This dissertation looks at the role of "oriental" imagery in Hollywood through case studies of two Hollywood cyberpunk films: Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982) and The Matrix (Larry and Andy Wachowski, 1999). Drawing from scholarship in Asian American Studies, Film and Media Studies, Postcolonial Theory, and Cultural Studies, my work explores why the futuristic mise-en-sc`ene of such films looks and feels so uncannily "oriental." It considers the relationship between these East Asian-inflected settings and changing attitudes about East Asians and Asian Americans in the U.S. from the 1980s to the present. Furthermore, it situates that relationship within larger shifts in national discourses around "race" during this time period. My analyses of these films are grounded in their industrial and historical contexts: economic and aesthetic developments in Hollywood since the 1980s, the rapid growth of the Asian American community during the same period, and the recent internationalization of East Asian popular culture, particularly Hong Kong cinema and Japanese animation.; My study endeavors to show how oriental imagery in Hollywood has changed as the Asian American population has grown and as East Asian countries have entered economic First World status. In the process it poses the following questions. How does oriental imagery function in cyberpunk films? What relationship does such imagery have to past and present racial constructions of Asians and Asian Americans in the U.S.? How does this imagery rework Edward Said's notion of Orientalism? And what new analytical frameworks does it suggest for examining racial and cultural exchange, appropriation, and commodification in U.S. popular culture? My dissertation approaches these questions by looking at expressions of the contemporary "Orient" in Hollywood's celluloid projections of the future. In doing so, it attempts to make sense of the growing representations of East Asian bodies and cultures as "oriental style."
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