What does (the late) Hollywood director, Irving Cummings (Down Argentine Way [1940], That Night in Rio [1941]) have in common with Franklin Delano Roosevelt?
Is it their mutual love of cinema? Nope. It's neocolonialism.
Ana Lopez emphasizes the importance of viewing Hollywood as an ethnographer which actively creates its own cultural realities. She says that Hollywood is not only “reproducer of fixed and homogeneous cultures or ideologies”, it is also “a producer of some of the multiple discourses that intervene in, affirm, and contest the socioideological struggles of a given moment” (Lopez, 405). Lopez then zeros in on American movies which depict Latin America or Latin American people post WWI during FDR’s “Good Neighbor” policy days.
For political and economic reasons, the US suddenly saw Latin America as a viable market for film; this coincided with the campaign to familiarize US citizens with Latin Americans, demonstrating these foreigners' benignity by promoting supposedly "common" (cultural) interests.
Lopez writes: “Hollywood's policies in the Good Neighbor period were directed by the assumption that Latin Americans would flock to see themselves created by Hollywood in glorious Technicolor and with an unexpected linguistic fluency” (ibd, 408).
This induced a shift in the depictions of Latin Americans which went from purely offensive caricatures and villains to a non-threatening, entertaining, exotic other. Interestingly enough, the quintessential “Latin” star from the American silver screen in this period was Carmen Miranda who was actually born in Portugal and not in Latin America. Her Brazilian-ness was played up to the maximum despite the fact that she came from a colonizing European country. Carmen Miranda's brand of sexy exoticism was all the more palatable to white audiences since Carmen looked (and was) more white than most of her fellow Brazilians.
Carmen Miranda in her classic tropical glam garb
And yet, despite this new fetishization and romanticization of Latin America, the old vein of othering ethnography remained alive and well. However, this time, it often took the form of (un-subtle) coding within the horror and fantasy genres.
The Cummings/Miranda brand of modern pseudo-ethnographic cinema, cloaked in sparkles and tropical fruit hats, exists on a parallel track to the more sinister depictions (which were often more symbolic/less overt) which still drew on fears of the ethnic other: the monster movie.
While Hollywood developed this exotic tradition for Latin America, it never stopped expressing that id of xenophobia/racism/colonialism. Fatimah Tobing Rony writes on the parallels between ethnographic and horror cinema. She claims that the narrative structure and the fear-inducing elements of monster movies and ethnographic documentaries are similar.
King Kong (1933), for instance, “takes its cue from the historic exploitation of native peoples as freakish ‘ethnographic’ specimens by science, cinema, and popular culture” (Rony, 242). King Kong was actually explicitly inspired by a zoological expedition film about finding the mysterious Komodo Dragon and being the first whites to see and conquer this beast. That film, by a man called Burner, has some real colonial overtones in the ways he and his team operate and in descriptions of the natives.
By the same token, monster movies, including the quintessential King Kong, often follow the same expeditional structure as zoological and anthropological films: onset, discovery, confirmation, confrontation (Rony, 246). Moreover, the fear-causing parts about the monster movie are the same fears that audiences experience watching films of far-flung primitives. They fear impurity, danger, and the transgression of boundaries-- the boundary between wild and civilization, between animal/alien and human, etc.
Thus, the concept of hybridity factors into these fears. In Rony’s words, “The horror film genre works because the audience is fascinated by the monster’s impurity, its hybridity, and because it is curious to get at the heart of this unknowable…” (ibd, 250). King Kong is a hybrid figure, not quite ape and certainly not man. So too, audiences are led to believe, are Indigenes who are cultural hybrids between the civilized and the strange. This is not to mention the frequent fears of miscegenation invoked by movies like King Kong (the black coded creature captures a white woman [Hund & Mills]) and in ethnographic texts and movies. The researcher who made the Komodo dragon film which directly inspired King Kong, Burden, writes explicitly about his disgust for race mixing: "it is the body of the racially mixed hybrid which Burden finds loathsome” (ibd, 248).
Sources
López, Ana M. “Are All Latins from Manhattan? Hollywood, Ethnography, and Cultural Colonialism.” Mediating Two Worlds: Cinematic Encounters in the Americas, BFI, London, 1993, pp. 405–424.
Tobing Rony, Fatimah. “King Kong and the Monster in Ethnographic Cinema.” The Horror Reader, edited by Ken Gelder, Routledge, 2000, pp. 242–250.
Hund, Wulf D., and Charles W. Mills . “Comparing Black People to Monkeys Has a Long, Dark Simian History.” The Conversation, 24 Jan. 2022, https://theconversation.com/comparing-black-people-to-monkeys-has-a-long-dark-simian-history-55102.
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