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Techno-Orientalism in i\itX-M en Film
Franchise
The first film in the X-Men film series premiered in 2000 and
was both a critical and box-office success and was one of the precursors
to establish comic-book films as marketable and profitable projects that
led to the massive successes of such franchises as The Dark Knight and
Iron Man. Prior to this, films based on comic-book heroes were certainly
not novelties as films like Spawn (1997) and Blade (1998) were released
and garnered moderate success due to the already built-in demographic
of fans of the source material. However, it was the first X-Men film that
demonstrated the considerable global appeal of comic-book films and
their potential for economic and artistic success. While earlier films like
Superman (1978) and Batman (1989) were wildly popular in their
respective time periods, they did not act as catalysts for the deluge of
comic-book films in the marketplace or have studios clamoring for such
projects in the same fashion as X-Men did. X-Men has gone on to spawn
numerous sequels with much more on the way (e.g. The Wolverine
(2013) and X-Men: Days o f Future Past (2014)) and has become one of
the more successful comic-book franchises in terms of both ticket sales
and fan and critic approval. However, the beloved nature and the
immense popularity of the X-Men films exacerbated the questionable
depictions of Asian/Americans as a neo-yellow peril with TechnoOrientalist imagery. At the crux of this article is the examination of the
Asian/American presence in various films in the series and how TechnoOrientalism manifests itself in these films.
Initially, the term “yellow peril” referred to Chinese immigrants
or “coolies” during the mid-19"’ century, but later referenced Imperial
Japan during World War II and again during the 1980s with the rise of
Japanese corporations in various industries. The term connoted the belief
that Asian (mainly Chinese) immigration to the U.S., and later the
military and economic expansion by the Japanese threatened a
Eurocentric worldview and standard of life. Anti-Asian sentiment was
ramp