Hooray for Haolewood? Hawai‘i on Film

Abstract

Western explorers and adventurers such as Captain James Cook, William Ellis, and Charles Stewart, returned from the Pacific with exciting ‘South Seas’ tales of Eden-like islands, idol-worshipping natives, man-eating cannibals, lost treasure, and beautiful, available native women. Novelists such as Herman Melville, Mark Twain, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Henry de Vere Stacpoole would later add elements to the mythology in their semi-fictional tales. By the time Hollywood started making movies about the South Seas in the early years of the twentieth century, there was already familiar, exotic imagery to draw upon — recurring plot devices that were evident in the stories of earlier adventurers and novelists, with themes of mystery, romance, danger, adventure, opportunity, and utopianism. As recent scholarship has shown, Westerners have created, in all of these mediums, semi-mythical places, whose inhabitants reflect Western desires and prejudices:

Western intrusions into Hawai’i — from early explorers, traders, and missionaries, to planters, diplomats, and military leaders, to travel agents, airline companies, and foreign visitors — have seen Hawai‘i as a welcoming feminine place, waiting with open arms to embrace those who come to penetrate, protect, mold, and develop, while simultaneously lacking that which would make it fully realized (and which the intruders conveniently believe themselves to possess). Maps of Hawai‘i from Captain James Cook’s expeditions represent Hawai‘i with soft, curved, breast-like mountains and mysterious coves and bays … Missionary accounts of ‘the natives’ emphasize their darkness; naked, unashamed, promiscuous (Ferguson and Turnbull 6).