Cultural Voyeurism
March 14, 2018, by Ali
Jumping straight into the Low Life reading, one thing that really jumped out at me was the talk about European tourists mentioned in “The Rubberneckers”. The Europeans were fascinated by “the race mixing in New York slums” and “guided tours of Chinatown became a popular fad in the 1890s (Sante).” I thought this was really strange and it struck me as some kind of cultural voyeurism.
A policeman even summed it up by saying how “if [tourists] don’t see a few Chinamen disappearing down traps in the pavement pursued by somebody with a hatchet or a long curved knife, they haven’t had any fun and they go home disappointed (Sante).” I can’t help but find this kind of awful. It is almost as if they are treating the Chinese population of New York as animals in a zoo or some kind of entertainment that is there for their own amusement. But obviously, the people living in Chinatown are just trying to live their lives and have lives that are totally normal. But the Europeans tourists just want to see a scene from a book about “seedy Chinatown”.
This reminded me of people on social media who go to Africa or India or South America to “find themselves” and think they’re going to places that are totally different from the “first-world” countries they are in; going to a place “untouched by time” if you will. But in reality, all of those places are developed and modern and are not unlike America.
We also watched Downtown 81 this week. I looked it up on Wikipedia first and I thought that it was very strange that it wasn’t released until 2000. Even though it was actually shot in 1980/81, I guess they ran into some financial trouble in the mid-80’s causing the filmmakers to abandon the movie. They didn’t pick it back up again until 1999.
I wonder if the film would’ve had more of an impact if it was released in the mid-80’s like it was originally planned. Honestly, I kind of doubt it. Downtown 81 being released then would be like a biographical film about the 2016 election being released now. Nobody would want to see that, we all lived it.
One last thing to end on: there didn’t really seem to be a theme to the readings (and now movie) for the week. I feel like there always is but this week felt more disconnected. I guess technically all of it took place Downtown and that’s basically just the theme for the entire class. But now that I think about it, you probably haven’t been doing overarching themes; it’s probably in my head. Just something to think about.