For the final quarter of Humanities Core, we are free to explore our personal interests about war further in depth for the Research Project. We must choose an artifact from the time period we want to study and analyze its importance. I want to research whether portrayals of Orientalism in the media are used to retroactively justify decisions such as imperialism or the Vietnam War. I chose this topic because I found Edward Said’s theory of Orientalism very thought-provoking and wondered if it can apply to contemporary society. In addition to that, I have not seen a lot of contemporary analysis on Orientalism of Southeast Asia. My initial inspiration was when I watched the film No Escape, which seemed blatantly racist and problematic. I narrowed and refined my topic by further researching the concepts of Orientalism and otherness, and considered how they could be applied to this film. Sources that have been key in defining my research topic include scholarly articles on Orientalism and otherness and film reviews.
My artifact is director John Erick Dowdle‘s film No Escape, which was released in the U.S. on August 26, 2015. No Escape is about an American family, the Dwyers, who move to an unspecified Southeast Asian country because the father, Jack Dwyer, gets a job there. Shortly after their arrival, they find themselves amidst an insurgency and struggle to survive. The film largely focuses on how this rebellion impacts the Dwyers rather than Southeast Asians, whom this insurgency affects more. Dowdle’s most popular films have been horror films. In No Escape, he successfully terrifies the audience throughout the film in a way similar to horror movies. Director John Erick Dowdle works with his brother Drew Dowdle, who is the producer of the film. In 2007, John visited Thailand shortly after it experienced a peaceful insurgency; during his trip there, he began to wonder what would happen if he was stuck in a foreign country in a more violent insurrection, which inspired his idea for No Escape.
No Escape was filmed in various Southeast Asian countries, including Thailand, Vietnam, and Cambodia. I found it interesting that the film never specified the exact setting and only referred to it as a Southeast Asian country. I thought that that this conflated all Southeast Asian countries and classified them as “the other.” However, upon further research, I discovered that No Escape was inspired by an insurrection in Thailand. Dowdle chose not to identify the setting in order to honor the request of the Thai government. To comply with the Thai government, Dowdle also had to avoid using the Thai language, the color yellow because it is associated with the king, and depictions of the Buddha. In addition to that, Dowdle claimed that it was actually an anti-interventionist message because the rebellion arose from American exploitation of Southeast Asian resources, notably the water manufacturing company that Jack Dwyer works for. However, I think that this message falls short due to the portrayal of the Southeast Asian rebels as relentlessly violent, dehumanized killers. This particularly reminded me of Orientalism, which argues that the West reduces foreign countries—such as those in Southeast Asia—to primitive, broad stereotypes in order to establish the West as superior to them. In the past, this idea has been used to justify Western imperialism because it falsely framed imperialism as helping civilize a less advanced society. I think a similar dichotomy is present in No Escape because it characterizes the Dwyer family as innocent Americans who unfortunately got caught up in a Southeast Asian rebellion, while it characterizes the Southeast Asian rebels as one-dimensional characters who only care about terrorizing Southeast Asian civilians and foreigners.
I picked the film No Escape as my artifact because it really stood out to me as a problematic depiction of Southeast Asia in the media. Instead of picking a topic first and then finding an artifact, I did it the other way around. When I saw this film, I noted that I might want to consider it for my research paper (and previously blogged about it). No Escape really opened my eyes to the kind of harmful depictions of other cultures in the media and made me wonder about the function of these portrayals. My working thesis about No Escape is that it unintentionally contributes to American xenophobia, which makes it a contributor to Americans’ collective memory about events such as imperialism and the Vietnam War. I plan to find out more about my artifact by researching the film’s production through interviews with the cast and crew, film reviews that address whether or not the film is racist, and the events that transpired in Thailand that loosely inspired this movie.
Humanization through Empathy 