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The Evolution of China's Image in American Films

Judging from the existing silent film Broken Flowers (directed by David Griffith, 19 19), American films have shaped the image of China for 85 years. This paper selects six American films in different periods to analyze and interpret how the image of China has become the embodiment of racial, gender and political conflicts in American popular culture. At the beginning of the 20th century, China people were portrayed as people who love peace and are kind to others, like blood flowers. However, due to the continuation of the "yellow peril" consciousness after the United States expelled Chinese workers at the end of 19, Hollywood is more keen to imagine China people as "barbaric" others who pose a threat to whites, such as General Yan's bitter tea (capra R. arrived in War of Resistance against Japanese Aggression, China and during World War II in Europe and America, Hollywood released "The Good Earth" in time under the influence of American religious salvation discourse (director [sidney franklin],/kloc Praising China women's hard work and bravery and their persistent orientalist imagination during the Cold War projected a number of fairy tales, such as The World of Susan Wong (directed by [Richard Quine], 1960), which publicized the unconventional love of the western "Prince Charming" and the gratitude and dedication of oriental women. The intensified racial conflicts in the United States since the 1960s have also made Chinese people stand out as "model minorities" for a time, and they have "voluntarily" assimilated into the mainstream white culture in the United States, and staged a light comedy with ups and downs, such as Flower Drum Song (directed by richard rodgers, 196 1). Butterfly (directed by Kronenberg, 1993), as a rare mythical film reflecting the western center, laid a gender maze, exposed the emotional and identity crisis of western men, and subverted the narrative mode of the Western Cold War discourse and Orientalism.

The image of China in American movies can be interpreted in many ways. According to the scholar Marchetti, 1:

Hollywood regards Asian, Chinese and South Pacific as another race, in order to avoid more direct racial conflicts between blacks and whites, or to escape the complex feelings of white people's remorse and hatred for Native American Indians and Hispanics.

Marchetti thinks that the narrative operation mode of Hollywood movies is mythical, confusing the audience with various story modes, such as rape mode, captive mode, temptation mode, redemption mode, sacrifice mode, tragic love mode, extraordinary romance mode and assimilation mode. The films analyzed in this paper have confirmed the lasting influence of these Hollywood film models to varying degrees. Because of this, it is of great practical significance for us to reveal the ideological connotation and discourse operation mode of these models for a deeper understanding of Hollywood.

A Bloody Flower: Racial Crisis and Gender Expression

Blood Flowers tells the tragic love story of a China man who left his hometown to make a living in London and secretly loved an English girl who was repeatedly abused by his father. From the beginning, the film clearly shows the cultural differences between East and West. After going abroad, the yellow race made a pilgrimage to the Buddhist temple in China to pray for peace, but just after leaving the temple, they met western sailors gathering in the streets to make trouble. On the one hand, peace in the East and violence in the West reveal the differences between the two cultures, on the other hand, they also reflect the gender stereotypes of races. After setting foot in a foreign country, the behavior and value orientation of the yellow race have always been feminine, thus forming a binary opposition with the western masculinity embodied by Barrow, the Irish boxer: the former is a weak shop gang, and the latter is a rude and powerful drinker; The former is a romantic dreamer who is addicted to opium and aesthetics, while the latter is an abusive father who tortures his daughter Lucy and gets pleasure. Lucy was enchanted by the exquisite oriental goods in Ren Huang's shop, and Ren Huang enthusiastically donated silk materials, which made Lucy get unprecedented "home" warmth. This interracial love affair threatened the order of the western patriarchal center, and Barrow whipped Lucy to death in a rage. The yellow people who came to the rescue confronted Barrow, shot Barrow, took Lucy's body back to the store, put it on the bed, burned incense, and then stabbed themselves with a dagger.

Marchetti pointed out that the title of Blood Flowers reveals the sadistic and fetish nature of fantasy in the film: Lucy played by lillian gish grew up in a barren land, but was inevitably trampled to death. In the film, in order to emphasize the tenderness and delicacy of the East (female style) and the rudeness and rudeness of the West (male style), director Griffith has shaped the yellow shop into a battlefield and an altar at the same time. First, the yellow race took good care of Lucy's traumatized heart, then tried their best to protect Lucy from being taken home by Barrow, and finally committed suicide in the form of double suicide, completing an interracial and cross-cultural love that was not recognized by the world. At the end of the film, Griffith deliberately creates a poetic atmosphere of incense, as well as the kneeling posture of the yellow people when they stare at Lucy's body and dagger. Marchetti and other western scholars believe that the suicide scene of the yellow race subconsciously shows a kind of "necrophilia plot" and visual "sexual pleasure", thus adding more space for desire and fantasy to the film. The positioning of this desire and fantasy in the film is also reflected in Lucy: as an underage girl, she represents a transcendence of sexual behavior, so she becomes an unattainable pure woman.

It is because of Lucy's purity that the sadistic father becomes the predatory image of western male culture criticized in Blood Flowers. Griffith set two symbolic rape scenes in the movie. First, Barrow held a whip symbolizing "penis", and the tail of the whip hung forward from the waist, threatening Lucy who fell to the ground and looked frightened. Second, in order to avoid her father, Lucy hid behind the narrow storage room door, while Barrow angrily held a sharp weapon, smashed the door, broke in and took Lucy out to beat her. Two symbolic "rape" scenes show the tragic situation of traditional women under the western autocratic patriarchal system, and also reflect the plot structure of self-abuse and sadism in the film.

From the perspective of gender, the yellow race represents another male virtue that may attract western women at that time, but it is undoubtedly regarded as a "feminine" male image in the west. Lesacchi called Ren Huang a "romantic hero", a kind person who tends to be self-critical, humble, weak, passive and ultimately incompetent. Griffith used this aesthetic image to express a moral view: "Asian civilization and its altruistic spirit are dazzling compared with the immorality and roughness in Europe and America." In order to improve the aesthetic status of Blood Flower, Griffith's film designed a prelude to a ballet performance when it premiered in new york, so the film was positioned as a high-class art that only nobles and middle class could enjoy, rather than a general silent film that many immigrants in new york could watch for five cents.

Undeniably, Griffith beautified the modesty and mutual tolerance between races, to some extent, in order to alleviate the bad influence caused by the description of black discrimination in his early film The Birth of a Nation (19 15). Here, "Blood Flower" praised the oriental civilization, which was originally intended to alleviate the racial conflicts in western society, and hoped that movie audiences would improve their self-cultivation and identify with elegant culture. However, from the perspective of film history, Griffith consciously or unconsciously identified a typical male and female image of China for Hollywood on the screen, which has had a far-reaching influence since then.

General Yan's Bitter Tea: Sexual Threats and Captive Conspiracy

Of course, another well-known male Chinese image in Hollywood is the other end of the image of the yellow race-a murderous warlord or bandit. In "General Yan's Bitter Tea", the overbearing General Yan looked at no one in China, ignored the good words of Megan, a western missionary, and showed his absolute authority in front of Megan, who could order the collective shooting of prisoners of war without blinking an eye. The Bitter Tea of General Yan turned to deliberately create an ambiguous emotional game between General Yan and Megan, so it was different from the Shanghai Express (directed by Robert Jeffrey Sternberg, 1932) released a year ago.

In Shanghai Express, the leader of the revolutionary party who also kills people without blinking an eye is a mixed-race Chinese. After riding and robbing the Beijing-Shanghai Expressway, he drooled over the most popular western prostitute among the passengers, Shanghai Lily (played by [marlene dietrich]). In order to intimidate Shanghai Lily into submission, on the one hand, he threatened the British doctor (Shanghai Lily's ex-lover) with poker, and on the other hand, he forced Huifei, a prostitute from China who had a car contract with Shanghai, to spend the night with her. Therefore, Shanghai Express combines the rape mode and the captive mode in Hollywood, emphasizing the sexual threat of China people to westerners. According to Freud's theory, blindness is a symbol of male castration, while the leaders of revolutionary parties burn German opium dealers with tongs, which means symbolic acts of rape and possession.

The turning point of Shanghai Express was that Huifei accidentally retaliated and killed the leader of the revolutionary party who raped her, thus saving the "prisoners" on the Beijing-Shanghai Express and completing the love dream of Shanghai Lily and the British doctor at the end of the film. In the revenge scene, director Robert Jeffrey Sternberg created a unique mysterious scene, projecting the huge figure of Hui Fei, played by China movie star Huang Liushuang, on the wall, and reappearing Huang Liushuang's sinister, vicious and profound after The Thief of Baghdad (director [Raoul Walsh], 1924) through confusing light and shadow interlacing. However, once China's sexual threat was removed, Shanghai Express ended its happy ending with the love between men and women inherent in Hollywood.

Back to General Yan's bitter tea, the love between China warlords and white female missionaries is difficult to develop according to the conventional Hollywood model. At the beginning of the film, Megan first meets her white fiance in China and accidentally falls into General Yan's palace during the war. Contrary to the leader of the revolutionary party in Shanghai Express, General Yan loves Megan without imposing his will. On the contrary, he let Megan do her duty of evangelizing and move freely in the palace, which proved who influenced whom between emotional games. Because Megan trusted General Yan's concubine, General Yan's military secrets were exposed and the arms train was robbed. From then on, General Yan lost all power and abandoned his relatives.

Interestingly, with the weakening of General Yan's power, his degree of "civilization" in Megan's eyes has been increasing, from a savage executioner to a graceful gentleman. General Yan's change is fully reflected in one of Megan's daydreams. Megan first dreamed that General Yan appeared as a romantic ranger, just like the feminine detective in the detective film series Chen, which was popular in Hollywood at that time (1926-52), and then General Yan appeared as a ferocious and erotic man, chasing Megan and waking her up from her dream. In Megan's Dream, General Yan plays the two extremes of China men assumed by Hollywood: one is a kind but feminine or asexual man, such as or an early yellow man; The second is a sinister and ferocious demon, such as Flash Gordon, a traitor in China who wanted to conquer the world-ruthless and bright.

Megan's Dream not only expresses Hollywood's binary opposition to China's male image, but also reveals that this opposition actually comes from the inner contradictions of westerners. On the one hand, she yearns for exoticism, on the other hand, she is afraid of threats from others. Compared with her ordinary and boring fiance, General Yan in Megan's eyes is both a sexual threat and a sexual temptation. At the end of the film, General Yan ran out of money, and Megan would rather stay and serve General Yan. She put on the silk dress presented by General Yan and knelt in front of General Yan, but it was too late, because General Yan had committed suicide by taking poison and died with the joy of conquering foreign women, leaving Megan alone to lament the desolation and fate of the world in the abandoned palace.

General Yan's bitter tea responded to the blood flower in some details. Megan is similar to Lucy dressed in silk, while General Yan's suicide is more similar to the yellow race. These two films symbolically-together with The Assassination of the Leader of the Revolutionary Party by Shanghai Express-confirm the desire of Hollywood narrative mode for China men to be at least symbolically castrated, that is, to fundamentally eliminate the sexual threat of China people to western women. It is not difficult to imagine that Hollywood rarely weaves love stories between China men and western women, instead, it is the endless lingering love that Prince Charming of the West conquered Oriental beauty (which will be described in the fourth section of this article).

The Good Earth: Peasant Woman's Land and Primitive Emotion

Marchetti speculated that "General Yan's Bitter Tea" described China as "a strange, dangerous, chaotic place where anything could happen" in order to divert the attention of the American audience who suffered from the economic depression. This speculation may be exaggerated, but a few years later, The Good Earth's portrayal of famine and poverty in China may indeed give American audiences a sense of superiority: American society has entered modernization, while the people of China are still struggling. The pride of American audiences can also come from their religious salvation belief: China farmers, like pioneers in the early days of the founding of the United States, overcame natural and man-made disasters and built their own homes with unshakable faith in the land. The Good Earth is adapted from the English best-selling novel of the same name by Pearl Buck, an American missionary descendant who grew up in China, and its Christian connection is self-evident.

The industrious and brave image of China peasant woman in The Good Earth is called a breakthrough in the history of American movies, which has changed the stereotypical image of China people (such as opium addicts, funny chefs, laundry assistants and other supporting roles, as well as the leading roles such as sinister witches and savage warlords mentioned above). The film depicts a peasant woman, Lan Ou, who has gone through all kinds of hardships, bearing children, managing the family diligently, silently helping her husband farm and manage the family, resolutely refusing to sell her land in the famine years, preferring to beg all the way to the south to maintain the foundation of her family, and finally marrying a concubine for her husband to spend her old age peacefully. At the end of the film, Oran died quietly. The husband looked at the peach tree outside the window, thought of his wife and sighed, "Oran, you are the land. Earleen thinks that the China farmers' love for land in the film is unimaginable to westerners and can only be understood in "primitive" China. Earleen further pointed out that The Good Earth made the image of farmers in China real and lovely, and successfully established the image of farmers in China in the war movies in the 1940s. It is true that another film, Dragon Seed (directed by [Jack Conway] and [Harold S. Bucquet], 1944) based on Pearl Buck's novel also plays up the farmers' love for the land in China. In order to prevent Japanese soldiers from harvesting grain, they voluntarily set fire to their rural farms, took refuge in the mountains, and let their children join guerrillas to defend the land.

The image breakthrough represented by The Good Earth is closely related to the current situation. On the one hand, the Japanese invasion made China an ally of the United States; On the other hand, Hollywood has learned the lesson that films such as Shanghai Express and General Yan's Bitter Tea have been repeatedly protested and banned in China. During the filming of The Good Earth, it invited China officials to pre-examine the script, went to China to buy props, and used many China volunteers to participate in the filming. Although China officials were not satisfied with the finished film, luise rainer won the Oscar for Best Actress by playing Oran successfully. It is worth noting that in the 1940s, Hollywood explicitly stipulated that the hero and heroine should not be played by ethnic minorities, which made the white actors make up grotesque and unrecognizable for "playing the yellow-faced woman", and there was no truth or beauty at all.

Su Sihuang's World: Prince Charming and Extraordinary Love

By the 1960s, the world of Su Sihuang was released, and the phenomenon of "playing the yellow-faced woman" had ended, and the heroine had been played by China people. This romantic film with strong oriental color tells the story of Robert, an American white painter, going to Hong Kong to find himself, falling in love with Miss Su Sihuang, overcoming the barriers of race, class and culture, and everything will be fine. When Susie first met Robert on the ferry, she declared herself "Merlin" in nonstandard English, a rich "virgin". Robert entered Kowloon City, and the crowded stalls, pedestrians and vehicles on both sides of the street formed a typical chaotic third world city scene in the view of Orientalism. This scene is reminiscent of the scene where the Beijing-Shanghai Expressway at the beginning of the Shanghai Express was blocked by pedestrians and animals in the ancient city of Beijing. After a lapse of nearly 30 years, these two scenes show that the vision of western civilization is helpless to the backwardness of the third world. However, helplessness does not mean incompetence. In Susan Huang's world, Robert shoulders the responsibility of changing the backwardness and ignorance of the East. In the bar of his hotel, he found that "Mei Lin", formerly known as Susie, was a famous maiko in the local area. The sultry and charming Susie showed her sexy body in front of Robert. In order to save Susie's "fallen" soul, Robert invited Susie as a model to explore the beauty of the East she embodied, thus gradually changing the artistic taste of her personal image.

Based on the typical discourse pattern of Orientalism, The World of Su Si Huang made Robert reinterpret the "ignorant" East from the perspective of western civilization, and created a "new" meaning that orientals could not understand. One day, Robert was surprised to find Susie wearing an expensive European dress bought in the street, and accused her of being "unattractive" and dressing like a "cheap European street prostitute". Then he stripped Susie half naked and staged a striptease on the screen. Ironically, Robert never objected to Susie's China dress as a street prostitute. More ironically, he dressed Susie in the clothes he bought for her in China and dressed her up as the "Oriental Princess" imagined by westerners. Here, Robert "recreates" the East to emphasize his subjectivity: it is he who "embodies" the western "artistic taste" in oriental women who don't know their own value. He painted Susie, a princess in costume, into the painting, creating another Susie who is "more beautiful" than reality, regardless of whether Susie herself agrees with this embodiment of "beauty".

It seems that it is not enough for Robert to "save" Susie in art. Susie Huang's world also allows Robert to perform a thrilling scene in which the hero saves a beautiful woman in the climax of the film. After Susie and Robert live together, they often leave without saying goodbye and disappear for a few days before coming back. The puzzled Robert followed and found that Susie had an illegitimate child and was fostered in a slum on the mountain. In Hong Kong, it is raining cats and dogs and flash floods, endangering slums. In order to save the child, Susie broke through the police and ran to the mountainside in the rain. Robert followed closely and rescued Susie before the nail shed was washed away by the flood, but the child was killed. At the end of the film, Susie burns incense in the temple to transcend the children's souls, and promises to move to America with Robert, thus realizing Prince Charming's wish. If children in movies generally represent the future, then Susie's children represent the third world with no future. Therefore, as a memory symbol of poverty and backwardness in the third world, this innocent bastard is easily written off in Hollywood's extraordinary love story, because the film wants the audience to look forward to the happy future of Susie and Prince Charming in the western world after they leave the third world.

Five Flower Drum Songs and Dances: Immigrant Stories and Cultural Similarities and Differences

If the ideology of the western center appears in the films analyzed above in the form of mainstream discourse, Flower Drum Dance shows the ubiquity of the western center through China immigrants' positive recognition of the assimilation model of American culture. This film, which is adapted from the best-selling Broadway opera, is all starred by China people. Through the value design of love triangle and the conceptual conflict between two generations of immigrants, it not only praises the traditional virtues of China, such as filial piety and morality, but also supports China people's willingness to accept mainstream culture and enjoy modern civilization. Hong Kong is the starting point of the film's beauty and her father's illegal immigration. They hid in a wooden bucket in the cabin and crossed the ocean to San Francisco. Mei has been betrothed to others since she was a child, and this trip is to fulfill her engagement. When father and daughter first arrived in San Francisco, they were strangers. Thanks to a beautiful brainwave, they sang a flower drum song in Chinatown so that you can meet your husband (a playboy who runs a restaurant). But this playboy falls in love with dancer Linda, and Linda likes Jim very much. Playboy introduced beautiful women to stay at Jim's father's house. The virtuous beauty touched Jim's father, who abides by China tradition, and made him want to stay for Jim, thus putting Jim in the dilemma of love triangle. When Jim and Linda went out by car, Linda kissed Jim and let him enjoy the "American-style" expression of love, but like Robert in Susan Huang's world, Jim, an introverted scholar, was quite uncomfortable in front of aggressive new women.

Flower drum not only covers up the growing racial conflict in the United States, obliterates history and whitewashes peace, but also designs a happy ending for everyone. Jim, who is inclined to China's traditional virtues, finally married playboy and Linda, whose beauty is addicted to western material life, which shows that the United States, an immigrant country, can accommodate various interests and ideals. This theme of "fusion" is vividly shown in another song "hodgepodge": American society is like a hodgepodge of Chinese food invented by Americans, with all kinds of vegetables and meats, which are delicious. The occasion when everyone sang the song machete was the day when Jim's aunt was sworn in as an American citizen, and the intention was self-evident. As a "newly discovered" model minority in the United States, Chinese seem to avoid conflicts and pursue integration, thus becoming the best choice for Hollywood assimilation model.

There is no denying that the crowing Chinatown in the flower drum lantern is just a cover-up for Hollywood's self-deception. In the mainstream western culture, Chinatown is a symbol of violence and danger, just like China in the melee between warlords. The bad image of Chinatown has not been solved in the 1980s. "the Year of the Loong" (directed by Simino, 1985) describes new york's Chinatown as a community dominated by gangsters and assassinations. Only a white detective who changed his surname to "white" and was willing to "avenge" the defeat of the Vietnam War in the United States fought against Chinatown alone. Under the double constraints of western centralism and orientalism, White first "saved the beauty by a hero" in a restaurant gunfight, but soon raped a beautiful female reporter of China TV station, and then arbitrarily occupied her apartment for anti-triad activities. White's behavior once again proves the colonial mentality of "occupying foreign women is occupying foreign land", except that the Year of the Loong's foreign country is in new york, and this "foreign theory" further reveals that mainstream American culture has never regarded Chinatown as a part of American native society. It should be noted that the Chinese community in the United States has gradually matured in the 1980s, and Chinese communities jointly protested to Hollywood that the film insulted China, forcing the Year of the Loong to join shattered glass's avoidance in the opening of the film, such as "pure fiction".

Butterfly: Gender Labyrinth and Identity Crisis

One of the films that completely subverted the western central myth was Butterfly. The story of the film unfolds in two overlapping clues: one is the complicated spy war between the East and the West during the Cold War, and the other is the typical love game in which western men conquer oriental women in orientalist discourse. We say "game" here because the final outcome of the gender political maze between the East and the West is that the East remains mysterious, while the West finally deludes itself, trying to conquer others but ruthlessly deconstructing itself.

At the beginning of the film, Galimard, a diplomat of the French Embassy in Beijing, was moved by Song Liling's wonderful singing of the Italian opera Madame Butterfly at a concert, and his admiration arose, so he took the initiative to pursue Song Liling. Song Liling ironically reminds Galima that the beauty of the opera Madame Butterfly is a fantasy of westerners, and the orientals may not recognize it. This opera praises a Japanese woman who complains about missing her American lover after she left. A few years later, she found that her lover married a white wife, in great pain, and committed suicide by double suicide in order to fulfill an unshakable ideal. However, Galima could not extricate herself from the rigid one-way thinking of Orientalism. He thinks he is a prince charming full of western masculinity, and naturally wants to conquer the oriental beauty with both talent and appearance. After many twists and turns, Galima got what she wanted and took possession of Song Liling's body. After returning to France during the Cultural Revolution, she was pleasantly surprised to learn that Song Liling had given birth to a child for him, as described in the story of Madame Butterfly. When they reunited in France after years of separation, Galimard was surprised to find that everything in the past was a scam. Song Liling used to be a spy in China, so they were all imprisoned. Even more surprising, the court declared that Song Liling was a male, and this scandal made headlines for some time after it was made public.

In fact, this sensational spy case is based on a true French story, and the film is adapted from David Henry Hwang's best-selling stage play of the same name. At the end of the film, there is a climax that completely subverts the western central myth. At this point, Song Liling was deported and flew back to China, while Galima committed suicide in extreme pain after playing Madame Butterfly in prison. Galima's suicide scene has profound meaning. While playing the sad "Madame Butterfly" on the tape recorder, he disguised himself as Madame Butterfly and announced to the prisoners watching in the corridor: "I, Galimard, am Madame Butterfly. Then he committed suicide with a broken makeup lens, and the unknown audience was still applauding his wonderful performance. Galima's sincere confession in suicide performance reveals that the beauty of the East imagined by westerners is only an illusion, an unattainable concept, which urges western men to chase the imaginary East and finally realize that the fantasy of this life is not in a foreign country, but in their own performances! Galima's most wonderful self-expression is also the moment when he ends himself: he no longer fantasizes about owning Mrs. Butterfly (Song Liling, the wife he once owned, cheated him mercilessly), because here and now he has become Mrs. Butterfly herself (a "she" who will never cheat him).

None of the spy information that Galima stole in his life is more true than the fact that he found at the end of his life: the perfect man (white man) and the perfect woman (oriental man) of Orientalism are just illusions created by western words. Zhou Lei therefore pointed out that Galima was so dead set on this fantasy that she went to extremes, narcissistic (that is, her own fantasy) and died 13. The confusing pattern of Hollywood stories has undergone a turning point and subversion in the movie Butterfly: western male (Galima)-oriental beauty (Song Liling)-Madame Butterfly (Song Liling)-Madame Butterfly (Galima). In terms of gender, his fantasy about her (Madame Butterfly) is only a fantasy itself (his identity with her), thus revealing the identity crisis inherent in the western center.

Obviously, the subversion of the western center by the movie "The King of Butterflies" began with the egoism of the western male body. Sunel believes that the male subjectivity in the modernist sense is manifested in the body's complete control over nature. Once the body is out of control after changes and mutations, men will panic because of the blurring or disintegration of boundaries, and their subjectivity will be on the verge of collapse. Therefore, Mr. Butterfly might as well be interpreted as a postmodern horror film. From this point of view, the exchange of Galima and Madame Butterfly has fundamentally disintegrated the boundaries between East and West, men and women, subverted the binary discourse of the Western Cold War and Orientalism, and caused a "horror" effect on western audiences. The film The Butterfly King brilliantly deconstructs the discourse strategies of western "colonial women" (both female colonization and feminization of the colonized), unexpectedly introduces the feminization of a male colonizer (the West), and regards the latter as the essence of western colonial fantasy. The result of subversion is that the western center itself is empty and boring, and the subjectivity of the west (male) is full of crisis. They enrich their desire to colonize and occupy and expand by imagining fantastic stories in the East (such as The Butterfly King and other films analyzed in this paper).

The movie Butterfly shows that the East is unknowable to the west after all. Song Liling, an imaginary image of China in the West, actively brought the illusion that Orientalism wanted back to the center of the West: the perfect woman (Oriental lover) and Lady Butterfly (tragic beauty), but he (she) also showed the West the cold war facts that the West did not want to face: "treacherous" China spies and crisis-ridden western subjects. Therefore, Song Liling embodies both the charm (love) and the danger (death) of the East in the western vision, which together destroyed Galima (the representative of western arrogance, conceit and self-deception). Undeniably, this duality of China's image is a driving force of Hollywood's long-standing narrative desire: fantasizing about the other, fabricating love, satisfying the audience and expanding itself. In Hollywood's imagination, China people are like mysterious oriental women hidden behind the spectacle mask (China men must be feminine, which is designed from Ren Huang to Song Liling), which is both charming and life-threatening. But this spectacle mask itself is also one of Hollywood's fictions. There is no hidden truth behind the mask, because the mask itself is the truth of Hollywood, or the real Hollywood: a spectacular dream machine, constantly making up its own stories at the intersection of race, gender and politics.

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