“It is not so much ‘facts' that history as such disseminates but
symbols of spiritual realities.”
— Andr¨¦ Breton, 1949
In Hou Hsiao-hsien's remarkable Good Men, Good Women, an unhappy
actress in contemporary Taipei, Liang Ching, receives entries taken from
her stolen diary over her fax machine. They remind her of her dead lover —
a petty criminal, Ah Wei, shot and killed several years earlier —and the
fact that she took three million in “blood money” from his murderers as a
settlement. On the phone, at one point, she tells the anonymous individual
sending the faxed passages, “Everyone said: the dead stay dead, but
money's real.”
If an artist could send pages of social history to contemporary
audiences with the aim of reminding them of past traumas and their bearing
on the present, how would he go about it? We don't have to sit around and
speculate. Hou has accomplished it in Good Men, Good Women.
One of the pressing issues of our day is the need to read emotional
life historically. That is to say, to put it bluntly, how do we account
for the extraordinary unhappiness, confusion, and sense that something is
absent from life afflicting great numbers of people (leaving aside, of
course, those who are feeding at the stock market trough or its overflow,
and whose existence is its own punishment)? Each individual attributes his
or her own state of mind to personal factors, all of which may be real and
legitimate. But surely if the condition is so generalized, it suggests a
broader process at work. It occurs to almost no one — least of all in
North America — to look to history as the source at least in part of his
or her difficulties. Is there a generalized social psychology and can its
historical trajectory be traced?
Hou, it seems to me, is one of the few contemporary artists who has
considered this problem. Good Men, Good Women can be interpreted in
a number of ways, as a modernist love story, a Taiwanese melodrama, a
crime drama, an historical puzzle that needs to be pieced together.
Through and beyond all that, it's a meditation on history and sadness. Hou
locates the historical trauma, and it would be a good place for any of us
to begin, in the post-World War II era. Liang Ching (Annie Shizuka Inoh)
is acting in a film about Chiang Bi-yu (also Inoh) and Chung Hao-tung (Lim
Giong), a Taiwanese couple who went off to fight in the anti-Japanese
resistance on the Chinese mainland in 1940. Upon returning to Taiwan after
the war, they helped establish a left-wing group that published a magazine
called The Enlightenment for the purposes of “educating the
masses.” They fell under the heel of political repression. Chung
Hao-tung,
along with many other socialists and opponents of the Chiang Kai-shek
regime, was executed and Chiang Bi-yu widowed.
The Taiwanese of the 1990s are haunted, albeit unconsciously, by this
past. Hou stresses the parallels between the two periods and the two
women. He has said his theme was to show what remains constant, “the true
color and energies of men and women.” Both Chiang Bi-yu and Liang want
children and are unable to have or keep them; both women are in love with
“outlaws” who meet early and violent deaths; and both mourn and grieve for
these absent lovers.
It seems impossible, however, for a spectator not to be struck
forcefully by the differences in their lives and times. Chiang
Bi-yu dedicated her life, no matter how naively, to the ideals of social
equality and justice. Liang's life has no such purpose, but Hou doesn't
moralize. Her wretchedness is palpable, and it can't be attributed solely
to her sadness at Ah Wei's death. She leads a largely cold, empty life,
hanging around with small-time gangsters and drinking till she passes out.
Whereas Chiang Bi-yu turns to her sister for support at the time of her
arrest, Liang and her sister squabble over the former's supposed
attentiveness to the latter's husband.
In the 1990s everything seems petty. The pursuit of money has replaced
social idealism. In one of those scenes that only Hou and perhaps one or
two other Taiwanese directors can stage and shoot — in which complex
social relationships are brought out and dramatized in the most apparently
effortless manner, as if such exposures were the most natural thing in the
world — we see the intimate ties between gangsters and politicians,
working out some filthy deal over a waste disposal plant. It's a
thoroughly corrupt environment. The only thing Liang can do to try and
make her situation more tolerable is remember Ah Wei and sing about her
broken heart: “All around I see gilded lives, but mine is tarnished. All
around I hear words like jade, but mine are luckless.”
The most exquisite and painful scenes are Liang's memories of her
affair with Ah Wei (Jack Kao). It's truly terrible: their yearning, their
helplessness, and how they connect intimately and how — at the same
moments — they remain entirely apart from one another. In one scene, the
pair sits on the floor in front of a mirror propped up against a wall. At
first we see only Liang putting on make-up and her reflection in the
glass. (A woman applying make-up is a fascinating sociological and sensual
phenomenon.) The two discuss the possibility she's pregnant. It's the kind
of dialogue that no one, or practically no one, in the US or Europe can
write these days: the universal, the “sacred,” in the form of the
everyday, the banal.
Liang: “So we should we get rid of it? [Camera moves slowly.] What if
it is yours? [We see him, playing with her hair.] Okay, I won't have it.
[Pause.] Okay, I'll have it and bring it up myself. Do you want a child?”
Ah Wei: “Is it mine? [She slaps him lightly.] No more jokes like that,
okay?” Liang: “Loads of women could have a child with you. You don't want
to?” They go on in this vein. Later, he says: “I'd give you all you need.”
She: “That personality of yours, it'll be the death of you.” He: “I'd just
like to see a little Ah Wei.” Tough, sweet, unconscious and so obviously
doomed — by a thousand external pressures and personal inadequacies and a
cold-hearted social order.
The scenes of Chiang Bi-yu and Chung Hao-tung in the 1940s are perhaps
too reverently done to fully come to life, and it's understandable why.
Hou wants to pay tribute to people who have suffered horribly. He treads
carefully, perhaps too carefully. And possibly too he has more of a
feeling for his contemporaries. In any event, the figures in the past
remain a little distant, their inner lives a bit hard to discern. On the
other hand, the scene of the socialist group meeting, in which its members
discuss their plans for The Enlightenment, is wonderfully done,
particularly as I have no reason to believe Hou sympathizes with the
group's goals. He treats them without a hint of condescension or irony.
Clearly, these are courageous and farsighted people. Also, as it happens,
doomed.
The shot of Chung Hao-tung, who's been beaten savagely by police, being
supported by his comrades as they make their way down the prison corridor
stays with you. The subsequent shot of the long, sterile, empty corridor
is even more evocative. A number of Taiwanese films have similar images.
Their country was a prison for decades. Why should anyone forget it?
It seems legitimate at this point to ask, and not in a provocative
manner: how many of those who admire Taiwanese films know something of the
island's history? China ceded Taiwan to Japan after the First
Sino-Japanese War (1894-95). It remained in Japanese hands until the end
of World War II, at which point Chiang Kai-shek's Kuomintang [KMT] forces
occupied the island. Friction between the Taiwanese population and the KMT
authorities, fueled by oppression, social inequity and shortages created
by the war, grew to the boiling point. On February 28, 1947, in response
to the beating of a woman cigarette-seller by police, the local population
rebelled. The authorities carried out a massacre throughout the island;
estimates of the dead range from 18,000 to 28,000.
With the victory of Mao's forces on the mainland in 1949, Chiang
Kai-shek moved the seat of his government to Taiwan. The island became, as
the narration in Good Men, Good Women has it, “a front line in the
anti-Communist struggle.” The KMT regime, supported to the hilt by the
United States and the rest of the “Free World,” carried out brutal
political repression. Martial law was not lifted until 1987. Only at that
point was it possible for filmmakers to raise the “2.28 Incident” and the
“White Terror.” Good Men, Good Women is dedicated to “all the
political victims of the 1950s.” Where else but Taiwan was someone making
a film like this in 1995?
Many people admire the Taiwanese and Iranian films of the 1990s. Is it
not telling that citizens of both societies suffered for decades under
US-backed regimes and were perhaps not so likely to share in the
triumphalism that followed the collapse of Stalinism in 1989-91?
Filmmakers in those two countries seemed able to keep their wits about
them while so many elsewhere were losing theirs. People can pretend all
they like that there are North American or European equivalents of Hou and
Abbas Kiarostami and Mohsen Makhmalbaf, but there aren't at the moment.
And there are reasons for it.
To return to the starting-point: Hou is one of those who understands
that historical events have implications for the psychological life of the
individual. (He is not unique among Taiwanese directors in this regard. I
think of Hsu Hsiao-ming's Heartbreak Island, Wu Nien-jen's A
Borrowed Life and Wan Jen's Super Citizen Ko, among others.)
Here he shows how modern Taiwanese society was born by stamping out what
was best in some people and physically eliminating others, and by
elevating obedience and the worship of money. And how this helps make
people sad today, without their understanding why, and how doubly sad that
is.
But this is by no means simply a Taiwanese problem, or the film
wouldn't move and disturb us. The political witch-hunts and the
generalized disappointments of the post-war period, for which Stalinism
was also responsible, have significance for everyone. In advanced
capitalist countries at least the 1950s were marked by that disorienting
combination of relative prosperity and psychic devastation. What would a
society look like in which much of the energy generated by revolutionary
and utopian ideas had been temporarily siphoned off? Look around you.
This film about sadness is full of life. It has too many elements to
talk about: the music, the shots of trees, the food, the way people talk
to each other like real human beings — not like one supermodel to another,
and the beautiful and precise imagery. There are plenty of ambiguities,
things I can't explain, things that can't be explained. Good Men, Good
Women adopts a serious attitude to life. It suggests that there are
difficult, painful social and personal problems that aren't going to be
solved overnight, or by shortcuts. Good Men, Good Women needs to be
seen and reseen. Writing about it only gets you so far.
And the conclusions you draw from the film will partly depend on what
you bring to it. It's not “pessimistic.” The real pessimists today are the
ones who more or less cheerfully accept the present situation. There's
hopelessness for you! Andr¨¦ Breton was another artist who knew that
history had psychic consequences. And he wrote that “the feeling that one
is lost, however alarming it may be, is not — far from it — one of those
feelings that leave man in the depths of despair, precisely because it
instinctively begets the question of how to find a way out.”
From World Socialist Web Site
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