Cultural representation and cultural violence in the Jammed

Jan
2009 11

Cultural representation and cultural violence in the Jammed

Category: Edition 6 - Passing, Failing
Tags: Essay

Cultural representation and cultural violence in The Jammed

By: Selvin Kwong and Jen Tsen Kwok

No longer is it sufficient to ask how stereotypes injure real human beings. Rather, it becomes necessary to consider exactly how stereotypes duplicate and imitate, and what they can tell us about the negative acts that are often attributed to them – injury, violence, and aggression – and the assumptions that support such attributions.

Rey Chow, The Protestant Ethnic and the Spirit of Capitalism, p. 54.

Is it possible that bad films are judged by a different set of standards when they happen to be ‘important’? Looking back at The Jammed, an independent Australian thriller about sex trafficking in Melbourne, a film almost universally lauded after its August 2007 release, we come to either of two conclusions: Australians are too parochial and will support bad films as long as their politics are good, or worse, Australian cinema has some way to go before it comes to terms with cultural diversity in the twenty-first century.

The Jammed is a political film that attempts to represent Australia’s modern ‘subalterns’, the voiceless and exploited women ‘jammed’ between global capitalism’s voracious hunger for human lives, and the borders which govern them. With this political representation in mind, we would assume that it would be sensitive to portrayals of cultural difference, and that it would extend beyond the cultural generalisations we are accustomed to in popular media.

In assembling its political vision we would expect that it would pause long enough to try to also assemble the lifeworlds of its subjects, not only in terms of the ‘truth’ of their exploitation, but with an intention to represent these strangers with some of the language and behaviours of their cultural origins. Beyond the presumed ability for such a film to connect a broader audience to its characters, some of its strength must surely rely upon the possibility that somewhere in Australia people like this exist. However, instead of empathy one can be left with the kind of response you have when watching badly-dubbed kung fu films.

What we find in this film is that most of the characters resembled a mish-mash of ‘Asian’ stereotypes, in particular regarding their fake foreign accents. The various Chinese or Vietnamese characters, be they the trafficked women or pimps, were generally not of those linguistic origins. Crystal, the half-Shanghainese spoke English with more of a European accent, whilst Rubi and Sunni, either spoke very bad Cantonese with each other or at least one of them did not speak Cantonese at all. The relationships between the characters were also lacking in authenticity. Take two of the main characters, Crystal and Rubi, who were both allegedly Chinese. In a foreign country, under duress, it is likely that these women would talk to each other in Chinese, but they did not. Neither did the women appear to find it difficult or at least challenging to communicate with each other in English, at least in a way that would dampen their intimacy. Instead, there were scenes of intimacy between the women which portrayed them as though they were posing for a girlfriend magazine.

Yes, the accents were bad, but underpinning these defects were more serious deficiencies in the cultural translation in the film. The character in search of her daughter, Sunni, probably represented one of the worst examples of Asian stereotyping. She was portrayed as illiterate, incapable, and demanding unrealistic things of the white female protagonist, as though she had just come out of a fishing village. As far as Rubi was concerned, if she was half-white in Shanghai, she would have had immense cultural capital, and probably would not have had to get into Australia by trafficking.

The great concern in the failure to think through cultural translation leads us to wonder who the film was written for, and why the filmmakers would permit the exclusion of audience members who could not recognise these young women as members of anything but an awkwardly fictive reality. The concern becomes that a film bearing the flag of ‘good politics’ might also be programmed with ‘bad stereotypes’.

Beneath its surface, The Jammed is a film beholden in equal measure to cultural insensitivity, as it is to moral outrage. Its failed cultural translation reveals a perhaps even more disturbing voyeurism for a voiceless and exoticised other. Maybe if The Jammed hadn’t done the NGO rounds of World Vision’s Don’t Trade Lives and the UN’s Conference on Human Trafficking it could have been left to flounder. But having been elevated to the mantle of ‘important’ Australian cinema, it is relevant to situate it as yet another ‘iteration’ about who gets left behind, according to the identity politics of mainstream Australia. For a film that was set to inform its audience about globalisation, The Jammed is very Western-centric, Orientalist, and failed to reflect the complex ways in which people of different nations and cultural origins are increasingly interlinked in the twenty-first century.

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About the Author: Selvin Kwong

2 Comments on “Cultural representation and cultural violence in the Jammed”

I read this article with great enthusiasm due to a long-time interest in the trafficking of women and children, which mostly stems from looking at issues of transnational adoption but also includes interviewing The Global Alliance Against Traffic in Women (GAATW) in Thailand about a project involving the films of sex-workers in 2001. I also have an interest in the welfare of females in Australia who’ve moved from situations of domestic violence and drug addiction to prostitution.

‘The Jammed’ is rendered important because it is one of the first fictional Australian-made films to deal with pockets of human-trade in our society, migrant females who are forced into prostitution. This is a topic that is different to the no less complex struggles and status of local, non-migrant sex-workers in Australia (whose stories are also sadly under-addressed in Australian cinema). Thus, despite its dramatic failings, ‘The Jammed’ might be seen as opening the door for better productions on ‘trafficking issues’ to follow, and done so through using recognisable Asian actors such as Lung who played an equally questionable half-Asian character, Steph, in ‘Peaches’ which garnered art-house critic approval.

The issue of poor cultural representation and stereotyping of Asianness does ask us to question why, in consulting with sex-workers for their story on trafficked women (if they did at all), did the filmmaker decide to compromise the ‘authenticity’ of the actors they used vis a vis the ethnicity of ALL the fictional characters. It is a necessary puzzle that cultural critics still need to unravel but to which this insightful and necessary critique raises many important starting points and questions. I would add, however, that the poor cultural stereotyping of the characters is also accompanied with what is an overly ‘clean’ picture of the violence and degradation that goes with forced prostitution, such as the scene where the women are taken to beach etc.

I was also not sure when to read the, at times, woodenness of the actors as bad cultural stereotyping of Asians, as the characters’ trauma-induced stammerings, or as just bad acting (yet I found some of their emotions believable and moving). I was also perhaps too easily ready to accept the portrayal of a mother who trafficked her daughter as being as vulnerable and socially awkward in a foreign country as she was portrayed. Alternatives exist but also might have also charted the dangerous territory of offering a self-destructive, addictive and greedy mother for example. How to portray grief-stricken and guilt burdened mothers who have ‘sold’ daughters is also something that filmmakers, reporters, researchers and many others have to struggle with. In addition, whilst the character Rubi’s interpretation of the ‘benefits’ of half-whites faring better in Shanghai also strips her of being more worldly or streetsmart, the circulation of ‘mixed’ race children on the global market does warrant some kind of inquiry as to whether mothers problematic beliefs about ‘half-whites’, amongst many other issues, does have a bearing on this situation.

For overseas alternatives on the lives of sex-workers, it is useful to turn to the “Documenting our Lives” (2001-2004) film project funded by The Global Alliance Against Traffic in Women (GAATW). This is a project in which groups of women were given training and equipment that allowed them to film their own stories, struggles and the evolving degrees of empowerment they achieve through solidarity with each other and relevant support groups. Titles include, ‘When We Walk the Streets’, ‘We are Women Too’ and ‘A Peep into the Silenced’.

For existing viewing on trafficking in Australia – I agree with the authors of this article that future efforts will be all the more important and worthy if they do their research, cast wisely and manage not to cross the line from dramatic realism to racial/cultural voyeurism.

by Indigo Willing on January 13, 2009 at 11:45 am.
[...] ‘Cultural Representation and Cultural Violence in the Jammed’ by Selvin Kwong and Jen Ts…: a review with discussion on the portrayal of Asian subcultures [...]

by You will submit to Peril’s ‘Why are people so unkind?’ « Thuy Linh Nguyen on September 9, 2009 at 11:22 am.