StarD_Bean_1910s_final

by Ellen Dawson

  In a series of newspaper articles titled “Are the Japanese assimilable?”

  Sidney Gulick, a former missionary in Japan and a pro-Japanese professor, insisted that there were two types of assimilation, “biological” and “social.”

  He wrote: “Biological assimilation may touch upon the issue of miscegenation, but social assimilation is surely possible because it can be achieved by education and surrounding conditions. The Japanese can learn our language, way of thinking, and democracy” (“Nihonjin wa dôka shiuruya (1) [Are the Japanese assimilable?],” Rafu Shimpo 3581, 8 August 1915, 2). It is hardly coincidental that Martha Grover McKelvie, writing for Photoplay, called The Hidden Pearls “a picture of educational value” (“Playing with Fire in Hawaii,”

  November 1919, 46). What The Hidden Pearls teaches is, once again, that the race barrier in American society must be maintained. By maintaining it, as one reviewer for Motion Picture News noted, Hayakawa’s character becomes safely identifiable: “The author [Beulah Marie Dix] has furnished—one important element which is necessary for Mr. Hayakawa to reach the hearts of his audience, and that is sympathy” (23 February 1918, 1181).

  Notwithstanding the safely sympathetic distance that The Hidden Pearls affords middle-class Anglo-American audiences, Hayakawa’s performance and physical presence also generates alternative “affective experiences”

  (Shaviro viii). Indeed, the excessive spectacle of Hayakawa’s onscreen body, and blood, produces treacherous ecstasy—a crucial element in his star image to which we now turn.

  ✩★

  ✩★

  ✩★

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  ✩ The Man Beneath:The Racialized Body

  The motif of the mirror becomes a crucial onscreen entity for Hayakawa’s films in the latter years of the decade. As noted in the previous

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  discussion of the mirror scene in The Hidden Pearls, the mirror is a device that tactfully balances/divides the direct physicality of Hayakawa’s body and the racial and sexual ideology that body signifies. In an expansive survey of cinematic styles developing in a wide variety of countries in the 1910s, Kristin Thompson points out that the mirror is used for expressive cinematic effects but not necessarily for narrative legibility. Thompson claims: “Mirrors, with their reversal of relations among objects, provided an obvious way of undercutting spectators’ understanding of scenes” (“International” 261). In Hayakawa’s films, by contrast, the expressivity of the mirror as a prop bears a key narrational function: it displays the nonwhite protagonist’s encounter with and reconfirmation of his racial otherness that prohibits him from coupling with white women. These mirrors also serve a particular ideological purpose that reminds the spectator of the racial order.

  Ironically, however, the same mirrors and close-ups that reflect and reframe Hayakawa’s body engender sensuous effects for the spectator that could be subversive to the same order. In other words, on one hand, in the mirror, Hayakawa’s Asian heroes quite literally “reflect” on their racial identity. On the other hand, reframed in the mirror, the close-up of Hayakawa’s body, especially his face, generates “affective experiences” for the spectator (Shaviro viii). The Man Beneath (1919), a star vehicle Hayakawa made at Haworth and a story of “the tragic situation created by a race barrier block-ing the gates of love,” according to Margaret I. MacDonald of Moving Picture World (“The Man Beneath,” 5 July 1919, 111), exemplifies this intricate doubling effect.

  In a telling scene midway through The Man Beneath, Hayakawa’s Dr.

  Ashuter, a young and successful Hindu scientist working at a university in Scotland, looks intensely into a mirror in his dark room. He has just received a letter from Kate, a white woman he loves. Ashuter has confessed his love to her on a beautifully moonlit terrace at a party honoring Ashuter’s achievements. Kate regards Ashuter as a great scientist, but she refuses his love because of their racial differences. She writes to Ashuter, “Racial differences and racial hatred exist, in both the East and the West. A love that goes against social beliefs is egotistical and brings unhappiness to those who break this law. It also brings disaster and tragedy to innocent offspring.”

  In medium close-ups, Ashuter reads Kate’s letter of rejection without a blink. When the camera reframes to a medium shot, he finally closes his eyes.

  In the long shot that follows, Kate appears at the dark corner of the room in double exposure. As Ashuter tries to come close to her, the image disappears.

  With a melodramatic gesture of depression (he extends his arm to the air and then lowers it to his head), Ashuter walks to another room with a mirror. A

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  The mirror reveals Dr. Ashuter’s (Hayakawa’s) expression in a key scene from The Man Beneath (1919).

  close-up of a photo of Kate in Ashuter’s hands is followed by a close-up of Ashuter looking at it. A long shot from his back reveals two images of Ashuter holding the photo: one in the room and one in the mirror. The different positions of the two images are important, since the mirrored image of Ashuter reveals his expressions even as his back is turned to the camera. Discussing Victor Sjöström’s 1913 film Ingeborg Holm, Kristin Thompson writes,

  “Logically, it would seem that hiding a central character’s facial expressions would detract from narrative clarity. Yet, by putting Ingeborg’s back to us, Sjöström displays an awareness that a de-emphasis on her facial expression could actually enhance our sense of her anguish and the poignancy of the moment” (“International” 256). By showing both Ashuter’s facial expression and his back, this scene in The Man Beneath achieves both “narrative clarity”

  and “enhancement” of our sense of Ashuter’s “anguish and the poignancy of the moment.” The darkened background vividly heightens the illuminated reflection of his figure in the frame within the frame. In a close-up, with his eyes wide open, Ashuter’s double in the mirror recklessly grips the flesh of his right cheek with his left hand. He grabs the skin so strongly that bloody spots appear on his face when he releases the skin from his hand. Then Ashuter’s double desperately but implicitly curses his nonwhite skin color. In

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  In a close-up from The Man Beneath (1919), Hayakawa’s Dr. Ashuter grips the flesh of his cheek while looking in the mirror and curses his nonwhite skin color.

  intertitles, he says, “O! God of my fathers! Take pity on your son. See, this blood that runs is red . . . red. . . .” Significantly, it is Ashuter’s double that performs these violent physical and verbal actions. The inclusion of part of the mirror’s frame in the shot reminds us that we are watching Ashuter’s reflection, rather than the man himself. When we see both images of Ashuter in the mirror in a long shot again, he is a gentleman as he always has been and always will be. He closes his eyes for the first time in this room and turns his head up as if he has surrendered to the logic of the letter, accepting the racial differences between himself and his beloved Kate.

  By reflecting Ashuter’s hidden self (“the man beneath”), the mirror reminds the nonwhite hero of his racial status and urges him to figuratively sacrifice himself for the heroine. And as I have noted, the motif of self-sacrifice was crucial to the creation of Hayakawa’s star image (Miyao 106–16). Robert Sklar claims that noble sacrifice of oneself for womanhood or honor was a major character trait of the romantic hero of the genteel tradition, which was “so ubiquitous a part of American culture as it was like air” for about half a century until World War I (Sklar 20). Insofar as Hayakawa’s romantic heroes of the genteel tradition sacrifice themselves and sometimes even die for the good of white American women, their actions

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  alleviate anxieties related to miscegenation. Thus, the motif of self-sacrifice could place Hayakawa’s nonwhite characters at the moral center of the narrative while preventing their full assimilation into American society and prohibiting the
m from interracial marriages. While Tori in The Cheat is capable of social assimilation but remains morally inassimilable, the motif of self-sacrifice renders Hayakawa’s later characters near heroic examples of a rigorously achieved moral refinement .

  Stretching beyond even Tom’s sacrificial act of returning to Hawaii in The Hidden Pearls, Hayakawa’s character in The Man Beneath quite literally rescues and restores the sanctity of a white family. When Bassett, Ashuter’s college friend, comes to seek his help when being pursued by the murderous secret society Black Hand, Ashuter protects him with his secret scientific formula. Ashuter thus makes up for the mistake that the naïve white American man made in the past. Considering the linkage in the popular discourse of the time between Black Hand and Italian immigrants (as detailed by Giorgio Bertellini in his chapter on George Beban in this volume), Ashuter eliminates the unwelcome non-Caucasian alien to protect the white American couple. He provides an opportunity for Bassett to change into an ideal husband of a white American family. Safely bringing Bassett back to Mary, his fiancée and Kate’s younger sister, Ashuter bids another farewell to Kate, kissing her right hand as always, while Bassett and Mary kiss each other on the lips. As a result, Ashuter earns the sympathy of other characters as well as the (white) viewers of the film.

  Thus, sympathy is primarily generated through the manner in which the film articulates the protagonist’s struggle with, and acceptance of, his racial difference. In this sense, in addition to being the narrational device, the mirror and the close-ups of Hayakawa’s face in it have a peculiar ideological function. The presentation of Hayakawa’s Asian body in close-ups in The Man Beneath differs from the exhibition of exotic others in world fairs that Alison Griffiths describes as “an index of biologically determined racial identity” or “an ethnographic sign” (Griffiths 68, 184). To the spectator of The Man Beneath, Ashuter’s recognition of his skin color and its difference from Kate’s is not a literal but a symbolic one. While Hayakawa’s face is recognizably Asian, the use of white makeup in The Man Beneath renders his appearance extremely pale onscreen. In turn, the blood on his face looks as

  “red” as that of any white actors, thus narrowing the visible difference between Ashuter’s skin color and that of the white characters.

  Alternately, we might say Ashuter’s racial identity, which is “split” in the mirror, turns into an “act,” one that generates a virtual racial object. As Andrew Parker and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick claim, “performativity” is an act

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  of constructing “identities . . . through complex citational process” (Parker and Sedgwick 2). Objectified in the mirror, Ashuter’s face reminds him that racial differences exist as social beliefs. In other words, the mirror visualizes the division between Ashuter as a social being and Ashuter as the man beneath the social being. The social, that is, racialized, being is a “performative” one, but eventually the virtual object inside the mirror comes to control the emotion and behavior of the self who is performing. Because of the mirror Ashuter comes to recognize, or reconfirm, the ideology of race and the unsurpassable power relations between white and nonwhite, subject and object, performing and performed. He needs to perform for social beliefs; the virtual object forces him to control/hide his inner feelings toward the white woman he loves. Here, the mirror affects Ashuter’s behavior in “positive” ways for a society dominated by the Caucasian race.

  The hero played by Hayakawa does not cheat any longer but consciously maintains the unconquerable barrier of different races.

  ✩★

  ✩★

  ✩★

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  ✩ The Man in the Mirror:

  Photogénie and Carnal Sensuality

  The violent action in the close-up of Hayakawa’s face in the mirror, or the intense materiality of Hayakawa’s fragmented body that urgently involves racial politics, also has strongly sensual effects on the spectator that could subvert the ideological point of the scene. As Miriam Hansen persuasively argues, women’s increased significance as consumers for the film industry often proved contradictory to the systematic imposi-tion, on the level of film style, representation, and address, of masculine forms of subjectivity, and of a patriarchal choreography of vision. The Valentino cult typifies this ambivalence. Hansen argues that Rudolph Valentino’s film vehicles “offer women an institutional opportunity to vio-late the taboo on female scopophilia” (Hansen 277, 282). Gaylyn Studlar also points out that visual objectification of the male in film and its surrounding discourses, especially when Valentino became a star with his image of a “woman-made man” or a “creation of, for, and by women,”

  gained enormous public attention as the act of women looking at men became symbolic of the tumultuous changes believed to be taking place in the system governing American sexual relations (Studlar, “Perils” 288–89).

  To a certain extent, Hayakawa also was represented as a fascinating consumable ethnic other for white female spectators and was conspicuously positioned as an object for female audiences in his publicity. For instance, a one-page ad for The Brand of Lopez (April 1920), another of his star vehicles,

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  foregrounds a framed photo of Hayakawa in a western suit with a bull-fighter cap while a drawn image of a white woman looks up in admiration at the photo. Similarly on the screen, the narrative of Hayakawa’s films overtly comments on the practice of objectifying the male star for female consumption. On the surface, for instance, The Devil’s Claim (1920), another Haworth production, has the structure of an adventure comedy: shootings, kidnaps, fistfights, and escapes. However, the film displays a commodified male star “in ways associated with women’s interest in objectifying men”

  (Studlar, Masquerade 101). Hayakawa plays Akbar Khan, a Greenwich Village novelist of Indian extraction. Akbar and his novels are so popular among female readers that his previous girlfriend, a young Persian girl, Indora (Colleen Moore), tries to murder him out of jealousy. In this opening scene, Akbar is clearly captured by Indora’s gaze via continuous use of the point-of-view structure. Long shots and medium shots of Akbar strolling on a New York street at night and checking out his newly published book, Karma, at a street vender are constantly followed by close-ups and medium close-ups of Moore with a pistol in her right hand. Akbar is an object to shoot. Eventually, in a long shot with a deep space composition, Indora fires her gun at Akbar while his back is turned.

  Witnessing the whole event and impressed by Indora’s devotion to her emotion, Virginia, another female reader of Akbar’s novels, conspires a plot in order to bring Akbar back to Indora. At an exotic café in “New York’s Latin Quarter,” Virginia pretends to be a fugitive from a secret society and lures Akbar into the tale of devil worship. Akbar sees Virginia at the café as his point of view. When he catches sight of her, in close-ups, he opens his eyes wide without blinking and moves his eyes fervently, probably out of desire. In reality, though, he is the one who is already gazed at, objectified, and captured in the plot schemed by the female characters. In fact, Indora stands outside the café and sees Akbar listening to Virginia’s story in her point of view. Clearly, Akbar is an object of Indora’s gaze. Inspired by Virginia’s story, Akbar starts writing his new serial novel for the Metropolitan magazine, Mark of Satan. With its story-within-a-story structure, Hayakawa plays the second role in the film, Hassan, a Persian adventurer. Akbar thus commodifies himself—turning the events of his life into a novel to be consumed. Moreover, now that Hayakawa plays both Akbar and Hassan, his body is doubly commodified for the spectator: for the onscreen readers of Mark of Satan and simultaneously for the viewer of The Devil’s Claim.

  It could be said that Hayakawa’s star image was doubly commodified, insofar as he came to embody a refined, even idealized, consumer lifestyle, as well as an object of desire for female viewers. The photos attached to a 1917

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  artic
le in Picture-Play Magazine, for instance, emphasize Hayakawa’s personal life in a home surrounded with exotic but refined objects. In these photos, Hayakawa and his wife Tsuru Aoki wear western clothes and dance a western-style dance in front of elegant Japanese-style furniture; Hayakawa reads English literature surrounded by gorgeous Japanese objets d’art; Hayakawa and Aoki have tea with dainty porcelain tea cups seated at a dining table; and, as noted above, the Hayakawas appear in western clothes in front of an American-style bungalow with their “English” bulldog (Warren Reed, “The Tradition Wreckers: Two People Who Became Famous, Though Few People without Almond Eyes Can Pronounce Their Names,” March 1917, 62–65).

  Typifying Hayakawa’s offscreen performance of race, these photos and accompanying text may mirror the onscreen roles that Americanize Hayakawa’s characters, but they deviate from the mutually reinforcing tropes of sympathy and sacrifice dominating his film vehicles. To be more exact, Hayakawa’s Japanese traits in fan magazine discourse symbolize his refined taste in an American home, a product of his own choice. It is a visual display of consumer culture that encourages middle-class readers to imitate his actions through the purchase of furniture of Japanese taste (Miyao 140–41).

  Ultimately, however, the affective appeal of Hayakawa’s cinematic body was limited neither to the female gaze nor to an idealized codification of consumer culture. Wid’s Films and Film Folk Independent Criticisms of Features, for instance, claimed of The Cheat: “His [Hayakawa’s] careful timing of his slow movements and the wonderful control he has over his facial muscles, makes his work grip you in a truly effective manner” (“Feature Films as Wid Sees Them,” 16 December 1915, n.p.). It is noteworthy that in The Devil’s Claim there is a scene on a New York subway train where a middle-aged Caucasian man reads Akbar’s story in the Metropolitan magazine. In a manner similar to female readers of the magazine, including a middle-class woman on a living room sofa and sales girls in a department store, he is so riveted by the story, which features numerous close-ups of Hayakawa’s face, that he misses his stop at 125th Street and realizes that he is already in Yonkers.