StarD_Bean_1910s_final

by Ellen Dawson

  (Delluc 138–39)

  In the most general and obvious way, Delluc’s language is riddled with racism, locating Hayakawa’s appearance as “cat-like” and “childlike,” as well as “mysterious”—a “natural force.” The primitivist associations with Hayakawa as an embodiment of the premodern East, however, are trumped by Delluc’s overriding proclamation: that the actor’s presence on the screen renders Western audiences inarticulate—incapable, that is, of civilized and communicative speech: “One can say nothing. . . . Explanations are here

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  out of place.” Taken together with Epstein’s assessment of Hayakawa’s face as an image that “excludes” all other meanings, it is clear that French intellectuals were “dumfounded” by Hayakawa’s body on the screen (Hammond and Ford 330).

  The French were not alone in their amazement. Throughout the latter half of the 1910s, Hayakawa’s stardom was a site of continuous negotiation between what Vivian Sobchack calls “the carnal sensuality of the film experience” and what could be called the “classical” narrative strategies of meaningful codification (Sobchack 56). More specifically, Hayakawa’s films labor to confine the signification of the Asian body through a series of assimilation narratives, through the motif of self-sacrifice, and through an increasingly sympathetic portrayal of the nonwhite character’s racial difference. Such assimilation narratives often coincided with a nationwide Americanization Movement, organized by voluntary middle-class Americans, that sought to facilitate the social assimilation of new immigrants in the United States while maintaining a strict racial boundary to prohibit biological assimilation.

  The tense line between social and biological assimilation define the narrative logic of Hayakawa’s star vehicles in the late 1910s, especially The Hidden Pearls (1918) and The Man Beneath (1919), which this chapter scrutinizes. The recent availability of these prints, as well as other key titles such as The Devil’s Claim (1920), provides a fresh historical lens for examining the complex, and often competing, meaning-making economies through which Hayakawa’s body was simultaneously racialized and cast as an object of female and consumer desire at the height of his stardom. Hayakawa’s capacity to transcend the existing vocabulary in film acting, such as restrained facial expressions and pantomimic gestures, undoubtedly participated in his capacity to perform racial identities while deviating significantly from any singularly determined ethnographic logic.

  Moreover, it is crucial to recognize that Japanese media emphasized the physicality of Hayakawa’s body as “cinematic” and tried to liberate it from the dominant “theatrical” tendency in Japanese filmmaking of the time. By reading “Japaneseness” into the Hollywood-made star image of Hayakawa, those who were engaged in the critical and practical discourses on films in Japan sought, for the first time, to formulate a specific identity of “Japanese cinema” understood as presentable and exportable to foreign markets.

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  ✩ The Hidden Pearls:The Americanized Body Not coincidentally, the Jesse L. Lasky Feature Play Company, which released The Cheat, attempted to assimilate their promising, but non-

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  American, new star by broadcasting the image of a physically and morally healthy all-American man. Around the time that The Cheat was released, the burgeoning U.S. film industry was attempting to acquire cultural legitimacy and thus appeal to middle-class audiences. Stars played a key role in this ideological project. In December 1918, Motion Picture magazine announced five winners of the “Motion Picture Hall of Fame” popularity contest—Douglas Fairbanks, Harold Lockwood, William S. Hart, Wallace Reid, and Francis X. Bushman—who collectively represented a “clean-living group of all-Americans” (Koszarski 299).

  The popularity of these male stars with “all-American” images corresponded to a nationwide Americanization Movement organized by voluntary middle-class Americans. Sumiko Higashi argues that the legitimatization and institutionalization of cinema “meant the articulation of middle-class ideology in an era that stressed Americanization as a response to cultural diversity” (Higashi, Cecil 3). The ethnic reverberation set off in the United States by the outbreak of the European war in 1914 marked the opening of a far more intense phase of the Americanization movement (Gleason 40).

  In 1915, the National Americanization Committee was organized. On 4 July 1915, “Americanization Day” was celebrated by Chambers of Commerce and Industry, churches, organizations of mutual aid in immigrant communities, and so on in more than one hundred cities all over the United States.

  In 1916, Royal Dixon, an activist of the Americanization Movement, published a book entitled Americanization, insisting that immigrants forgo their respective cultural traditions and merge with the national community by identifying themselves with American principles and customs (Matsumoto 52–75).

  As I have discussed elsewhere, Hayakawa’s star image was meant to represent a successful assimilation narrative of Asian immigrants (Miyao 87–105). Perhaps the first article referring to Hayakawa’s private life appeared in Photoplay in March 1916, suggestively titled “That Splash of Saffron: Sessue Hayakawa, a Cosmopolitan Actor, Who for Reasons of Nativity, Happens to Peer from Our White Screens with Tilted Eyes.” Here, reporter Grace Kingsley exoticizes Hayakawa’s national origin by referring to Japanese religion, but stresses his Americanized lifestyle: No, Sessue Hayakawa, the world’s most noted Japanese photoplay actor, does not dwell in a papier-mâché house amid tea-cup scenery. He is working in pictures in Los Angeles, and he lives in a “regular” bungalow, furnished in mission oak, and dresses very modishly according to American standards.

  Even his gods are forsaken, for he owns an English bull-pup, named Shoki, which means “destruction,” and is the name of a Japanese god.

  (141)

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  The rhetorical strategy that Americanizes Hayakawa’s Japanese identity and national origins by offering readers a glimpse of his very “regular” home and decidedly “American” taste in clothes repeats with relatively little vari-ance in the flurry of reports to come. In each, Hayakawa’s dog attains a peculiar totemic status. In a 1917 essay for Picture Play Magazine, for instance, reporter Walter Reed incorporates a photo of that same “regular”

  bungalow, in front of which stand Hayakawa and his wife, Tsuru Aoki, dressed in American clothes with a perky dog straining at the leash. Emphasizing that there is “still another nationality represented—by the English bulldog,” Reed’s investment in portraying Hayakawa’s household as an illustrative example of refined cosmopolitanism, a kind of idealized melt-ing-pot, thus manages to Americanize the dog as well (“The Tradition Wreckers,” March 1917, 62). For reporter Pearl Gaddis, however, that bulldog was decidedly American to begin with, and hence emblematic of Hayakawa’s willingness to fully identify with Anglo-American customs (“The Romance of Nippon Land,” Motion Picture Classic, December 1916, 18–20).

  Not surprisingly, the process whereby immigrants or racial others come to identify with Anglo-American customs dominates the plot of The Hidden Pearls (1918), Hayakawa’s seventeenth film for the Lasky Company. Here, he plays the role of Maki, the prince of Uahiva, a Hawaiian tribe. Maki is raised and educated in America as Tom Garvin, the son of an American pearl trader, and understands himself to be wholly American. He loves Enid Benton, but her father tells Tom that he cannot marry Enid unless he acquires a fortune. Meanwhile, Tom’s uncle reveals the secret treasure of the pearls that Uahiva holds, and Tom returns to his native island of Hawaii to obtain them. He receives a royal welcome from the natives and learns from Tahona, who loves him, where the pearls are hidden. He tries to escape with the pearls but is caught and branded for punishment. Tahona comes to his rescue, and Tom escapes to America with the treasure. But Tom’s conscience bothers him. He cuts his arm, conceals the pearls under the skin, and returns again
to Uahiva in time to save Tahona from being sacrificed for punishment.

  The plot of The Hidden Pearls, in which the chief of a tribe sends his son to western society, appeared many times in “Indian films.” Hayakawa himself played such roles several times in the films Thomas Ince produced at the New York Motion Picture Company before Hayakawa became a superstar at Lasky. According to the original script, Teariki, Maki’s father, says,

  “When the traders learn of these wondrous pearls, they will come among us—with guns and Bibles,” and there is a shot of “the girl and the little children—the innocents who inevitably suffer at the coming of the white

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  man.” In order to learn American ways and enlighten his people, Maki is sent to America to become an American; indeed, at the boy’s birth his father declared, “My boy must grow up in the States—American.” It is noteworthy that this element of the script echoes, almost verbatim, the story circulating in the press of Hayakawa’s alleged reason for coming to the United States. As Pearl Gaddis explained in “Romance in Nippon Land” ( Motion Picture Classic, December 1916, 18–20), Hayakawa’s father recommended that his son should be Americanized in order to enlighten other Japanese people.

  He reportedly advised him: “Go to America, to an American college. Learn the American ways—the American plays—all that is best in American drama. Then bring it back to your countrymen.” As we see below, various elements of Hayakawa’s star image differ from the narrative structure of his films. For now, it is relatively easy to discern that the introduction to Hayakawa’s character in The Hidden Pearls mirrors Lasky’s strategy for Americanizing his star’s image.

  But Lasky’s narrative strategy for The Hidden Pearls was also in accordance with the U.S. Americanization policy of Hawaii, which was annexed in 1898 and became a territory in 1900. Importantly, The Hidden Pearls presents Hawaii as a transitional zone between Japanese and American cultures.

  Even though Hayakawa plays a native Hawaiian, he symbolically represents the Japanese residing in Hawaii. As the actor explained in April 1918: Repression is characteristic of not only the Japanese, but of the entire Orient, and even extends its influence to the South Sea Islands and as far east as Hawaii. There are thousands of Japanese in this new colony of America and their influence has been strongly felt by the natives. In my most recent picture, “The Hidden Pearls,” I take the part of a Hawaiian, and I tried to interpret it strictly along the lines of Oriental expression.

  (Harry Carr Easterfield, “The Japanese Point of View:

  And Incidentally a Chat with Hayakawa,”

  Motion Picture Magazine, 15 April 1918, 119)

  In reality, a great number of Japanese immigrants after 1865 started residing as migrant laborers in Hawaii, where they played a central role in developing the Hawaiian economy, especially in installing the sugar plantation system. Initially, American planters instituted a system of migrant labor that

  “was designed to control and exploit the productive labor of Asians and then to expel them when their utility had ended” (Okihiro xii). As workers resisted their exploitation and formed permanent communities of settlers, it was considered indispensable not only by the planters but also by U.S.

  foreign policy to Americanize the Asian laborers, and to transform “a sinister alien presence within the republic’s gates—awaiting Japan’s command

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  to spring into action,” into patriotic, Christian, and English-speaking Americans (Okihiro xiii).

  The narrative of The Hidden Pearls emphatically stresses the Americanization of Hayakawa’s Hawaiian character. The original script of the film overtly states: “Twenty years in the States changes little Maki into an American ‘gentleman of leisure.’” The introductory close-up of Tom, in evening clothes, shows “very much the well turned out, athletic young American, with college antecedents and a sufficiency of money.” Tom’s Americanization is reinforced by his reaction to his childhood memories. When a shot of little Maki is inserted as Tom’s subjective flashback, Tom “frowns slightly, shakes himself not pleased at the recurrence of memories of his childhood.”

  The script pays particular attention to differentiating continental American space from the Hawaiian Islands in order to emphasize Maki’s Americanized identity. The script notes:

  Make this interior in smashing contrast to the open space and simplicity of the islands—almost oppressive in its luxury. Everything in good form—he is not a vulgar nouveau riche, but a nouveau riche with the sense to trust to his interior decorator. The beauty and distinction of this set is useful not merely for contrast with the islands, but to emphasize Tom’s assured and excellent social standing.

  While Hawaiian people want the pearls returned because they are “taboo,”

  Tom does not believe in such customs. Rather, his motivation to return them stems from a promise he made to a Hawaiian girl who loves him. If he goes back, he will surely be punished; if he does not return, the girl will be executed in his place. Here, the motif of chivalrous self-sacrifice makes Hayakawa’s character the moral center of the film, within a notion of racial hierarchy. Since the role of Tahona, the Hawaiian girl, is played by a white actress, Tom’s act could loosely be read as self-sacrifice for a white woman.

  However, even in this narrative that emphasizes Tom’s Americanization, Hayakawa’s performance invites a tension between the literal inscription of race on the surface of the body—the “brand” itself (which was obviously a reinscription of the type of “branding” of the body in The Cheat)—and the character’s interiority and identity. In the scene in which Tom decides to return to his native island, he stands in front of a mirror in a dark room. In a long shot, strong lights illuminate him from a frontal direction and frame Tom’s body in sharp relief against the black background. He wears a dark nightgown, and his face and his naked chest are so white that they even appear to emit white light from inside. A long shot of a half-naked native Hawaiian woman, Tom’s fiancée, in tears on the beach is inserted as his flashback. This heightened sense of his interiority is followed by a medium

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  shot that frames only his reflection in the mirror. Within the mirror’s frame, Tom gazes at himself without blinking. We see a black tattoo of a fish on the naked white chest of Tom’s double in the mirror, a tattoo forced on him by the native people so that he would not forget his Hawaiian racial identity.

  The contrast between the whiteness of Tom’s skin and the blackness of the tattoo is intensified by the so-called “Lasky lighting” techniques. Initially elaborated by Cecil B. DeMille and his cinematographer Alvin Wyckoff in The Cheat, such lighting techniques generate “confined and shallow areas of illumination, sharp-edged shadows and a palpable sense of the directional-ity of light,” all of which enhance the dynamic visuality of Hayakawa’s performance and appearance (Jacobs, “Belasco” 408).

  This luminosity of Tom’s body comes close to what Thomas Elsaesser astutely observes in his examination of the UFA studio’s lighting styles in Weimar Germany. Elsaesser claims:

  Lighting turns the image into an object endowed with a special luminosity (being lit and at the same time radiating light) which is to say, light appears as both cause and effect, active and passive. In short it suggests “authenticity”

  and “presence,” while remaining “hidden” and “ineffable.” The object, and the human actor as object become irreducibly immanent, more-than-real in their “there-ness” and “now-ness,” but by a process that confers this presence on them from off-frame, off-scene . . . the luminous becomes ominous becomes numinous. . . . The special kind of luminosity that comes from objects being lit and at the same time radiating light, brings forth the illusion of a special kind of “essence.”

  (Elsaesser 44, 251)

  The whitening of Tom’s appearance in this scene enhances his psychological struggle, the dramatic battle between h
is internalized sense of self and the way his body is marked as different. The “essence” of Tom’s self remains

  “hidden” but the special luminosity confirms its “presence.”

  But the question remains: what is the “essence” of Tom’s self in the narrative of The Hidden Pearls? Is it his Americanized, white identity enhanced by the Lasky lighting? Or is it the “primitive” Hawaiian racial identity indicated by the tattoo, starkly visible on his white chest? Tom’s luminous half-naked body signifies Tom’s Americanization that morally condones such a primitive custom as tattooing; it also simultaneously reminds the viewers of his racial otherness and evokes primal desire for that other. Thus, the special luminosity and the split of self-image in the mirror conspicuously enhances Tom’s identity crisis, the struggle to balance his Americanized self and his status as a native Hawaiian. The scene also provokes the viewers’

  moral struggle, an internal battle between the fear of miscegenation and sensual (visual) attraction to prohibited pleasure.

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  Later in the narrative, a very similar setting of a dark room with a strong spotlight from above is restaged. This time, the half-naked Tom sticks a knife in his left arm. A close-up reveals red/black blood seeping over his white skin, as if an inner darkness symbolically “covers” an Americanized/white surface. Moreover, Tom has cut open the skin of his forearm with a knife to conceal the pearls, the religious/essential treasure of his native race. “Hidden pearls” thus suggestively signifies Tom’s true self, hidden under the Americanized white skin. Importantly, there is no mirror in this scene. As a result, there is no visual splitting of the bodily image but rather a singular image of self, one determined by “blood.” Indeed, by the end of the film, Tom chooses his native Hawaiian identity and accepts his inability to fully assimilate in the States, forgoing his love for Enid in favor of saving Tahoma.