Lotus Flower's Colors: Interracial Autoeroticism and The Toll of the Sea

Abstract:This article argues that Toll of the Sea (1922), the first film to use the two-strip (red and green) Technicolor system—and also the first to star Anna May Wong—is a work whose manifestation of color is inherently linked to its understanding of interracial relations. While the film's Madame Butterfly–inspired narrative and usage of Orientalist mise-en-scène would appear to imply that color is used to allegorize racial evidence, this article proposes instead that the film's color is aligned with the autoerotic, uncoupled position of Wong's character Lotus Flower. This article seeks to establish a historiography of this racialized loneliness that persists not only within the film but also across contemporaneous immigration law and the problematics of white/Asian miscegenation that informed Wong's career. In elaborating sexual consummation as a racialized structure, the article presents a means of aligning—although not necessarily reconciling—Asian American critiques of sexual teleology with accounts of anti-Asian legislation and formal analyses of early Technicolor ornamentation.