Washington And Hollywood Share A Common Enemy

02/27/1997 

Hollywood and Washington tend to agree on the enemy and the foe of the moment is China, as Eric Ellis reports from Los Angeles.

HOLLYWOOD has been particularly skilful at identifying the American Enemy.

Blacks, Red Indians, Nazis, communists, South Africans, Japanese businessmen, Arabs and aliens, Hollywood has never discriminated about bad guys if there's a box office killing to be made, and a cliche to exploit. Now, new creative inspiration is coming from Asia in the form of the emerging China - the nasty communists who kill and oppress their citizens and their neighbours. And now they've got an economy too.

A new book by New York Times journalist Robert Bernstein, entitled The Coming Conflict with China, details the expectant Cold War of the new century, the one between the US-led West and China.

Also, Tom Cruise has bought the rights to screen a popular anti-China spy thriller, and filming is under way on Columbia's Seven Years in Tibet, starring Brad Pitt, and Kundun, the Disney biography of the Dalai Lama.

These films sympathetically portray the Tibetan plight under Chinese annexation and come as US hipsters embrace so-called "Lama Chic" in the form of concerts, restaurants and ersatz spiritualism.

Leaving aside Seattle, where one in 10 planes that Boeing builds will have Chinese livery, the Middle American mindset on China is dominated by the 1989 Tiananmen massacre and a so-far unjustified belief that Hong Kong will become a ghost town after June 30 this year.

Hollywood has never been quite sure how to portray the modern Chinese: are they cunning, evil geniuses like Fu Manchu or hyperactive Bruce Lees? And if, as Hollywood would have you believe, that film mirrors life, why has there not been one significant movie about one of the seminal 20th-century events: the Chinese Revolution of 1949 and the extraordinary human dramas that followed -the Cultural Revolution, the rise of Deng Xiaoping? Mostly, because it didn't involve Americans.

The average American movie-goer finds it hard to distinguish between Asians of any creed, let alone fathom the subtleties of the China-Taiwan ideological stand-off. The need to explain doesn't translate as good box office.

The anti-China bent comes as China involuntarily returns to the public eye with the death of Deng, the increasing attention over Hong Kong and perhaps poised to enter one of its periodic societal upheavals.

It also comes as China girds itself for a sustained bout of anti-American, anti-Western nationalism, as articulated in the controversial best-seller, The China That Can Say No, published in Beijing last year, and the anti-British blockbuster China is preparing to air the day Hong Kong reverts to its sovereignty.

One of the Chinese book's chapters is entitled "Burn Down Hollywood" and its five authors seem to share US author Bernstein's belief that the next big conflict will be a Sino-US one.

"Due to deep-rooted ideological prejudices and a super-lord's desire to dominate the world by itself, the United States has more often shown painfulness and uneasiness towards China's rising ...

"In (US) eyes, China may become the only country in the near future that could challenge their cultural hegemony, economical hegemony and military hegemony. Therefore, a grand conspiracy from the 'Free World' targeting China is beginning to brew and ferment.

"After the Cold War, the US was bored by the fact that there is no Number One Enemy. The Americans will find out that if they do not seek another enemy, then the contradiction within the Western countries will emerge as the main issue ... that is why they pick China.

"In Washington DC, they erect both a Vietnam War Memorial Wall and Korean War Memorial. We would like to make a suggestion: erect a taller and wider memorial wall, and engrave a longer list of names of casualties on it if Americans want to mess up with the Chinese."

This sentiment is hardly the stuff on which long-standing friendly relations are founded, and while the Chinese Government didn't publish it, it didn't stop its publication either.

Hollywood's apparent confusion about the emerging China neatly mirrors that of Washington in not knowing whether to woo it or hate it. The liberal wing is appalled by China's continuing human-rights violations, arms build-up and potential military threat but the profiteers among them are drawn to the vast market it offers for Western icons.

Disney, owner of some of the most potent of those icons, was recently confronted by that very dilemma when it emerged it was financing Kundun, the Dalai Lama bio-pic.

In buttoned-up Beijing, the regime complained about US support for Tibetan "splittists". In laissez-faire Shanghai, the very mayor who had dined at former Disney president Michael Ovitz's house was issuing soothing statements that Disney's plans for a theme park outside Shanghai would be unaffected.

Hollywood is expert at creating enemies but less concerned with reversing the stereotype.

It's often said today that a big reason that downtrodden native Americans face such gigantic obstacles en route to national reconciliation is because, thanks to Hollywood conditioning, they are generally seen as hostile -when a wander through their arid reservations, no Dances with Wolves here, of the US south-west reveals nothing more threatening than a wasteland of rusting pick-up trucks, mobile homes and piles of discarded Big Mac cartons.

Consider how many films and television series in which African-Americans have been portrayed as low-lifers, drug dealers or illicit beefcake slave-lovers of white belles - even good guys like "Huggy Bear", Starsky and Hutch's charismatic informer, was a pimp who popularised the full-length leather coat.

Hollywood and Washington have broadly moved in tandem when identifying the Great American Ogre and their relationship has traditionally been a symbiotic one.

In how many films of the Cold War were Russians and Eastern Europeans portrayed either as bluff vodka-swilling buffoons or sinister plotters of world domination surrounded by blinking technology? Lots.

From the Escape from East Berlin in 1962 to Hunt For Red October in 1990, the Soviet bloc was mercilessly demonised until the genre faltered at the dawn of the PC age and the end of the Cold War when Hollywood saw fit to depict the Russian villain as a professional, with feelings and, in the end, a good guy. He was also played by box-office darling Sean Connery.

It certainly didn't worry the Cold Warriors of the Eisenhower White House to have films like The Atomic Kid made, a supposed comedy where a glowing Mickey Rooney inadvertently strays into the path of a US atom bomb desert test and gets radiated.

Made in 1954, it presented the nuclear program as something accessible, almost fun.

The Green Berets was made in the tumultuous year of 1968 and debuted after North Vietnam's Tet offensive against the US, when US public opinion decisively turned against the campaign.

It showed that all-American hero John Wayne in jungle camouflage, leading US Special Forces on successful covert operations against faceless Viet Cong "gooks". With few exceptions, notably The Joy Luck Club, Asians have never emerged well from Hollywood.

There was the spate of John Wayne (again) vehicles that glorified the US (Allied?) victory in World War II - Sands Of Iwo Jima, Back to Bataan, Operation Pacific, They Were Expendable. The theme continued on into the Korean War -Prisoners of War (with Ronald Reagan), Torpedo Alley, The Glory Brigade. These films not only celebrated US military supremacy and made audiences feel good about being American, they also portrayed some of the first Asians many Americans had ever seen. And not at all favourably.

While The Last Emperor lavishly portrayed a romantic China inside the walls of Beijing's Forbidden City - and an anarchic one outside - it took an Italian communist director, Bernardo Bertolucci, and nonHollywood financing to get it to the screen.

In Hollywood's Vietnam angst period, Asians fared slightly better in that the self-obsessed focus was on neurotic US veterans. The Vietnamese tended to be the little-seen enemy, though in the critically acclaimed The Deer Hunter they were depicted as torturous, merciless sadists.

The rise of Japan to economic superpowerdom in the 1980s - and the simultaneous loss of US auto jobs in Detroit - prompted a spate of anti-Japanese films, most notably Rising Sun and Black Rain in which Sean Connery and Michael Douglas respectively penetrate a dark-hued subculture where corporate Japan meets mystical Zen Buddhism meets the Yakuza.

Today, Japan flounders but at no time has the stereotype been reversed for Americans who don't read The Washington Post or New York Times.

Beyond Asia, Nelson Mandela's release and subsequent election immediately dated Lethal Weapon 2 as inspiration for a promising anti-white South African genre as did Middle East peace to Schwarzenegger's True Lies.

Today, with the Cold War and Gulf War won, Japan subdued, Bosnia too complex and Colombia's Pablo Escobar dead, Hollywood needs a new enemy to enrage viewers with "political thrillers", where handsome American heroes speak five languages and stride confidently through diplomatic incidents.

In this past year, the drought of enemies has been so dire that Hollywood had to invent one: the aliens that attacked the US on July 4, Independence Day.

Perhaps for the rest of the world's sake, the next enemy could better be found closer to home - the drug war, the cranky white militias, O.J. Simpson or the intrusive tabloids; audiences across the US clapped a scene in Ransom when Mel Gibson outwitted pursuing paparazzi.

But it will more than likely be lurking in the laptops of Michael Crichton or Tom Clancy, and the rumours are it's about China.