Use of Musical for Impersonal Romance
Analysis of Tsai Ming-liangʼs Art Film The Hole
As an internationally renowned auteur, director Tsai Ming-liang has been an overriding force that assembles and unifies all aspects of his film façade. Throughout his body of works, the anchoring themes of loneliness and human interaction in the modern society have been extensively explored in the genre of arthouse and drama. Among them, The Hole (Tsai, 1998) stands out as one of his few musicals, telling a story between a man upstairs and the woman downstairs after the appearance and enlargement of a hole in her ceiling. Through his stylistic use of musical along with the narrative, Tsai Ming-liang gradually implies the romantic intimacy between the protagonists to be false and impersonal.
Quoting from Bordwell, “the art cinema motivates its narratives by two principles: realism and authorial expressivity” (651). Throughout Tsai’s films, there are many recurrent thematic motifs braided into the narrative as marks of his stylistic signatures while maintaining its realistic credibility. In Vive L’amour (Tsai, 1994), The River (Tsai, 1997), The Hole (Tsai, 1998) and The Wayward Cloud (Tsai, 2005), the narratives all take places in “real locations”, reflecting “real problems” in the society and often implicating “eroticism” between the characters (Bordwell, 651). Among these films, water is always a prominent element manifested through the characters’ living habit or environment in scenes of them drinking, cooking, showering, swimming or being overwhelmed by rain. The protagonists’ intimate touch with and dire need of water are both routine in daily life and symbolic of sexual desire, often increasing with their stronger lust and catharsis. Similar to his The Wayward Cloud that is set in drought, The Hole constructs a disastrous diegetic world due to the imbalance of water, in which the city is always flooded by torrential rain and endangered by an apocalyptic plague. The woman downstairs, constantly troubled by the shortage of water supply on her own floor and agitated by water leaking from upstairs, stockpiles toilet paper to dry her apartment. Such use of detrimental contagious water dripping to one character’s space from another’s and consequent resistance are reminiscent of The River, in which the running water for the son’s dirty clothes seeps into the father’s room that he tries to block it at first. In both of the films, the room is emblematic of the character’s inner space and the leaking water is symbolic of the character’s influence on another in their evolving relationship. When the woman makes an erotic call, she asks for coconut juice, peels the paper off walls while telling she is undressing and rubs toilet paper against her body intimately. In this scene, the actions and signs involved are all conventional in the context and yet highly symbolic of her lust, imbuing the semiotics with psychological realism. Besides, in all of the above-mentioned films, the characters often communicate their desire by smoking. Through sharing a cigarette with another, smoking simultaneously, or seductive blocking with others while smoking alone, the characters signal their lust and offer intimacy to others by smoking, a typical activity of unleashing desire. Therefore, such “a hard core of basic and often recondite motifs” (Wollen, 457) endow the film with “a rich meaning and a correspondingly complex form (Wollen, 469) to preserve Tsai’s stylistic realism in his arthouse films.
Through the combination of drama and musical, Tsai realizes “a commitment to both objective and subjective verisimilitude” that “distinguished the art cinema from the classical narrative mode” (Bordwell, 652). Different from most of his works, in The Hole, ve musical scenes with first four of them sung by the woman take a more formalist approach than the realistic narrative part that is often shown through gloomy realistic long takes with little non-diegetic sound or conversation between the protagonists to render the loneliness of isolated characters. Instead, in the musical part, there is the woman in glamorous dresses cheerfully singing and dancing with merry music at bright and lavishly decorated places. Such stark contrast in visual styles and character expressions alludes to the musical scenes only being her fantasies, heightening the tension between film reality and constructed fiction. Despite the dramatic texture of the mise-en-scène, there are hints through Tsai’s consistent color code that reveals psychological truth about the woman. Every time, the musical emerges after the protagonists’ interaction through the hole. Though in the narrative, the woman seems averse to it by responding with shock or actions to block the hole, her life has been shown to passively intertwine with the man’s more through parallel editing as their interaction increases. Such formal implication of characters’ relational change extends to the musical in terms of recurrent and increasing redness throughout the film. In contrast to the man’s white vest and the woman’s black dress in the narrative, her costume and hair style in the musical increase in the portion of redness. For example, the red feathers as her decoration in the first musical scene Calypso, red-flower dress in the second one and fully red dress in the last scene I Don’t Care Who You Are, of which the color coincides with that of the door to the man’s inside space, insinuating her increasingly disclosed desire for intimacy. Such use of red to hint the character’s psychological demand for interaction can also be found in The Wayward Cloud at the recurrent appearance of watermelon flesh and in The River at the doors to indoor space. As Bordwell says, “the art cinema is less concerned with action than reaction; it is a cinema of psychological effects in search of their causes” (651). Thus, through Tsai’s formalist approach to these musical scenes, which can potentially be seen triggered by the protagonists’ interaction in the realistic narrative, the woman’s psychological demand for interpersonal intimacy in her lonely diegesis is magnified, explicitly manifesting the theme of “a search for intimacy” (the poster of The Hole).
The intimacy desired by Tsai’s protagonists, which seems exclusive between them on an ostensible level, is revealed to be impersonal through his recurrent anthropomorphization of inanimate props and dehumanization of the character’s romantic partner. In expressing their desire for intimacy, the human characters of Tsai’s films often interact with objects around them. In Vivre L’amour, Mei-Mei gently touches the bare mattress before falling asleep alone; in The Hole, the woman rubs toilet paper against herself when longing for body contact; both in The Wayward Cloud and Vivre L’amour, the protagonists fetishize a watermelon by kissing or licking it romantically. Tsai’s characters express their desire for intimacy not only with objects as above-mentioned, but also towards them, projecting the unilaterality of their desire. In both of his musicals The Wayward Cloud and The Hole, objects such as asphalt (sculpture) and re extinguisher appear in the narrative first and are later featured in the musical scene for romantic company with the actress. In the latter, the intoxicated man upstairs hugs and carries a re extinguisher home, which is anthropomorphized again when the woman sings in a corridor of re extinguishers and dances with it despite the man’s avoidance of intimacy in the third musical scene I Want Your Love. There is no romantic interaction between the protagonists involved but only desire expressed through the woman’s singing and dancing. With the similarity of her movement towards the re extinguisher and the man, the tension between her strong desire for intimacy and lack of particularity for the intimate object’s identity implies the interchangeability, thus the substitutability, of the human character and inanimate prop here. As sung by the last musical in the film, “I don’t care who you are, but in your arms I cling. Alone together, in the dark”, in the end, the woman, in a fully red dress that visually resembles a re extinguisher, dances with the man in a seemingly affectionate manner. Such juxtaposition of male and female characters in musical texts typically, as “semantic signal”, builds up “syntactic expectation” of romance (Altman, 562) into the generic musical syntax about “the joy of coupling, the strength of the community, and the pleasure of entertainment” after 1931-1932 (Altman, 559). However, the closer bond between characters is negated by their guarded interaction and limited communication: like in other Tsai’s films such as The Wayward Cloud and Vivre L’amour, despite the protagonists’ intimate relief through a final ejaculation or one-night stand, they never vent their emotions by verbal disclosure to each other. In The Hole, as the woman sings in the first musical Calypso, “I really don’t need to pour my heart out”. The protagonists barely know each other before their fantasy or intimacy starts. Thus, the musical’s syntax illusion of stronger bonding is destructed by Tsai’s portrayal of masturbative intimacy and impersonal romance.
Furthermore, the “syntactic view” of Tsai’s musical, which “privileges the structures into which they are arranged” (Altman, 556), collides with art film thematically to enhance the interplay of these two genres. According to Bordwell, in art film, “the drifting protagonist traces an itinerary, an encyclopedic survey of the film’s world” (651). Though in The Hole and many other films by Tsai, the narrative is mostly situated in enclosed private space, all of the first four musical scenes take place in interactive communal spaces respectively at the elevator, the staircases and the corridor within the diegesis. As these spaces descend in their mechanicality and modernity, the mobility within them becomes more and more effortful while the woman’s desire for closer interaction grows within the narrative, reflecting the art film’s concern of “la condition humaine” and “its attempt to pronounce judgements on modern life as a whole” (Bordwell, 651) against the fictional backdrop of millennial apocalypse. Through unconventional behaviors at these communal places, Tsai provokes the spectators’ vision of modern interaction between individuals. In The Wayward Cloud, the man gives way to the woman in the corridor by climbing to the ceiling; in The Hole, lively rhythm and outward expression for intimacy sung by the woman in the form of musical heighten the loneliness and isolation of individuals in the film reality. In the final moment of the film, the man’s “rescue” of the woman takes place through their first real body contact in the narrative when he pulls her upstairs through the hole, eventually transgressing the borders of their private space. Next, it is cut to the two dancing together in the man’s apartment. Here, the boundary of narrative and musical blurs. Unlike other musical films in which the musicals are intertwined into the narrative and emerge in an organic way, both of Tsai’s musicals The Hole and The Wayward Cloud distinguish themselves from the norm by the metric syntax of the musical part, whereby the musical scenes are interpolated into the narrative uniformly on the timeline. Tsai’s stylistic musical syntax highlights the “episodic structure” (Bordwell, 654) of the art film against the “broken teleology of the art film” (Bordwell, 651). The final scene takes place in a location logically coherent for the narrative with non- diegetic song by Ge Lan, instead of any performed by the protagonist, playing in the background. However, the scene appears one regular time gap after the last musical, where the next one is supposed to be. With the characters’ costume and hairstyle in-between formalism and realism, “the film constantly strains between the coherence of the fiction and the perceptual disjunctions of cinematic representation” (Bordwell, 655). Therefore, in the end, fantasy and reality meet, merging the form of narrative and musical.
As Bordwell concludes in his study of art film, “to push the realism of psychological uncertainty to its limit is to invite a haphazard text in which the author’s shaping hand would not be visible” (654). In his art film The Hole, Tsai Ming-liang preserves its objective verisimilitude by delicately braiding his recurrent motifs into the narrative and magnifies the subjective verisimilitude through his stylistic use of musical, achieving an interplay of realist and formalist approaches. Across his body of works, Tsai has centered his concern around the lack of real intimacy in the modern society through his auteurist cinematic discourse. This essay proposes that the anthropomorphization of inanimate signs such as re extinguishers reveals the impersonal nature of featured romance and the metric musical syntax stirs the boundary between fantasy and reality in the film. However, the arguments are still speculative and may have gone beyond or against the author’s creative intention.
Works Cited
Films
The Hole. (1998) Drama-musical. Directed by Tsai Ming-liang. [DVD] Taiwan: Fox Lorber.
The River. (1997) Drama. Directed by Tsai Ming-liang. [DVD] Taiwan: Strand Releasing.
The Wayward Cloud. (2005) Drama-musical. Directed by Tsai Ming-liang. [DVD] Taiwan: 20th Century Fox.
Vive L’amour. (1994) Drama. Directed by Tsai Ming-liang. [DVD] US: Strand Releasing.
Chapters in an Edited Book
Altman, R. (1984) A Semantic/Syntactic Approach to Film Genre. In Braudy, L. & Cohen, M. Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings. 7th edition. p.552-563. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Bordwell, D. (1979) The Art Cinema as a Mode of Film Practice. In Braudy, L. & Cohen, M. Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings. 7th edition. p. 649-657. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Wollen, P. (1972) From Signs and Meaning in the Cinema. The Auteur Theory [Howard Hawks and John Ford]. In Braudy, L. & Cohen, M. Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings. 7th edition. p.455-470. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
