Guanxi Master

Past and Present Hollywood Stereotypes and Archetypes of China

One of the great movies of the 50’s is the legendary Around the World in Eighty Days, and part of the charm of the 1956 movie adaptation of Jules Verne’s classic novel is in its exaggerated stereotyping of the characters. It’s a surprise feast for the eye and delightfully flooded with incidental cameo appearances of almost fifty celebrities alive at the time. Directed by Michael Anderson and produced by Michael Todd, the film starred the stately Larry Niven as Phileas Fogg. Nominated for eight Oscars and winning five, it was a late part of that era in which Hollywood “took itself seriously.” Todd’s movie is an affectionately tongue-in-cheek “seriously epic” send up of 1930’s -1950’s Hollywood.

Mr. Fogg is portrayed as a completely stereotyped tweed-wearing, pipe-smoking English gentleman: a stickler for punctuality, tea time (in some of the most inopportune moments), and with an unshakeable conviction in the British imperial sense of moral right and duty. For instance, in a scene with Princess Aouda (Shirley MacLaine), Fogg saves an Indian princess about to be burned in the Hindu funeral ritual of sati. The scene is depicted in such a way that the viewer has no doubt about the moral integrity of Fogg’s disruption of a native rite which he regards as evil, and so he saves the beautiful woman like the chivalrous English gentleman he is. I’m sure Joseph Conrad would have depicted it quite differently, not to say many other postcolonial novelists and theoreticians.

While in Hong Kong China, Fogg hires rickshaws and speaks condescendingly in infantile English to the Chinese until one “Chinaman” replies to him in perfect English. Perhaps this foreshadows the fate of the gentle story on the big screen almost a half a century later.

In 2004, Walden Media and Walt-Disney Studios produced another adaptation even further removed from the original Verne novel than the first film was. In the 1956 movie, the supporting character of Passepartout, Phileas Fogg’s “manservant,” was portrayed as an inept and comical Spanish immegrant who was obliged to do all the dangerous and dirty work of the voyage around the world while his British master observed tea time, or other such comparatively idle activity. The latest adaptation, however, has a marked change in the roles as Passepartout is played by Jackie Chan. The servile, bungling Passepartout is gone and the movie opens with a martial arts expert Chinese warrior robbing the Bank of England. His meeting with the clueless and priveledged Phileas Fogg (played by Steve Coogan) is serendipitous because of Fogg’s innate stupidity (he mistakes Jackie Chan’s character for a Frenchman).

The entire movie gets its comic moments from the clueless arrogance and stupidity of the Western character as he is being resourcefully used by the intelligent, swashbuckling Eastern character. While in China, Chan’s character engages in setting right an ancient wrong, something which his English “master” cannot understand or fathom as he sulks at perceived betrayal.

What is striking in the latest film as a cultural symptom is that this is exactly the kind of image China wishes to project upon its current relations with the West. The West is clueless, and its quixotic talk of moral integrity and “global focus” falls easily into the hands of a more capable and realist East. In other Jackie Chan movies, nearly all the most severe stereotypes of the American and British male is on full display (the Rush Hour and the Shanghai Noon/Knights series), while the Chinese character possesses innate dignity, courage, fidelity, and most naturally a higher destiny than his Western counterpart.

There is no more affectionate across-the-board satire as in the 1956 Eighty Days adaptation, but it is clear from the consistent and uniform depictions of today’s screenwriters that the Westerner portrayed in the recent film has lost all relevance in today’s world.