CULTURAL POLITICS

VOLUME 7, ISSUE 2 PP 289310

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TRAVELING SPIES AND LIMINAL TEXTS: COLD WAR CULTURE IN ASIAN SPY FILMS
LEONG YEW
LEONG YEW IS AN ASSISTANT PROFESSOR IN THE UNIVERSITY SCHOLARS PROGRAMME IN THE NATIONAL UNIVERSITY OF SINGAPORE. HE IS THE AUTHOR OF THE DISJUNCTIVE EMPIRE OF INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS (ASHGATE, 2003) AND EDITOR OF ALTERITIES IN ASIA: REFLECTIONS OF IDENTITY AND REGIONALISM (ROUTLEDGE, 2010).

ABSTRACT Little has been written about Asian spy lms and their relationship with Cold War cultural studies. While their Anglo-American counterparts could be discursively analyzed for the way they portrayed Western anxieties about communism, constructed own identities as opposed to the alterity of Russians and communists, these lms defy easy categorization because they not only reproduced these cinematic tropes but also weaved in politics, themes, and conventions outside the mainstream Cold War narrative. In this article, I examine four spy/cop action lms made by Filipino director, Bobby Suarez, and explore how a global cinematic circularity shapes the creative and industrial aspects of Asian spy lms. While Suarez made these lms explicitly for a Western/regional audience,

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they also imported cinematic styles like blaxploitation and the Hong Kong kung fu genre, while also adopting Asian culturalist positions that redrew conict positions from that of capitalism versus communism to that of Asians versus Westerners. The two categories of transnationalism and sexuality are queried, and they demonstrate the pastiche and ambivalence inherent in the lms, confronting Western notions of the Cold War with their local/regional anxieties of modernization, selfidentity, and Western encroachment. KEYWORDS: spy lms, Cold War cultural studies, intertextuality, transculturalism in cinema, Asian spy lms

It is now not uncommon to read the Hollywood spy action genre as political texts having a direct connection and resonance with the Cold War culture in Britain and the United States. Indeed, lm and television series like James Bond, The Six Million Dollar Man, and The Man from U.N.C.L.E., have been dissected, analyzed, and critiqued for the way they construct the communist Other (as opposed to the highly valorized Self), reinforce ideological divisions, and even reproduce gender, sexual, and racial tropes and stereotypes.1 As seen from an American context, for instance, James Bond reafrms the ideals of the anticommunist narrative, which invariably juxtaposes the masculinized and righteous Wests search of capitalistic freedom against the depraved and totalitarian nature of Soviet tyranny. While such readings are admittedly instructive, their Anglo-American centric disposition obscures the more global impact of Hollywood spy lms. Not only were they highly successful in their countries of production, they also had a signicant impact on cinematic consumers and producers in various parts of noncommunist Asia. Apart from nding a tremendous following among audiences in this part of the world, Asian lmmakers also actively adapted the genre to their local audiences, with such titles as the Kokusai Himitsu Keisatsu [International secret police] lm series (Japan, 19637), The Spy with My Face (Hong Kong, 1966), Jefri Zain dalam Gerak Kilat [Jefri Zain in Operation Lightning] (Singapore, 1965), and Don (India, 1978) coinciding with the emergence of this genre in the 1960s and 1970s. Overtly there is much in these lms that demonstrates the cultural power of American media; these lms were mimetic in that they faithfully copied the various devices of their Hollywood counterparts, such as the oversexed and virtually invincible super(heroic) spy, the egregious use of women as sexual objects, the pervasiveness of Western technology (through gadgetry), and the role of the megalomaniacal and ruthless villain. Nonetheless, these lms also possess a considerable amount of local interpolation with local/regional languages, values, political themes, and other preexisting modes of artistic narration or cinematic styles playing a signicant part in these lms. In Hong Kong, for instance, the cinematic mainstay of this era was the martial arts/kung fu genre,

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and the intrusion of the spy action genre did little to disrupt these productions. In effect, kung fu found its way into the spy lm, with the Hong KongAmerican joint production, Enter the Dragon (1973), being a primary example. What happens, then, when Anglo-American spy lms travel to Asia? How are we to think about the putatively intercultural consequence of a Western lm genre penetrating a different cultural context, and itself becoming challenged, if not, transformed by the local? At the outset, one way to think about this is to argue that a coreperiphery framework remains unshakable, in that Asian lmmakers at the periphery are nonetheless subordinated into the dominant structures of a neoimperial cultural core. Here, the United States dominates not simply because it is the ideological and cultural center of the noncommunist bloc, but that it represents a fragmented capitalist logic, which scholars today variously term boutique multiculturalism (Fish 1997) and the postcolonial exotic (Huggan 2001). Thus, even if Asian lmmakers appear to be producing lms with an intercultural context, they do so not because they are making a nativist cultural statement, but because the lm market both at home and abroad has been primed through this logic. Local audiences watch these lms because they reect the fetishized cosmopolitanism inherent in them while Western audiences (usually the B movie market) do so because they present an exotic campiness that departs from the regular Hollywood offerings. Yet another contradistinctive way of considering the Asian treatment of the spy genre is to accept these lms as exhibiting greater social agency. For if proponents of Asian lmic transnationalism are correct, the Western origins of this genre would merely be one of the many cultural components of global cinema that constantly adapt and borrow from each other. For example, a lm made in Hong Kong might adapt themes from Hollywood, appropriate lming techniques unique to Japanese cinema, which might then in turn go on to re-inuence future productions from the US and Japan. Keeping these two explanations in mind, I would like to focus on four spy/cop action movies made by Filipino director Bobby A. Suarez in the late 1970s Bionic Boy (1977), They Call Her . . . Cleopatra Wong (1978, alternatively titled Female Big Boss), Dynamite Johnson (1978, also known as The Return of the Bionic Boy), and The Devils Three (1979, also titled Devils Angels and Pay or Die) because unlike their counterparts produced in the Philippines or elsewhere in Asia, their liminal nature has led them to fall in between epistemological boundaries. As exploitation lms made specically with the intention of distribution in the region or in the B movie market in the US and Europe, they were shot entirely in English (although they were subsequently redubbed with American-accented voices) and featured a cosmopolitan cast (the lead characters are Singaporean, Filipinos played supporting roles, while the villains were a motley collection of Americans, Europeans, and Africans), international intrigue or crime, and most signicantly kung fu action. Furthermore, these lms were

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intra-regional joint productions, with Singaporean and Malaysian collaboration, leading to the formation of the eponymous production company, B.A.S. Films,2 through which the lms were made. As such these lms have not had a place in histories of Filipino cinema and given only supercial treatment in that of Singapores.3 They, therefore, do not have the same appeal as Third cinema or national cinemas might have to postcolonial lm studies. Theorizations of transnational Asian cinema have also become quite segmented, focusing either on the inter-Asian or trans-Pacic cultural trafc of the last two decades.4 Since these lms impinge on both directionalities of trafc and were released earlier, they have tended to be ignored. What remains then is their diminished agency and the temptation of bundling them with other Western Cold War lms, and as such, applicable to the same cultural analyses one might use to interrogate James Bond. Consequently in this article I wish to reconnect these four lms to the broader problem of the Asian spy lm, and by so doing assess the applicability of Cold War cultural studies in coping with the globality of Asian cinema. So particularly the earlier question of the impact of AngloAmerican spy lm traveling to Asia now needs to be supplemented: what happens if these Asian spy lms, in their variations, become liminal texts? How are we to locate them culturally and make sense of their multiple connections to different cinematic styles? Two highly visible features of these four lms are (1) the transnationality of their narratives, production, and consumption and (2) multiple gradations of sexual politics. By examining these features, I argue that they characterize diegetic misalignment. In brief, this is the manner in which the relationship between the texts diegesis and the real world become deceptively ambiguous, allowing the text to assert certain political positions in an unconscious or Manichean way. So apart from reproducing American political positions found in mainstream Cold War texts like anticommunism, nuclear exterminism, and anxieties over communist expansionism, or the mechanics of lm capitalism, these spy lms also integrated local or regional anxieties over cultural identity, and continued Western encroachment. In effect, the misalignment establishes certain propensities. While these lms pandered to a Western(ized) mainstream Cold War audience in Asia, the US, and Europe, they also have the tendency consciously or unconsciously to disrupt and subvert familiar ideological and cultural terrains.
CULTURAL POLITICS

ASIANIZING COLD WAR CULTURE

Until recently, little work has been done to provincialize studies on the Cold War. While there have been new forms of critical scholarship that show the increasing interest of non-traditional disciplines like literature, sociology, anthropology, and communication and media studies in the Cold War, and thus signal new ways of relating it to issues of identity, gender, sexuality, and discourses, the Cold War has remained largely a Eurocentric and transatlantic phenomenon. All other geographical areas, such as Asia, remain peripheral to it. As Vu

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intimates, Cold War narratives still describe Asian developments as dependent on the superpowers rival moves. Works on the Cold War in Asia rarely examine cultural issues, and those that do are limited to ideologies primarily the communist ideology (2009: 4). There is therefore a need to examine how the sociopolitical events and cultural productions in various parts or communities in Asia may either have had an impact on the mainstream teleology of the Cold War or collaborated to produce parallel histories outside that of Cold War historicism. At this juncture, there are only two works in English that attempt to fulll this need the edited volumes by Vu and Wongsurawat (2009) and by Zheng, Liu, and Szonyi (2010) and they either reconstruct the complex cultural network occurring within Cold War Asia or recenter Asian historical narratives as crucial to the explanation of Cold War phenomena. In this analysis, what concerns me especially is that just as Cold War studies have taken a cultural turn (Grifth 2001), the increasing interest in Asianizing the Cold War now implies that theories used to critique Anglo-American Cold War texts cannot be readily used in relation to their Asian counterparts. Subsequently, Asian spy lms cannot be understood so simply. On the one hand, colonial legacies, modern-day political alignments between noncommunist Asia and the US, the increasing familiarity with English, or the widespread dubbing or subtitling of English lms into local languages have allowed the Western spy lm (notably, James Bond) to secure a place in the popular imagination of Asian audiences. But, on the other hand, while Asian audiences were consuming Bond, Asian filmmakers were themselves producing Asian spy lms with varying degrees of appropriation. At one extreme, there is Ko Nakahiras comedic Interpol (1967), which featured an Agent 009 and borrowed most other Bond conventions, while at the other there is Chandra Barots Don (1978), which appears to have little to do with the spy narrative, but nonetheless appropriates the heroic bravado of Bond in the characterization of its protagonist. On one level, these acts of mimicry should not be dismissed as a top-down assertion of cultural power from the core to the periphery, but as Bhabha avers, the outcome is never the perfect imitation, but objects and subjects that disturb and disrupt the original, hence almost the same, but not quite (1994: 86). On an even more profound level, one also needs to take into consideration some features of cinematic globalism. Here, I borrow Bill Ashcrofts concept in suggesting that Asian spy lms demonstrate post-colonial transformation, in which colonized peoples [have the capacity] to make the dominant discourse work for them, to develop economically and technologically, [and] to enjoy the benets of global capitalism (2001: 5). Putting these two notions together, it becomes possible to argue that Asians do not become Bond, rather Bond is Asianized; speaks Cantonese, Japanese, and Malay; practices martial arts; becomes a spokesperson against the evils and vices of the West, concerns himself with local issues far removed from the

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titanic struggles of freedom versus communism; and, as we shall soon see in Suarezs movies, even becomes female.5 While this idea of Asian spy lms as having the capacity to transform and resist their more culturally hegemonic Western counterparts, the relationship is still arguably dyadic. In other words, the discussion still revolves around interactions between the West and the East (or Asia), as if these two cardinal entities could be ontologically stable reference points. Increasingly, Asian lms have become recognized as what Aihwa Ong and Stephen Collier term global assemblages (2005) and the concepts of transnationalism, transculturalism, and transvergence have been used to describe how Asian lms are constituted by uid cultural interows within Asia (see also Iwabuchi, Muecke, and Thomas 2004). Textually, they adapt and appropriate the subject matter, lming techniques, and narrative styles from lms made in other parts of Asia and from other eras. And in terms of industrial matters, these lms are often shot in other countries and involve creative, nancial, and logistical collaborations with parties located in different places. Consequently, the resulting productions become origin-less entities that enter a global cultural pool that is endlessly drawn upon by yet other cinemas. For instance, Hong Kong cinema has undoubtedly an inuential role in Asia, not just because of its ability to connect with Chinese diasporic cinema (Hunt 2003: 15783; Fu 2008) but also in the way it exercises a nonhierarchical or non-assimilative marginal imperialism (Lii 1998). So, while Hong Kong is in itself subjected to the cultural imperialism of Hollywood, it too contributes to global popular culture such as in the form of Jackie Chan, Ang Lee, Stephen Chow (see Morris 2004; Klein 2007), and the kung fu genre. Let me further reect on how this represents a form of global circularity in lm. Undeniably, the Hong Kong kung fu lm is a result of a fusion of Western technology and a traditional form of Asian aesthetics. So popular was this genre that it inuenced blaxploitation lms, which arguably emerged as a reaction to the racial and sexual politics of 1970s America (see Cha-Jua 2008; Lawrence 2008). One outcome was the creation of Cleopatra Jones, a black female version of James Bond, who is as comfortable with kung fu as she is with modern-day weaponry, and is an inspiration for Suarezs Cleopatra Wong. But Wong, again, is no faithful reproduction of Jones, and her (re)entry into Asia, renationalization as Singaporean, also required additional intervention from Hong Kong. Not only was Wong now expected to perform even more kung fu, she had to be reintegrated with the Chinese female pugilist, with the main character of the 1971 Hong Kong lm, The Lady Professional, and Bruce Lee6 also giving form to the Cleopatra Wong character (Millet 2006: 75, 76). So inuential was Cleopatra Wong to Quentin Tarantinos work that over two decades later she was to become transmogried as the Bride in Kill Bill (2003). How then are we to position the transformative, multifarious, and globally circular nature of Asian spy lms? In this article, I use the idea of diegetic misalignment7 to highlight how ctional narratives are

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constituted by multiple semiotic layers, with each having a different political relationship with reality. Diegetic misalignments occur when the main diegesis of the lm does not cohere seamlessly with what is happening in the real world, for instance, when a lm appears to be making allusions to a particular historical event but then suddenly undercuts or denies references to that event, or unexpectedly switches to another and seemingly unrelated event. To illustrate, an example from James Bond might be helpful. Now, in spite of the improbability and highly fabular nature of the Bond lms, as cultural critics we often interpret their narratives as articulating a position on the Cold War. There are certainly immediate references to real world entities like Cold War bipolarity, spy agencies like the CIA, MI6, KGB, and SMERSH, but also other more ctitious organizations, events, and individuals. When these elements become misaligned from their real world counterparts, they become highly deceptive. For instance, although Bond is explicitly British, his reinscription in Hollywood makes him synecdochical of American heroism. In addition, very few Bond villains are Russians. But because these villains are almost always megalomaniacal, despotic, and shown to rule over their underlings with an iron st, they are rearticulations of the archetypal Soviet dictator whose defeat in each Bond movie replays over and over again the fantasy of Western triumphalism. There are many more examples of such misalignments, but when Bond becomes transcribed into Asian contexts, he (or she) additionally takes on narrative layers that connect with real world events in the region/specic countries and communities that may or may not be related to the peculiar the manifestation of the Cold War there. I shall discuss these in the context of the Suarez movies in the next section.

CLEOPATRA WONG AND THE BIONIC BOY

Very little has been written in general about Bobby Suarez and his lms, let alone specic academic papers.8 Because the lms were shot mainly in English and intended for the regional or international distribution, Suarezs works have not been considered part of Filipino national cinema and not mentioned in its major histories (Baumgrtel 2006: 206).9 There is no reference to him in the online catalogs of the National Library of the Philippines or the University of the Philippines Library, although there are a few casual web pages about him on the Internet. On these pages, Suarez has been described more as an entrepreneur (Baumgrtel 2010a), and particularly the movie themes, cosmopolitan setting, choice of language, as well as the strategic industrial collaborations with individuals in Singapore, Hong Kong, and the US, suggest that Suarezs primary focus was prot making, something that is in opposition to the image of the principled and politically-conscious auteur of national cinemas. In a biography posted on the Internet Movie Database (IMDb) website, Suarez is depicted as having humble origins, whose early contact with the lm industry was not in a creative role, but as a salesperson, and later as a lm producer

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in Hong Kong, going on to receive tutelage by a Spanish director before returning to the Philippines to direct over twenty-four lms (itchie, no date).10 In thinking of Suarez as the opportunistic lmmaker capitalizing on the international B movie market, one reaches an impasse. It no longer makes sense to ask why these lms were made up of such globally eclectic components. But it is also equally risky to suggest that Suarezs commercialism meant that the lms had no agentic value or had little impact on Asian cinema worth commenting upon. As Baumgrtel intimates, Suarezs lms are densely intertextual, creating a amboyant parallel universe of female Chinese martial artists, Singaporean spies, Philippine thugs, Mexican drug lords, American super cops and German expats, who ght their way through an assortment of lm genres. It is party cheerful cock-and-bull story a la Feuillade, but it is also partly post-modern pastiche. In effect, these lms demonstrated cultural globalisation avant-lettre (2006: 209). So while the overt raison dtre for these movies is clear, it would be better to suspend it contingently, in favor of an analysis of what impact or implications these aspects of the Suarez movies might have on Asian spy lms or the more general studies on Cold War cultures.

Transnationalism
The transnationality of the four Suarez movies needs serious reconsideration since their creative processes, narratives, industrial collaborations, and appeal to different international markets all reect the global circularity of lm production and consumption. In his essay, Baumgrtel offers a number of possibilities to reect on this transnationalism, such as assimilation, imitation, and indigenization of foreign and culturally more dominant cinemas. Yet, the liminal nature of these lms makes it difcult to pigeonhole them into any of these categories, leaving him to interpret them as manifestations of a prelude of [sic] todays globalization (2006: 226). Although Baumgrtel provides a globalistically suggestive exposition of They Call Her . . . Cleopatra Wong and The One Armed Executioner another Suarez lm it is not clear how they connect to these early forms of globalization, since these were also not substantially mapped out. What I propose to do here, then, is to take Baumgrtels lead and further work out how various aspects of the lms diegeses reect the global circularity of Asian cinema and how their misalignment might have something to say about the Cold War in Asia. In particular, I examine these four dimensions: 1. the infusion of Hong Kong cinematic features like the revenge genre, thin plot developments compensated by prolonged and detailed martial arts ght sequences; 2. the Asian appropriation of technology and juxtaposition of tradition; 3. the casting of Westerners as villains and their attempts to subvert regional growth and development; and 4. the incorporation of regional political tensions and local themes that have been peripheral to dominant narratives of the Cold War.

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Let me begin this examination of transnationalism by discussing the rst of the four lms, The Bionic Boy. Clearly, this lm is an Asian renarration of the popular American TV series, The Six Million Dollar Man, in which a severely injured astronaut is resurrected through bionic technology. The bionics provide the protagonist superhuman abilities and combined with his American humanism he goes on to uncover and destroy criminal operations, week after week. Arguably, there are already diegetic misalignments in this text: the heroes and villains appear to be depoliticized and disconnected from more recognizable Cold War institutions, but read differently they still neatly fall intertextually between the two camps. In this way, the series implicitly feeds on the American sense that both its superior technology and its values would allow it to prevail in the international politics of the 1970s. By referencing these themes, The Bionic Boy becomes overdetermined with this Western narrative baggage. But at the same time, the lm is also a modernized and technologized retelling of the formulaic revenge lm, which is a popular theme in the Hong Kong kung fu genre. These lms usually feature violent, sometimes comedic coming-ofage stories in which a willful and playful youth experiences the murder of his parents/family/friends and seeks the tutelage of an unlikely kung fu master who imparts ghting skills together with Chinese metaphysics and wisdom. While at first resistant to the masters unorthodox methods, the youth completes the training and goes on to defeat the murderers, and therefore avenge the death of the aforementioned parties. As an exploitation lm, the revenge movie has a very simple plot; what usually drives it are the long ght sequences that provide a form of spectatorial titillation. Also adapting from these themes, The Bionic Boy narrates the story of nine-year-old Sunny Lee who is critically wounded when assassins kill his wealthy Singaporean entrepreneur parents while on a visit to the Philippines. With the help of Western specialists and technology, Sunny receives his bionic parts. But this is only the rst part of his transformation. The next part is the lengthier and purportedly more painful transition as he learns to cope with his newly acquired abilities and bring the evildoers to justice. However, unlike his usual Hong Kong lmic counterparts, there is no kung fu master to learn from, and one could read Sunnys transformation into Bionic Boy as a frightening moral degeneration. Off-narrative, we are told that Sunny is already a black belter, so what he must really learn is how to synthesize his new abilities with his preexisting skills. Even his guardian, Silvario Ramirez, plays a negligible role in this transition, not only failing to provide any paternal wisdom but also needing to be given martial arts lessons by Sunny himself. The uselessness of the guardian is then substituted by on the job training. As the criminal mastermind continues to send his goons to kill him and Ramirez, Sunny becomes more procient as he rises to protect himself, remorselessly dealing fatal justice, until his nal confrontation with the mastermind where he attains the zenith of his bionic/martial arts ability. Clearly, there

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is something disconcerting when a young child becomes an efcient killing machine who can uninchingly leer over his dead adversaries. The relationship between martial arts and bionic technology is another important counterpoint in the diegeses of The Bionic Boy and its sequel, Dynamite Johnson, rendering the Suarez lms as neither Hong Kong nor Hollywood. As Li (2006) argues, kung fu casts an ambivalent relationship between Chinese nationalism and modernity. If Chinese cinema intends to juxtapose itself nationalistically against a painful history of cultural loss to and domination by the West, then traditional kung fu, in all its unarmed glory, becomes a characteristic that distinguishes it from the brazen celebration of the repower and technology of Westerners. The Wong Fei-Hong movies of Tsui Hark are some obvious examples. However, accepting both kung fu and modern technology, the Suarez lms present an alternative culturalist position. For example, Cleopatra Wong is as comfortable with kung fu as she is with modern weaponry and equipment. In the opening expository sequences of They Call Her . . . the lm establishes her superlative kung fu prowess as well as her marksmanship, and in later sequences she is seen taking on numerous henchmen, unarmed, while in other scenes shown using her crossbow, assault ries, and even a motorcycle with rear-ring guns. This fusion of kung fu with technology goes on to make a profound culturalist statement in the Bionic Boy lms. In the rst installment, Sunny eerily embodies and anticipates the dominant Asian self-narratives that were to surface from the 1990s onwards; in this case the claim that Asia has become successful (over the West) because of its ability to blend traditional Asian values with modern technologies. Thus, by allowing an Asian Sunny to fuse preexisting martial arts skills with new technology, the lm explains how triumph over villainous Westerners could be achieved. In Dynamite Johnson this fusion of tradition and technology becomes much more pronounced, leading to a disjuncture between Western Cold War narratives and anxieties about Asian self-identity and the encroachment of the West. Much more than its prequel, this lm demonstrates how an Asian-centric appropriation of technology could be juxtaposed against its deviant Western use; with the deviant now not just a representation of Soviet technological use but also ambiguously Westerners in a generic sense. In this lm, a historically displaced Nazi ofcer known as Herr Kuntz keeps the Igorot tribe in the Northern Philippines under his thrall through the use of a metallic/ robotic re-breathing dragon. Here, Suarez self-Orientalizes, depicting the superstitious primitiveness of the tribesmen as being complicit with their own subjugation. The dragon, nonetheless, allows Kuntz to keep the tribesmen in nearby mines to supply uranium (thus, the allusion to the nuclear terror in Cold War reality) for a mega-weapon he has hidden in the vicinity, and which he plans to use to destroy Hong Kong and thus attain global control. The dragon, its suggestiveness as the Western aberration of nature, the weapon, and their evil utility are then contrasted against the Asian tradition/technology dyad, with

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the Philippines now reterritorialized as the center of bionic technology. Sunnys return to the Philippines from Singapore at the start of the lm was necessitated by some of his bionic parts needing servicing. The Western experts accredited with Sunnys implanted bionics in the prequel are nowhere to be seen in the lm. In effect, Filipino specialists are now denitely the best when it comes to the science of bionics, as Interpol chief Castro reassures Sunnys worried aunt, Cleopatra Wong, who accompanies Sunny for the procedure. The appropriation becomes complete; through the fusion of Sunnys martial arts skills and this moment of amnesia, Sunnys bionics become completely Asianized, which then stand in stark contrast to the technology employed by the white villainy of Herr Kuntz. In the lm, Sunny and Cleo foil Kuntzs bid to use the weapon, with the former chasing the villain as he attempts to escape in his dragon. Sunny catches up and begins to bend and contort the weapons on the dragon, as it crashes into the side of a hill with its driver. In a display of poetic justice, then, the lm concludes with Kuntzs demise, a victim of his own technology, meeting a ery demise within the connes of his metallic beast. Taken together, the infusion of Hong Kong cinema into these lms and the Asian appropriation of technology collectively lead to a form of Occidentalism in which Western villainy needs to be established in order for (Southeast) Asian heroism to be celebrated. Arguably, the racial encoding in these lms could be said to emanate from within the ambivalent, self-critiquing economy of American cinema itself, and it is this feature that allows for its consumption among white, as well as other, audiences in the US. For example, blaxploitation inverts the white-is-heroic and black-is-evil dichotomy in mainstream Hollywood, and it could be said that this informs Suarezs work. Nonetheless, when this formula is expatriated and then used in a context outside Americas racial politics, it attains a different Occidentalist quality. In Southeast Asia of the 1970s, it is also important to consider the rise of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), the NonAligned Movement,11 and the challenges of constructing postcolonial self-identity as regional and local events that shape the lms narrative structures. Indeed, although the Cold War gured heavily in these instances, they were also attempts by regional leaders to take control of their own political destinies, and in so doing create a Western Other vis--vis a more complex regional agglomeration of selves. Returning to Dynamite Johnson, it is possible to see how Herr Kuntzs Germanness/ whiteness, reinforced by his afliation with militarized Nazism and his Eurasian associate Cordero forms a regionalized racial demarcation with the SingaporeanFilipino protagonists. If anything, They Call Her . . . Cleopatra Wong probably the most famous of the four movies crystallizes these themes exceptionally well. In a move that seems to anticipate former Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathirs accusation that Western speculators like George Soros were responsible for the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis, this lm sees an unnamed Western(ized) villain collaborating with European

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and Asian associates to ood ASEAN with so much fake currency that the economies in the region would collapse. This would then allow them to acquire businesses there cheaply and, thus, dominate the regional economy. As a result of a collaboration between the Singapore and Philippine branches of Interpol, Cleo is assigned to investigate the deluge of counterfeit Asian currencies, taking her from Manila to Singapore and Hong Kong, before returning her to the Philippine island of Luzon. As the narrative unfolds, viewers become increasingly familiar with the distinction between Cleo and the villains. On the one side, Cleo is linked to a de-traditionalized, urbanized Asian landscape (See Baumgrtel 2006: 216), which counters the exotic sceneries desired by the Orientalist gaze. This, together with her sexual prowess and combat skills, (re)presents her as a character that upsets the stereotypical depiction of the Asian femme fatale, the passive, enchanted beauty who needs to be rescued by white male heroism. As a further twist in this character inversion, the white/cosmopolitan masculinity of the villains is allowed to further degenerate. In the nal act of the lm, Cleo discovers that all the fake currency was produced in a convent on a Luzon mountain, and the bona de occupants of that complex were held hostage by the criminals, now (cross)dressed as either monks or nuns. The monks are replete in brown cowls reminiscent of the Spanish friary, thus connecting them to the trauma of Spanish colonization (Baumgrtel 2006: 217), while the nuns are gun-toting henchmen who are now subjected to a visual interplay of feminization and remasculinization. The lm ends with Cleo and her fellow Philippine Interpol agents, also disguised in nuns habits, inltrating the compound, but not before a long sequence of kung fu action, gunghts, explosions, and Cleos delivery of the coup de grce to the criminal mastermind.

Sexuality
Of the four Bobby Suarez lms mentioned in this article, the last one, The Devils Three, presents an interesting problem. Although Cleopatra Wong is featured in two other movies, she only appears in a supporting role in one of them (Dynamite Johnson), which leaves The Devils Three as the nominal sequel to They Call Her . . . Yet, this sequel is very different from its predecessor in many ways. A number of features connect this lm to the earlier one, with the same actor reprising her role as Interpol agent, Cleo Wong, and the character remaining identiable through her kung fu ability and her trademark crossbow. Despite these, The Devils Three has become largely comedic in nature. In this lm, the disaffected henchmen of drug kingpin and racketeer, Lucifer Devlin, kidnap his daughter for ransom, and he in turn seeks Cleos help to rescue her. What follows is a series of bizarre developments. Cleo enlists the help of two unlikely assistants, a corrupt ex-cop who has now become an androgynous, effeminate, and openly gay bar performer/host(ess) Terry del Rio, and an overweight clairvoyant called Rotunda. Surprisingly, Cleo is no longer as sexualized as in They Call Her . . . and more signicantly has become bumbling and incompetent. Although she still retains her

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ghting abilities, her investigative work keeps failing; the end of the movie shows the trio rescuing both Devlins daughter and the racketeer himself, but more as a result of fortuitousness rather than the policing mastery Cleo was accorded in the earlier lm. In the nal act, Cleo relies on Rotundas powers of divination to pursue the kidnappers in their out-of-sight car; all this is presented using a motorcycle and sidecar gag. While drawing intertextual references to the Keystone Cops, this sequence subverts They Call Her . . . in which Cleo is shown to ride a more powerful mountain bike, which she uses with great effectiveness. In The Devils Three, Cleo also rides a delivery bike, with Terry riding pillion, and Rotunda perched ludicrously on the sidecar. This sequence provides the image that is featured in the movies main promotional artwork. How does one explain the re-characterization of Cleo Wong, her descent from a female version of James Bond to that of Maxwell Smart (of the Get Smart series), and the shift in genre from spy/cop action to spy/cop comedy? Baumgrtel feels that as exploitation lms, these four movies were thrown together without too much regard for character development, logic or psychological depth (2010b) and should not be seen as works requiring thematic, character, or even genre consistency. Establishing reasons aside, there are still a number of important effects that need to be discussed, and I argue that it is really the politics of sexuality in these lms that evinces a crucial diegetic misalignment, and this subsequently displaces Asian spy ction from mainstream Cold War culture. In the other three lms, there are already certain elements of sexuality. The same actor plays effeminate henchmen in Bionic Boy, Dynamite Johnson, and The Devils Three, ostensibly in roles intended as comic relief for the heterosexual gaze. And if, as Jenkins asserts, sexual deviances and physical abnormalities demarcate Bond villains as degenerate enemies (2005: 309), then it is possible to see how physical defects and sexual dysfunction could be mutually encoded. In this way, Dynamite Johnsons Herr Kuntz sports the same scar around his right eye as does Bonds Blofeld, and the formers eyepatch completes the piratical stereotype. More signicantly, in The Devils Three, Manny, the kidnapping ringleader has a hook (another piratical allusion) in place of a missing right hand, and Suarez does actively use this to indicate the characters lost masculinity being substituted by a rigid, penetrating, but deformed phallus. For instance, he is shown to react oversensitively to the kidnappee calling him hookey, and Terry in drag, and in a strange foreplay scene, comments how big and sharp his hook is. Furthermore, as I also discussed earlier, Cleopatra Wongs character assimilates the raging libido of her blaxploitation namesake, but in her Asian form she does not signify the empowerment of (black) womanhood (see Dunn 2008), but rather a culturalist statement countering Western fantasies of the Asian woman. All these eclectic plays on sexuality culminate with The Devils Three. Unlike the previous lms, this one is even more displaced from Cold War

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allusions, featuring a very localized story of a double-crossed crime lord. And although this is meant to be a Cleopatra Wong lm, her assistant, Terry, plays a more than an incidental part, representing particularly an unstable sexuality that does not fall neatly into any pre-given gender category. Audiences are rst introduced to Terry when Cleo announces to Devlin her need for assistants whom the kidnappers would least suspect are on their case. Terry is found in a nightclub, wearing makeup, a frilly shirt/blouse, a heavily permed hairstyle, and regaling and teasing customers. A ght breaks out involving local hooligans and, at this point, Terry mysteriously remasculinizes. Without a single effeminate gesture, Terry displays his superb martial arts skills and takes down one opponent after another. He resumes his normal demeanor and rejoins Cleo at the table, where their relationship, Terrys past, and information about his outing and sexuality are revealed: Terry: Ta da. Cleo: [blows him a kiss.] Terry: Look thank you my dear, its terrible every time that riffraff comes into this place. Cleo: I see you havent lost your touch. Terry: If it werent for my touch, I would still be on the force, Cleo. Cleo: I didnt mean that touch. Has it been difcult for you? Terry: Well, I do miss all the badges and the bullets. But at least I have been myself, and its so nice to be needed. Cleo: Well, I need you as well. Terry: Really? Oh I dont think I could handle a straight trick. Think of my public. Cleo: Be serious, Terry. Remember, Im the one who turned you under this . . . routine in the rst place, and free lancing for the force never paid as much money as Im wiling to for the job I have in mind. Terry: Oh money. Thats what got me into trouble the last time. It could even turn me straight. Cleo: Taking kickbacks was your idea. But your reputation around here for being corrupt is very handy, and you have an ear for action. Terry: Yes I really do have a darling ear. What do I have to do? Cleo: Just be yourself. Ill explain. Terry: Oh Im so glad. I was afraid you were going to ask me to get out of show biz.
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So we have in Terry a very uid and multiplicitous identity: he is an ex-cop, highly skilled in unarmed combat, corrupt, capable of sliding in and out of masculinity and femininity, but gay and, as we shall see later in the lm, also transgendered. Let me further articulate Terrys uid sexuality in two juxtaposing scenes. In an early sequence, Terry, under Cleos instruction, is in drag, his mission is to seduce Manny and to nd out where Devlins daughter is being held. To the audience, Terrys disguise is obviously unconvincing, but Manny falls for this and agrees to pimp for her. Under

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the pretext of checking her out for prospective clients, he later takes her to a motel room, where a bizarre act of foreplay Manny chasing Terry around the room ensues. Shot in fast motion the sequence devolves into slapstick, with Manny convinced that Terry is playing hard to get, but the audience knowing that Terry is trying desperately to fend off Mannys advances. The scene concludes with failed sex as Terry offers the light bulb socket of a broken lamp to Mannys hook, electrocuting him and making a highly ironic statement of an intercourse involving substitute sexual organs. Curiously, although we know of his ghting skills, this sequence sees Terry momentarily losing them as a woman. But strangely these abilities are to reappear in his next encounter with Manny, this time resuming his more androgynous form. In this nal showdown, a number of things are noticeable. First, the main character is not given the opportunity to defeat the main villain; in effect Terry is given this responsibility. Second, the scene again employs irony as it alludes back to the motel scene. Both Manny and Terry are now engaged in a struggle of a different sort. As the effeminate and purportedly sexually deviant character, Terry is now once again subjected to a more brutal attempt of penetration by Mannys hook. But Terrys ghting skills now make a dramatic return, as he overcomes the hook and plunges it into Mannys own crotch. It is not clear if Manny has been killed, but this sequence then initiates double emasculation; with the rst being what Terry does to Manny. The second revolves around the last spoken line in the lm. As Devlin and his daughter are reunited against the sunset, Cleo walks off with Terry. Terry pauses, reaches into his bra, and retrieves a hidden pistol. Flinging it away, he quips, Oh Cleo, I dont need this anymore. How then are we to appreciate this co-mingling of comedy and sexuality? In a certain sense, these elements are no strangers to Western Cold War texts. Even though the Cold War at its critical junctures in the US enforced a fairly monopolistic discourse, it nonetheless remained open to satire and parody (Lenihan 1993). Furthermore, as a number of scholars have argued, the Cold War to the US was also sexually encoded. Apart from using sexual deviance as a way of representing the Soviet Other, anxieties of homosexuality were also mobilized as a domestic social parallel to the activities of American communists during the time of the Red Scare. Here, the fear was not simply because of the susceptibility of gay people to blackmail but because they were seen as moral degenerates; these forms of association then allows the fear of homosexuals to mutually reinforce that of communists (De Hart 2001: 125). Textually, this nds its way into the Cold War texts, with Alfred Hitchcocks thrillers being notable instances of homophobia articulated through Cold War national security (Corber 1993). Since Suarezs lms appropriate much from these texts and also need to speak to these audiences, these comedic and sexual conventions do pre-form and shape their diegeses. That said, Asian performances of comedy and sexualities do disrupt their Western diegetic counterparts, thus further displacing the narratives from each other. For instance, Pang calls

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for the concept of masculinity to be pluralized in Hong Kong cinema, thus refusing a modern hegemonic masculinity (2005). However, I do not wish simply to assert here that because Asian sexualities are different, their incorporation into lm must therefore suggest forms of cinemas different from a hegemonic, universal cinema, but as Grossman argues in his volume on Queer Asian Cinema Eastern and Western interpretations of homosexuality are highly entangled with each other (2000b), making it difcult to locate the cultural origins of any particular performance of sexuality. Instead of retreating into unhelpful concessions of postmodern difference, Grossmans purpose resounds the issue of the global circularity of Asian cinema, in this case conjuring an image of queer Asian cinema as a Eurocentric or Western queer-theory umbrella intervening between the alternatively Asian lms themselves and their reception, distribution, and interpretation (2000a: xvi). Reconsidering the case of The Devils Three, I suggest that it reects these forms of diegetic misalignments, representing pastiche and ambivalent plays on sexuality. In some instances, the lm calls for a hetero-normal gaze to view Terry (and Rotunda) as comedic objects, and his ultra-effeminate gestures and falsetto could be construed as a patriarchal parody of the feminine. But Terrys rather elastic sexuality, on the other hand, appears to echo subaltern subjectivities in which the subject is able to slide in and out of different subject positions. This becomes extremely important because Terry becomes a multiple character: a comic relief, a heterosexual stereotype of gay people, a submissive woman, an assertive and emasculating individual who retains the power to both emasculate self as well as the Western Other.

DIEGETIC MISALIGNMENT AND THE ASIAN SPY FILM

Although the broad objective of this article was to discuss certain aspects of the Asian spy lm in relation to its Western Cold War counterparts, I have only specically examined the four movies made by B.A.S. Films in the late 1970s. My intention was not to suggest that they are an accurate reection of the Asian spy lm, but that they do capture some important aspects of global cinematic circularity and that we need to seriously rethink how a Western-originated lm genre relates to its Asianized counterparts. Indeed, the Suarez lms are now difcult to obtain; because of its cult status, They Call Her . . . Cleopatra Wong can still be purchased as a DVD from some specialist online video stores, but the others can only be downloaded from a number of obscure lesharing or peer-to-peer websites.12 As a result, it might be difcult for others to corroborate what I have mentioned specically about these lms. While I am aware of this problem, I stress that the lms evince the impossibility of speaking of the Asian spy lm as a monolithic entity, but in its variations, differing localisms, and politics, they do challenge the idea that Cold War cultural studies, which have long tended to focus on Anglo-American texts, could be ported over without any intervention. By looking at the Suarez lms, such an intervention needs to come in the form of diegetic misalignment, compelling one to think not only of

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lm capitalism thus the lms tendencies to mimic Western forms to appeal to that market but also their ability to incorporate cinematic forms from other cultures and infusing their narratives with themes that may not have any direct connection with mainstream Cold War politics or express political positions that might be local or transvergent. In this essay, I examined two aspects of the Suarez lms: transnationalism and sexuality. These aspects can in many ways be situated within the context of the Cold War. But read alternatively, they invoke other more subversive positions. Hence, the bionic boy and Cleopatra Wong both appropriate Western texts while also invoking culturalist positions like Asian anxieties of Western encroachment, the synthesis of technology and traditional martial arts, regional and local concerns. In effect, the juxtaposition of (Southeast) Asia and the West remains one of the most recurring themes in these lms. Even the performance of sexuality is no longer neatly tied to the usual idea of the stable hegemonic, heterosexual masculinity, but is constituted by uid subject positions sliding in an out of stereotyped effeminism, subversive masculinities anchored on the sense of Asian sexual self-determination.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I thank Shirlene Noordin of the Southeast Asian Cinematheque and the late Bobby A. Suarez for having granted me access to view the Cleopatra Wong and Bionic Boy lms that are discussed in this article.

NOTES
1. See, for instance, Sayre (1982); Bennett and Woollacott (1987); Grifth (2001); Kuznick and Gilbert (2001); Shaw (2002, 2007); Klein (2003); Corkin (2004); Black (2005); and Foertsch (2001). 2. The companys name is derived from both the initials of Suarezs full name and the rst name of his Singaporean and Malaysian partners, Sunny Lim and Mohamad Ashraf, respectively. 3. The two histories of Singapore lm only mention these lms as an attempt at regional co-production (Uhde and Ng Uhde 2010: 513) or to revive the local lm industry (Millet 2006: 73), which saw its golden era come to an end a few years before. However they do not offer any critical analysis of the lms. 4. Some recent works on Asian lm do consider lms made before the 1990s as having a historical foundation to the current transnationalism of Asian lms (See Hunt and Leung 2008). But most works in this regard have emerged particularly because of the kinds of lms made in the last twenty years and the global nature of its distribution and inuence on lmmaking techniques and narratives. 5. Suarezs spy movies are not the only ones that feature female spies, and certainly female spies are not unique to Asian spy lms. In fact this theme is not uncommon in Hollywood. However, what is notable is that the female roles in Asian cinema do not cohere so neatly with their counterparts that are formed under Western patriarchy. In many cases, the female heroes in Hong Kong cinema such as in

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6. 7.

8. 9. 10.

11.

12.

wuxia (period swordghting) or kung fu lms are strong characters that do not constantly need to be rescued by males, and these features have found their way into other genres in Asian cinema, Suarezs female spy being one such beneciary. The main actor, Doris Young was given the stage name of Marrie Lee to encourage audiences to associate her with Bruce Lee. In an earlier writing, I called this narrative misalignment and more discussion can be found in my The Disjunctive Empire of International Relations (Yew 2003: 349, 438). With the exception of Tilman Baumgrtels essay (2006), which I will discuss shortly. For example, David (1998, 1995); Tolentino (2000). Baumgrtel (2006: 211) also notes that this was the ofcially approved biography that was distributed with his corporate prole of B.A.S. Films. For instance, Percival Wood (2011) argues that despite relying on Western techniques of statecraft and diplomacy, the Non-Aligned Movement critically shows the tendencies by marginalized powers to nd alternative forms of collaboration, the idea of Panchsheel or peaceful coexistence between Nehru and Chou Enlai being an important development. Unfortunately, because of the dubious legality of le-sharing and peer-to-peer websites, I have been reluctant to attempt downloading anything from there. Therefore, I am uncertain if users will be able to download these lms successfully, although they are advertised as being available on these websites.

REFERENCES
Ashcroft, Bill. 2001. Post-Colonial Transformation. London and New York: Routledge. Baumgrtel, Tilman. 2006. Imitation, Indigenization, Assimilation? No, Globalization!: The Cinema of Bobby Suarez. In K.-D. Shin and J. David (eds) Asia Culture Forum 2006: Whither the Orient. Kwangju, Korea. Baumgrtel, Tilman. 2010a. Bobby Suarez (19422010). Southeast Asian Film Institute. Last updated February 8, 2010. Available online at http://southeastasiancinema.wordpress.com/2010/02/08/ bobby-suarez-1942-2010/. Baumgrtel, Tilman. 2010b. Personal communication with author. May 21. Bennett, Tony and Woollacott, Janet. 1987. Bond and Beyond: The Political Career of a Popular Hero. London: Macmillan. Bhabha, Homi K. 1994. The Location of Culture. London and New York: Routledge. Black, Jeremy. 2005. The Politics of James Bond: From Flemings Novels to the Big Screen. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press. Cha-Jua, Sundiata Keita. 2008. Black Audiences, Blaxploitation and Kung Fu Films, and Challenges to White Celluloid Masculinity. In

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Poshek Fu (ed.) China Forever: The Shaw Brothers and Diasporic Cinema. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, pp. 199223. Corber, Robert J. 1993. In the Name of National Security: Hitchcock, Homophobia, and the Political Construction of Gender in Postwar America. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. Corkin, Stanley. 2004. Cowboys as Cold Warriors: the Western and U.S. History. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. David, Joel. 1995. Fields of Vision: Critical Applications in Recent Philippine Cinema. Manila: Ateneo de Manila University Press. David, Joel. 1998. Wages of Cinema: Film in Philippine Perspective. Diliman, Quezon City: University of Philippines Press. De Hart, Jane Sherron. 2001. Containment at Home: Gender, Sexuality, and National Identity in Cold War America. In P. J. Kuznick and J. Gilbert (eds), Rethinking Cold War Culture. Washington and London: Smithsonian Institution Press. Dunn, Stephane. 2008. Baad Bitches and Sassy Supermamas: Black Power Action Films. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Fish, Stanley. 1997. Boutique Multiculturalism, or Why Liberals are Incapable of Thinking about Hate Speech. Critical Inquiry 23(2): 37895. Foertsch, Jacqueline. 2001. Enemies Within: The Cold War and the AIDS Crisis in Literature, Film, and Culture. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Fu, Poshek (ed.). 2008. China Forever: The Shaw Brothers and Diasporic Cinema. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Grifth, Robert. 2001. The Cultural Turn in Cold War Studies. Reviews in American History 29(1): 1507. Available online at http://www1. american.edu/bgriff/rghome/TheCulturalTurn.htm. Grossman, Andrew. 2000a. Preface. In Andrew Grossman (ed.), Queer Asian Cinema: Shadows in the Shade. Binghamton: Harrington Park Press, pp. xvxx. Grossman, Andrew. 2000b. Beautiful Publicity: An Introduction to Queer Asian Film. In Andrew Grossman (ed.) Queer Asian Cinema: Shadows in the Shade. Binghamton: Harrington Park Press, pp. 129. Huggan, Graham. 2001. Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins. London and New York: Routledge. Hunt, Leon. 2003. Kung Fu Cult Masters: From Bruce Lee to Crouching Tiger. London and New York: Wallower Press. Hunt, Leon and Leung Wing-Fai (eds). 2008. East Asian Cinemas: Exploring Transnational Connections on Film. London and New York: I.B. Tauris. itchie [pseud.]. No date. Biography for Bobby A. Suarez. Internet Movie Database. Available online at http://www.imdb.com/name/ nm0836825/bio. Iwabuchi, Koichi, Stephen Muecke, and Mandy Thomas (eds). 2004. Rogue Flows: Trans-Asian Cultural Trafc. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press.

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Jenkins, Tricia. 2005. James Bonds Pussy and Anglo-American Cold War Sexuality. The Journal of American Culture 28(3): 30917. Klein, Christina. 2003. Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, 19451961. Berkeley: University of California Press. Klein, Christina. 2007. Kung Fu Hustle: Transnational Production and the Global Chinese-Language Film. Journal of Chinese Cinemas 1(3): 189208. Kuznick, Peter J. and Gilbert, James (eds). 2001. Rethinking Cold War Culture. Washington and London: Smithsonian Institution Press. Lawrence, Novotny. 2008. Blaxploitation Films of the 1970s: Blackness and Genre. New York and London: Routledge. Lenihan, John H. 1993. Hollywood Laughs at the Cold War, 1947 1961. In Robert Brent Toplin (ed.), Hollywood as Mirror: Changing Views of Outsiders and Enemies in American Movies. Westport and London: Greenwood Press, pp. 13955. Li, Siu Leung. 2006. Kung Fu: Negotiating Nationalism and Modernity. In Dimitris Eleftheriotis and Gary Needham (eds), Asian Cinemas: A Reader and Guide. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 10025. Lii, Ding-Tzann. 1998. A Colonized Empire: Reections on the Expansion of Hong Kong Films in Asian Countries. In Kuan-Hsing Chen (ed.) Trajectories: Inter-Asia Cultural Studies. London and New York: Routledge, pp. 12241. Millet, Raphael. 2006. Singapore Cinema. Singapore: Editions Didier Millet. Morris, Meaghan. Transnational Imagination in Action Cinema: Hong Kong and the Making of a Global Popular Culture. Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 5(2): 18199. Ong, Aihwa and Collier, Stephen J. (eds). 2005. Global Assemblages: Technology, Politics, and Ethics as Anthropological Problems. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing. Pang, Laikwan. 2005. Introduction: The Diversities of Masculinities in Hong Kong Cinema. In Laikwan Pang and Day Wong (eds), Masculinities and Hong Kong Cinema. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 114. Percival Wood, Sally. 2011. Constructing an Alternative Regional Identity: Panchsheel and IndiaChina Diplomacy at the Asian African Conference 1955. In Leong Yew (ed.), Alterities in Asia: Reections on Identity and Regionalism. London and New York: Routledge. Sayre, Nora. 1982. Running Time: Films of the Cold War. New York: Dial Press. Shaw, Tony. 2002. Martyrs, Miracles, and Martians: Religion and Cold War Cinematic Propaganda in the 1950s. Journal of Cold War Studies 4(2): 322. Shaw, Tony. 2007. Hollywoods Cold War. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

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Tolentino, Rolando B. (ed.). 2000. Geopolitics of the Visible: Essays on Philippine Film Cultures. Manila: Ateneo de Manila University Press. Uhde, Jan and Uhde, Yvonne Ng. 2010. Latent Images: Film in Singapore, 2nd edition. Singapore: Ridge Books. Vu, Tuong. 2009. Cold War Studies and the Cultural Cold War in Asia. In Tuong Vu and Wasana Wongsurawat (eds), Dynamics of the Cold War in Asia: Ideology, Identity, and Culture. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 116. Vu, Tuong and Wongsurawat, Wasana (eds). 2009. Dynamics of the Cold War in Asia: Ideology, Identity, and Culture. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Yew, Leong. 2003. The Disjunctive Empire of International Relations. Aldershot: Ashgate. Zheng Yangwen, Hong Liu, and Szonyi, Michael (eds). 2010. The Cold War in Asia: The Battle for Hearts and Minds. Leiden and Boston: Brill.

SELECTED FILMOGRAPHY
Diaz, Leody M. 1977. Bionic Boy. B.A.S. Films. Suarez, Bobby A. 1978. Dynamite Johnson. B.A.S. Films. Suarez, Bobby A. 1978. They Call Her . . . Cleopatra Wong. B.A.S. Films. Suarez, Bobby A. 1979. The Devils Three. B.A.S. Films. Sulong, Jamil. 1965. Jefri Zain Gerak Kilat. Malay Film Production. Tarantino, Quentin. 2003. Kill Bill: Vol. 1. Miramax Films.

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