Something Wicked This Way Comes : Essays on Evil and Human Wickedness [1 ed.] 9789042028791, 9789042025509

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Something Wicked This Way Comes Essays on Evil and Human Wickedness

At the Interface

Series Editors Dr Robert Fisher Dr Nancy Billias

Advisory Board Dr Alejandro Cervantes-Carson Professor Margaret Chatterjee Dr Wayne Cristaudo Dr Mira Crouch Dr Phil Fitzsimmons Dr Jones Irwin Professor Asa Kasher

Owen Kelly Dr Martin McGoldrick Revd Stephen Morris Professor John Parry Professor Peter L. Twohig Professor S Ram Vemuri Revd Dr Kenneth Wilson, O.B.E

Volume 57 A volume in the At the Interface series ‘Perspectives on Evil and Human Wickedness’

Probing the Boundaries

Something Wicked This Way Comes Essays on Evil and Human Wickedness

Edited by

Colette Balmain and Lois Drawmer

Amsterdam - New York, NY 2009

The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ISO 9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents Requirements for permanence”. ISBN: 978-90-420-2550-9 ©Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2009 Printed in the Netherlands

Table of Contents Preface: Colette Balmain

1

PART 1: Images of Evil 1.

“…and if Looks Could Kill:” Making Up the Face of Evil Geraldine Biddle-Perry and Janice Miller

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2.

Oriental Nightmares: The ‘Demonic’ Other in Contemporary American Adaptations of Japanese Horror Film Colette Balmain

25

3.

Hoping for Heaven, Landing in Hell: Lessons Learned at a Medieval Chinese Grotto Karil Kucera

39

4.

The Cartoon Nationalism of Contemporary Japan Charles Nuckolls

61

PART 2: Ethics and Responsibility 5.

Collective Denial: Serbs and the War in Bosnia Merdijana Sadovic

81

6.

Ethical Aliens: The Challenge of Extreme Perpetrators to Humanism William Andrew Myers

91

7.

The Problem of Evil Beyond Theology Alan Watt

103

8.

The Way of the Transgressor is Hard: Personal Experience on Death, Suffering and “Community Responsibility” Chris Bell

117

9.

Teaching About Evil in History: Demonizing Historical Figures 127 Robert W. Butler

PART 3: Sex and Seduction 10.

Remarriage and Ass-F**king: Shifty Byzantine Views of Sex Stephen Morris

143

11.

The Seduction of Evil: An Examination of the Media Culture of the Current White Supremacist Movement Anthony F. Crisafi

167

12.

“Get Your Kicks on Route 666,” or Why the Devil has all the Best Tunes: Trekkin Through the Darker Side of Heavy Metal Music Frank Faulkner

183

13.

Wicked Women: The Menace Lurking Behind Female Independence Margarita Carretero-González & Mª Elena Rodríguez-Martín

199

Notes on Contributors

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Welcome to an At the Interface Project By sharing insights and perspectives that are both inter-disciplinary and multi-disciplinary, ATI/PTB publications are designed to be both exploratory examinations of particular areas and issues, and rigorous inquiries into specific subjects. Books published in the series are enabling resources which will encourage sustained and creative dialogue, and become the future resource for further inquiries and research. Something Wicked This Way Comes is a volume which belongs to the research project Perspectives on Evil and Human Wickedness (www.interdisciplinary.net). This wide ranging project seeks to explore issues connected with evil, suffering, pain and the consequences of human actions. It recognises that even the language of 'evil' is a problem, and attempts to find ways of beginning to make sense of human wickedness. Key themes that are central to the project include; x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x

the language of evil the nature and sources of evil and human wickedness moral intuitions about dreadful crimes psychopathic behaviour; is a person mad or bad? choice, responsibility, and diminished responsibility social and cultural reactions to evil and human wickedness the portrayal of evil and human wickedness in the media and popular culture suffering in literature and film individual acts of evil, group violence, holocaust and genocide; obligations of bystanders terrorism, war, ethnic cleansing the search for meaning and sense in evil and human wickedness the nature and tasks of theodicy religious understandings of evil and human wickedness postmodern approaches to evil and human wickedness ecocriticism, evil and suffering evil and the use/abuse of technology; evil in cyberspace

Dr Robert Fisher Inter-Disciplinary.Net http://www.inter-disciplinary.net

Preface Colette Balmain The papers collected in this volume are expanded from papers given at the 6th Global Conference on Evil and Human Wickedness, which took place in March 2005. The chapters here represent the diversity and interdisciplinary nature of the conference itself covering topics such as historical and theological concepts of evil, media representations of evil, contemporary debates surrounding the Bosnia war and woman perpetrators in Birkenau, and the construction of the Other as evil in the face of the continuing hysteria over AIDS. In the aftermath of the events of 9/11 and those in London shortly after the conference (7th July 2005), it seems that these debates have never been so timely or necessary. What I recollect most from the reports of the London bombings is the bemusement of the press and the public when the real life stories of the bombers gradually unfolded. In particular, press reports of Shehzad Tanweer, who grew up in Beeston, Leeds, showed a man well liked within his community. Indeed, on the day before the bombings, he played a pickup soccer match. In The Washington Post, Sudarsan Raghavan writes: It was a ritual he carried out most days, if he wasn’t playing cricket. Whites, blacks, Asians - everyone in the neighborhood would come out. For a couple of hours, they would forget their races, religions and prejudices and play only as Britons.1 And yet the very next day, Tanweer would sacrifice his and others’ lives in the service of an ideology that at first seems so anathematic to this young man who appeared well adjusted at negotiating the competing demands of his Islamic faith and Western society. Of his experiences growing up in Beeston, his friend Saeed Ahmed writes, “He felt completely integrated and never showed any signs of disaffection,”2 In the aftermath of 7/11, Tanweer is reported as having become more religious, frequenting a local Islamic bookstore and visiting Lahore. Then there is the story of Mohammed Sadique Khan, a teaching assistant and youth worker, and another of the four London bombers of whom the following was written: In Dewsbury yesterday, no one could understand what had driven him to take his own life and kill others in such obscene circumstances. They remembered him as a bearded

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Preface

______________________________________________________________ young man, who wore Western clothes along with his religious cap. They recalled that he loved his wife, that the pair had a harmonious marriage and almost never argued. Both were pleasant and polite in the street. Proud parents, to all the world model members of their community.3 It became, then, difficult to construct any of the four young men in terms of evil, although it was agreed that their actions - the bombings - were evil. The conclusion was that these men had been indoctrinated by ideology - and it was ideology therefore that was evil. In these terms, evil was externalised and distanced, individually and geographically. The evil came from elsewhere the East - the ultimate source of which was Al Qaeda and its leader, Osama bin Laden. In a sense it was not important whether or not Al Qaeda was actually behind the bombings, but that recourse to the extremist [evil] ideology of Al Qaeda provided a framework to explain the actions of these seemingly normal British men. On that day in July, just as in September 2001 in the United States, something wicked indeed did this way come. And while the papers contained within this volume might not have solutions to the problem of evil - evil, after all, is a shifting signifier and culturally specific - they clearly demonstrate the continuing necessity of debates in the face of acts of evil and human wickedness, as seen through multiple perspectives and theoretical landscapes.

Notes 1

Sudarsan Raghavan. “Friends Describe Bomber’s Political, Religious Evolution: 22-Year-Old Grew Up Loving Western Ways And Wanting for Little.” The Washington Post. Friday, 29 July 2005. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wpdyn/content/article/2005/07/28/AR2005072801991_pf.html, accessed 10th September 2008. 2 Saeed Ahmed, cited in Sudarsan Raghavan, op. cit. 3 Jonathan Brown, “Mohammed Sadique Khan: Expectant father whose chosen path meant he would never see his baby”, The Independent UK, online, Thursday, 14 July 2005, http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/mohammed-sadique-khanexpectant-father-whose-chosen-path-meant-he-would-never-see-his-baby498749.html, accessed 10th September 2008.

Colette Balmain

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Bibliography Brown, Jonathan, “Mohammed Sadique Khan: Expectant father whose chosen path meant he would never see his baby”, The Independent UK, online, Thursday, 14 July 2005, http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/mohammed-sadique-khanexpectant-father-whose-chosen-path-meant-he-would-never-see-his-baby498749.html, accessed 10th September 2008 Raghavan, Sudarsan, “Friends Describe Bomber’s Political, Religious Evolution: 22-Year-Old Grew Up Loving Western Ways And Wanting for Little.” The Washington Post. Friday, July 29, 2005. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wpdyn/content/article/2005/07/28/AR2005072801991_pf.html, accessed 10th September 2008.

Colette Balmain September 2008

Part 1 Images of Evil

“....and if Looks Could Kill:” Making Up the Face of Evil Geraldine Biddle-Perry and Janice Miller Abstract The achievement of beauty through make-up is part of a whole range of cultural practices of self-management written and read through the body. Cosmetics offer women not only enhancement and the correction of perceived imperfections, but also the promise of social and sexual success and a positive sense of self. Using a feminist analytical perspective, this paper seeks to explore how make-up, at a discursive level, can be utilised in a range of media, but particularly film, to create a network of associations, which can be perceived as ‘deviant’ or ‘pathological’. Drawing on a Bahktinlike conception of ‘grotesque realism’, it will further analyse the representation of the ‘disorderly woman’ and the ways in which cosmetics and their perceived misuses become a literal and metaphorical device in the construction of ‘the face of evil’. It will suggest that make-up can function as the perceived external signification of an interior lack of social, moral, sexual and psychological control and the characterisation of a dangerous femininity, which threatens to disrupt and destabilise the boundaries that mark and maintain organised society. Keywords: Femininity; transgression.

grotesque;

make-up;

self-management;

Introduction The power and social significance of facial beauty or its lack however it is determined - has always figured in the age-old belief that equates physical beauty with goodness and spiritual beauty, and ugliness with moral degeneracy and evil. Across a continuum of ideal facial proportions “… the physical and the metaphysical, body and soul, appearance and reality, inner and outer are one. Each mirrors the other”.1 Yet such aesthetic prejudice and discrimination “… is so widespread as to be a cultural norm … so taken-for-granted as to be almost invisible’.2 The moral of most stories from Homer’s Iliad to the Brothers Grimm to Pretty Woman, is not just that virtue or beauty triumphs in life, but that they are one and the same thing. It should not be forgotten of course, that women have more often been judged in these terms than men. This essay aims to site the use of make up on film as a key signifier in narratives of deviant femininity. It will argue that at the basis of female representations of the abhorrently made up face, is the rhetoric of healthy and unhealthy femininity: that feminine evil is literally inscribed on the face via cosmetics and that the worst transgression a woman can commit is to be

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______________________________________________________________ unable to effectively manage the rituals of femininity. This crime against beauty becomes symbolic of other evils in her life or her psyche. Parallel to the overly made-up face is the neglected one, which equally contravenes recognised codes of acceptable femininity. Both faces we will argue are considered in Western culture to be equally objectionable, often finding refuge in the brothel and the attic in the face of the diseased whore or the unkempt madwoman. With Hollywood narrative regularly acting as a marker of sociological concerns, what becomes clear is the contradictory paradigm in which every woman finds herself when in front of the mirror. On the one hand she must succumb to the lure of cosmetic products, but on the other their use must be almost imperceptible. Historical and contemporary accounts clearly show that nature is what is required. Yet “nature” in itself has clearly, rarely been enough. What we are therefore left with is not just the impossibility of a face that is either neutral or natural, but also a conception of beauty that is literally in the hands of the woman herself. Wicked Ladies : “‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore”3 It is with Christianity and the writings of the early church that the use of makeup begins to be increasingly condemned as the embodiment of sin and moral deficiency. A woman who used makeup was considered to have displayed a wantonness that contravened Christian teaching. Those who indulged in overt beautification were castigated for being under the influence of the Devil indulging in artifice and the wilful adulteration of God’s natural intentions. As Phillip Stubbes observed in 1548 “whosoever do colour their faces or their hair with any unnatural colour, they begin to prognosticate of what colour they shall be in hell”.4 The relationship between physical and spiritual beauty has a complex place in Christian thinking. However, throughout its history the vilification of beauty contrived through artificial means has been relatively consistent: the use of make up is evidence of particularly women’s sinful nature and innate capacity for deceit and vanity. Such a belief joins of a long tradition in Christian thought both that sex itself is inherently sinful, and that women by their very nature might possess an insatiable sexual appetite “more carnal than a man”.5 Although not confined to religious diatribe, women’s employment of artifice - and any technique of beauty at her disposal - often reflects not just a face in a mirror, but to a greater or lesser extent a moral judgement of her potential appetite for vice and a lack of virtue. However, the Christian discourse of modesty and chastity in dress and adornment, and the simultaneous recognition of women’s underlying potent sexuality defines the sets of value oppositions that have come to dominate western conceptions of femininity and its embodied practice.6 The paradoxical valorisation of idealised beauty on the one hand and castigation of women’s attempts to achieve it on the other can clearly be situated as part of a coded dualistic 1.

Geraldine Biddle-Perry & Janice Miller

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______________________________________________________________ “game of modesty and sexual explicitness, denial and celebration of pleasure”,7 and the social and religious doctrinal double standards which counter such ambiguities. As a result an image of woman as either chaste virgin or sexually voracious vamp, Madonna or whore has served as a receptacle for all kinds of displaced fears and anxieties, projected onto a host of cultural experiences and phenomena distinguished by their feminine characteristics.8 The use and misuse of makeup and its alliance with a whole host of corresponding moral and personal attributes, certain practices, and the status of those who indulged in or abstained from them, can clearly be situated within this cultural historical framework. What to apply, how much, when and by whom, provides a timeline of proscription and sanction to the present day and effectively demonstrates the constancy of the ambiguities of makeup’s practice both culturally and historically. On the one hand the female body is a focus of sexual desirability, on the other it is the site of sexual desire. To avoid moral reproach women must be subject both to constant regulation through techniques of display and concealment, must enter into a lifelong relationship with cosmetics as part of the artifice of femininity. In applying makeup, women are literally marking out a feminine identity, but it is one always bound up in a whole repertoire of adornment and self-presentation and the articulation of an arbitrary set of culturally and historically specific meanings. This has nothing to do with what could be termed ‘natural’ femininity or innately feminine attributes, but rather how such meanings are formulated through a complex network of signifying practices to constitute a recognisable vocabulary of gendered identity and sexuality9. 2. Playing by the Rules As Michel Foucault forcefully argues10 it is not in overt coercion but in the invisible mechanisms of internal subjective scrutiny through which real power is exercised. The achievement of beauty through make-up and the whole range of cultural practices and processes of self regulation of which it is a part can be seen to embody the power relations inherent in Foucault’s concept of the “examination… its rituals, its methods … its systems of marking and classification” .11 For many women (and increasingly men) every facet of their facial exterior can become the object of minute scrutiny, discipline and control. The methods employed may shift over time in accordance with fashionable doctrine and modern technology, but at their core is a disciplined process and a time consuming activity that seeks to create a seamless natural beauty; indelible, because what is fulfilled is that which is temporally and culturally appropriate. The use of cosmetics is an ingrained part of most women’s daily experience and it would be asinine to demonise them, because this ignores

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______________________________________________________________ the potential that they have as a site of pleasure for women. Make-up can become the positive ritual via which women transform themselves daily in preparation for the outside world. Like many other facets of appearance it can be also argued that whilst some feminist writers might decry make-up as symbolic of the subjection of women, it can also be a site of creativity, individuality and personal expression.12 Herein lies its power and as such its battles. For Foucault it is specularity and a scopic regime of visibility and invisibility which ultimately implies subjection and establishes the highly ritualised mechanisms of the ‘normalising gaze.’ Subjectivity becomes inseparable from representation and the social regimes that organise and subordinate the body and its management to the institutions of social regulation. The self is produced through the internalisation of a whole set of normalising standards and discursive practices which constitute the body as a site of both pleasure and pain through classification, conscience and constant self regulation. “In a sense, the power of normalisation imposes homogeneity; but it individualises by making it possible to measure gaps, to determine levels, to fix specialities and to render the differences useful by fitting them one to another”.13 As such women’s power in relation to cosmetics is limited by other structures of power, her creativity must be sited within the confines of normality, her transgressions calculated against these and her sense of self, confidence and attractiveness relies on a successful negotiation of these boundaries. To flout them would be a powerful and political act, but would also result in ridicule and dreaded accusations of abnormality and unattractiveness. The rules are complex. Strategies of enhancement and concealment are mapped and plotted according to a whole taxonomy of facial attributes which constitute a recognisable physiognomic landscape. Different ‘looks’ are deemed appropriate not only in relation to different skin and hair colours but also moods, seasons, locations, and times. Thus, the sense of an interior self or individual subjectivity being articulated through body decoration is always also situated in relation to a range of varying exterior circumstances.14 In a Foucauldian sense, figured by and inscribed upon the female body, the regimes of beauty and the use of cosmetics become synonymous with the norms of a mentally and physically healthy woman. At her most extreme, the madwoman in the attic or on the street is most often portrayed as devoid of the regimen of self management: matted hair, facial hair, unclean, in a nightgown a lack of make-up thus equalling a lack of control over the self and a lack of sanity. Famously, in the film Now Voyageur15, Charlotte Vane (Bette Davis) is transformed from plain, and emotionally damaged, dowdy spinster aunt into an idealised picture of feminine sexuality. With her finely plucked brows, translucent skin and full lips, she is ‘well’ because she is beautiful at last. What is significant is the way in which the use of make up and its lack continues to function as an exterior physical marker of both an

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______________________________________________________________ interior psychological condition and its ideological narrative resolution. Charlotte is implicitly portrayed as, although intellectual, sexually repressed and frigid because of her attire, her severe glasses, lack of makeup and grooming and having her hair tightly combed back in a bun; these are causes, not effects. The western use of cosmetics and make up in the 20th century is very much part of transformative rhetoric of their production and consumption and the boom in the modern cosmetics industry from the early 1930s onwards. This was a result not only of the promotion of make-up as an essential part of women’s everyday beauty routine but of the links made between these and the specific ideals of femininity embodied by a range of Hollywood stars.16 Hollywood came to dominate cosmetics and their branding17 by presenting a visual display of commodities as spectacle and the fantasy of self-transformation through consumption. Established through sometimes heavily schematic narratives, many ‘women’s films’ of the 1940s and 1950s used visual (and musical) metaphors to clarify the dramatic stakes.18 In films such as Now Voyageur the cinematic figure of woman functions at a symbolic level to explore contemporary ideological conflicts, particularly those around the appropriate management and manifestations of feminine sexuality. As in Now Voyager, in many films this management or rather any mismanagement is fraught with difficulties: feminine sexuality must exist with desirability but not desire, visual but not visible, articulated but not spoken. Clearly cinematic expression exploits make-up’s physical potentialities to expose the conflict female protagonists encounter in negotiating, subjugating and channelling feminine desire and expressing an autonomous and a healthy sexual identity. 3. All made up Within a mise-en-scene of desire and fantasy, makeup can be seen as integral to the construction of particular feminine identities and a fundamental part of a whole stylistic repertoire of visual symbols whose characterisation and narrative significance is immediately recognisable to the cinema audience. Feminine regulation and constraint, sexuality and its containment, desire and its fulfilment constantly drive the narrative in Black Narcissus.19 An acceptable, stable and healthy feminine sexuality is constituted in the oscillating relationship between the three main female protagonists Sister Clodagh/Deborah Kerr, Sister Ruth/Kathleen Byron, and Kanchi/Jean Simmons, and the local agent Mr Dean played by David Farrar. Makeup functions throughout Black Narcissus as a key denotation of different femininities - virgin, vamp, whore - characterised in the leading female characters in relation to different contexts and circumstances. Sister Clodagh’s meticulously constructed and carefully maintained repression is figured in the contrast between her life in the convent and her

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______________________________________________________________ previous life in Ireland. In one scene, Clodagh’s ‘drifting and dreaming’ of a youth spent galloping across the Irish country is brought to an end as she (and the audience) are reluctantly returned once more to the rigorous constraints of convent life by the, almost brutal, superimposition of a wimple to constrain her abundant red hair, and the overlaying of an emotionally anaemic face and blanched lips on a flawlessly beautiful made-up face fully of vitality. However, all the Sisters, even the highly emotionally charged Sister Ruth, pale before Kanchi’s dark-skinned, earthy, sensuality. Using the familiar strategy of the creation of an exotic “other”, Kanchi’s promiscuous lack of control and flirtatious advances to both Dean and the young General (Sabu), are indulged because they are seen as evidence of a natural, healthy but burgeoning female libido. In stark contrast, poor deluded Sister Ruth is pathologised throughout as being out of rather than lacking control, and as a result in possession of a perverted and dangerous sexual appetite which degenerates into madness. In what has been described as one of the few truly erotic scenes in British cinema,20 Sister Ruth, having renounced the order and dressed in a low-cut, tightly-fitting red dress, clashes with Sister Clodagh. Deliberately and provocatively, Ruth opens a powder compact and almost violently applies another coat of lipstick. As Sister Clodagh virtuously reaches for her Bible, to Mirror Sister Ruth’s compact she is all the time watched over by the ‘other’ women pictured in the erotic murals that cover the walls, plump and fecund and bejewelled, and eerily shimmering in the candlelight. It is inevitable that makeup as an integral part of the constitution of an idealised femininity is incorporated into a vocabulary of proscribed sexual desire and desirability. The highly stylised figure of the femme fatale that has dominated much feminist film criticism21 is similarly marked out through her use of dress and make-up. Portrayed as cruel and calculating, such women were shown to wantonly manipulate their bodies and blatantly use their sexual attraction without regard for polite conventions. “She knew what she wanted and she didn’t care what she did to get it.”22 Within the inherent narrative contradictions offered by classic film noir, and the ideological contradictions their female protagonists open up, very red lipstick and long red nails become a fetishised erotic code of narcissistic feminine masquerade signalling both an active desiring subject and a calculated deception. The application of make-up thus potentially marks out women as both the passive object of masculine desire and its contradiction: the masochistic sexual fantasies implicit in the threat an empowered feminine sexuality poses for patriarchy. However, what Sister Ruth’s moral and spiritual decline and descent into madness, and its articulation through make-up, seems to demonstrate is the fundamental instability of the boundaries between the two. “[W]hat seems to be at stake... is the production of a rational coherent subjection. In other words, the notion of unified form is integrally

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______________________________________________________________ bound up with the perception of self and construction of individual identity”.23 In the case of make-up, it can be argued its primary function is to patrol the borders of feminine representation by visibly acting as a marker of both a managed, idealised feminine identity and its potential degeneration. As Lynda Nead points out there is always “... a point where the systems break down”.24 Throughout Black Narcissus, Sister Ruth’s mental state is represented in terms of a pathological desire - for importance, for attention, for approbation, for Mr Dean - that eventually tips over into madness. She literally sees red and her use of make-up effectively signifies a deviant feminine sexuality that threatens, not just the sacred order of the convent, but also the very fabric of society that it’s ordered and regulated existence metaphorically represents. 4. Mad, bad and dangerous to know “All human societies have a conception of the monstrous-feminine, of what it is about woman that is shocking, terrifying, horrific, abject”.25 Creed explores the relationship between physical states, bodily waste and the construction of what she hypothesises as the “monstrous-feminine”, and draws in particular on Julia Kristeva’s Powers of Horror26 and the notion of the abject. However, what is pertinent to this discussion is her analysis of the ways in which the monstrous, as constructed in modern horror texts, are similarly grounded in relation to the feminine body, sexual immorality and perversion, corporeal alteration and decay. In 1740, Horal Walpole wrote a letter from Florence where he was staying, to a friend in which he described Lady Mary Wortley: She wears a foul mob that does not cover her greasy black locks, that hang loose, never combed or curled; an old mazarine blue wrapper that gapes open and discovers a canvas petticoat. Her face swelled violently on one side with the remains of a ****27 partly covered with a plaister, and partly with white paint, which for cheapness she has brought so coarse that you would not use it to wash a chimney.’ 28 As the physical expression of an inner state, the image of the disorderly woman disrupts the traditional and stable, hierarchical social structure through a loss of any normalising boundaries. Such a figure epitomises Bakhtin’s29 image of the ‘senile pregnant hag’ - the ultimate expression of the grotesque body that destabilises the aesthetic perfection of the pure and aspirational Classical body, and signifies a sickening lack of self awareness at its core. However, Bakhtin’s conception of carnival emphasises not the polarities between the two but their ambiguous affinities. Its expression in a transgressive female body subverts dominant culture and the conventional

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______________________________________________________________ structures of language by being in a constant state of flux, providing a site of insurgency through a mix of inversion, mockery and degradation, old hags with, “deformed flesh with the flesh of new life, conceived but as yet unformed ... Moreover, the old hags are laughing.”30 Such ambivalence is central to the conception of the grotesque body and its stress on protuberances, apertures and openings, particularly the mouth, through which the cosmic, the universal and the natural word can enter. However it is not that the use (or misuse) of makeup simply reflects this grotesque liminal state but that it does much more than this, it embellishes such a body and infuses it with a constant and potent reminder of its fundamental social and physical deviancy. Growing older is inevitable, but even in old age women are obliged to continue to negotiate the fine line that separates an appropriate and managed femininity from the cultural nightmare of its opposite. Ageing women must be careful to avoid being considered “mutton dressed as lamb”, but they must also clearly demonstrate through attendance to the subtleties of a chronologically appropriate styled identity that they have not “let themselves go” - neither of which considerations seem to bother the now geriatric child star, Baby Jane Hudson (Bette Davis). In Whatever Happened to Baby Jane31, Bakhtin’s ageing crone comes to life in a grotesque body which “transgresses its own limits”.32 Loaded with connotations of fear and disgust, Baby Jane’s overly white, yet wrinkled skin, caked in powder, juxtaposed with blonde ringlets and a mouth smeared with scarlet lipstick is the summation of such a body. [T[he grotesque is related most strongly to the psychic register and to the bodily as cultural projection of an inner state.33 Baby Jane stomps around the decaying mansion in a housecoat and slippers with a cigarette in her mouth and a glass of whisky in her hand. She is not “making the best of herself” nor “growing old gracefully”, worse she appears to be lost in and reliving her childhood in the body of an elderly woman, either a lack of self awareness or perhaps worse a deliberate rejection of the rules a refusal to play the game of sociological proprietary. Beyond the unsettling aesthetics of such disregard, Jane’s flagrant indifference both to what others might think, and to the familiar paradigms of old age, is far more disruptive. Just as gender is demonstrably performed through style and the arbitrary masquerade of feminine and masculine identity, so then is age similarly constituted according to the, albeit shifting, social historical proscription and articulation of a whole range of social and cultural conventions. Makeup is just one such example, but it epitomises the tensions between the body and its embodied and situated practice. Fashion and dress has always had a traditional role in literally marking time but in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane the rhythms of sartorial convention are constantly disrupted in the recurrent slippage

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______________________________________________________________ between past and present and the temporal aberration of the body of an old woman in the persona of a child. Haunted by the glories of her child stardom, and to the creepy accompaniment of her signature tune, Baby Jane exists in a grotesque somatic vacuum, overstepping the mark by stepping “… as it were, into the limelight out of turn – too young or too old, too early or too late...” .34 Ultimately, consumed with hatred and guilt, the spectre of sibling rivalry and competing ageing femininities find physical form in the exaggerated make-up which denotes a deranged Bette Davis. The boundaries between the collective and individual body and its social and cultural boundaries are inseparable35 and the spectacle of Jane coquettishly flirting with the man at the newspaper office disrupts and destabilises the boundaries of both. In the constant play of youth and decrepitude, excess and lack, Jane’s disregard for the conventions of ageing and delusions of youth convey a constant sense of unease. In the suggested combination of the sacred and the profane expressed in her excessive makeup and excruciatingly inappropriate mannerisms, “Baby” Jane exists on the margins of classification in a Bakhtin-like grotesque ambivalence. 5.

Papering over the Cracks Freud’s analysis of the “Uncanny” (or Unheimlich) would seem useful here as a term which has been used in both philosophical and psychoanalytical writing to indicate such a disturbing sense of ambiguity and ambivalence. .In its received connotations the Freudian uncanny is an aesthetic category that lies directly within the boundaries of “all that is terrible”36, yet it is neither absolute terror nor mild anxiety. The uncanny is never a property of a particular spatial or physical embodiment, but an aesthetic and unconscious dimension, a manifestation of a mental state projected on to the environment or on to other people. Not unsurprisingly, Freud found his uncanny experience in the sight of the painted female form. On holiday in Italy attempting to make his way back to the safety of the piazza he found himself repeatedly in “… a quarter whose character I could not long remain in doubt. Nothing but painted women were to be seen at the windows …”37 For Freud, it is not the act of repetition itself which is uncanny, but that which reminds us of this inner compulsion to repeat. Coincidences, doubles, mirror images, mannequins and, it could be argued, painted women, all throw into question not so much the status of physical, but psychical reality, as they objectify our unconscious fears and desires. Makeup’s proscriptive history is clearly one underwritten by the discourse of artifice but Freud’s analysis of intangible fear and anxiety suggests it is neither the masquerade in its explicit articulation, nor necessarily the revelation of what it might hide. It is the uncanny potential of uncertainty that exposes what is at stake in such a discourse. In its limitless ambiguity makeup’s essential artifice reveals the frailty at the heart of

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______________________________________________________________ gendered identity. Who is real and who is a fake? Through the spectre of artifice the overtly ‘made up’ woman opens up a vista of a potentially sublime, powerfully threatening form of nature/woman that poses a danger to the male ego, but what is most terrifying is what such ‘bad’ makeup ultimately exposes: the ‘truth’ of gendered identity, and it is this fear that Hollywood cinema has exploited. 6. Conclusion: ‘To put on femininity with a vengeance suggests the power of taking it off’ 38 In her seminal essay Womanliness as Masquerade39, the psychoanalyst Joan Riviere draws on observations of a successful professional woman client and the anxieties her client exhibits in fulfilling the perceived requirements of both a professional and feminine identity. After each public speaking performance, the woman was full of misgivings and apprehension that her behaviour had been in any way inappropriate and was obsessed by a need for reassurance - which usually took the form of compulsive flirting with the predominantly male audience. Riviere argues, therefore, that in order for women to avoid retribution in a male dominated environment they must hide behind a facade of idealised femininity which “... could be assumed and worn as a mask, both to hide the possession of masculinity and to avert the reprisals expected if she was found to possess it ... “40. Enacted in gesture, pose and adornment, Riviere’s conception of femininity as a carefully constructed artifice offers a model for the analysis of make-up as fundamental to the constitution of a normative feminine body and sexuality that both appeases masculine anxiety and surpasses other rival ‘feminine’ women. In whatever form, the misapplication of makeup signals the wearer’s inability to “play by the rules” and respect the boundaries of the acceptable and unacceptable and social and cultural taboos- in Hollywood cinema this has equated to madness, with women like Sister Ruth and Baby Jane pathologised either because of their sexual desperation or their lack of self awareness. But makeup can similarly be theorised as a way of questioning the definition of the self as the coherent, indivisible and continuous unit that has dominated Western thought and its expression. Its complex, ambiguous and contradictory nature can be situated in the disjunction between signifier and signified, neither beautification nor disfigurement, natural nor artificial, neither entirely real nor completely fake. At its root, the exaggerated and excessive display of cosmetic overindulgence or perversion calls into idealised feminine sexual identity through their constant juxtaposition. The implications of make up’s disruption of culture’s highly organised categories and classification, as well as its potential for non-signification, or at least the lack of certainty it engenders, are far-reaching.

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______________________________________________________________ Catherine Constable41 questions this dialectic between artifice and truth through a concept of the made up face as a mask. Situating it within a feminist critical framework Constable nevertheless seeks to move beyond a critique of make-up as a mask of patriarchal submission behind which the true face of woman might be uncovered. Constable looks to “generate a more productive model for thinking about the meaning of make-up”42 through a Nietzschean analysis of the mask as a truthful illusion. This opens up a frame of analysis where “… the mask is not viewed as purely patriarchal, or merely indicative of the absence of the truth, it becomes a construct that can be mobilised in a variety of ways”43. Similarly, rather than attempting to claim that make-up’s material substance should be conceptualised solely in terms of a fixed, idealised structure, this essay aims to draw attention not to the depths of possible meaning that might lie behind such a structure but to the very surfaces they inhabit. It suggests therefore, that make-up be examined beyond a sense of both deployed disguise and as a transparent reflection of the cultural purposes ascribed to it. Instead it seeks to emphasise the paradoxes of make-up’s inherent superficiality and the ways in which its use and representation exploits the need for spectators to create meaning by not looking through but at its visible contradiction. Makeup’s dramatic possibilities and competing discursive formations can function to expose the inherent fragility of an idealised femininity and its embodied practice. Its use, misuse, excess or lack suggests that “the body’s boundaries cannot be separated from the operation of other social and cultural boundaries”44, and the cultural practices and rituals that maintain a facade of control. It could be argued, therefore, that the subversive potential of make-up lies in its implicit a power to disrupt the normative sense of the appropriate through an aberration whose ambiguous character simultaneously serves to reinforce the values of the status quo - and the means by which it can challenge or realign their shifting boundaries. Clearly, “... the specific nature of the border changes [from film to film]”, but “the function of the monstrous remains the same – to bring about an encounter between the symbolic order and that which threatens its stability ...”45. Baby Jane’s corruption of an aged identity through a lack of both physical and moral control is the personification of a Bakhtin-like grotesque body; Sister Ruth’s desperate femininity symbolises a hysterical descent into insanity; whilst the femme fatale’s construction (and subsequent destruction) poses an explicit challenge to patriarchal authority through a dangerous sexual appetite, the repressed desires of single women like Aunt Charlotte implicitly but equally threaten: all are in their own way committing evil in some form. Even the immaculately beautiful woman is problemitised: “She is perfect to a fault, she is too beautiful” because in the embodiment of feminine perfection she has revealed the fundamental emptiness at the heart of its spectacular masquerade.

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______________________________________________________________ Understanding these spectacular pluralities is integral to both the varieties of make-up’s rituals and the ontology of the images themselves. Decay, deviance, dissent, desire: in foregrounding its own constructedness, make-up can exceed its proper boundaries and reveal a reality that the symbolic order ultimately cannot counter: patriarchy’s worst nightmare, matriarchy’s worst evil, a transgressive female body which contradicts and threatens the very symbolic order it seeks to sustain. If, make-up signally provides a continuum of symbolic iconography around the embodiment of appropriate feminine behaviour, then it could be argued, excess and lack equally function in the cosmetic constitution of a metaphorical face of a femininity that is both monstrous and dangerous.

Notes 1

A Synnot, The Body Social: Symbolism, Self and Society, Routledge, London, 1993, p. 75 2 Ibid., p. 75 3 John Ford, English dramatist, 1632. 4 A Synnot, op. cit., p. 85 5 Ibid., pp. 46-47 6 E Tseelon, The Masque of Femininity, Sage, London, 1997. 7 Ibid., p. 14. 8 A Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture and Postmodernism, McMillan Press, Basingstoke, 1998, pp. 44-81 9 See J Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, Routledge, London, 1990, and A Oakley, Sex Gender and Society, Temple Smith, London, 1976. 10 M Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Penguin Books, London, 1977. 11 Ibid., p. 185. 12 For a more in depth discussion see E Wilson, Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and Modernity. IB Tauris, London, 2003. 13 M Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Penguin Books, London, 1977, p.184. 14 See J Craik, “‘I must put on my face’: Making up the body and marking out the feminine” in Cultural Studies, 3, 1: 1-24 1998, p. 12. 15 Dir. Irving Rapper, 1942.

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______________________________________________________________ 16

See J Craik, op.cit.; J Craik, The Face of Fashion: Cultural Studies in Fashion, Routledge, London, 1993; and K Peiss, Hope in a Jar: The Making of America’s beauty culture, Metropolitan Books, New York, 1998. 17 C Eckert, “The Carole Lombard in Macy’s Window” in Quarterly Review of Film Studies, 3: 1, 1978, pp. 1-21. 18 M Doane, The Desire to Desire: The Woman’s Film of the 1940s, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, Indiana, 1987; C Gledhill, Home is Where the Heart Is: Studies in Melodrama and the Woman’s Film, British Film Institute Publishing, London, 1987; and J Gaines and C Herzog (eds), Fabrications: Costume and the Female Body, Routledge, London, 1981. 19 Dir M Powell and E Pressburger, 1946. 20 “Today”, BBC Radio 4, Discussion of Film Premier of 9 songs, 04/03/05 21 E A Kaplan, Women in Film Noir, Revised Edition, British Film Institute, London. 1980. 22 B Crowther, Film Noir: Reflections in a Dark Mirror, Columbus, London, 1998, p. 115. 23 L Nead, The Female Nude: Art, Obscenity and Sexuality, Routledge, London, 1992, p. 7. 24 Ibid., p. 11. 25 Ibid., p. 251. 26 J Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, Colombia University Press, New York, 1982. 27 Corson suggests the word omitted by the original publisher of the letter is “gumma”, the mark of syphilis which Lady Wortley was known to have suffered from. 28 R Corson, Fashions in Makeup, Peter Owen, London: 1972, p. 115. 29 M Bakhtin, Rabelais and his World, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, Indiana, 1984. 30 Ibid., 25-26. 31 Dir Robert Aldrich, 1962. 32 M Bakhtin, op.cit., p. 26 33 M Russo, The Female Grotesque Routledge, London, 1984, p. 9. 34 Ibid., p. 53. 35 M Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concept of Pollution and Taboo, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1984. 36 S Freud, The Uncanny, Penguin, London, 2003, p. 89. 37 Ibid., p. 76. 38 M Russo, op. cit., p. 69. 39 J Riviere, “Womanliness as Masquerade” in V Burgin, J Donald and C Kaplan (eds), Formations of Fantasy, Methuen, London, 1986.

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______________________________________________________________ 40

Ibid., p. 35. C Constable, “Making up the Truth: On Lies, Lipstick and Friedrich Nietzsche” in P Church Gibson and S Bruzzi, Fashion Cultures: Theories, Explorations and Analysis, Routledge, London, 2000. 42 Ibid., p. 197. 43 Ibid., p. 199. 44 L Nead, The Female Nude: Art, Obscenity and Sexuality, Routledge, London, 1992, p. 6. 45 B Creed, The Monstrous Feminine: Film, Feminism and Psychoanalysis, The Women’s Press, New York and London, 1993, p. 253. 41

Bibliography Allen, J., “The film viewer as consumer” in Quarterly Review of Film Studies 5: 4, 1980, pp. 481-99. Bakhtin, M., Rabelais and his World. Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1984. Bruzzi, S., Undressing Cinema: Clothing and Identity in the Movies. Routledge, London and New York, 1997. Butler, J., Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. Routledge, London, 1990. Church Gibson, P and Bruzzi, S., Fashion Cultures: Theories, Explanations and Analysis. Routledge, London, 2000. Corson, R., Fashions in Makeup. Peter Owen, London, 1972; revised edition, 2003. Craik, J., The Face of Fashion: Cultural Studies in Fashion. Routledge, London, 1993. Craik, J. “‘ I must put on my face.”: making up the body and marking out the feminine” in Cultural Studies, 3, 1989, pp. 1-24.

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______________________________________________________________ Creed, B. The Monstrous Feminine: Film, Feminisim and Psychoanalysis. The Women’s Press, New York and London, 1993. Crowther, B. Film Noir: Reflections in a Dark Mirror. Columbus, London, 1998. Curry, D., “Decorating the body politic” in New Formations 19, 1993. Doane, M A., The Desire to Desire: The Woman’s Film of the 1940s, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, Indiana, 1987.

ʊ, Femmes Fatales: Feminism, Film Studies and Psychoanalysis. Routledge, New York and London, 1992. Douglas, M., Purity and Danger: An analysis of the Concept of Pollution and Taboo. Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1984. Ebin, V., The Body Decorated. Thames & Hudson, London, 1979. Eckert, C., “The Carole Lombard in Macy’s window” in Quarterly Review of Film Studies 3, 1978, pp. 1-21. Foucault, M., Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Penguin Books, London, 1977. Freud, S., The Uncanny, Penguin, London, 2003. Gaines, J. and Herzog, C. (eds), Fabrications: Costume and the Female Body. London, Routledge, 1981. Gledhill, C., Home is Where the Heart Is: Studies in Melodrama and the Woman’s Film, British Film Institute Publishing, London, 1987. Huyssen, A., After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture and Postmodernism. Macmillan Press, Basingstoke, 1988. Kaplan, E A., Women in Film Noir, British Film Institute, London; revised edition, 1980. Kristeva, J., Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Columbia University Press, New York, 1982.

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______________________________________________________________ Levi-Strauss, C., “The art of Asia and America” in Structural Anthropology. Allen Lane, London, 1969. MacKendrick, K., “Technoflesh or ‘Didn”t that hurt?’” in Fashion Theory 2:1, 1998. Modleski, T. The Women Who Knew Too Much: Hitchcock and Feminist Theory. Methuen, New York and London, 1988. Murphy, R., British Cinema and the Second World War. Continuum, London and New York, 2000. Nead, L., The Female Nude: Art, Obscenity and Sexuality. Routledge, London, 1992. Oakley, A. Sex, Gender and Society. Temple Smith, London, 1976. Peiss, K. Hope in a Jar: The Making of America’s Beauty Culture. Metropolitan Books, New York, 1998. Perry, G., “Primitivism and the Modern” in C. Harrison, F. Frascina and G. Perry Primitivism, Cubism, Abstraction: The Early Twentieth Century. Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1993. Riviere, J., “Womanliness as Masquerade” in V. Burgin, J. Donald and C. Kaplan (eds) Formations of Fantasy. Methuen, London, 1986. This article was first published in The International Journal of Psychoanalysis, vol. 10, 1929. Roberts, J. The Art Of Interruption: Realism, Photography and the Everyday. Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1998. Russo, M. The Female Grotesque. Routledge, London, 1984. Said E., Orientalism, Penguin, London, 1978; extract in F Frascina and J Harris (eds) Art In Modern Culture: An Anthology of Critical Texts. Phaidon, London, 1992, pp. 134-42. Stacey, Jackie Star Gazing: Hollywood Cinema And Female Spectatorship, Routledge, London and New York, 1994.

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______________________________________________________________ Strathern, A. “Dress, decoration and art in New Guinea” in M. Kirk, Man as Art: New Guinea Body Decoration. Thames & Hudson, London, 1987. Strathern, M. “The self in self-decoration” in Oceania, 48, 1979, pp. 241257. Synnott, A., The Body Social: Symbolism, Self and Society, Routledge, London, 1993. Tseelon, E., The Masque of Femininity. Sage, London, 1997. Wilson, E., Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and Modernity. IB Tauris, London, 2003. Wollen, P., “Fashion, Orientalism, the body” in New Formations 1, 1987, p. 533.

Filmography A Stolen Life, dir. Curtis Bernhardt, USA 1946, Warner. Black Narcissus, dir. Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger, GB 1946, GFD The Archers. Now Voyageur, dir. Irving Rapper, USA 1942, Warner. Whatever Happened to Baby Jane, dir. Robert Aldrich, USA 1962, Warner Seven Arts/Associates and Aldrich.

Oriental Nightmares: The ‘Demonic’ Other in Contemporary American Adaptations of Japanese Horror Film Colette Balmain Abstract This paper discusses the re-positioning of the “oriental” other as evil and demonic in two recent adaptations of popular Japanese horror films: Ringu1 remade as The Ring2 and Ju-on The Grudge 3 as The Grudge4. The title of this paper, ‘Oriental Nightmares’, refers to the manner in which in both American films the twin constructs of ‘Japan’ and ‘Japaneseness’ - at the level of narrative, character and mise-en-scene - articulate American [and Western] fears around reverse-colonialism and imperialism which are expressed most fully by the discourse of what Toshiyo Ueno terms technoorientalism. I suggest that the abjectification, objectification and “othering” of the ‘oriental’ self in both remakes represents the perpetuation of racist myths around the irreducible alterity of the Far East in the Western imagination and within mainstream Hollywood cinema. It is also no coincidence I suggest that at the centre of these racist myths is the figure of the ‘Dragon Lady’, the oriental femme fatale. Through a comparison between the original and the remake, I demonstrate the mechanisms, by which these films appropriate, colonize and re-orientalize the “Other”: as irrefutably different, exotic and dangerous thereby reconsolidating traditional boundaries between self and other, good and evil, and West and East. Keywords: Horror Film; Japan; Ju-on The Grudge; Other; Orientalism; Techno-orientalism; Ringu; The Ring; The Grudge 1.

Introduction In Robin Wood’s seminal discussion of the American Horror Film, he distinguishes between the operation of basic and surplus repression. In simple terms, basic repression, in the psychoanalytical sense, is necessary for the functioning of society5 and is distinguished from surplus repression, which is not necessary, but represents the ideological base of a particular type of society through which subjects are conditioned to take, in a Marxist sense, and in Wood’s words ‘predetermined roles within that culture.’6 Surplus repression operates to: ‘[M]ake … us (if it works) into monogamous, heterosexual, bourgeois, patriarchal capitalists.’7 It is from the processes of surplus repression that the concept of the “Other” arises: ‘that which bourgeois ideology cannot recognize8 or accept but must deal with … in one of two ways: either by rejecting it and if possible annihilating it, or by

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______________________________________________________________ rendering it safe and assimilating it, converting it as far as possible into a replica of itself.’9 In his article, Wood also distinguishes between two types of horror film, the progressive - films such as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre10 and The Hills have Eyes11 in which the monster functions to undermine binary distinctions between self and other and thus threaten the ideological basis of patriarchal, capitalist society - and the reactionary: films in which the monster is simply evil and/or inhuman, offering Carpenter’s Halloween12 as one such example, and which reaffirm the functioning of patriarchal, capitalist society and obligatory heterosexuality. In “The Horror Film in Neoconversative Culture”, Christopher Sharratt points out that central to the progressive nature of the horror film in the 1970s - as delimited by Wood - is the manner in which, horror foregrounded questions ‘around the social construction of “evil” in Western society”13. As such, this functioned to problematise traditional binary conceptions of the “Other”. Analysing the shifting nature of the horror film in the 1980s and 1990s, Sharratt contends that the political and cultural climate in America led to the cooption of what he terms the horror film’s radicalism. In other words, the horror film became increasingly more reactionary in line with political and conservative shifts during the period in question. Sharratt writes: ‘[T]he restoration of the Other in fantastic art are evidence of capital’s further colonization of consciousness.’14 Although Sharratt understands this mainly in terms of the sexual politics of the horror film, his argument can also be extended to the position of the racial other - or indeed to the manner in which racial and sexual difference become conflated - and with particular relevance to questions of the “oriental” Other, or the orientalization of the Other, in the contemporary American horror film. This in turn reflects what I would argue is a more general trend towards the appropriation and assimilation of Oriental cultures by the West. And whilst the term fusion might be used, and has been used, to define this trend - from cuisine, clothing, design and music, to mention just a few of the areas in which the Asian influence can be noted - there have been anxieties expressed around the lose of cultural tradition and heritage that the process of globalisation entails, not least by Asian American scholars.15 2.

The Yellow Peril In the case of the contemporary American horror film, long-standing and ingrained racial stereotypes around the differences between the civilized West and the uncivilized East can be clearly seen. These draw on fears of the so-called ‘Yellow Peril’, which can be traced back to the invading forces of Attila the Hun and the Mongolian people in the 5th century BC. Fears which subsequently became displaced onto to the Chinese, and then during World War 2, after the attack on Pearl Harbour, onto the Japanese. Although

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______________________________________________________________ momentarily replaced by anxieties over the Red Menace in the 1950s and onwards, in the 21st century, Japan’s perceived technological superiority and the recent media hysteria around China’s textile imports, has meant that those deep-seated fears around the threat of the racial ‘other’ have re-emerged, as can be seen in the proliferation of cinematic texts in which the “Oriental” other is situated as ‘inscrutable’, ‘threatening’ and inherently oppositional to the democratic and Western way of life. Arguably most famously, although not exclusively, in cinematic terms, these fears were most fully embodied through the menacing figure of Fu Manchu, who first appeared in 1929 in The Mysterious Fu Manchu. In 1932, Myrna Loy played Fa Lo See, Fu Manchu’s evil daughter, in The Mask of Fu Manchu16, whilst Boris Karloff took the central role. The film review in Time Out writes that the success of the film was partly down to ‘Myrna Loy’s gleeful performance as Fu Manchu’s sado-nymphomaniac daughter’17 However, the role of Fu Manchu, the “yellow peril” personified, is perhaps most associated with Christopher Lee who donned ‘yellow face’ in five films between 1965 and 1969, to threaten the safety and security of the Western World.18 More recently, though, Gwen Stefani’s ‘posse’ of Japanese beauties, or ‘Harajuku Girls’, who frame her whiteness in her music videos, from her album “Love, Angel, Music, Beauty”, testifies to the persistence of racial stereotypes in contemporary cultural artefacts. Here whiteness as beauty is foregrounded through the framing of Stefani by her ‘inscrutable’ Japanese entourage. As MiHi Ahn describes in “Gwenihana”: They shadow her wherever she goes. They’re on the cover of the album, they appear behind her on the red carpet, she even dedicates a track, “Harajuku Girls,” to them. In interviews, they silently vogue in the background like living props; she, meanwhile, likes to pretend that they’re not real but only a figment of her imagination. They’re ever present in her videos and performances - swabbing the deck aboard the pirate ship, squatting gangsta style in a high school gym while pumping their butts up and down, simpering behind fluttering hands or bowing to Stefani. That’s right, bowing. Not even from the waist, but on the ground in a “we’re not worthy, we’re not worthy” pose. She’s taken Tokyo hipsters, sucked them dry of all their street cred, and turned them into China dolls.19

My skin is like a map Of where my heart has been

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______________________________________________________________ And I can’t hide the marks It’s not a negative thing So I let down my guard Drop my defences down by my clothes I’m learning to fall With no safety net to cushion the blow20 The lyrics above are taken from UK artist, Natasha Bedingfield’s song ‘I Bruise Easily’ (2004). In the video for the song, she utilises the costume of the geisha in order to construct a binary opposition between non-feeling and feeling. As the song unfolds, Natasha removes both the clothing and the thick white make-up to reveal the white, vulnerable self beneath the “mask” of Japaneseness. Here as in Gwen Stefani’s music videos, the “oriental” other is situated in binary opposition to the white Western subject, and utilising racial stereotypes through which the Japanese have long been perceived: in particular those of the Japanese as both “inscrutable” and “unknowable.” Even the progressive potential of Lucy Liu, the first Asian-American actress to appear on Saturday Night Live is tempered by her casting as Pearl, the femme fatale, in Pay Back21 and sexually voracious lawyer, Ling Wong, in the television series, Ally McBeal.22 Ideologically Asian female stereotypes are constructed in binary terms, either the passive, submissive and delicate ‘China Doll’ as utilised by Gwen Stefani and Natasha Bedingfield, or as man-eating, femme fatales, or ‘Dragon Lady’, as epitomised by the daughter of Fu Manchu. Both stereotypes work as embodiments of traditional racial fears around the inscrutability, unknowability and ultimate alterity of the ‘oriental’ other. 3.

Adaptation, translation and appropriation Both Ringu and Ju-on The Grudge23 were made for television films before being remade for the big screen in Japan. Success at home and abroad led to large-budget American remakes. The one difference, however, is that unlike with The Ring, in which Gore Verbinksi took the directorial role from Nakata - the original Japanese director, Takashi Shimzu remained the director for the American version of The Grudge.24 Through the process of adaptation, the narratives of both films were reworked within the conventions of mainstream Hollywood narrative with the psychological horror of the originals being replaced in places by greater emphasis on the more immediate visceral thrills of the spectacle. For example the addition of graphic horror - the brutal suicide of Samara’s father, Richard Morgan (Brian Cox), in The Ring, and the horrific sequence in which the ghost of Yoko (Yoko Maki) turns around to gaze directly into the camera, minus a severed jawbone in The Grudge!

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______________________________________________________________ The remakes flatten the fractured perspective - and in the case of Juon The Grudge, the episodic structure - into the codes and conventions of the “slasher genre” - not only in terms of body count but also by focalizing the narrative through the perspective of the “final girl” and by association the Western Colonial gaze. In both films, the central female protagonist is played by well-known Western actresses, Naomi Watts (Rachel Keller) in The Ring, and Sarah-Michelle Geller (Karen) in The Grudge. These remakes offer a sense of continuity and temporal-spatial integrity alien to their Japanese counterparts and reduce the progressive possibilities implied by the collapse of self and other, time and space, the familiar and unfamiliar that is evoked both aesthetically and thematically, in Japanese horror cinema. This is most apparent in the remake of Ju-On The Grudge, which streamlines and simplifies the episodic nature of the original from five interlocking narratives through to just three: (1) The present as focalised through Karen, an exchange student who is in Japan on placement as a trainee social worker. Tangential to this is: (2) Tangential to (1), and set mainly in the recent past, is the story of Jennifer (Clea DuVall) and Matthew Williams (William Mapother), the present occupants of the cursed house of the title, whose disappearance and abandonment of their catatonic mother, Emma, provides the central narrative enigma, and (3) The “historical” past in which the curse originates and the narratives of Takeo (Takashi Matsuyama) and Kayako Saeki (Takako Fuji), and their son Toshio (Yuya Ozeki): all characters that appeared in the “original” and are played by the same Japanese actors. In these terms, it could be argued that American horror cinema and Japanese horror cinema offer diametrically opposed world-views, which is visually expressed within the imagistic sign-systems that comprise the coding of the cinematic-image. Whilst mainstream narrative insists on temporal spatial continuity and a dominant perspective through which the story is focalised, Japanese [horror] cinema often dispenses with such narrative conventions and traditions. 25 Further, I would argue that the other central difference between the Japanese “originals” and American “remakes” is the colonization of the “Other” and in particular the manner in which the sympathetic vengeful female spirit (or yurei) 26 - Sadako in Ringu [Samara in The Ring] and Kayako in both Ju-on The Grudge and The Grudge - is transformed into an oriental nightmare: a demonic femme castractice as signified by the long dark hair, white costume and an unending appetite for death and destruction.

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______________________________________________________________ The opening titles of The Grudge demonstrate this. The visual connotations of the sequence are clear. The strands of long dark hair, which provide the framework for the main title, symbolize both femininity and Orientalism. The transmutation of colour from black on red to red on black signifies both death and destruction. Bodily fluids are implied by the use of both blood and water, which are associated in Western culture with the feminine blood signifying menstruation and fears of pollution. Kristeva’s concept of the abject seems particularly pertinent here. In The Powers of Horror, she writes: ‘On the edge of non-existence and hallucination, of a reality that, if I acknowledge it annihilates me. There, abject and abjection are my safeguards. The primers of my culture.’27 In other words, the abject exists as that which defines the subject whilst simultaneously threatening it with non-existence. 4.

The Vengeful Spirit and Female Monstrosity In both versions of The Grudge, the vengeful female spirit-Kayako-is played by the same actress, Takako Fuji. However, Kayako plays a much more prominent part in the American film than the Japanese “original”. Murdered by her husband, along with her young boy-child, Kayako’s spirit haunts the house in which she was brutally killed, becoming the site of a horrific oriental “otherness” in The Grudge, and appearing, somehow, more inhuman and evil28 - and much less a sympathetic character than in Ju-on The Grudge. Kayako, the innocent victim of patriarchal oppression, is turned into a “whore” like figure, or “Dragon Lady”, whose very sexuality constructs her monstrosity. With her long dark hair, and white make-up-characteristics already codified for Western audiences through the figure of Sadako in Ringu, Kayako is the epitome of the monstrous-feminine whose gender and sexuality situate her as the evil “other” of the good white western self. Kayako is the femme fatale, whose monstrous desires consume the masculine subject. In Creed’s discussion of the femme castratrice in film, Creed argues that this representation of woman as monstrous castrator is one of: [T]he more deadly personae adopted by the monstrous feminine, almost always represented as fulfilling a stereotypical image of female beauty …. [S]he clearly comes across as a modern-day version of the ancient Sirens, those mythological figures who lured sailors to their doom through the beauty of their song.29 In The Grudge, Kayako, like the siren, lures white male subjects to their doom. As such this finds resonance with racial stereotypes of the 1930s, as in The Mask of Fu Manchu discussed earlier in this paper. Writing about the

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______________________________________________________________ Bride of Frankenstein in the film of the same name30, Elizabeth Young argues that: Despite her secondary status as a creature of male fantasy, the monster betrays the fear that all female bodies are in fact unspeakably monstrous – and in this monstrosity, unspeakable powerful.31 However it should be noted that the association between the “Dragon Lady” and the femme fatale was already an ingrained racial stereotype by the 1930s, as can be seen through the representation of Hester Prynne-one of the first cinematic femme fatales- in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850). In Hawthorne’s words, Hester had “in her nature a rich, voluptuous, Oriental characteristic”.32 Darshan Singh Maini in “Hawthorne: The Indian connection” highlights the fact that by the 1850s, this was already a too familiar stereotype. He writes: ‘Hawthorne’s evocation of the femme fatale as a dark beauty rich in Oriental airs and delights falls into a familiar paradigm’.33 In The Grudge, Kayako’s monstrosity is situated within her obsession with the white western subject, Professor Peter Kirk (Bill Pullman), a professor at the University where Kayako had previously taken classes. And it is this, which is situated as the causational factor in the formation of the curse. In Ju-on The Grudge, there is no reason given for the husband’s violent rage and terrible vengeance, instead the murder of the wife and child should be interpreted as symbolic of the demise of the traditional family unit in a Japan overtaken by modernity and uncertainty. Kayako is made more horrific by the fact that visually and thematically she is situated in direct opposition to the white western female subject. In The Grudge, Karen is the double of the “oriental” other. Dressed in vibrant colours, with her long blonde hair, and her Buffy origins, Sarah Michelle Geller is nothing like either Kayako or indeed the character of Rika, her direct counterpart in Ju-on The Grudge, with her demure appearance and narrative insignificance. A comparison of the ending sequences of both versions of The Grudge clearly highlights the demonization of the oriental other in the American version, and indeed the stereotypical construction of Kayako as ‘The Dragon Lady’, rather than a rounded and empathetic character, whose oppression by Japanese patriarchal society is implied by her senseless murder. In The Grudge, Karen rushes to the cursed house in an [abortive] attempt to save her boyfriend, Doug, with little care for her own safety. Unlike the sequence “through the looking glass” in Ju-on: The Grudge in which the past/present, self/other collapse in the film’s climatic finale as signified through Rika’s bodily transformation[s], Karen remains separate to the evil as embodied within the ghost of Kayako. This allows the

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______________________________________________________________ reinforcement and reassertion of traditional conceptions of the “Other” as the boundaries between Light/Dark, Subject/Object, Good/Evil, West/East are reconstructed which presupposes a unified and stable ego providing coherence and stability to the narrative disruption. In Hélène Cixous’s words: The machine of repression has always had the same accomplices; homogenizing, reductive, unifying reason as always allied itself to the Master, to the single, stable, socializable subject, represented by its types or characters.’34 By situating Karen and Kayako in direct opposition to each other, the complexity of Ju-on: The Grudge’s “progressive” mediation on the nature of subjectivity as articulated through Rika’s becoming-other, is replaced by the traditions and conventions of mainstream [understood here as the American model] horror in which the demonic “other is situated as both the opposite of and different to the white [western] self. For Cixous, the multiplicity of the “I” in fantastic text allows the undermining of the phallocentrism of Western discourse. She writes: ‘These texts baffle every attempt to summarization of meaning and limiting, repressive interpretation. The subject flounders in a multiplicity of its states […] spreading out in every possible direction […] transegoistically.’ This subverts the underpinning base of ‘logicentricism, idealism, theologism, the scaffolding of political and subjective economy.’35 Instead, The Grudge’s narrative reinforces patriarchal and capitalist notions of subjectivity, and appropriate femininity on which phallocentric society is built. Indeed, I would argue that the manner in which Kayako is bending over Doug, as Karen desperately tries to burn the house down, utilises the imagery of rape as an allegory for cultural anxieties over the perceived Japanese threat as embodied within the characterisation of the female oriental other as femme castratrice. The racial stereotyping of the oriental other seems less obvious in the remake of Nakata’s Ringu, as the character of Sadako (Rie Inou) is replaced by Samara, and played by a Western actress, Daveigh Chase: However visual cues such as the long dark hair and white costume, can be read as signifying the oriental and/or racial other: especially taking into consideration that at least some of the audience would have already been familiar with the Japanese film. The narratives of both Ringu and The Ring take the form of an epistemological journey to discover the origins of murderous videotape that kills its spectators, exactly seven days after being seen. The “origins” of the tape are eventually traced back to the murder of a

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______________________________________________________________ young girl, Sadako in Ringu and Samara in The Ring, whose paranormal abilities as threatening to patriarchal society were suppressed through her violent death. And in both films, a female reporter [and importantly single mother] and her male counterpart undertake the investigation: Rachel Keller (Naomi Watts) and Noah Clay (Martin Henderson) in The Ring, and Reiko Asakawa (Nanako Matsushima) and her ex-husband Ryiuji (Hirouyuki Sanada) in Ringu. The monstrous-feminine as the oriental other is clearly foregrounded during the sequence in the American remake when Noah discovers the medical records of Samara’s adoptive mother, Anna Morgan (Shannon Cochran). Japanese writing down the left hand side of these records suggests both Samara’s foreign-ness and orientalism. Further, I would argue that in The Ring, the removal of Sadako’s narrative voice, which functions as articulation of male oppression of female difference in Ringu, transforms Samara into a foreign “body”, whose irreducible alterity causes madness and chaos in the American backwater to which she is brought. As I have argued elsewhere: [I]n the film the ‘racial other’ is the ‘monstrous-feminine’, a threat to American patriarchal and capitalist society that must be, but at the same time, cannot be, contained. She is an illegal immigrant, a product of advanced technologies associated with the East and a demonic child.36 5.

The Geography of Evil In The Ring, Samara is brought to the West from the East. This can be said to articulate fears around reverse-colonialism, and of the potential demise of the white male subject [and by association all thing American/Western] at the hands of the oppressive oriental other. However, in The Grudge, the location of the horror does not change: the narrative remains set in Tokyo, although this is a very different Tokyo to that constructed in Juon The Grudge. In The Grudge, the binary distinction between city/county central to many American horror films becomes displaced onto America [civilized] and Japan [uncivilized]. Writing on questions of the “urbanoid” in the city-revenge film, Clover argues these films function in a similar manner to ‘thirties and forties westerns of the settlers-versus-Indians variety.’37. Clover highlights how ‘the race and ethnicity of the Other of revenge narratives have always been subject to historical shifts.’38 However Clover sees an element of guilt contained within the demonising forces at work in the urbanoid film, which I would suggest is absent in The Grudge. Instead we have an urban nightmare which consciously/unconsciously embodies many Western fears around

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______________________________________________________________ Japan in particular and oriental cultures more generally. In his essay ‘Japaninamation and Techno-orientalism’, Toshiyo Ueno points out that: A host of stereotypes appeared when binary oppositions culture and savage, modern and premodern, and so on - were projected onto the geographic positions of western and nonwestern. The Orient exists in so far as the West needs it, because it brings the project of the West into focus.39 In The Grudge, for Karen the Japan of her childhood dreams becomes an oriental nightmare as she is trapped in a culture that she does not understand, in an alien and dangerous land. And as the film is mainly focalised through Karen’s Western and colonial gaze, Japan is presented as something inherently “other”, “evil” and inextricably different. This reconstruction of the Orient allows the resituating of America as civilized, in a similar way to that of early Westerns. Again a direct comparison of similar sequences in the “original” and the “remake” allows us to delimit the mechanisms through which this works. In The Grudge, shots of a teaming Tokyo provide the backdrop to Karen’s journey to work: a crane shot of a sea of faceless workers crossing the busy roads as a train passes by in the background, constructs a Tokyo envisaged through the Western perspective - in which sameness is evoked at the cost of difference: another racial stereotype. This Western and Colonial gaze which re-territorializes the geographical spaces of the Other is central to Westernisations of the East that populate mainstream American narratives such as the crowded and contained spaces of Ridley Scott’s Bladerunner (1992), and is also reminiscent of the workers in scenes from Metropolis40 . In opposition to this is Rika Nishina’s (Megumi Okina) journey in Ju-On The Grudge. Here space is empty, rarefied, instead Tokyo is defined through an absence of people - as such the themes of abandonment and isolation are aesthetically mirrored by the empty, open spaces in which most of the action takes place. The removal of the cultural contextualisation of Japanese horror means that the evil is situated in The Grudge, not only as personal but also as geographical. 6.

Conclusion It is clear therefore that the remakes of both Ju-on The Grudge and Ringu are films which work within the sort of racial stereotypes more commonly associated with early [1930s] American horror cinema. In terms of narrative, character, and mise-en-scene, both films work to reconstruct the binary distinctions between self [white/civilized/good] and other [nonwhite/uncivilized/evil] unlike the original versions which problematise the relationship between the two. These oriental nightmares exhibit both a

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______________________________________________________________ fascination with and fear of the “other”. As such they fall into Wood’s categorization of the reactionary horror film and seek to negotiate difference by externalising, objectifying and ultimately demonising the “Other”.

Notes 1. Hideo Nakata, Ringu, Japan: 1998 2. Gore Verbinski, The Ring, US/Japan, 2002 3. Takashi Shimizu, Ju-The Grudge, Japan: 2003 4. Takashi Shimizu, The Grudge, US/Japan: 2003 5. As Robin Wood writes: ‘Basic Repression is universal, necessary and inescapable. It is what makes possible our development from an uncoordinated animal capable of little beyond screaming and convulsions into a human being; it is bound up with the ability to accept the postponement of gratification, with the development of our thought and memory processes, of our capacity for self-control, of our recognition of and consideration for other people.’ see Robin Wood “An Introduction to the American Horror Film” in Planks of Reason: Essays on the Horror Film, ed Barry Keith Grant (Scarecrow Press, Kent and Maryland, 1996), p. 164 6. Ibid, p. 164 7. Ibid, p. 164 8. Ibid, p. 168 9. Ibid, 168 10. Tobe Hooper, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, US, 1974 11. Wes Craven, The Hills Have Eyes, US, 1977 12. John Carpenter, Halloween, US, 1970 13. Christopher Sharratt, “The Horror Film in Neoconservative Culture” in The Dread of Difference: Gender and the Horror Film, ed Barry Keith Grant. (University of Texas Press, Austin, 1996), p. 253 14. Ibid, p. 254 15 See for example “Restrictive Portrayals of Asians in the Media and How to Balance”, produced by the Media Action Network for Asian Americans at