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An 1898 Thomas Edison film, entitled Dancing Chinamen-Marionettes, consists of one scene-a stage set on which we see two marionettes on strings next to each other, facing us. For the duration of the brief film the marionettes are pulled up by the strings above ground, then quickly let down until they sit on the ground doing splits, pulled up, let down, pulled up, let down, and so on. This movement within the static shot creates an image of a strangely multijointed body, a body that is definitely "foreign" -coded as "Chinese." Such a mobile body, whose limbs seem to be able to perform physically impossible feats, reveals a strange fascination with precisely this kind of "strange" body and, at the same time, a considerable aggression. After all, the marionettes are on strings, moved by an invisible hand.
Such aggression is much more visible in Chinese Rubbernecks (American Mutoscope and Biograph, 1903), in which one Chinese laundry man grabs the head of another Chinese man and pulls it until the neck extends across the entire screen before it springs back, a feat made possible by the use of a dummy head and a dummy neck. Revealing white fantasies about the emerging Chinese presence in the United States, these films suggest not only the physical aggression directed toward the Chinese body, but also a fascination with the Chinese body that gets coded as strangely extendable and mutable. The use of props-marionettes and dummy body parts-in both Dancing Chinamen-Marionettes and Chinese Rubbernecks ground the representation of the Chinese in fantasies of magical, bodily transformations beyond the physically possible.2 More implicitly than explicitly, these two films reveal fantasies not only about Chinese bodies but also about the white spectators' own transformations in the wake of the emergence of U.S. Chinatowns. In the 1890s, as part of the larger development of the intraurban tourist industry, New York City's Chinatown became the object of a considerable slumming craze.3 American magazines began to feature essays on Chinatowns, describing menus in Chinese restaurants, the offerings in Chinese curio shops, and the enclaves' inhabitants.4 By 1909, so-called rubberneck automobiles, accompanied by a "megaphone man," who provided a commentary on the urban landscape, would take the curious spectator on a tour through Chinatown, which included visits to a joss house, a theater, and a restaurant.5 The emergence of rubbernecking as a new form of entertainment -the term was coined in the United States in the 1890s-suggests that the title of Chinese Rubbernecks was hardly coincidental.6 The film displaces rubbernecking onto a racialized body, but its literalization also associates this new form of leisure with bodily transformations. Of course, white rubbernecking tourists would hardly be transformed in such a physical, literal way. With its ascending rows of seats, the rubberneck automobile looked like a moving theater, which suggests that rubbernecking revolved around fantasies of self-transformation, rather than physical mutations.
The difference between the rubberneck automobile and the movies lay, among other things, in the price. Chinatown trips cost one to two dollars and would have attracted an (upper) middle-class audience, many of whom must have been tourists visiting New York City.7 Movies, on the other hand, made Chinatown available for consumption to the masses. Actuality films, such as Chinese Procession, No. 12 (Edison, 1898), Parade of Chinese (Edison, 1898), and San Francisco Chinese Funeral (Edison, 1903), captured apparently unstaged scenes in open, urban space, often privileging moments of celebration; more apparently staged films, such as Scene in Chinese Restaurant (American Mutoscope and Biograph, 1903), Chinese Shaving Scene (Edison, 1902), and Scene in Chinatown (American Mutoscope and Biograph, 1903), showed scenes from everyday life; other films, such as The Heathen Chinese and the Sunday School Teachers (American Mutoscope and Biograph, 1904) and Rube in an Opium Joint (American Mutoscope and Biograph, 1905), exploited popular fantasies about Chinatown; and some films, particularly Lifting the Lid (American Mutoscope and Biograph, 1905) and The Deceived Slumming Party (American Mutoscope and Biograph, 1908), closely modeled themselves after actual slumming tours. Once they became available for consumption of both working-class and middle-class Americans, Chinatown tours and Chinatown films, I argue in this essay, provided white viewers and slummers with fantasies of magical (self-) transformations.
Such fantasies, as well as the pleasures of Chinatown tourism in general, have received little attention in recent work on American Chinatowns' emergence into national consciousness, which has usually stressed how popular depictions of Chinatown served to reinforce racial distinctions and maintain the status quo. James Moy, for instance, has located early U.S. representations of the Chinese in the context of a commodified, dehumanized spectacle, in which they were exhibited as an "objectified or dead Other," a strategy meant to establish Americans' imperial superiority.8 And Sumiko Higashi has suggested that slum films "objectified and commodified the urban 'Other' " in order to reinforce "social hierarchies."9 In the logic of these accounts, Chinatown tourism and early Chinatown films helped stabilize the middle-class, imperial nation.
While I do not disagree with the claim that such representations ultimately maintained racial hierarchies, the focus on stability does not quite explain the fascination with mobility, mutability, and bodily transformations in Dancing Chinamen-Marionettes and Chinese Rubbernecks. In this essay, I want to address how the production and consumption of Chinatown may simultaneously assert a white hegemony even as it grants its viewers and tourists access to new, rather than old, mobile, rather than static, subjectivities. My objective here is to further explore the cultural logic of commodification by not presuming commodification's static quality but by accounting for its fascination with mutability, mobility, and bodily transformations. In doing so, I partially follow Gaylyn Studlar, who has recently argued that orientalism in U.S. film provided white women with new "transformative identities," as well as Esther Romeyn, who comes to a very similar conclusion in her study of the anti-Chinese hysteria surrounding the murder of Elsie Sigel-a young, white woman whose dead body was found in the apartment of a Chinese man in 1909.10 I do not presume, however, that Chinatown appealed almost exclusively to women (although its pleasures were certainly gendered), and I do not presume that the "transformative identities" Chinatown offered were congruent with those of the New Woman.11 Instead, I argue that the commodification of Chinatown and the filming of Chinatown imagined new kinds of vision, and new ways of engaging the racialized metropolis.
I want to bring into view three structures of representation and experience-a surface aesthetic, multisensorial perceptions, and an aesthetic of fakeness-that became available to viewers around the turn of the twentieth century. Along the way, I wish to show how early Chinatown films appropriated a form of urban spectatorship already familiar from sightseeing tours and the popular iconography developed in mass-circulation magazines, while they also struggled to establish the specificity of their own medium. The new kinds of experience and spectatorship made available in magazines, on tours, and on film constituted a complex negotiation of the contradictory presence of the Chinese in the United States, who had been banned by the Exclusion Act of 1882, but who were already present in the country. For David Palumbo-Liu, it is precisely this presence despite the exclusion that makes the Chinese in the United States the harbinger and sign of the modernity of the United States, a nation defined by its new focus on "the management of a newly defined interiority."12 The emergence of Chinatown in New York City seemed to require some sort of bodily and psychic response and transformation on the part of white Americans. Tours to Chinatown and Chinatown films, I want to suggest, helped manage this new interiority by giving white Americans a new sense of self and a new sensorial experience. On Chinatown tours and in Chinatown films, white viewers and tourists could experience not a stable, hierarchical regime, but a regime predicated on fluidity and bodily transformations, as well as a fundamentally modern subjectivity not grounded in concepts of identification or stable identity. Rather than altering social and racial hierarchies in everyday life, such new ways of experiencing themselves and the city, I would suggest, ultimately allowed white Americans to negotiate-and be in control of-a racialized, urban modernity.
A few years later, such a cultural exchange with the Chinese and Chinatown was theorized by cultural critics across the Atlantic, particularly by Karl Kraus and Siegfried Kracauer. Writing in response to the murder of Elsie Sigel, Kraus, a Viennese satirist, suggested that the outrage generated by the murder revealed white male Western society's fear of a Chinese "superman," who commands past, present, and future, and who can take all guises and perform all roles.13 Writing a decade after Kraus, Kracauer used a passing reference to the Chinese as a way of thinking about how urban filmic spectatorship allowed its viewers to entertain fantasies of radical transformations: "It [the human spirit] squats as a fake Chinaman in a fake opium den, transforms itself into a trained dog that performs ludicrously clever tricks to please a film diva, gathers up into a storm amid towering mountain peaks, and turns into both a circus artist and a lion at the same time. How could it resist these metamorphoses?"14 In Kracauer's scenario, modern urbanity in general and the cinema in particular foster a fantasy of a series of transformations that leave the spectator's body behind and that are "global" in that they are not limited by geography, nation, gender, or even species.