Hollywoods China Doll - Dragon Lady Syndrome - Movie Review Example

Wong is an important figure in American film history worked, who paved the way for contemporary Chinese and Asian actresses in American film. The thesis relies on a large body of existing research and studies, including the work and ideas of renowned scholar and author Edward Said, whose published journals and books on colonialism and Orientalism are cited in the thesis. Three 21st century American films are the subject of examination in this thesis to assess the progress made in portraying Chinese and American women in other than the stereotypical image of the China Doll and Dragon Lady.

In the movie Young Guns (1988), actor Kiefer Sutherland, in character as the romantic poet Doc Scurlock, falls in love with a young Chinese woman, Yen Sun (Alice Carter). For Sutherland’s character, it is love at first sight. Playing Yen Sun, Alice Carter is the young woman, Scurlock learns, from his friend, exchanged for a shirt ruined in a laundry. The man whose shirt was ruined is Murphy (Jack Palance), a local bad guy. “He took the celestial woman’s daughter as payment,” Scurlock is advised by his friend, Alex (Terry O’Quinn).

The reference to the “celestial woman,” and the fact that the woman owned a laundry, is typical of the role and character in which Hollywood has long cast Chinese women. Stereotyping Chinese women in film has been a repeated pattern from the early days of American cinema. That Sutherland’s American character falls in love with the daughter of the “celestial woman” and Yen Sun, having been offered as compensation for a ruined shirt, combined with the fact that Alice Carter, who is strikingly beautiful, and very ethnic in appearance; is a storyline and a depiction typical of the Hollywood portrayal of Chinese women.

It is part of Hollywood’s China Doll/Dragon Lady Syndrome.For purposes of this thesis, that depiction and the combination of elements that facilitate the stereotyping of Chinese and Asian women – because Hollywood often does not distinguish ethnicity in portraying Asian women – is what shall be referred to here as the “China Doll” Syndrome.