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

Simulacra and SimulAsian: The Culture of Hollywood’s Yellow Peril Angie Wong Techno-Orientalism and the SimulAsian 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. By diverting familiar stereotypes of Orientalism into the future or within parameters of science fiction, these films seemingly incorporate a dose of magic into cinematic experience; this is a point of contention, however, that will be addressed below. For now, we should remember Edward Said’s statement that “continued investment made [End Page 208] Orientalism, as a system of knowledge about the Orient, an accepted grid for filtering through the Orient into Western consciousness” (4). Grounded in this tradition, the representational power of techno-Orientalism is related to what Jean Baudrillard initially identified as the “precession of simulacrum” or the idea that the “simulation […] is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal” (Simulacra and Simulation 3). These critical theories come together in this article to address qualities of representation, simulation, or what I call “simulAsian” in Ex Machina and Venom as devices under the guise of magical realist works that have garnered critical and commercial success. The models of Orientalism that assign Asian characters, particularly women, as magically operational engenders the simulAsian as familiar even in its novelty. They embody Baudrillard’s idea of hyperreality wherein simulacra-representations, imitations, forgeries of the real-“are themselves an anticipation of the real” (Simulacra and Simulation 81). Given extant models of Orientalism, this precession of simulacra or saturation of images are “characterized by a precession of the model” in which “facts no longer have a specific trajectory; they are born at the intersection of models” (Simulacra and Simulation 13) and contour the finitude of the onscreen simulAsian. In homage to Baudrillard’s 1994 English translation of Simulacra and Simulation, I correspond discussion between the simulAsians of both films to address how their techno-Orientalist elements provide a dose of magic that disenchants audiences from the ongoing realities of European-American frontier violence in East and South Asia. Ex Machina, in particular, hosts relevant critiques of the processes of modernization and the function of Black and Asian labour in the tech industry, which were elided by the very problem of reproducing stereotypical Asian female difference. Instead, Venom recapitulates these complex problems of geopolitics and global structuring by recasting familiar twentieth-century Yellow Peril stereotypes, such as that of Asians as carriers of disease, into its comic book universe. The simulAsians are simulations; they are a “play of illusions and phantasms” wherein no principle of reality is intact and the “simulation threatens the difference between the ‘true’ and the ‘false,’ the ‘real’ and the ‘imaginary’” (Simulacra and Simulation 3). Both films enhance the precession of simulacrum or the saturation of the simulAsian, “which no longer has anything to do with the logic of facts...