When White Lives Matter Most
By leaving the location and its people nameless, the film No Escape re-enacts elements of the colonialism it pretends to be against.
Late in the thriller No Escape (2015) the white protagonist, Jack Dwyer (Owen Wilson), chats with a man named Hammond (Pierce Brosnan). On a rooftop, the two hide from an angry mob of Southeast Asian men intent on killing them.
A rogue who favors local “girls,” Hammond explains to Jack, “I’m the one who put your family in harm’s way.” What Brosnan’s character means is that white men like him — representing countries who exploit foreign lands — created the oppression, poverty, and hopelessness that has led to the kind of violence Jack’s family is currently facing.
This exchange is meant to be a moment of self-awareness in No Escape, a chance for the director to deflect criticism that his cinematic narrative, which follows an American family caught in Asia amidst a military coup, is in anyway insensitive. Yet, minutes later, Hammond gives his life to save the Dwyer family. He dies a hero at the hands of another nameless, vicious person of color.
In fact, though Brosnan’s Hammond might say he’s at fault for starting this mess, there are ultimately no white villains in No Escape. More to the point, by the end of the film, all of the white characters are all redeemed. Meanwhile, dozens of violent brown characters receive no such sympathy, let alone a specific backstory.
As we reflect on the year that’s passed since Michael Brown was murdered in Ferguson because a white man thought he was a “demon,” as transphobia continues to kill black and brown trans women at an epidemic rate, and as Donald Trump stokes false fears that swarms of Mexican “rapists” are crossing the border into the United States, here’s another Hollywood film excusing white supremacy and blatantly casting people of color in the role of monsters. Again, ironically, even as No Escape inches towards an acknowledgement of privilege, it does so, quite literally, through the further dehumanization of Southeast Asian people.
For instance, in one scene, Jack Dwyer scrambles to find somewhere to shield his family from a wild mob of men executing civilians in the street. The family lands in an office building that was attacked by the mob, the bodies of dead people of color scattered amongst the rubble. As the villains get nearer, Jack directs his wife, Annie (Lake Bell), and their two daughters, to move under an office table.
Our white protagonist, then, picks up one of the bodies and uses it as camouflage for his family’s location. In one particularly harrowing shot, Jack peers out from behind the lifeless Southeast Asian man who now serves as his physical shield.
One reading of the director’s work here — a director whose previous credits include modest horror hits like As Above, So Below and Quarantine — is that this moment is a commentary on colonialism and the disposability of Asian bodies within global capitalism. Yet there’s little evidence to suggest the film rises to that level — or that it cares much at all about the Southeast Asian people it shows slaughtering and being slaughtered.
Rather, that body underneath which Jack hides remains nameless, just like almost every other Asian person in the film. No major characters in No Escape are Asian — the closest might be the reoccurring “bad guys” who chase the Dwyer family with machetes and rifles, but whose words remain untranslated, or “Kenny Rogers” (Sahajak Boonthanakit), a sidekick to Hammond whose actual name is never given.
Additionally, the entire country in which No Escape takes place remains nameless. Though it was recognizably filmed in Thailand, the people onscreen are given no precise culture or background. At times there are vague references to an economic crisis and beggars with injuries from land mines. The film reveals that wherever they are borders Vietnam (which Thailand doesn’t) and Annie claims to have read that the place is a “Fourth World” country, which is not meant as a compliment. Thus, the Southeast Asian people in No Escape are stand-ins for all human beings who live in the poorest parts of this mythical non-white land called “Asia.”
This generalization is not a mistake as it allows the director to include various “frightening” cinematic tropes of people of color — from what they eat, to how they speak, to an association with terrorism. In his review at The Collider, Matt Goldberg suggests that No Escape may have been improved had it included zombies instead of real people, adding “when you try to go realistic […] you come away with an action film that’s incredibly uncomfortable in how it dehumanizes an entire race.”
In many ways, there is an association with zombies in No Escape that serves to demonize Asian people even more. In his essay “Zombie Orientals Ate My Brain! Orientalism in Contemporary Zombie Film and Fiction,” Eric Hamako argues that zombie films have long expressed “anxieties about the lower-class racial Other trying (and failing) to take on American values.”
Thus, the first hint that the Dwyers have entered a symbolic zombie apocalypse is perhaps when they meet “Kenny Rogers” at the airport, the local man who poorly imitates a particular American country singer. As the comical Kenny drives them to their hotel, swerving wildly and singing terribly, Jack and Annie look at each other, feeling their first inkling of distress.
Comparing Western portrayals of protestors in the Middle East or China to those of zombies, Hamako goes on to write that “the threat of the horde helps explain why a supposedly stupid, weak enemy [becomes] a lethal threat.” In other words, through the Orientalist racist lens, individual “others” like Kenny aren’t capable of being powerful — but as a “horde” they can become terrifying.
Relying on mobs of people of color to create fear onscreen is certainly not a new cinematic technique. Astute audiences know the concept shows up in far more so-called “prestigious” films. For example, in an essay on Argo, the Oscar-winning drama depicting the escape of U.S. embassy personnel from Iran in 1979, professor Juan Cole writes that the violence of brown crowds in the film lacks context, and thus “the Iranian characters are depicted as full of mindless rage.”
Neither is this practice unique to Hollywood. Rather, it’s a reflection of age-old fears of peoples of color’s organizing. This is not dissimilar from how certain media outlets have falsely portrayed the #BlackLivesMatter movement as a leaderless mob, or how the Charleston church murderer expressed a fear that black people were “taking over our country,” or quite literally, how a white police officer defended the 2013 killing of Jonathan Ferrell (who was shot 10 times) by claiming the 24-year-old black man appeared to be in a “zombie state.”
In No Escape, the depiction of Asians as zombies reflects a particularly terrible strain of xenophobia, often called “yellow peril” (or “yellow terror”). John Dowers, in War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War, describes its relationship to racism:
“[T]he vision of the menace from the East was always more racial rather than national. It derived not from concern with any one country or people in particular, but from a vague and ominous sense of the vast, faceless, nameless yellow horde: the rising tide, indeed, of color.”
No Escape may portend a critique of the United States, by putting its white characters through hell, but it never refutes this portrayal of Asians as violent “others,” or the idea that Southeast Asian countries are dirty, wild places.
It partially attributes the chaos of this hyper-violent state on white mistakes, but it never attempts to humanize the people living there. We hear that the rebels out for “blood” are protesting the American control of their water supply, and yet we see very little of how this physically impacts their lives, or why it matters so much to them.
Instead, by leaving the location and its people largely in the realm of darkness, it re-enacts elements of the colonialism it pretends to be against.
Adapted from a longer piece previously shared on Medium.
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