不散

I literally cried when I watched Tsai’s Goodbye, Dragon Inn for the first time. With no doubt, this is one of the best films in the 21st century. Tsai is also one of my favorite auteurs. I have watched more than five of his works, including his most recent work Days. As I just can’t love this film more, this discussion post will mainly reflect on some issues from the perspective of the film, with brief discussion on the readings (mainly about Galt/Schoonover).

Contrast, or juxtaposition, is one significant theme for this film. As Galt and Schoonover argues the queer cinema as the dynamic proves of “worlding,” Goodbye, Dragon Inn depicts the collision between two worlds, the cinematic world (Hu’s Dragon Inn) and the reality (“normative world”). As Prof. Redrobe’s lecture discusses, Hu’s Dragon Inn (1967) was very popular at its time, receiving many recognitions and love from the audiences and other filmmakers. Therefore, it could represent a kind of collective memories, or the mainstream culture symbol reached by nearly consensus. This glorious past is revived at the beginning of Goodbye, Dragon Inn as well, when the theater is packed with audiences. Each viewer is appreciating Hu’s masterpiece quietly, sitting properly. However, after Hu’s name appears on the screen at the end of the credits, Tsai cuts to the desolate entrance of Fu He theater (福和大戏院). In this theater, which is also the main stage for this film, there are only several audiences. The people become the “strangers,” or the lost. They are the marginalized people who are also “out of date”: the lame female ticket seller, the Japanese man seeking a homosexual relationship, and the two forgotten cast from Hu’s Dragon Inn (Chun Shih, and Tien Miao). Therefore, the “haunted theatre” in this film forms a great contrast against the theater depicted in the very beginning. This space, the Fu He theater, witnesses the condensation of the past (the dirty and worn seats, the scraped walls). These marginalized people, with no specific aims or destinations, wander in this space, seemingly “summoned” by the re-screening of Hu’s Dragon Inn, a film premiered around forty years ago. The posters in the corridor of the theater drag the audiences back to its contemporary. (Peng Brother’s The Eye, and Je-yong Lee’s The Affair) Therefore, it creates the collision between two “worlds.”

As Galt and Schoonover suggests, Tsai’s film might function as the opposition against the Western dominant stereotype on queer cinema, which frequently involve the direct depictions of sexual acts “endorsing a Western cultural privileging of visibility and publicness.” (12) As Ma also points out, the sexuality and the sexual behaviors are always blurred and ambiguous in Tsai’s films, together with the identity. The audiences do not know that the man is Japanese until the later half of the film. Although he is actively seeking for some seemingly homosexual relationships with other man, there is no depiction of any direct touching or hugging. The cigarette replaces the genital organ, representing the phallic meaning when the Japanese man is seeking another man to “light” it. For most of times, the communication is silent, through their eye contacts or some slight body movements. This unsatisfied sexual desire of the queer people depicted in ambiguity frequently appears in Tsai’s films. In his work Vive L'Amour (1994), the homosexual, played by Kang-sheng Lee, could only lie under the bed, and masturbate when his beloved straight man has sex with another woman. Ma also uses the image of the “stolen kiss” of the next morning from that film in her essay as well.