Holy Crap Is the 1962 Shirley MacLaine Comedy My Geisha Racist and Offensive!
For the last year and a half or so I have compulsively conducted online searches for movies that might fit the criteria for The Fractured Mirror, my mammoth upcoming book about American movies about the film industry.
It’s not the healthiest way to pass time, particularly since every list I encounter seems to have the same movies, and also I’ve already written up about 96 percent of the movies listed.
It’s at least healthier than doom-scrolling Reddit, Facebook and what I will always call Twitter because FUCK that transphobic narcissist Elon Musk. That is a REALLY useless way to waste time.
I’ve already written up pretty much every movie about the making of another movie, real or otherwise, and every movie about directors, producers and writers. Then I tackled movies about stuntmen.
One of the great things about pursuing a project as ambitious and exhaustive as The Fractured Mirror is that it’s made me an expert on movies about filmmaking as a whole but also on a series of weird sub-genres, like stuntman movies and dark comedies that are variations on The Emperor’s New Clothes.
Having written up all the stuntman movies that are commercially available I then turned my attention to movies about actors and actresses.
That is how I found a 1962 movie called My Geisha. As you are perhaps aware, I make my living writing about movies that are terrible, and offensive, and have aged terribly in a way that tell us something about the era that birthed them.
Yet for some inexplicable reason I was not familiar with My Geisha or at least had forgotten about it.
My Geisha is squarely in my wheelhouse in that it’s not just a bad movie; it’s an abomination and I am way more familiar and comfortable with abominations than I am with movies than win awards or wow critics.
In My Geisha Shirley MacLaine plays Lucy Dell, a wildly popular movie star who specializes in making light comedies with her director husband Paul Robaix (Yves Montand).
When the ambitious frenchman announces that his next movie will be a gritty adaptation of Madame Butterfly filmed on location in Japan for the sake of authenticity Lucy assumes she’ll star despite her being a red-haired, blue eyed white American woman.
To his credit Paul tells his disappointed wife that it would be offensive for a white woman to play a Japanese geisha, which she takes as a challenge.
What follows is essentially Yellowface: The Movie, as Judy travels furtively to Japan and tricks her staggeringly idiotic husband and his equally dim-witted leading man into thinking that she’s a shy Japanese geisha named Yoko.
“Yoko” isn’t even an actress but Paul is so mesmerized by her that he gives her the lead role in his movie all the same.
My Geisha puts its very white, very American heroine in kimonos and white make-up but it also goes to insane lengths to make her eyes appear more Asian, to the point where MacLaine was apparently in a lot of pain and discomfort throughout filming.
My Geisha possesses Loqueesha levels of racism and offensiveness. In Loqueesha no black woman can be as good at being black and a woman as an arrogant straight white man. In My Geisha no one in Japan is as good or real at being a geisha as a white woman intent on proving to her husband that there’s nothing wrong with yellowface and cultural appropriation if employed by the right person.
I was flabbergasted at how terrible and wrong and regressive My Geisha is. Having written a column on famous failures and terrible films for sixteen years I fancy myself a bit of an expert on bad, misguided duds and My Geisha couldn’t be badder or more misguided
Why don’t more people talk about My Geisha? Why isn’t it as notorious as Breakfast at Tiffany’s or Soul Man?
Discovering My Geisha late in my career and research for The Fractured Mirror was encouraging and discouraging in equal measure. I was excited that I found a bizarre and terrible movie about the film industry that was super fun to write about but I’m also surprised and a little concerned that I didn’t even know it existed two days ago. Are there are more weird surprises like My Geisha lurking in my future? I kind of hope so and I kind of hope that I never see anything like it again.
In conclusion, you kind of need to see My Geisha to believe it. I like to think that we’ve come a long way since a major studio decided that Shirley MacLaine pretending to be Japanese geisha was a terrific premise for a light comedy but I’m not sure. We’re still pretty fucking racist even as we profess loudly and unconvincingly not to be.
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