Cloud Atlas’ Queer Tiki Kitsch: Polynesians, Settler Colonialism, and Sci-Fi Film

IntroductionQueer Polynesian film reception, feminism, and worldview offer crucial insights into the religious and gender aspects of Maori, Moriori, and Kanaka Maoli media. In line with Polynesian feminist practice, this article on the film Cloud Atlas (2012) not only uses the concept of queer to mean both non-heteronormative and non-cis-gender, it also utilizes specific Polynesian third gender or queer language terms such as the Maori takatapui, Hawaiian mahu, and Samoan fa'afafine to engage specific forms of queer Indigenous resistance in film.1 Polynesian and Native feminist theory allows for critiques of queer settler colonialism that simply elude film analyses framed by the intersectionality of secular Western-category oppressions such as race, class, and gender. As Native feminists, Kanaka Maoli Maile Arvin, Eve Tuck (St. Paul Island Aleut), and Modoc/Klamath Angie Morrill avoid race as a central category of intersectional Indigenous oppression. Instead, they draw upon Patrick Wolfe's discussion of settler colonialism as a continuous European displacement and erasure of Indigenous peoples, Andrea Smith's observations that settler colonialism is achieved through combined heterosexism and patriarchy, and Scott Morgensen's findings that settler colonial States utilize biopower to discipline Indigenous "queer" kinship systems and non-nuclear families.2 Arvin, Tuck, and Morrill also "problematize and theorize the intersections of settler colonialism, heteropatriarchy, and heteropaternalism"3 in ways that "recognize the persistence of Indigenous concepts and epistemologies," a Native feminist articulation central to this article.4 Other Polynesian scholars also utilize Indigenous methodologies in deciphering cultural production. Writing on the Hawaiian balance concept of pono, Hawaiian scholar 'Umi Perkins confirms that, "Indigenous worldview" can undermine uncritical "colonization/ occupation" representations. 5 Maori Fourth Cinema scholar Brendan Hokowhitu supports Raheja's film reception theory of "visual sovereignty," a film's ability to respond to Indigenous aesthetic, "spiritual," and National concerns.6 Visual sovereignty impacts a Moriori, Maori, and Kanaka Maoli multi-gendered sense of mana that Hawaiian gender scholar Ty Tengan defines as "spiritual power," "prestige," and authority. 7 Mana can apply to the prestige of all genders including the takatapui and mahu. Moreover, queer Indigenous concepts and worldviews can resist heterosexist settler colonialism that structures film like Cloud Atlas. Arvin et al.'s articulation of Indigenous religious "concepts" in opposition to queer settler colonialism fuels this criticism of the Polynesian representations in the Wachowskis' Cloud Atlas.8 A queer rendering of visual sovereignty and the related Polynesian concepts of peace, mana, moko, and pono resist the queer settler colonial logics that guide the Wachowskis' directorial and screenwriter choices in parallel editing, plot development, montage, casting, make-up, and camera angle.With little regard for Polynesian visual sovereignty, religious concepts, or queer Indigenous futures, Cloud Atlas (2012) directors and screenwriters Lana Wachowski, Andy Wachowski, and Tom Tykwer rely upon parallel editing to dramatize the reincarnation of their film's six main protagonists across bodies marked by Western- category oppressions of race, class, sexuality, age, and genetics. A third of Cloud Atlas' six different stories are set in Polynesia, though mostly filmed in Mallorca. Parallel editing integrates Cloud Atlas' six colonial, contemporary, and futuristic plots that date from 1848 to 2321. Through their parallel editing of the racially diverse actors and actresses who reincarnate across the six eras, the Wachowskis intimate that all people are ultimately transgender and transracial actors in a universal soul struggle for freedom. The first seven minutes of the film briefly introduces each of the six birth-marked protagonists from each of the six eras of the film before the title card Cloud Atlas finally appears on the screen. …