HomeAsian AmericansBrainwashed: Sex-Camera-Power and Attitudes Toward Asians | Sundance 2022
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Brainwashed: Sex-Camera-Power and Attitudes Toward Asians | Sundance 2022

By Jana Monji, AsAmNews Art & Culture Reporter

Brainwashed: Sex-Camera-Power is an expanded form of Nina Menkes’ presentation Sex and Power: The Visual Language of Oppression. While feminist pioneer Menkes doesn’t focus on Asian stereotypes in her film, the points she brings up are important in the analysis of minorities in films.

Menkes gives an example of a Black man objectified in a way similar to how women are commonly treated. Asian Americans will likely remember that more than three decades ago, in 1988, playwright David Henry Hwang suggested that the so-called Orient and people perceived as Oriental were considered the subordinate weaker part of humanity. In the yin-yang or the East-West dichotomy, the Orient is the feminine side of nature and is contrasted by the powerful, wise, and intellectually superior masculine side of nature represented by Western nations, and particularly Western White men. 

In Brainwashed: Sex-Camera-power, Menkes looks at how the visual language of cinema is tied to employment discrimination against women and sexual abuse/ harassment. This is not a love triangle, but an oppressive ménage à trois. 

Like any good lecture, we get bullet points: The Menkes List.

The Menkes List

  1. Point of View: Male subject/female object
  2. Framing: Fragmented shots of (female) body part
  3. Camera Movement: Body pans and the positioning of women’s bodies. The usage of slow motion that emphasizes the sexual desirability or availability of women.
  4. Lighting: 3-dimensional for men, but 2-dimensional or fantasy lights for women.
  5. Narrative Position: The sexualized female body exists outside the narrative flow. 

Most people are familiar with the term the “male gaze.” That’s at the top of the list. This is where the male is the subject and the female is the object. The woman knows she is being observed and is posing to please a heterosexual male. This dehumanization of women is also done by the fragmentation of the woman objectified, or framing. Women are also seen in “fantasy lighting” while men get three-dimensional lighting. Wrinkles on a man make him look rugged and distinguished. On women, they make her less desirable.

The camera movement contrasts men as active and women as passive as does the use of slow motion. In some cases, the sexualized female body has nothing to do with the narrative flow. It is just part of the scenery or background.

To her credit, Menkes has assembled a diverse set of talking heads, including  May Hong HaDuong, the director of the UCLA Film & Television Archive, and Los Angeles-based marriage and family therapist Sachiko Taki-Reece.  She is the first Asian American woman and person of color to lead the archive.

HaDuong notes, “There is a reticence to even question how they were made and the stories that they tell. Without questioning it, we are doing a disservice to our own humanity.” 

We need to look at how sexist elements are used in scripts and how scripts and visual presentation works toward the building of characters. Set design can also perpetuate sexism or misogynistic attitudes. 

Taki-Reece notes that “for women, because you are looking at those films, she would like to shape herself to be” a certain way. In essence, “she loses her own self; she feels empty.” 

Dr. Raja G. Bhattar emphasizes that this isn’t just a male gaze, but usually ” a white heterosexual male gaze.”

Yet Menkes shows the problem exists in films for places like Asia such as South Korean director Park Chan-Wook’s (박찬욱 ) 2016 The Handmaiden  (아가씨) and 2003 Old Boy (올드보이) or South Korean director Kim Ki-duk’s () 2018 Human, Space, Time and Human (인간, 공간, 시간 그리고 인간).

Kim also wrote and directed the celebrated “Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter…and Spring” (2004), but also the infamously gruesome “The Isle” ().  

While certainly Asian films are problematic, what wasn’t addressed in this documentary was some troubling ways that some minorities are sexualized in sharp contrast to other women in the narrative. Examples of this include the 2020 Amazon Prime Video science fiction drama series Tales from the Loop and the 2012 science fiction film Cloud Atlas.

Further, the 2011 French film, The Intouchables, and in the 2017 American remake, The Upside, the treatment of the female masseuses seems to differ from the treatment of the other women. Both of these films are ostensibly taking on issues of race and class, but in a largely Black and White binary. Don’t forget that it was 2016, when Chris Rock was hosting the Oscars that Asian Americans were the butt of a joke. 

That’s not to say that there should be another censorship board like the one in old Hollywood. Black face has been mostly abolished due to social pressure and the concern over racism from a Black and White binary perspective.  As with sexism and the so-called male gaze, Menkes emphasized that she doesn’t want to be “the sex police.” Here, Menkes uses a quote from Agnès Varda, “The first feminist act is looking. To say, ok, you’re looking at me, but I am looking right back.”

Asian Americans and people of Asian descent need to look back.  Not just because Asian films were used as examples in the documentary; Asian male directors are shown to be problematic. When a binary view of racism is applied, women of Asian descent might still be subjected to the male gaze. Further, the point of narrative position should not be lost on Asians and Asian Americans who have too often been bystanders in stories ostensibly about them or taking place in their locales (e.g. Chinatown, Hawaii) or even foreign countries where the focus is on a White person amongst non-White people. 

Brainwashed: Sex-Camera-Power is essentially a college lecture on films with information that also can be applied to other visual arts. Brainwashed: Sex-Camera-Power premiered at Sundance Film Festival 2022. 

For a longer essay on this film, visit AgeOfTheGeek.org. Follow me on Twitter, Instagram or TikTok.

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