Recasting Hawaiʻi’s Uneasy Role in Hollywood’s Dreamscape

Hollywood’s visions of Hawai‘i reveal how entertainment and colonial narratives intertwine in the portrayal of the Pacific.

Three essays on cinematic representations of Hawai‘i and the Pacific from the 1950s to the 2010s.

Hollywood does not take its task of filming the Pacific lightly, relying on some of the best directors, writers, and cinematographers in the industry. Its cinematic distortions of representation have been achieved with considerable film aesthetics, ranging from spectacular nature and oceanic scenes to underwater and color photography, complex editing, the creation of new genres such as the South Seas fantasy, the combat film, and battlefield documentary, as well as the use of classical Hollywood conventions of melodrama and musicals to highlight the work of nation building. In addition, the industry’s top stars have been involved in this enterprise to convey the Pacific’s full incorporation into the imaginary space of Hollywood drama. While contemporary audiences may be dismayed at some of the racist stereotyping and disavow these films as mere Hollywood products, audiences of the past received them favorably and saw them as an extension of the mainland’s imaginary space. This systematic conceptualization of the representation of the Pacific continues today with new technological and aesthetic developments to promote its appropriation. As such these films and television programs also provide a map to the ideological concerns that help build the edifice of the United States.

Hollywood films about Hawai‘i and the Pacific betray a colonial and imperial mind at work and give insight into the structures of power that have governed and still govern the United States today. Hawai‘i and the Pacific appear in this sense as a symptom pointing to the nation’s repeated attempts at self-portrayal. To what extent the South Pacific is a space of leisure or military conflict remains forever undecidable as Hollywood preserves the structural ambiguity of its symbolic universe, making it a form of entertainment rather than political discourse. It is in this fashion that it interposes itself between representation and consumption as a form of media-tion. Cinematically mediated images of the South Pacific and Hawai‘i purposely compromise and co-opt this region in order to serve as the continuing playground for the fantasy production of the United States.

Aloha

Aloha (Cameron Crowe, 2015) presents in this new mode an ecologically inflected military-industrial complex fusing Hawai‘i’s ecological outlook with US military concerns. Casting of blonde Emma Stone as one-quarter Hawaiian drew criticism but works predictably within the Hollywood logic of profit, using popular white stars as focalizing draws for film audiences. This business strategy also explains the casting in The Descendants of star George Clooney rather than a more credible and part-Hawaiian actor such as David Strathairn, who, though known, usually does not carry entire films. To this date, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, of Samoan and African Canadian ancestry, and Jason Momoa, of Hawaiian descent, are the only Pacific film stars with wide recognition value. However, a growing number of recent productions featuring Native Hawaiian perspectives and actors such as Moana (2016), Moana 2 (2024), Lilo & Stitch (2025), and especially the TV series Chief of War (2025), starring Momoa and spoken mostly in the Native Hawaiian language, may well change this representational shortcoming.

Set in contemporary Hawai‘i, Aloha often appears forced and artificial in its attempt to give Hawai‘i a more realistic and recognizable representation from a Hawaiian point of view. Emma Stone, for example, as Captain Allison Ng, sings with a Hawaiian group of musicians Gabby Pahinui’s slack key guitar classic “Waimānalo Blues” as one of her favorite tunes, but does so unconvincingly. Mitchell, the white son of retired Brian Gilcrest’s (Bradley Cooper) former girlfriend Tracy (Rachel McAdams), turns out to be a “Hawaiian myth buff” and decorates his room with the flag of the Hawaiian nationalist movement. Gilcrest’s daughter Grace comes to melodramatic awareness during a hula dance class that Brian, her mother’s former boyfriend, is indeed her biological father. This scene is shot with many medium close-ups of her dancing the hula, placing other Hawaiian class members out of the frame. 

Apart from such obvious Hollywood distortions, however, the film does address political claims for sovereignty by the Hawaiian nationalist movement and features a cameo of Bumpy Kanahele, Hawaiian nationalist leader and head of Nation of Hawai‘i. His T-shirt, filmed front and back and stating “Hawaiian By Birth–American By Force,” is nevertheless undermined as he is shown to be close friends with Gilcrest and admires the military in general, while asserting that Hawai‘i is “under occupation.” Since the nationalist movement’s flag, presented by him to Gilcrest, is shown in a final shot in the children’s bedroom of the Hawaiian myth buff Mitchell, to whom it has been bequeathed, the film further suggests that this movement is at best in its infancy and thereby belittles its seriousness. Other cameos of Hawaiian musicians are likewise used in exploitative fashion to evoke the usual atmosphere of local Hawaiian cookouts and lūʻau accompanied by Hawaiian music.

As a new feature, the film portrays the military and military contractors cooperating closely with Native Hawaiians, seemingly respecting their customs and lands. Gilcrest retired from the military and, now a private contractor, oversees a traditional Hawaiian blessing for a pedestrian gate on a former Hawaiian burial ground on Hickam Field and secures Hawaiian participation in exchange for two mountains and cell phone service. This ludicrous plot device allows the film to introduce Emma Stone’s part-Hawaiian character Allison Ng, who is introduced as a local liaison to Kanahele, the Hawaiian nationalist leader. Gilcrest is at the same time hired by billionaire Carson Welch (Bill Murray), who intends to install a communications satellite to aid six poor Pacific Rim countries. Later this claim is found out to be an outright lie, forcing Brian and the military to sabotage its concealed weaponized nuclear capability, causing the satellite to explode. Predictably the romantic comedy ends in the production of two couples (Brian and Allison, and the restored marriage of Tracy and her husband, Woody) as well as the blessing of the gate, ridiculously suggesting that the military preserves balance on Hawai‘i and protects the islands from ruthless private businessmen.

The film’s opening montage made up of video and documentary footage introduces its major thematic strands of military technology in conflict with Hawai‘i’s peaceful and ecological outlook. Hawaiian cultural icons (Duke Kahanamoku, Queen Lili‘uokalani), dancers, wartime images, and King Kamehameha parades alternate with historic footage of rocket launches, drones, and other reconnaissance technology. Ironically and unintentionally the montage also captures the military-entertainment complex, as it intercuts space and rocket technology footage with leisure footage from Hawai‘i, showing the two as intimately connected. As Brian Gilcrest lands at Hickam Field, Hawaiian dance ceremonies alternate with military ceremonials such as “Taps.” Later in the film, Captain Ng claims, “This is not the military of old … this is the new.” She invokes the Outer Space Peace Treaty of 1967 and promises Kanahele that the military “will not put weapons above these sacred skies.” This promise tacitly overlooks that Hawai‘i is already militarized to its teeth with many nuclear-powered carriers and nuclear submarines patrolling the Pacific. As Haunani-Kay Trask, Hawaiian activist-scholar and staunch defender of
Hawaiian independence, summarizes the facts: 

Aloha’s utopian narrative of demilitarization remains one of wishful thinking and does little to change the status quo of Hawai‘i in its spurious narrative, where the military checks the island’s safety against rogue corporate interests. The film is divided in its message by trying to give more voice to Hawai‘i and at the same time defending the major interest group, the military, that has kept Hawai‘i under occupation. In a sequence interspersed with the final credits of the film, Kanahele ceremonially reburies ancestral bones relocated from the Hickam gate together with Gilcrest on Hawaiian land and hands him a volcano stone. The old Hawaiian flag is shown upside down, with the British part of the flag in the lower left corner, a further reminder of the Kingdom’s hostile annexation and its state of occupation. Unfortunately, with the film framing the military as the guardian of stability, these scenes mostly constitute lip service for liberal-minded audiences.

With the rebalancing of US military power in the Pacific, starting under the Obama administration in 2012, strong military and strategic interests in Hawai‘i have in fact increased. As the United States gradually disengages from the unstable regions of the Near and Middle East, it has turned its view toward the large, profitable markets of China and India, while also protecting its older interests in Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. Crowe’s film Aloha, which involves the military much more significantly than previous films about Hawai‘i (50 First Dates, Forgetting Sarah Marshall, The Descendants), reflects the new remilitarization of the Pacific but seeks to tame its reality with a discourse of ecology, one of Hawai‘i’s latest cultural exports. In turning to the discourse of ecology, Aloha finds new a narrative formula to naturalize the inevitable US claim on Hawai‘i in the face of its recently increased military role in the Pacific.

In examining contemporary films and television programs about Hawai‘i, it has become apparent that two diametrically opposed themes dominate in the on-screen representation of the Pacific, namely amnesia and militarization. The former is rooted in escapist fantasy and white melodrama, negating any historical accountability of the United States toward its quasi-colony of Hawai‘i. Instead, Hawai‘i figures as a wholesome ecosystem that restores broken relationships or induces new romances. Its natural and oceanic habitats remind viewers that a belief in ecological balance and sustainability will correct all problems, even those that the films steadfastly refuse to address such as race, property, and political representation. The white coded liberal universe that sees Hawai‘i as a home away from home appears benevolent but gives little voice to those inhabitants who have been socioeconomically displaced by settler colonialism, tourism, real estate prices, and cost of living. In contrast to these fantasy escape scenarios, films with a dose of realism view Hawai‘i as a battleground for global conflicts and the maintenance of geopolitical dominance via military power. The necessary remilitarization of Pacific culture is made palatable to audiences via thriller and action plots, providing lowbrow entertainment rather than high-minded political seriousness. Once again, the reality of contemporary Hawai‘i and the Pacific falls through the cracks in such scenarios that indulge in the ever-growing enlargement of the military-industrial-entertainment complex.

the descendants

In an example concerning race, sovereignty, and property, consider the film The Descendants (Alexander Payne, 2011). Directed by indie filmmaker Payne, the film picks up the question of amnesia featured in 50 First Dates but with the seriousness it deserves in relation to Hawai‘i’s history. Based on the novel of Kaui Hart Hemmings, The Descendants stays close to a perspective of Hawai‘i seen through the critical eyes of a Hawaiian author, surpassing by far the usual entertainment fare of Hollywood. It opens with the comatose Joane King, wife of Matt King, being regularly visited by her husband in the hospital after an accident during a boating race. Matt King’s plea “wake up,” as the film will show, will have to be applied to him as well, namely his obliviousness in his private life to the extramarital affair of his wife and in his public life with his neglect of his Hawaiian ancestry and the accompanying moral obligations to the Hawaiian community. His ancestry is established early in the film through voice-over, providing necessary information about his wealth and status in Hawai‘i. Close-ups of two family portraits highlight his great-great-grandparents who entered a mixed marriage between one of the last princesses related to King Kamehameha and a white banker, son of a New England missionary family. This combination of power and land brings the King family into wealth and the possession of valuable land leases that are about to expire under a new law that prohibits the transfer of these rights in perpetuity. The film’s trajectory in its double narrative seeks a solution to both public and private concerns. Although many reviewers on the continent simply mistook the film for a melodrama with dysfunctional family members (it is a convention in independent films to not convey harmonious images of this institution), the film stresses on numerous occasions its public concern with the legacy of Hawai‘i and its possessions passed down among the haole elites. 

To underscore this topic, the film opens in medias res with the eventual fatal accident, demystifying Hawai‘i as the tourist paradise. Establishing shots of Honolulu taken from an elevated position show Diamond Head, the city’s trademark tourist site, crowded into the background by skyscrapers and the H-1 cutting through a maze of buildings. Little of the original nature paradise is visible, as the next shot cuts to a multilane traffic jam usually associated with Los Angeles. The city appears as unattractive, overdeveloped, modern urban real estate. Matt King himself turns out to be a real estate lawyer, and the secret affair of his wife involves another real estate agent, Speer, whose sign is prominently shown in close-up before we meet the actual character. Speculation on the part of King suggests that Speer, who would benefit largely from the sale of the King estate, may have even dated King’s wife to wield some influence on this decision. In Kaua‘i, where King visits his extended family to reach a final decision, we once again see numerous tourist developments such as resorts and golf clubs. King himself is shown in a T-shirt of the Outrigger Club, an exclusive escape for the island’s elite on the outskirts of Waikīkī, which he regularly frequents. A final display of family pictures also shows that the interracial marriage that built the family’s fortune is from then on basically a legacy of white couples, keeping the estate in the hands of the white elites. King’s cousins are shocked to hear when he refuses to sign the handover documents from which everyone stands to make a considerable profit. At this point, however, woken up to the dysfunctionality within his family, King develops moral qualms about the exploitative use of the land trust that Hawai‘i bestowed on his family. The film ends on a gesture of sacrifice with King returning the lease to the original ownership of Hawai‘i. The utopian, and slightly artificial, happy ending stresses the ecological sanctity of Hawai‘i’s Pacific islands to be preserved for posterity. Hawai‘i’s land, as the film suggests, should no longer be subjected to real estate speculation and development for pure profit. However, it remains the decision of the white land owner (90 percent white) to rededicate its purpose, thereby turning him into an ecological philanthropist. The casting of Clooney, known for his liberal activism, deceptively obscures a more realistic depiction of the issue of land ownership and subsumes it under the sentimentality of the white liberal savior and ecologist. Casting Clooney as mixed Hawaiian further adds a layer of appropriation whereby representation and voice of Hawaiians seamlessly pass into white ownership.

The ending, unfortunately, also does not reflect the current aggressive development on O‘ahu, Maui, and Kaua‘i, with an additional eye to the formerly prohibited island of Moloka‘i, as the leper colony fades out. Not surprisingly, in its 2015 visit to Hawai‘i, Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown, an exotic food TV show documenting various global cuisines, had a brief stopover in Moloka‘i and met local residents who were formerly part of Hawaiian nativist protests against construction. Reality TV shows such as Hawaii Life (2013–present) advertise affordable real estate for more affluent mainland middle-class families in many areas of Hawai‘i. The formerly elite real estate market on Maui, boasting such clients as the late George Harrison, Eric Clapton, and Oprah Winfrey, has been expanded and extends now to average mainland buyers at the exclusion of poorer Hawaiians. In doing so, Hawaii Life further promotes the economic dispossession of Hawai‘i’s native population by presenting the island to a mass market of US buyers and highest bidders.

the revolt of mamie stover 

Postwar film depictions of Hawai‘i’s World War II sex industry, due to Hollywood’s censorship codes, could not explicitly show its reality and instead resorted to sanitized images of dance bars and social clubs as seen in From Here to Eternity (1953). Film audiences familiar with James Jones’s best-selling novel, wartime Hawai‘i, and Hollywood’s censorship conventions, however, would easily recognize the real context in which that film cast the lives of young soldiers in Honolulu. A notable film concerned with Honolulu sex work, The Revolt of Mamie Stover (Raoul Walsh, 1956), presents this context in equally obscure fashion and dwells on a narrative stressing the return to family values.

 The Revolt of Mamie Stover was shot on location in Hawai‘i and is set during the time before and after the attack on Pearl Harbor. The film’s story is an adaptation of William Bradford Huie’s 1951 novel of the same title that first appeared serially in the American Mercury. Buddy Adler, who had produced From Here to Eternity (Fred Zinnemann, 1953), sponsored Walsh’s production, which can in many ways be seen as a parallel film. As with Jones’s novel, Huie’s graphic and explicit descriptions of wartime assembly-line prostitution in Hawai‘i once again could not be shown and were explained via the conceit of taxi dancing and private entertainment stalls. The sheer numerical quantity of serviced customers was shown with the device of copious rolls of fairground tickets with which the soldiers paid for dances and drinks. As historians Beth Bailey and David Farber note in The First Strange Place: Race and Sex in World War II Hawaii, “Each prostitute normally serviced about 100 men a day, at least twenty days out of every month.” Jane Russell in the lead role gives a convincing portrayal of Mamie as a modern, self-determined, and self-empowered woman who quickly learns to invest her hard-earned money in Hawai‘i real estate. While the film hints at eroticism in musical numbers and Hawaiian dance scenes, its main focus lies with the entrepreneurial and capitalist spirit of Mamie Stover, circumventing restrictions of location and movement in order to amass as much money as possible. Her accomplice is the reporter Jim Blair, with whom she has a secret affair but also business dealings. As Jim is drafted, she promises to stop her trade but is lured back by irresistible offers of profit. Jim returns unexpectedly, finds Mamie in the old “entertainment” establishment, and breaks the engagement with a lecture that money cannot be the ultimate pursuit of life. Mamie retorts that this advice applies only to people who have always had money. Enlightened partially by his words, she returns home to Mississippi and confesses to a police officer in San Francisco that she had made her fortune in Hawai‘i but lost it. This reference hints at the loss of Jim and prospective marriage and not the money per se. The film’s ending thus stresses a return to civil society, pays respect to the desirable status of marriage, and retains the hard-earned money as the reward for Mamie’s misguided but instinctively sound Protestant work ethic.

An extensively staged attack scene on the morning of December 7, involving many Hawaiian extras as the turning point in the film, becomes the inaugural moment for Mamie’s entrepreneurial endeavors and her revolt. As she is physically beaten and disciplined off-screen by the establishment’s bouncer Adkins for having violated a key rule by leaving the premise, the film cuts to the beginning of the Japanese attack, when the panic of war erupts with locals evacuating their homes. Mamie is shown leaving the establishment relatively unscathed, using the distraction to leave the premises once again and purchase real estate from owners desperate to leave the islands. These scenes are shown in parallel shots, juxtaposing the attack scenes and Honolulu’s population emerging on the street with Mamie’s buying of real estate, constituting her own attack and revolt against patriarchal norms. The scenes stress movement and mobility, representing Mamie’s own emerging socioeconomic mobility. In a curious reversal of the time image and its paralyzed male heroes in postwar films, Mamie fully embodies the action image. Later in the film, Mamie has a date with Jim at Waikīkī Beach, another strictly forbidden location for women of the trade, and once again Adkins wishes to make trouble but the tables have turned. Jim is now in uniform and military police come to his and Mamie’s aid when a fight erupts with Adkins. The MPs teach Adkins a lesson, giving him a thorough beating and showing the audience that the military now rules the islands. In another surprise turn, the strict madam Bertha Parchman (Agnes Morehead) holds on to Mamie as a financial asset and takes her side, dismissing the luckless Adkins from her services. Portrayed as a shrewd businesswoman, Bertha quickly understands that the military will protect her business interests and become her new clientele. Contrary to expectation, Mamie is shown not as a ruthless war profiteer but as a heroic woman who simply turns necessity into a virtue. In obscene but self-reliant fashion, she inaugurates Henry Luce’s American Century, converting both the military and prostitution into financial advantage.

In Huie’s novel, which also describes the changes in wartime Honolulu in satirical fashion, the trade of the prostitute is equated with a form of military service for the nation: “In short, the traveling men emancipated Honolulu’s whores from provincial exploitation. No longer were the whores to be regulated and exploited by the local fascists; they were now fonctionaires, as it were, of the Government of the United States. Naturally, all this national regulation made the whores feel patriotic.” In addition to becoming a quasi-legitimate branch of the military, prostitution also ushers in a new economic mobility. At the lead of this development stands Mamie Stover, a bolder version of Rosie the Riveter, who is not content with merely manning a factory job. As Huie writes:

While Huie stresses here the emancipation of women during wartime, he does not mention a similar emancipation of the local Hawaiian population from similar constraints of social and real estate zoning. In the film version, Jim Blair occupies a house at the highest point, possibly at the top of Mānoa Valley, overlooking the island from the colonial bird’s-eye perspective. When the Hawaiian natives emerge on the streets during the attack, the camera tracks their movements from the hilly terrain downward toward the city and eventually settles on shots in which rural field workers hurriedly leave the plantations while being strafed by Japanese warplanes from above. The visual geography places the white American at the top of the island, a position to which Mamie aspires. The film version does not grant Mamie this elevated perspective and never shows her moving to Pacific Heights. Nor does the film allow Hawaiians a modern narrative of social mobility.

The sexual and gender politics in Walsh’s film similarly reflects the contradictions of the postwar era in its depiction of wartime sexuality among the troops. In Victory Girls, Khaki-Wackies, and Patriotutes: The Regulation of Female Sexuality during World War II, scholar and historian Marilyn Hegarty discusses how female sexuality was controlled during the wartime period in which thousands of women, often termed “patriotutes,” provided soldiers with entertainment and other “morale-boosting services”:

This paradox of enlisting women for quasi-military service while simultaneously attempting to mark aspects of female sexuality as abnormal and diseased by equating it with venereal disease “created myriad problems, both institutional and individual.” Not only was this campaign, writes Hegarty, “complicated by deeply embedded ideologies of the female and male sexuality and by issues of race, class, and ethnicity,” but it “also amplified ambiguous social attitudes toward women at a time when serviceman had a ‘male mystique’ that valorized aggressive (hetero) sexuality. Military policies, including sex education for servicemen, free contraceptives, prophylactic stations, and support of houses of prostitution, all recognized and normalized male sexual needs and desires. The normality of women’s sexual desires was, however, silenced by the framing of female desire as a psychological problem or social pathology. The equation of female desire with deviance simultaneously oversexualized and desexualized many wartime women.” 

In Mamie Stover, the heroine’s sexuality is never explicitly shown but remains confined to melodramatic kissing scenes with her love interest Jim Blair. Suggestive clubs and dancing serve as the cleaned-up stand-in for the business of sex conducted on Honolulu’s Hotel Street. Conversely, the film depicts normative and marital sexuality among natives and locals in derogatory fashion. During the attack scene, the film shows an overweight and unkempt Hawaiian family packing up their many children into a station wagon with a naked baby hanging off the father’s shoulder. Normative heterosexuality is both advanced in the case of white women and discredited for minorities where it may lead to excessive population growth or “breeding.” Hegarty argues that such control of female sexuality “not only operated to mitigate women’s wartime gains” but also had long-term consequences, impacting all women, but most of all Black women, especially unmarried ones, who were marked as pathological and the antithesis of 1950s domestic and family culture.

Unfortunately, none of these films reflect in any way the social and cultural shake-up that the arrival of military and mass prostitution triggered in Hawai‘i. As Bailey and Farber point out, “Prostitutes had invaded every neighborhood. Hawai‘i’s carefully calibrated social stratification was being mocked. Mainland whores, white women, were out in public, demonstrating daily how little white skin meant in the way of moral superiority or some sort of ‘natural’ right to lord it over the vast majority of Hawai‘i’s people of darker hues. Already the hordes of working-class white soldiers, sailors, and war workers had damaged the racial equilibrium that gave stability to the island’s ruling white families who had seemed indestructible for some forty years. Now the white prostitutes made further mockery of the whole racialist setup.” Bailey and Farber rightly argue that the old social order of postwar Hawai‘i would undergo radical changes due to the impact of military personnel and wartime prostitution that exposed the 19-century missionary’s claim of the moral superiority of white civilization as a complete fraud. However, with the new stronghold of the US military in Hawai‘i, it remained to be seen if Hawai‘i could ever truly shake off white rule in its postwar history where the military-industrial complex wove its tentacles around the islands in the form of land grab and various forms of subcontracting to mainland businesses that still define Hawai‘i’s economy today.

These essays have been excerpted and edited from Hollywood’s Hawaii: Race, Nation, and War by Delia Konzett.