‘Die Another Day’ Indeed…

Feb 22, 2019 (original date)

Note: anything with “thoughts” in it means that the post is going to be very colloquial and organic.

Anyway, ‘Die Another Day’ got me thinking about this weird trope where an East Asian character transfers from their original body into a white one. Now, in this movie the process is very painful and invasive. The person has their bone marrow completely drained and replaced with that of a stranger who was “riff raff” and presumed to be the dregs of society and wouldn’t be missed. This character is even weirder because he despises white people (especially the British) and is the main villain. Yet he becomes what he hates to push an agenda. What am I supposed to get out of that?

This ties into some other threads. 1) Whites’ fantasy about merging with POC identity but only taking the parts they want. For example, Black coolness/swagger and “exoticisim” of East Asia and it’s “mystique”. 2) Whites’ believing POC (especially white adjacent) want to be them to the point of the destruction of the self. 

What’s interesting is that whites value East Asians more than Black people because they see actual live Asians as people enough to fantasize and that they’ll be more obedient as droids. (this is a tangent... and honestly it took me forever to decipher what I wrote in my journal like what are you doing...)

Side note: interesting that Bond himself went through light plastic surgery to do yellow face as a Japanese man then later Bond’s villain is a (North) Korean colonel who uses Sci Fi tech to rearrange his DNA to make him white at the expense of his ability to sleep and stay sane without the assistance of a “dream machine”.

Tech making an East Asian character white is disturbing to me. Oftentimes a lot of tech we have now is associated with E. Asia (China, Korea, and Japan.) So it’s kind of like this weird double edged sword. In the sci-fi drama Advantageous, this is explored via using a white body (very literally) to advance in society. This movie comments on whiteness still being the driving force for success, no matter how far into the future we are or think we are... This movie gets so much right because it was actually directed by an Asian woman and has Asian leads (and crew if I remember correctly). This is a stretch but both the N Korean colonel and Gwen use whiteness to advance their agendas, although Gwen’s is more noble, she wants to ensure her daughter’s future while the colonel wants to prove himself to his father and run the world with a giant laser. Only one here had their heart in a good place and not written by a weirdo white man. Putting aside the glaring differences in their source material and creators, Gwen also has motherhood and that sense of motherly duty on her conscience. Speaking of which, each time a character transfers from their Asian body into a white one they lose all or most of their consciousness.  1) In the Bond film ‘Die Another Day’ the colonel’s sanity is at stake because of the procedure’s major side effect insomnia. 2) In Advantageous, the procedure is very new and Gwen is the first patient. Her original consciousness is lost in the process and her memories are bound to this Gwen 2.0/twin in hopes of copying the original (& playing God). This brings me to 3) which ties into Ghost in the Shell (both the shitty live action and the original) The Major’s body is simply a vessel and personality and consciousness and the soul etc does not transfer over completely. The self, we should know, is greatly affected by the body and the politics that surround that body. Some Asian characters who had a choice (within the canon/narrative) use whiteness to further their goals while others like Live Action Makoto/the Major or the main character of Altered Carbon did not really have a choice (either in the creative process and/or in the actual canon/narrative.) Those who are given a choice (and not tainted by weird identity stealing whites) are able to make social commentary about what it means to be an Asian person and explore the self. 

Meanwhile, those who are denied a choice become unrealistic, hollow and poorly written. I cannot personally comment on Altered Carbon but I will watch it one day.

Whitewashing Asian roles says a lot. Aside from them not caring about Asian people it also gives way to be interpreted as Asians being a downgrade as if whiteness is the peak of humanity. So the process of an Asian body transferring its selfhood to a new “improved” white body is racist!