Turning Japanese: Japanization Anxiety, Japan-Bashing, and Reactionary White American Heteropatriarchy in Reagan-Bush Era Hollywood Cinema

Envisioned as a contribution to American Studies or, as it is now so often termed, American Cultural Studies, this dissertation examines how popular Hollywood films of the Reagan-Bush era registered prominent US anxieties about Japan's then burgeoning economic empowerment and the shifting cultural currents of a globalizing and socioeconomically transforming America. Focusing specifically on the films Gung Ho (dir. Ron Howard, 1986), Die Hard (dir. John McTiernan, 1988), Black Rain (dir. Ridley Scott, 1989), Mr. Baseball (dir. Fred Schepisi, 1992), and Rising Sun (dir. Philip Kaufman, 1993), I explore how these films articulated "Japan-bashing" practices and "Japanization anxieties" of the era in alignment with reactionary white heteropatriarchal backlash politics, which surged as white men found their socioeconomic hegemony and privilege challenged by globalization, affirmative action, and the rise of the professional career woman. Arguing that these films constitute rich cultural-historical repositories of a pivotal period in American history, I demonstrate how they registered reactionary white heteronormative fears of being "Japanized" via emasculating succumbence to economic conquest, thereby yielding fecund insights into the psychosocial zeitgeist of a reactionary Reagan-Bush era that continues to resonate with us today. Inspired by the theoretical methodologies of neo-Gramscianism and neo-Orientalism, my dissertation is ultimately best defined as a work of American cultural history that is oriented towards an overarching cultural political economy approach.