The World of Suzie Wong (10/4/22): In this film, we see Robert, and artist, move to Hong Kong and fall in love with a prostitute he meets named Suzie. The film explores various topics such as Asian or "oriental" fetishization and infanitlization and seeing the East as backward and stuck in time.
Through Robert's character, we see how white people, and more specifically white men fetishize femal Asian bodies. We first see this when Robert talks about why he wishes to have Suzie pose for him. Robert says "I'm more interested in those high cheekbones of yours" [36:15]. Robert is only interested in her because of how different she looks compared to other white models he could use. We see that he specifically only likes her for her "orinentalness" when he says "You look like a cheap European street walker" [1:21:40]. A quote from this weeks reading states "the key word seems to be 'European' -- for tearing off her clothes does not make her look less like a prostitue, only less like a Western one" (43). This shows that Robert is only interested in Suzie when he can keep confined in the "oriental" box he has construed in his head. Anytime she tries to leave the confines of this box, for example, by dressing in Western clothing, Robert is unhappy and acts violently towards Suzie. We see the infantilization of Suzie come out in a few scenes, but the most crucial one is when Robert refers to Suzie as "a little girl" [58:57]. We know that they have a large age difference ("You're not even 20, I'm pushing 40" [1:15:17]), yet Robert pursues a relationship with her anyway.
The film best presents the East as backward when Suzie gets assaulted by one of the white, male, sailors. After she is assaulted, she flaunts it to her group of friends, and lies sayig that Robert did it. This makes her friends jealous as they believe this means Robert is deeply in love with Suzie. This scene shows portrays the East as morally degraded, and desiring Western domination. Suzie's friends express that she is lucky a man would beat her as this means he really loves her. In the West, this would not be the case. A woman being assaulted would imply the opposite in the West. However, this film implies that the East is so backward, that they want to be beat up, and require it in order to feel validated.
The film also presents a double standard when compared with a film like "My Geisha". My Geisha features a white woman playing the role of a Japanese girl. This is a role that, had she announced that she was the one who played it, would have received critical acclaim and probably would have been nominated for various awards. Yet here, we see an Asian woman dress in Western clothing, and she is reprimanded for it. This shows that white woman are allowed, and even encouraged to explore and appropriate Easten cultures, yet Asian woman are reprimanded and looked down upon for attempting to enter the Western space.