本文是对于对台湾导演李安执导的喜宴和断背山两部电影去谈论略论种族和性别的范文。本文主要从电影人物的形象以及在电影扮演的角色、电影的场景背景以及事件发展的进一步阐述略论，英语论文网站，从中也对种族和性别歧视进行抨击。
For the final , I will explore the gender and racial representation in the movies of The Wedding Banquet and Brokeback Mountain with the method of research and production. The two movies are directed by the same Taiwanese director, Ang Lee. I choose the director because he is the only Chinese director who has won Oscar awards and I choose the two movies because they are Ang Lee’s two best representative movies. For Brokeback Mountain, I think I don’t have to emphasize on the popularity. As for The Wedding Banquet, it “was the most successful ‘box office hit in Taiwanese history’ to that time. In the United States, The Wedding Banquet became the most profitable film of 1993 in terms of “percentage of return on its cost”(The Wedding Banquet AFI Catalog). I want to make a comparison between the two movies first because both of them center on homosexual relationship, from which I can draw many similarities. Second The Wedding Banquet was made in 1993 while the other one was made in 2017 and the time span lasts for more than a decade. So I think the evidence will be much stronger to reveal the producers’ influence on making the movies. The last reason I choose them is because The Wedding Banquet was co-produced between Taiwan and the United States, which aims to attract both Taiwanese and American audience. For Brokeback Mountain, the producer company is from America and the audiences are mainly white people, which would make good examples to compare racial representations between the two.
The will devote most of its part to discuss the gender and racial representation of Chinese people, so The Wedding Banquet will be much more discussed than Brokeback Mountain since there is not a single Chinese actor in the movie. The will first dwell on the objectification of Chinese women from the aspect of white producers in The Wedding Banquet. Second, I will focus on Weitong(leading actor of The Wedding Banquet)'s bread-winner role in the same sex relationship from the perspective of Ang Lee as a Chinese director. At last, I will make a comparison between the two movies about the racial representation from the aspect of the male masculinity.
It’s a fact that Chinese women have very inferior positions in China’s old society and their only duty is to give birth to sons so that the family’s surname can be carried on forever. However, what shocks me most is that Weitong’s father pretends not knowing his son’s sex-orientation just to have a grandson. Grandson is important, but normally fathers would be more devastated by the sons’ behavior. In the movie, Weiwei(Weitong’s fake wife) is considered to make great contribution to the family by being pregnate. Weiwei totally serves as an object in this movie. What Rosalind says in “Supersexualize me-Advertising and the ‘Mid-riffs’” is exactly in accordance with Weiwei’s objectified position in the movie. “…the notion of objectification no longer has the analytic purchase to understand many contemporary constructions of femininity. Increasingly, young women are presented not as passive sex objects, but as active, desiring sexual subjects, who seem to participate enthusiastically in practices and forms of self-presentation that earlier generations of feminists regarded as connected to subordination...(Gill 255)”.
Many may argue that the image of Weiwei is not objectified or traditional at all because she is struggling alone in America for her dream as an artist. She did make the decision to have abortion because she didn’t want to sacrifice her future for the kid, but at the last moment, she changed her mind and everyone in the movie is satisfied including Simon, Weitong’s white boyfriend. I think the arrangement of Weiwei having the baby is an act of objectification. It is a decision which tells the audience that she decides to put her kid above her career. Although the movie is directed by a Chinese director and partly produced by Central Motion Pictures Corporation, a Taiwanese company, it’s also produced by an American company, Good Machine and distributed by Samuel Goldwyn Company. So the movie also has to cater for the white society. To western countries, Chinese women would never give up a baby for the sake of career, even when she is already in America because in Chinese women can never change the subordinate role in the family. “In every situation, the Chinese woman is almost always the subordinate, whether she is the abused spouse of the Chinese man, or the loyal lover of the white man. (Said 1979)” (Leng ).
What intrigues me most about The Wedding Banquet is its representation of Weitong’s lover, a white man. It seems very sarcastic since Asian gay men are always despised by the white gay men as feminine or sissy (citation). They are the invisible ones in American society. However, in this movie, Simon obviously plays the wife role in his relationship with Weitong while Weitong is the breadwinner. Weitong is a boss and busy with his career while Simon is the staying-home “wife”, busy cooking food and taking care of Weitong’s parents. Simon is portrayed as an even more qualified wife than Weiwei, a Chinese woman. Traditional Chinese family values are vividly portrayed in this film. Back in 1993, men were the breadwinners in Chinese families and the responsibility of wives were cooking and taking care of the elderly or younger family members. It’s very funny that Simon seems to be created as a typical Chinese woman. I think the portrayal of Simon is mainly due to the director. First it is Simon’s excellent cooking skill. Ang Lee has been a fan of food since he was a child. He said in an interview that “ ‘Food is a serious matter in Chinese culture,... It's always changing, and for the past 200 years Western influences have been tremendous.... Food is something we {Chinese} can be proud of and sell to the whole world (Taiwanese Filmmaker Sees His Art As a Delightful Culinary Adventure)”. So I believe for Ang Lee, cooking delicious food is a necessary quality for a wife.
The structure of Weitong and Simon’s relationship also comes from Ang Lee’s Chinese identity. For him, China had been a feudal society for thousands of years. So even when Weitong is in America with his gay boyfriend, the couple is still a typical Chinese couple. “ Lee explores this situation on a miniature scale in his movies about family life. ‘The father always stands for the head of the old patriarchal society’ (“Taiwanese Filmmaker Sees His Art As a Delightful Culinary Adventure”)”.
Although both of the two movies are about gay characters, the representation of the characters is starkly different. When I watch The Wedding Banquet, it’s gentle and warming but all I feel about Brokeback Mountain is violence and helplessness. “The officer was later informed that he faces punishment for allegedly failing to evaluate the film for content not permitted in prison: excessive violence, nudity, sexual content, or assaults on prison staff (Satzman)”. As is discussed in the previous chapter, Simon is depicted as a feminine figure in the movie even as a white person. Their love between each other is often manifested in the dinner table. By contrast, Jack and Ennis are both masculine and their love is often presented by their fight. Jack Katz says that “This doesn't mean that all men are violent but that violent behavior is considered masculine (as opposed to feminine) behavior (Katz 261)”. The blood in Ennis’s shirt becomes a symbol for their love. Unlike The Wedding Banquet, Brokeback Mountain is both produced and distributed by the American company, Focus Features [NBC Universal] (Brokeback Mountain, AFI Catalog). The Wedding Banquet is both in Chinese and English and co-produced between Taiwan and America. So the target audiences for this movie are both Chinese people and American people. The language of Brokeback Mountain is English and all the actors and actresses are westerners. So we can see its target audiences are first white people. To make the movie more acceptable or make profit as much as possible, the portrayal of the characters would sure conform to the stereotypical thinking of the white society. White men characters always expose their muscled bodies to show their masculinity in television shows. In The Wedding Banquet, there are only two scenarios in which Weitong is building up his body in the gym, which can be the description of Weitong's masculinity. But for Simon, the only time he exercises is being the company of Weitong's father, which is only a task of being a good “daughter-in-law”.
Despite that The Wedding Banquet is produced by Taiwanese and Taiwanese company, Chinese women are still objectified because the movie is also targeted for Western audiences. However, the director's Chinese identity ironically turns a white man into a Chinese “female”. To create a model Chinese family, Simon is being feminized to be a good cook and carer for the family members. The character's white man image is obviously misrepresented by Ang Lee. To carry out the director's interest in Chinese cuisine but maintains a typical Chinese family at the same time, Simon has no choice but to be the substitute of a Chinese wife. China’s patriarchal family structure is vividly presented in this movie. White men's masculinity is always exaggerated in media forms, but nothing about white men masculinity is shown in this movie. Both as a movie illustrating same sex love, The Wedding Banquet is through producing a traditional Chinese family while Brokeback Mountain is through violence. Because the first movie is collaborative work of both Chinese and American producers and the target audiences are from the two countries while Brokeback Mountain is mainly targeted for the western audiences. So from The Wedding Banquet, we see a Chinese couple in the American society while in Brokeback Mountain, what is presented are two stereotypical white men, two masculine men. “Though the main characters in Brokeback Mountain, Jack Twist and Ennis del Mar, both marry and have children, it’s stated explicitly in the story and strongly indicated in the movie that their primary sexual and emotional attractions are to men. Both strongly identify as masculine in a culture that constructs desire between men as negating masculinity (Paterson xxi)”.
Bibliography
Jackson Katz. “Advertising and the Construction of Violent White Masculinity: From BMWs to Bud Light.” In Gender, race, and class in media: a critical reader. 3rd ed., edited by Dines, Gail, Jean McMahon Humez, Thousand Oaks, Calif.: SAGE
Publications, 2017.328.
Rosalind Gill, 2017. “Supersexualize me-Advertising and the ‘Mid-riffs’ In Gender, race, and class in media: a critical reader. 3rd ed., edited by Dines, Gail, Jean McMahon Humez, Thousand Oaks, Calif.: SAGE.
Eric Patterson “On Brokeback Mountain-Meditatins about Masculinity, Fear, and Love in the Story and the Film”. Lexinton Books web. https://books.google.sg/books?hl=zh-CN&lr=&id=jUd3AAAAQBAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PR3&dq=Brokeback/Mountain&ots=n4rzsVsa4T&sig=RRt-XwOowzwh7uaPH0Yq_ei-aDg#v=onepage&q=Brokeback%20Mountain&f=false
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“Taiwanese Filmmaker Sees His Art As a Delightful Culinary Adventure” Report Information from ProQuest The Christian Science Monitor- The Christian Science Publishing Society 1994 Boston:
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Jonathan Saltzman “State Pans Decision to Show Inmates Brokeback Mountain” 2017 Boston Globe Globe News Company, Inc.
?accountid=14784
The Wedding Banquet AFI Catalog ?action=BYID&FILE=../session/1425980269_4443&ID=59703
Brokeback Mountain AFI Catalog ?action=BYID&FILE=../session/1426072055_8578&ID=54466
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