror,” a movement rather than a genre, is used to refer to a group of “relatively low-budget horror films
made in Japan during the late 1990s” (Kinoshita 104). “Asia Extreme” is a marketing brand created by British distribution company Tartan in the early 2000s to release films in the UK from predominantly Japan, South Korea, Thailand and Hong Kong under a new “collectable” label within the canon of “World Cinema” (Martin 1, 3). The unifying factor was the “extremity” of “visual violent content and emotional effect” (Martin 4). The label has since been criticized for being reductive and for Othering Asian filmmakers (Needham 9-10).
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Asami is soft-spoken and at the audition dressed entirely in white. After the audition, Aoyama calls her for a date and they begin seeing each other, despite red flags that Asami’s story about who she is may not add up.
After consummating their relationship on a weekend getaway during which Aoyama had planned to propose, Asami disappears, leading Aoyama to realize that he does not know where she lives. Following the scant clues that can be gathered from her audition resume, he looks for Asami at her old ballet studio and the bar she said she worked at, both of which have been abandoned. Aoyama then returns home, where Asami has poisoned his customary glass of Scotch and lays in wait to torture him. Drugged, Aoyama hallucinates scenes of Asami as a child, of being in Asami’s apartment and of having oral sex with his secretary and his son’s girlfriend. He also sees a cloth sack that has been on Asami’s apartment floor suddenly open and a mutilated man crawling out begging for food. When Aoyama regains consciousness, Asami injects him with a nerve agent that paralyzes him but keeps his sensory facilities intact. She then tortures him by inserting needles all over his body and by severing his foot with a wire. She is interrupted when Shigehiko returns home early; in a struggle, he kicks Asami down the stairs, breaking her neck. The film—with its inconsistent cuts, restaged scenes with new dialogue, no score or soundtrack at key moments, and hallucinations within dream sequences—creates an overall feeling of incongruity that never sits right with the viewer.
Most of the reviews and criticism of Audition state that the first half plays like a romantic drama, an atmosphere that is entirely upended in the film’s second act. In his book Extreme Asia, Daniel Martin writes: “The film initially appears to be a lighthearted story about the perils of middle-aged dating. . . . [It] is worth noting that for the first 45 minutes of the film there is no indication at all that it is anything other than a tender romantic drama”
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(41, 42, emphases in text). Charles Derry, in his book on the psychological history of modern horror cinema, notes that “most of the film is a subtle, often tender love story about two lonely people” (298) . While Derry points out that “the climax would be less shocking 4 without the more mundane, sometimes sweet scenes that precede it,” he also writes that the violence of the film’s second half comes across as a betrayal of the audience: “What has happened to our love story?” (298, 301). Sight and Sound, the magazine of the British Film Institute, wrote that once Asami begins torturing Aoyama, “men in the audience collectively wince”; this remark markedly contrasts with its description of the scenes in which a parade of young women is objectified under false pretenses as part of a “restrained tale of romance” (“Snuff of Dreams”). While critics have installed a narrative rupture that sets the “tenderness” of the first half in opposition to the violence of the second, I argue that the film’s first half is not as lighthearted and romantic as has been maintained. Instead, it bears within it its own narrative of violence that has not been recognized because it does not involve physical violence and is aimed against women.
The notion of a shocking narrative rupture is also difficult to take seriously because, especially in 2018 but at the time of the film’s release as well, it is unlikely that audiences saw the film without being aware of its marketing; the poster released by the Japanese distributor Omega Project, for example, features Aoyama’s face in terrified close-up framed by a bloody wire and Asami in the bottom corner wielding a syringe (see figure 1). This image of Asami was also used for the film’s UK release by Tartan Pictures and included the tagline, “She always gets a part” (Dew 63). Even less ambiguously, another poster has Asami
4 See also Newman, Kim. “Audition.” Empire, Empire, 12 Apr. 2016,
www.empireonline.com/movies/audition/review/. See also Gonzalez, Ed. “Audition | Film Review.” Slant Magazine, 9 Sept. 2001, www.slantmagazine.com/film/review/audition. See also O'Neill, Phelim. “Audition: No 21 Best Horror Film of All Time.” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 22 Oct. 2010,
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isolated against a red background, admiring her pulled-taut deadly wire (see figure 2). Bearing this in mind weakens romantic readings of the film’s first half, especially when taking into account that the horror film genre historically relies on a misleadingly calm opening. Instead, I agree with Tobias’s reading, which argues that Miike treats the romantic melodrama of the film’s first half with “tongue planted firmly in cheek” (Tobias). In my view, this tongue-in-cheek quality signals an awareness on the filmmaker’s part of the systemic sexism of the film industry, which is built on patriarchal power.
Figure 1: Japanese theatrical release poster; “Ôdishon (1999)”; Audition (1999); Imdb.com, 4 Jun. 2018, https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0235198/mediaviewer/rm2353864192
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Figure 2: Poster for Western release; “Ôdishon (1999)”; Audition (1999); Imdb.com, 4 Jun. 2018, https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0235198/mediaviewer/rm2267979008
In its first half, my reading of the film will show, Audition engages with the entertainment industry’s abuse of scenarios like the titular audition, which places female actors—their career, ambitions and livelihood—at the mercy of male producers. Notably, it does so decades before the investigation into (and subsequent arrest of) Harvey Weinstein and the launch of the #MeToo movement. Critics and scholars, most notably Tom Mes, with whose analysis I take particular issue, have suggested that a feminist reading of Audition would be too literal, citing the fact that Asami is hardly a faultless female avenger and Aoyama hardly an irredeemable male villain. While Aoyama is indeed not portrayed as a
