Simulacra and SimulAsian: The Culture of Hollywood’s Yellow Peril

Abstract

The films Ex Machina (2014) and Venom (2018) are two critical and commercial successes in Hollywood cinema that use the representational device of techno-Orientalism as a guise for magic realism. Techno-Orientalism, also known as ‘high-tech’ Orientalism, “assigns technological and thus inhuman characteristics to the peoples and locations of the so-called Orient” (Pham 7). The subgenre, according to Minh-Ha T. Pham, “temporally locates Oriental difference in the future rather than the past” (15), as the signs and symbols of Orientalism are transmitted to the future, reproducing a novelty that is common among a universal fascination with the culture industries of Hollywood. Consequently, techno-Orientalist narratives offer a dose of magic through, for instance, AI (artificial intelligence), the comic book universe, and the extra-terrestrial-onscreen reproductions that engender a tranquility towards histories and ongoing realities of European-American frontier violence in Asia, as well as the significance of Black and Asian labour (women and their bodies) to technological production in the West. My discussion of these films involves discussions of how, in the favour of commercial, as opposed to critical, success, both films transit between Orientalism and techno-Orientalism and recapitulate a deeper postmodern problem of white male hegemony in Hollywood cultural production that is reinforced by a precession of onscreen vocabularies of stereotypical Asian female difference, which most prominently manifest in visual vocabularies of silence, sexuality, and sickness.