“Happy Together”
The Representation of the ‘Third Space’ in Wong Kar-wai’s Cinema
BA Thesis, Arts Culture and Media
Yan Zhang S3302709 Faculty of Arts University of Groningen
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Faculty of Arts Bachelor’s thesis Statement, University of Groningen
Name of student: Yan Zhang Student number: s3302709
Bachelor’s degree programme – specialization: Arts, Culture and Media
Title of final-year thesis: “Happy Together”: The Representation of the ‘Third Space’ in Wong Kar-wai’s Cinema
Name of thesis supervisor: Julian Hanich
I hereby declare unequivocally that the thesis submitted by me is based on my own work and is the product of independent academic research. I declare that I have not used the ideas and formulations of others without stating their sources, that I have not used translations or paraphrases of texts written by others as part of my own argumentation, and that I have not submitted the text of this thesis or a similar text for assignments in other course units.
Date: May 29, 2020 Place: Groningen
Signature of student:
N.B. All violations of the above statement will be regarded as fraud within the meaning of Art. 3.9 of the Teaching and Examination Regulations.
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Table of Contents
Abstract ... 3
Chapter One: Introduction ... 3
1.1 Wong Kar-wai’s cinematic travel in Hong Kong ... 3
1.2 Reception of Wong’s cinema ... 5
1.3 Theoretical Framework ... 6
1.4 Thesis Statement and the Significance of the Research ... 7
1.5 Structure of the Thesis ... 8
Chapter 2: The Representation of the Cinematic “Third Space” ... 8
2.1 The Physical Spaces ... 10
2.2 Scene/Film Language Analysis ... 14
Chapter 3: Resettlement of the Protagonist in The Third Space ... 23
Chapter 4: Conclusion ... 25
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Abstract
As one of the most famous auteurs since the late 20th century, Wong Kar-wai dedicates his unique cinematic style to depict the marginalized people in postcolonial Hong Kong society in which the formerly colonized have lost their identities and struggle to seek a stable physical and spiritual space for their lives. In the field of post-colonialism, an important theory proposed by Homi Bhabha is the “Third Space Theory”. Third Space breaks down the binary oppositions of the colonizer and the colonized, providing a hybridized and interstitial space where negotiations between different discourses happen, thus for people who are in between different cultures to find their identities. This space is gradually established through the process of identity seeking where confrontation with a different ideology and introspection of the confrontation happen. Therefore, the chosen case study for this is 春光乍泄 (Happy
Together, 1997) which is a film based outside of Hong Kong yet tells a love story of a Hong
Kong homosexual couple. Based on the above, my aim of the thesis is to find justification for Happy Together being a legitimate representation of Hong Kong society in a postcolonial context by looking for the cinematic representation of the third space in the film. The central research questions of this thesis is: how is the “third space” represented in Wong’s films through his filmmaking techniques and style? And: Can Happy Together be regarded as a reflection of the third space? To achieve this, the main discussion is divided into two parts. The first part is dedicated to a discussion of the physical spaces shown in the film, and the second part is devoted to an analysis of relevant scenes in order to argue that the film itself presents an abstract third space in line with third space theory. By doing this, the thesis aims at examining Wong’s cinema through the lens of Bhabha’s postcolonial concept of the “third space”, to provide a new insight into Wong’s cinema.
Chapter One: Introduction
1.1 Wong Kar-wai’s cinematic travel in Hong Kong
From a small fishing village in early 19th century to a business harbor today, Hong Kong
seems to be westernized after a hundred and sixteen years of colonization by British government. On a macro level, Hong Kong culture takes shape upon traditional Chinese culture, especially connecting tightly with Lingnan, a city in southern China. On December 19th, 1984, the Chinese and British governments officially signed the Sino-British Joint Declaration, which confirmed Hong Kong’s return to China's sovereign right in 1997. It was a joyful moment for China but not for all Hong Kong people as during those years, the declaration always reminded them of their identity or nationality which they were confused about. Hong Kong had gradually become a hybrid city with the penetration of western culture and values and immigrants from different places, a dynamic and globalized society had been formed. New hybridity and transitional identities were emerging by the “mass migrations and
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bizarre interracial relations”.1 Therefore, the dual identity has become an obvious dilemma for the locals: on the one hand, they definitely could not deny their kinship with China, and on the other hand the impact of the British colonization resulted in a huge change in people’s lifestyle and the social system. Confrontations between the locals and the westerners occurred in Hong Kong, and Hongkongers became city dwellers who had difficulties with their identity. Where these two different cultural spaces encountered each other, a third space emerged. It is a hybridized space that does not have to be a concrete place but can be shown to exist in any forms of culture such as literature, music and a very popular medium – film. Film can be appreciated by all kinds of audiences, and more importantly, different eras of Hong Kong can be reflected vividly. Like other forms of art, film can be seen as a “realized presence of a haunting history” and can be translated as an image that depicts the relation between art and social reality.2 Films produced in the 1990s have a close connection to the social situation at the time as a kind of record that keeps track of the changes of Hong Kong society.
Films made around the handover of Hong Kong in 1997 uniquely reveal the consciousness and experiences of Hong Kong society, which become a collective memory of the people in Hong Kong. The unique postcolonial cultural identity that Hong Kong possesses is the result of a colonization for more than a century. This congenital defect made Hongkongers feel rootless from generation to generation.3 The portrait of marginalized people in films always
struck viewers,as it was difficult for them to state a clear identity because of the colonial history. 4 Film has become a way to release emotions and fulfill the expectations with regard to the difficulty with their identities. As an acclaimed filmic auteur of Hong Kong cinema, Wong Kar-wai has made a great contribution to the reflection of the life situation of marginalized people. In the postcolonial Hong Kong society, immigration and commercial globalization have created an urban cultural landscape which serves as the cultural background of Wong’s cinema.
Recurring motifs such as alienation, rejection, memory, pursuit and loss are considered as reflections of Hongkongers’ cultural anxieties in the context of the late 20th century.5 Wong has a deeper understanding of the loss and gain of the identity of people in the colonial and
1 Guillermo Gomez-Pena, “The new world border,” TDR, vol. 38 (Spring, 1994): 131.
2 Homi K. Bhabha, “Introduction,” in The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994), 12. 3 Wang Yuechuan王岳川, “Xianggang wenhua de houzhimin shenfen” 香港文化的后殖民身份 [The
postcolonial identity of Hongkongers’ culture], Free Forum of Literature 文学自由谈 2 (1999): 67.
4 Li Daoxin 李道新, “Wang Jiawei dianying de jingshen zouxiang jiqi wenhua hanyi” 王家卫电影的精神走
向及其文化含义 [The spirit of Wong Kar-wai’s cinema and its cultural implications], Contemporary Cinema 当代电影 3 (2001): 35.
5 Song Jingjing, “Modern Aesthetics in the Films of Wong Kar-wai” (Master. Diss., Hong Kong Baptist
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postcolonial Hong Kong due to his complex personal experiences of immigration. He was born in Shanghai in 1958 and immigrated to Hong Kong with his parents at five years old while his siblings were left in Shanghai’s French Quarter. As the only child, his isolation was compounded by the difficulty in assimilating Hong Kong’s dialect and culture. His interests in film developed during his childhood when his mother was a movie fan and often brought him to the cinema.6 At Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Wong earned a diploma in graphic design. After his graduation, he entered a program for production designers and directors at the local television station TVB, which paved the way for his career.7 The protagonists in Wong’s cinema are mostly marginalized groups such as killers, drug dealers, homosexuals, etc. Wong’s cinema reveals a care for the marginalized and their seeking for identity in the modernized world. Wong’s last film prior to the handover of Hong Kong, 春 光乍泄 (Happy Together, 1997), presents the anxiety over identity and a stabilized home through a homosexual couple Lai Yiu-fai (Toney Leung Chiu-wai) and Ho Po-wing (Leslie Cheung Kwok-wing) who travel to Argentina, South America from Hong Kong. They are seeking somewhere better to start their life again but what turns out is still the same as usual — ending up in quarrels and finally becoming estranged, which projects inner struggles of contemporaneous Hong Kong people. Happy Together implicitly demonstrates the process of searching for identities through an interstitial space that takes shape during the journey.
1.2 Reception of Wong’s cinema
Wong Kar-wai and his film work are highly appreciated by film critics, especially in the Western world. Some critics appreciated Wong’s films as a revival of what Pier Paolo Pasolini called “the cinema of poetry”, for instance, John Orr mentioned in his book
Contemporary Cinema.8 Film critic Tony Rayns sees that Wong’s cinema is a unique icon embedded in the particular social and cultural context of Hong Kong and Chinese society in the late 20th century, emphasizing that the ambiguous and itinerant cultural identity of Hong Kong people at the colony’s return to China’s sovereignty in 1997 is the core of Wong’s film, which is an intimate footage of the era. 910 In the book Wong Kar Wai, it is clearly argued
that Wong has tried to create a unique art style by his own film language to bridge Hong Kong with the rest of the world.11
6 Gary Bettinson, “Wong Kar-wai and the Poetics of Hong Kong Cinema” in The Sensuous Cinema of Wong
Kar-wai: Film Poetics and the Aesthetic of Disturbance (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2015), 2.
7 Erick Gregersen, “Wong Kar-Wai,” in Encyclopædia Britannica (Encyclopædia Britannica, inc., November
07, 2019), https://www.britannica.com/biography/Wong-Kar-Wai.
8 John Orr, “A Cinema of Poetry,” in Contemporary Cinema (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998),
31.
9 Tony Rayns, Wong Kar-wai on Wong Kar-wai (London: Faber & Faber, 2000). 10 Ibid.
11 Jean-Marc Lalanne, David Martinez, Ackbar Abbas, and Jimmy Ngai, eds. Wong Kar Wai (Paris: Dis Voir,
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Film studies on Wong Kar-wai can be divided into two types, i.e. studies on his iconic cinematic style and studies on the recurring motifs which are frequently linked to Hong Kong’s culture and society. From a chronological perspective, research on Wong Kar-wai’s films can be roughly divided into two periods: pre- and after- 1997. In his early films, Wong Kar-wai has been restlessly innovating and establishing his own cinematic style through spectacular visual images, subversion of film stereotypes and genres, experiences of mixing and matching different forms, fragmentation of narration, etc. Elegantly blending the market demands with his personal contemplation towards the Hong Kong identity, Wong inherited the innovation idea of the New Wave movement in Hong Kong cinema during the 1970s and 1980s, but he also created a new way forward. Film critics during this period mainly focused on debating about the film languages and innovations he has made. In the year 1997, the same time of Hong Kong territory’s turnover to Mainland China, Happy Together reflected both personal relationships and the larger commonalities and differences between mainland China, Taiwan and Hong Kong. The anxiety over Hong Kong identity and its social embarrassment then continued to serve as a frequent theme and concern of Wong Kar-wai in his later work. In the Mood for Love (2000) and 2046 (2004) even discusses Wong’s imagination and questioning on what Hong Kong would be like after 50 years of its auto-administration ended. Research targeted on Wong’s films after 1997 shifted to focus on the cultural studies of history and social interpretation reflected in his films.
1.3 Theoretical Framework
Post-colonial critic Homi K. Bhabha applies Soviet psychologist Lev Vygotsky’s sociocultural theory which originated Third Space theory to postcolonial conditions in his book The Location of Culture (1994), breaking down binary oppositions such as orient and occident, self and other, etc. In the context of colonialism and postcolonialism, Bhabha argues that the cultural systems are constructed in this liminal third space, and cultural identity emerges and develops in this contradictory and ambivalent space. Based on Bhabha’s argument, this thesis claims that the third space provides the people an “in-between” area where they come into contact with another ideology, along with “providing the terrain for elaborating strategies of selfhood—singular or communal—that initiate new signs of identity, and innovative sites of collaboration, and contestation, in the act of defining the idea of society itself”.12 Therefore, this space is “the emergence of the interstices – the overlap and
displacement of domains of difference – that the intersubjective and collective experiences of nationness, community interest, or cultural value are negotiated”.13 The presentation of
difference in this interstitial space is not the reflection of the “pre-given ethnic or cultural traits set in the fixed tablet of tradition”, but is to form “the minority perspective, a complex, on-going negotiation that seeks to authorize cultural hybridities that emerge in moments of
12 Homi K. Bhabha, “Introduction” in The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994), 1-2. 13 Bhabha, “Introduction,” 2.
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historical transformation” and “this interstitial passage between fixed identifications opens up the possibility of a cultural hybridity that entertains difference without an assumed or imposed hierarchy”.14 This hybridized phenomenon affirms the emergence of interstitial
space which is a desire for recognition as the borderline community of migration. According to Bhabha, the “third space” resembles a stairwell which prevents “identities at either end of it from settling into primordial polarities”.15 With the interaction between colonizer and colonized, the third space enables other possibilities to emerge. In other words, there are less exclusion and more possibilities of arguing and contemplating on cultural identity in this open space. “Hybridity” is another relevant term in this thesis. Originated from biology, this term has been employed in several other academic disciplines, such as linguistics, sociology and cultural anthropology, and it is often used in discourses on identity, race, postcolonialism, etc. Like his third space theory, Bhabha’s notion of hybridity is one of the most widely used and controversial terms in postcolonial theory. Hybridity here commonly refers to the formation of new transcultural forms within the interstitial space generated by colonization. To put it in the simplest way, Homi Bhabha’s notion of hybridity can be understood as a mixing of east and western cultures.
Though the application of the third space theory to the interpretation of films have not been seen much, there are some scholars who have carried out the investigation. Ömer Alkın, a scholar of media and cultural studies, published an article “The Filmic Realization of Third Space in Vatanyolu (1987)” in which he presents that cultural hybridity is not merely an issue of identity but also an issue of space by analyzing the space created by the protagonists in a Turkish-German film Vatanyolu.16 In Dickson Cheung’s essay “Wong Kar-wai’s Jianghu as Method: Reimagining Hong Kong in The Grandmaster” Wong Kar-wai’s new “Jianghu” is seen as a third space that represents Wong’s reimagination of the identity of Hong Kong people.17
1.4 Thesis Statement and the Significance of the Research
In this thesis I am going to argue that in Hong Kong society of the late 1990s, local people have become rootless and have troubles with their identity due to the intertwined western and eastern cultures and histories, while Hong Kong people’s alienation, loss and pursuit in Wong’s cinema are presented in an interstitial space which is the third space in film. The objective of this thesis is to apply Homi K. Bhabha’s third space theory to the study of Wong Kar-wai’s Happy Together (1997) in order to answer the questions how the “third space” is
14 Bhabha, “Introduction,” 4. 15 Bhabha, “Introduction,” 4.
16 Ömer Alkın, “The Filmic Realization of Third Space in Vatanyolu (1987),” Media Fields Journal no. 12
(2017).
17 Dickson Cheung, “Wong Kar-wai’s Jianghu as Method: Reimagining Hong Kong in The Grandmaster,”
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represented in Wong’s film through his filmmaking techniques and style and accordingly if
Happy Together indeed displays a third space in Bhabha’s definition. There have been lively
discussions in previous studies on Wong Kar-wai’s cinematic innovations as well as cultural studies embedded in his films, however fewer focus on the interpretations of the films with regard to the state of Hong Kong people in a postcolonial society. In this regard, this thesis hopefully provides some insights to explore Wong Kar-wai’s cinema through the third space theory.
1.5 Structure of the Thesis
The analysis of this thesis consists of five sections. After this introductory chapter I will delve into the main body of the thesis – Chapter 2 – which is itself divided into two parts – the discussion of the physical spaces in Happy Together and the analysis of the chosen scenes in order to identify the film as a whole with a representation of the third space. Chapter 3 examines the resettlement of people in a postcolonial context in the third space through the analysis of the process of searching for identity in the interstitial space, which aims to argue that more opportunities can emerge in that space for the formation of identity. Chapter 4 gives a conclusion of the above discussions and analyses.
Chapter 2: The Representation of the Cinematic “Third Space”
In the post-colonial Hong Kong, Hongkongers had to face social transitions. It was not a total binary opposition of the west and the east that Hongkongers experiences, however a more complicated situation. The “uncanny forces of race, sexuality, violence, cultural and even climatic differences” appear in the colonial discussion as the blended texts of hybridity.18
When two different social and political systems encounter, the resistance to each other is not a simple cultural exclusion but a hybridized one that two cultures intertwine and shakes the stabilized discourse of the colonizer.19 Therefore confrontations emerge in the hybridized space. For Hong Kong that bears a complicated history, Hong Kong people feel bewildered to adjust to the new era after the handover. To find a solution to life in Hong Kong was already an urgency before the time when sovereignty was handed back to China. One of the solutions has been to give up on their lives in Hong Kong, to leave before 1997 because of the uncertain future.20
18 Homi K. Bhabha, “Signs Taken For Wonders,” in The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994),
113.
19 Zhao Xifang 赵稀方, “Houzhimin zhuyi” 后殖民主义 [Postcolonialism], in Houzhimin lilun 后殖民理论
[Postcolonial Theory], (Beijing: Peking University Press, 2009).
20 Hugh D. R. Baker, “Social Change in Hong Kong: Hong Kong Man in Search of Majority,” The China
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Unlike the United States which has created its own history after the Revolutionary War, Hong Kong does not have a unified history and is in a continuous condition of motion. There is no clear Chinese identity or British identity beneath Hong Kong’s exterior, rather, Hong Kong finds itself removed from the narrative of both countries. “It is constantly progressing forward towards nothingness, a place removed from time, striving for a collective history it will never achieve.”21 This sense of time and the inability to be joined on a historical and
intimate level is perfectly reflected in Wong Kar-wai’s cinema. In an interview with Wong Kar-wai, he explained the reason of choosing Argentina as the filming location. “Because when departing from Hong Kong, Argentina is the furthest place that can be arrived which is full of a sense of exile and nostalgia”.22 Buenos Aires, the capital city of Argentina, is a
city of immigrants just as Hong Kong but geographically situated opposite to it. The inner state of the protagonists as dwellers in a foreign city is revealed in Happy Together and their journey to Argentina plays a role as a third space for the protagonists to escape from their suffocated life in Hong Kong as well as seek new possibilities for living in a foreign land. According to Bhabha’s notion, the third space should have been discovered in Hong Kong in this case, however in this thesis, the object of study is the representation of the third space, i.e. how the journey to Argentina in Happy Together can be read as a representation of the third space for the protagonist.
Happy Together itself is a hybridity speaking from various aspects. The title “Happy
Together” refers to a popular song of the 1960s by The Turtles, while its Chinese title very much differs from the meaning of “happy together”. “春光乍泄” directly translates as “spring light breaks out” which is used to describe “wardrobe malfunction”. “The title has feminine resonances, and in that way it is teasing, given the film’s absence of women.”23 It
is a Hong Kong film but set in Buenos Aires with an ending sequence in Taiwan; it is a film about homosexuals and homosexuality made by a heterosexual director; it is a film about Hong Kong right before the handover which includes a sequence of television news of the death of Deng Xiao-ping; and it is a film about exile, nostalgia and displacement.
21 Nick Usen, “Motion In The Flux: The Postcolonial Hong Kong Of ‘Chungking Express,” Movie
Mezzanine.com, accessed May 8, 2020, http://moviemezzanine.com/motion-in-the-flux-the-postcolonial-hong-kong-of-chungking-express/
22 Yao Wanlin 姚婉琳, “57: Chunguang · lingdu · da pubu: guanyu jilupian sheshi lingdu · chungunag
zaixian de zaji” 57 春光 · 零度 · 大瀑布：关于纪录片《摄氏零度 · 春光再现》的杂记 [57: Buenos Aires Zero Degree: The Making of Happy Together”], in Yu ta gongdu 61 shi: Zhang Guorong de dianying
shengming 与他共度 61 世 [61 Years with Him : Leslie Cheung's Movie Life], Shanghai: Shanghai Bookstore Publishing House, 2006, 547.
23 Jeremy Tambling, “Reading the Film,” in Wong Kar-wai’s Happy Together (Hong Kong: Hong Kong
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2.1 The Physical Spaces
Cinematic space and time are two key elements in Wong Kar-wai’s cinema which features a disjointed style in terms of the way of narrating, telling stories with poetic images. The trait of disjointedness is always considered as an avant-garde manner and a characteristic of postmodernism manifested in art. Postmodern culture is closely related to highly commercialized and developed societies which include Hong Kong without a doubt. Influenced by the French New Wave and their physical and social environments, Wong created his own style in cinematography that goes against the traditional conventions of filmmaking, featuring unconventional narrating, manipulation of film speed, the use of hand-held camera, low-key lighting, depth of field, silence and lack of dialogue.24 The result
reinforces the physical and psychological state of the characters who are experiencing confrontations at different times and their struggles, which is the idea that Wong wants to convey by his cinema. The disrupted narrating rather than a clear linear story line becomes a symbol of Wong’s cinema, especially those made before the handover of Hong Kong. Although his films are regarded as commercial products by some critics, Wong is clever enough to be adept at both auteur cinema and commercial cinema. The charm of his cinema lies in the profound understanding of Hong Kong in the transitional period of the 1990s which still provokes thought and resonates with the viewers today. In Happy Together, the cinematic space can be divided into two groups, the closed and open space. The open spaces involve streets, beaches, the port, alleys, corridors, stairs, etc. and the closed spaces include the bar, the restaurant, the telephone booth, the car and the bus, rooms, and etc. These spaces are important elements that participate in the representation of the cinematic “third space” and the meaning of the film.
The closed spaces in Happy Together can be categorized into two types: public spaces such as the bar, the restaurant, the telephone booth, and the bus; and private spaces such as the rooms where the protagonists stay. Wong Kar-wai takes advantage of the closeness and narrowness of these spaces and employs the shallow depth of field (see Figure 1 and 2) as well as the movement of the camera to create visual impact and contrast, thus separating the characters from their surrounding environment. To illustrate, in the restaurant the people in the background are chatting and brawling, while the people in the foreground are still holding wine glasses, concentrating on drinking and listening to music, turning a deaf ear to others. In the tango bar when the dance is at its climax, the shot cuts to the outside of the bar where there is only Lai in the scene who is squatting on the street and eating bread. When the shot cuts back to the interior of the bar, Ho is kissing a man crazily. By contrast, Wong shows
24 Timothy R. Gleason, Qi Tang, and Jean Giovanetti, “Wong Kar-Wai: An international auteur in Hong
Kong film-making,” Journal of Asian Pacific Communication, no. 12 (2002): 291-310, https://doi.org/10.1075/japc.12.2.06gle
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“the enclosed inner world and rumbustious outside world by one scene”.25As a means of
transportation, the bus itself brings instability and insecurity. In the film, there are many shots of Lai and Ho getting on and off the bus. With their faces hidden in the shadow at most of the time, the characters are placed in this narrow, closed space that lacks security and stability, which generates a feel of suffocation and anxiety. Dominated by the lamp, a single bed, a sofa and a cupboard for keeping cigarettes, Lai’s small room looks cramped. A suffocating and uncomfortable living atmosphere is delivered via the poor lighting and untidiness, which is one of Wong’s customary tactics to express characters’ depression. (To give an instance, in Days of Being Wild, poor artificial lighting is widely used, thus most of the scenes are presented with a dark environment surrounding the protagonist Yuddy.) They accompany each other and also fight with each other in such a space. When the bubble bursts, what remains is a strange place that is no longer a home for them where they cannot even communicate. What the room reflects are “all forms of urban fears, from boredom to paranoia”.26 The closed space as the environment indicates the emotions of the characters in
their innermost heart, while the open space contrasts the insignificance and helplessness of the existence of individuals with its spatial extension and integrity.27
Figure 1. The close-up of Ho’s face.
25 He Jianping 何建平, “Piaoling yu fugue: xiandairen de jingshen zhi lv – xi Wang jiawei dianying
Chunguangzhaxie” 飘零与复归：现代人的精神之旅——析王家卫电影《春光乍泄》[Wandering and
returning: the journey of spirit of modern people – an analysis of Happy Together by Wong Kar-wai], Film
Art 电影艺术 5 (1998): 67.
26 Jeremy Tambling, “Reading the Film,” in Wong Kar-wai’s Happy Together (Hong Kong: Hong Kong
University Press, 2003), 46.
27 He Jianping 何建平, “Piaoling yu fugue: xiandairen de jingshen zhi lv – xi Wang jiawei dianying
Chunguangzhaxie” 飘零与复归：现代人的精神之旅——析王家卫电影《春光乍泄》[Wandering and
returning: the journey of spirit of modern people – an analysis of Happy Together by Wong Kar-wai], Film
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Figure 2. The close-up of Ho with Lai blurred in the background.
Figure 3. Lai and Ho are on the way to the Iguazu Falls.
Back to the beginning where Lai and Ho are looking for the way to Iguazu Falls, the highway is sandwiched between endless deserts (see Figure 3). There are only Lai and Ho in the scene who are situated in the background with several cars galloping in the background once in a while. Places that should have been tourist hotspots such as the beach and harbor area look lonesome as well – only Lai is adrift in a boat. In the city, the dark street is cut into several parts by lighting and buildings, and the protagonists are positioned on one side of the frame. The scenes of the street appear with Lai smoking and drinking alone on a street corner while Ho lies down and cries on the street, or they lean on each other while smoking and walking to the end of the street and disappearing in the dark. There is almost no one else in the scene except some cars passing by. Wong thus places characters in an empty setting, making them impossible to communicate with others. Lai arrives at the Iguazu Falls near the end of the film. Looking tiny in front of the waterfalls, he looks up at the waterfalls and stands there motionless though being exposed to the water. The littleness and powerlessness of people as individuals against the society and history are reflected.
There is another kind of open space in the film – the corridor, the staircase and the alley, which act as intermediate areas that connect people and witness their meeting and parting. The many appearances of empty corridors and staircases not only indicate the urban isolation of the protagonists but also the externalization of the protagonist’s empty and lonely state of
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mind.28 The alley where Lai plays football with his colleagues is a rather lively scene in the whole film. The warm-toned scene and running figures in the back contrast to the internal melancholy of Lai on the foreground. At the same time, the illusion and instability caused by the shaking of the camera also imply the turbulence of the postcolonial world and the resulted anxiety of people to a certain extent.29 A further discussion on this scene is included in the
next chapter.
Wong does not exhibit these open and closed spaces in a comprehensible way. Rather, he creates a disorganized “collage” which makes a powerful metaphor for a postcolonial society that provides its members with an unstable living situation. One scene cuts to another without a clue. For example, at the very beginning, the two naked men are having sex on a single bed in a shabby room, but next the shot cuts to a car driving on the highway. After they break up on the way to the waterfall, a panorama of the Iguazu Falls is suddenly shown that lasts ninety seconds, which is quite long for a changeless pure natural landscape. When it immerses the viewers in the magnificent scenery, the shot cuts to the city scene which pulls the focus back to the reality.
The cities that Happy Together makes reference to are presented in a disrupted manner as well. Besides Buenos Aires, Hong Kong and Taipei are shown in the film in an unexpected way. The scene of Hong Kong is shown after Lai gives his father a call. He wonders what Hong Kong looks like upside down when he watches television alone in his shelter in Buenos Aires, following a sequence of the upside-down view of Hong Kong. This hints at homesickness and that Lai will return home at some point. Taipei appears at the end of the film. When Lai leaves Argentina and arrives in Taiwan, he comes to the night market and finds the food stall of the third protagonist – his colleague at a restaurant in Buenos Aires – Chang’s (Chang Chen) parents in Taipei, he understands the reason why Chang can leave to anywhere he wants – he has a family that awaits him at home, revealed by Lai’s monologue. Chang’s family and Lai’s father both symbolize the concept of home. The theme underlies these disorganized fragments of cities is exposed as home which is bound up with and very much a part of identity in postcolonial societies. At the food stall Lai’s monologue is delivered once again, “I don’t know when I can meet Chang again. But I’m sure that if I want, I know where I can find him.”30 Immediately followed by the music “Happy Together”, the
shot is cut to a sequence of time-lapses of the city night. Lai is shown on the subway, as if thinking of something. With the subway arriving at a stop, the film closes. It ends with a feeling that something about to take place but Wong refuses to disclose what will happen in the end. The premiere of the film in Hong Kong was exactly one month prior to the handover
28 He, “Wandering and returning,” 66. 29 He, “Wandering and returning,” 66-67.
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of Hong Kong. The futures of the protagonists in relation to their past in Hong Kong are not discussed. Through Lai’s longing for home and the fact that the ending of the film does not tell if Lai returns to Hong Kong or not – it ends with Lai on a subway in Taipei – Wong suggests the point of an unstable future of postcolonial society.
2.2 Scene/Film Language Analysis
Before everything else, it is fundamental to discuss the city of Buenos Aires which Happy Together is principally set in. Although it is a city very different from Hong Kong, it can be assumed that Wong Kar-wai is always discussing Hong Kong metonymically. The American Marxist critic Fredric Jameson argues that all Third-World texts are necessarily allegorical, which he calls “national allegories”. Though Jameson’s argument has aroused a bitter controversy, there are some points within his argument that can be used in discussing Happy
Together.31 He argued in his work Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational
Capitalism that “Third-World texts necessarily project a political dimension in the form of
national allegory and the story of the private individual destiny is always an allegory of the embattled situation of the public culture and society”.32 For this argument, Happy Together,
as a Hong Kong film, would be included in the “Third-World texts” because by “Third World” Jameson means countries or regions which had suffered colonialism and “Third-World Literature” is the literature produced by writers from such nations or regions.33 Then any city
might become an allegory as a way of depicting Hong Kong indirectly for Wong Kar-wai and Buenos Aires is no exception.34 The indirectness appears in the choice of images and the
approach of presentation of the city. As discussed above, despite the fact that Happy Together is not based in Hong Kong, it tells a story that could relate to Hong Kong intimately and it is not gratuitous speculation. In fact, the Argentina setting strengthened the idea that this “film was profoundly Chinese”.35 Film scholar Marc Siegel considers the use of certain Argentine spaces is for localizing “Hong Kong concerns and perceptions”.36
The first scene before the title sequence shows the process of stamping the protagonists’ passports upon their arrival in Argentina (see Figure 4). It is a short scene that lasts 10 seconds
31 For example, Aijaz Ahmad argues against Jameson’s notion of the “Third World” in In Theory: Classes,
Nations, Literatures; Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present doubts that there is a determinate narrative in “Third-World” texts that can be
allegorized.
32 Frederic Jameson, “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism”, Social Text, No. 15
(Autumn, 1986): 69.
33 Jameson, “Third-World Literature,” 67.
34 Jeremy Tambling, “Happy Together and Allegory” in Wong Kar-wai’s Happy Together (Hong Kong: Hong
Kong University Press, 2003), 12.
35 Ken Provencher, “Wong’s America, North and South,” in A Companion to Wong Kar-wai, ed. Martha P.
Nochimson (West Sussex: John Wiley & Sons, 2016), 491.
36 Marc Siegel, “The Intimate Spaces of Wong Kar-wai,” in At Full Speed: Hong Kong Cinema in a
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with quick flipping the passports and stamping. In 10 seconds, the protagonists of the film are introduced and a story based on a travel motif is prepared to be unfolded. Thought difficult to notice, the passports clearly show that both Lai and Ho’s nationality is British. This British nationality along with the Asian faces on the page and dialogues in Cantonese language in the film establishes a subject of identity that Wong is going to address in a hiding manner, since it is shown sneakily.
Figure 4. Lai Yiu-fai’s passport page.
As mentioned above, Buenos Aires is antipodal to Hong Kong. The protagonists feel hopeless about life in their hometown, thus decide to leave for a completely different place in the hope of finding a way out. They have crossed the globe arriving in Buenos Aires, a port as is Hong Kong. In some ways, they never get to go beyond being part of a port culture.37
Societies and individuals once were colonized, they are confused to find their real identity. They find themselves between the past and present, they feel detached from previous history and not attached to present atmosphere of decolonization. As in a complex society where Hong Kong people struggle with identities, they would not be able to get rid of their Chinese identity or the deep colonial impacts on them in order to solve the problem. Then in an invisible and intangible third space, these two influences encounter and negotiation is formed, which is embodied in Buenos Aires, the city where the protagonists experience confrontations in their life i.e. the third space constructed by Wong unintentionally through various techniques for mise-en-scene and storytelling.
After Lai and Ho’s break up on their way to Iguazu Falls, Lai works as a waiter in Bar Sur where he is responsible for receiving guests. The shot of the inside of the bar starts with a close-up of an accordion played by the musician (see Figure 5). As the camera moves up, the floor becomes noticeable and occupies the center of the frame surrounded by dancers,
37 Jeremy Tambling, “Reading the Film” in Wong Kar-wai’s Happy Together (Hong Kong: Hong Kong
16
audiences and a cello. Markedly, the floor is in grids of black and white, which are opposite colors and can be seen as symbols of polarity. The audiences are guests from Taiwan China watching two foreign dancers performing tango in the middle of the place. There is a distance between the audience and the performers which is filled with the black-and-white grid. Featuring the performance surrounded by Chinese tourists, this scene emphasizes a gap between Western and Eastern cultures and ideologies. This bar notably functions as a third space in which differences overlap.
Figure 5. Inside of the Bar Sur.
Lai is shown outside of the bar smoking in a medium close-up shot (see Figure 6) before it shows Lai looking up at the bar on the street, which is filmed from inside of the bar (see Figure 7). A huge left and right flipped logo of Bar Sur on the window dominates the viewer’s field of vision that takes about a half of the frame. Only Lai’s face is visible above the logo, and he keeps looking at the camera. However, the logo does more than obfuscate, as Gary Bettingson argues in his work The Sensuous Cinema of Wong Kar-wai:
“The inscription…has the effect of embedding Yiu-fai farther into deep space, augmenting his exclusion from the bar interior (and the cozy aura of warmth and intimacy inside). … Depth staging and the inscription motif compound the impression that Yiu-fai is literally and emotionally shut out in the cold. … No mere decorative flourish, the window inscription—together with the camera’s interior vantage point—expressively conveys Yiu-fai’s emotional situation, a kind of psychological exile reflected and exacerbated by his physical displacement from home.”38
Due to the exclusion, Lai is curious and interested in the world behind the window that does not belong to him. The window here plays a role of an invisible barrier between him and others, symbolically between the colonized who is confused and the hybridized postcolonial society. Also, it can be seen that the window allows only a visible access to the bustling and homely sphere for Lai which is something he can see but not touch and everything he sees is indistinct because of the window decal.
38 Gary Bettinson, “Partial Views: Visual Style and the Aesthetic of Disturbance” in The Sensuous Cinema of
Wong Kar-wai: Film Poetics and the Aesthetic of Disturbance (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press
17
Figure 6. Lai is outside smoking.
Figure 7. Lai is looking inside the bar.
After the sequence of Bar Sur, Lai appears in the scene of his home which starts with a close-up of a lamp (see Figure 8). Through Lai’s previous monologue we get to know that Ho bought this lamp because he finds the print of Iguazu Falls on the lamp very beautiful, and they have always been wanting to go to see the Falls. A sequence in the beginning of the film shows their attempt to find the Falls but they get lost along the way, which causes quarrels and they break up in discord as always. Thus getting to see the Falls together has become an ideal for the couple, the waterfall now stands for “a personal nirvana for the estranged couple”, and the lamp with the waterfall print has turned into a symbol of a happy relationship. It marks “the figurative distance between the protagonists’ relationship and their attainment of this adopted idyll”. 39 Apart from their wish for such an idyll as a couple on the surface, the
idyll can be understood as an eagerness for a peaceful life for Lai since Ho proposed everything and now he leaves Lai. As a stranger to Argentina, Lai can only find emotional sustenance in Ho. When Ho disappears, a real home is needed for Lai where he is sheltered and can feel safe emotionally. All in all, this lamp as a motivic element symbolizes an ideal place for a comfortable and happy life. In this sequence, the camera pans from the close-up of the lamp to the right where in the background we find Lai is eating alone with the television playing (see Figure 9). The distance between Lai and the lamp gets emphasized through the
18
camera’s panning track and the comparison between being placed in the background and the foreground, which accentuates the distance to an idyllic home. In fact, the lamp has already appeared at the beginning of the film, which is the first scene after the title sequence. The shaky camera quickly zooming in on the lamp declares the importance of this lamp (see Figure 10). Being placed on a small messy bedside table, a comparison has been created. The beauty of the lamp contrasted with its untidy and dusky environment, which represents a wonderful dream that the status quo would be changed.
Figure 8. Close-up of the lamp.
Figure 9. Lai is eating alone.
19
“As both a material object and a visual image, this bedside lamp continues to occupy an iconic position throughout the rest of the film.”40 It reappears periodically. In the middle of the film, Lai returns home finding Ho is not here. Lai sits at the table, and the close-ups show him staring at the lamp which glows with a warm light (see Figure 11). The lamp is framed in the front, but the focus of the camera is on Lai’s face. Compared to the glowing lamp, Lai is positioned in a quite dark corner, only the lamp lighting up his face. As a couple in a foreign land, Ho represents Lai’s sense of security and belonging. In a situation where Lai is not sure whether Ho would come back to him (which is explained in the next scene), these shots become symbolic. Lai can be seen as a figure who represents the displaced people in a postcolonial context, though he is not forced to leave his home. This beautiful lamp stands for Lai’s wish to have a home that gives Lai hope when he feels insecure, thus it suggests a sense of national belonging.
Figure 11. Lai is looking at the lamp depressedly.
Near the end of the film, a similar scene appears, yet the character changes – now it is Ho who is staring at the lamp at the table (see Figure 12). Lai has left this place when Ho wants to get back together with Lai. Ho fixed the cylinder inside of the lamp so that it can rotate and the waterfall on the lampshade is running again. Emblematically this scene is followed by a rotating shot of the door of the room where Ho and Lai have lived together (see Figure 13). Shot from a low angle, the doorway is prominently bright in a yellow hue in this frame, highlighting the concept of home. Seen from both protagonists, a longing for belonging is an unhidden theme.
40 Carlos Rojas, “Queer Utopias in Wong Kar-wai’s Happy Together,” in A Companion to Wong Kar-wai, ed.
20
Figure 12. Ho is looking at the lamp, in a similar composition.
Figure 13. The door of the room shot from a low angle.
The following sequence is the scene of Lai standing under the waterfall (see Figure 14). He finally comes to Iguazu Falls, yet he does not feel happy because he feels it should be a couple standing here. This scene consists of shots of a long shot of Lai under the waterfall, a close-up of Lai getting all wet in the water with a bitter smile on his face (see Figure 15), and a zoom-in shot of Lai being exposed to the water flows as well as the camera (see Figure 16). Different from the picture on the lampshade, the scenery in the real place displayed through the camera is not dreamlike or bright-colored, rather it is very obscure in a bleak atmosphere because of the cloud of spray that comes up from the waterfall. Iguazu Falls represents a broken dream when Lai eventually achieves to see it by himself.41 From the silhouette of Lai gazing at the Falls, it shifts to a rotating high-angle shot of the Falls which lasts two minutes (see Figure 17).
At the beginning of the film, a similar scene of the Falls is already seen, and it reappears in a longer sequence with the soundtrack playing the tango music. With the dark tone and the mist, the view of the Falls is blurry and gloomy. This atmosphere corresponds with Lai’s confused mood. The technique of rotation stresses that the water vanishes into a vast hole, which gives an image of absence and implies that it is just a utopia that the two
41 Li Hao 李浩, “Qianxi dianying Chunguangzhaxie huamian zaoxing zhong de guangse yingyong” 浅析电影
《春光乍泄画面造型中的光色应用 [A Brief Analysis of the Employment of Light and Color in Happy
Together], Journal of News Research, no. 15 (August 10, 2017): 290,
21
protagonists have ever wished.42 As previously argued the lamp symbolizes an idyll, thus the real Iguazu Falls can be seen as a representation of reality. When Lai stands in front of the Falls, he is experiencing the sublime, a term that refers to an immensity beyond the possibility of measurement in aesthetics. Unlike beauty which gives a sense of belonging, the sublime seems hostile, to defy and overstimulate the senses. According to Immanuel Kant, the waterfall is classified as dynamical sublime – “nature considered in an aesthetic judgement as might that has no dominion over us”.43 From the first shot listed above we can feel Lai’s
tininess when facing the Falls, and the second and the third shot show Lai looking up at the huge waterfalls and getting hit by them. To speak of the Falls in this sense is to speak of the reality, metaphorically, Lai is hit by reality. Relate this to Hong Kong, the protagonists’ and director Wong’s hometown, it is hard not to consider that it is a utopian dream to be able to find their postcolonial identities and sense of belonging in their home, despite the fact of Hong Kong’s return in 1997.
Figure 14. Long shot of Lai standing under the waterfall.
Figure 15. Close-up of Lai’s wet face.
42 Li, “Qianxi,” 290.
43 Immanuel Kant, “Second Book. Analytics of the Sublime,” in Critique of Judgment (New York: Oxford
22
Figure 16. Lai’s dark figure in the water.
Figure 17. High-angle shot of the waterfall.
In the middle of the film when Lai works at a restaurant, he sometimes plays football or mahjong with the colleagues. One of the few warm-toned scenes is created for the football playing. The actions of them playing football and Lai having a quarrel with others happen in the sunlight (see Figure 18). Lai does not play with them anymore and leaves, turning around and going into the background in the poor light. The alley is flanked by houses that block the light in the background, which makes a contrast between the warm, bright running figures on the foreground and the lonely figure of Lai in the dim background. As the shot switches to Lai’s leaving, a long shot is used here instead of the previous medium shot that focuses on the group of people. The shots of people playing and quarreling are shaking, which implies a chaotic hybridized society that Lai does not want to be a part of. The physical displacement results in psychological alienation or displacement. The long shot of him leaving emphasizes his alienation from others. He tries to get along with different people but he cannot resist his inner rejection. This reveals a conflicted feeling that on the one hand one is longing for integrating into society but on the other hand they feel downcast for an unsuccessful attempt. In a post-colonial society, people struggle with the impact of the colonizer and new social system, in turn resulting in an insecure mentality. This alley resembles the interstitial space on the macro perspective because it gives hope to the desperate people by providing opportunities.
23
Figure 18. Lai playing football with the colleagues.
The above discussion of the chosen scenes is for the purpose of providing evidences for the argument that the examples of space presented in the film and further the whole film is a representation of the process of rebuilding identity in the metaphorical third space where the main protagonist Lai Yiu-fai.
Chapter 3: Resettlement of the Protagonist in The Third Space
Caught between the identities of the Chinese and the British, Hong Kong people have been struggling with identity issues since the Sino-British Joint Declaration signed in 1984. They had no close connection to the Great Britain the colonizer while China seemed too far away from their society. “Finding a root became a core concern of Hong Kong people. But the problem is why should they find a root and what is a root”.44 As Stuart Hall states in his
canonical essay “Cultural Identity and Diaspora”, identity is complex and problematic. Hall suggests that identity should not be regarded as “an already accomplished fact, which the new cultural practices then represent, we should think, instead, of identity as a ‘production’, which is never complete, always in process, and always constituted within, not outside, representation”.45 The identity is not static but always in a process of forming. It develops
and is reflected within different historical, political and economic contexts. In the then Hong Kong, the society was experiencing great changes, so was the state of people’s identity. In Happy Together, the journey of the protagonists represents a third space where they temporarily escape from the suffocating reality. Cinematic representation is “not as a second-order mirror held up to reflect what already exists, but as that form of representation which is able to constitute us as new kinds of subjects, and thereby enable us to discover places from which to speak” and it allows “us to see and recognize the different parts and histories of ourselves, to construct those points of identification, those positionalities we call in
44 Chen Jiaming 陈嘉铭, “Chunguangzhaxie”《春光乍泄》[Happy Together], in Wang Jiawei de yinghua
shijie 王家卫的映画世界 [Wong Kar-wai’s Cinema World], ed. Pan Guoling 潘国灵 and Li Zhaoxin 李照兴 (Hong Kong: Baihua Literature and Art Publishing House, 2005), 191.
24
retrospect our ‘cultural identities’”.46 Growing up and living within the complex context of
Hong Kong, Wong Kar-wai is fully aware of the national fear and anxiety. Due to his own experience of immigration in his early age, he has a profound understanding of the marginalized people in society. In his films, the function of cinema gets fully reflected. In the late 20th century, the colonization, globalization and hybridization contributed to the unique cultural landscape of Hong Kong, which provided Wong with inspirations for creation. A series of themes such as urban isolation, rejection, loss and pursuit all come from it. His works always try to convey people’s feelings and emotions in their own times and Happy
Together directly connects to the year of 1997, which makes it marked with the allegory of
the handover of Hong Kong. The world of marginalized people created in Happy Together responds to the lost and anxious state resulting from the handover, which is a projection of the uncertainty and instability of Hong Kong during that period. Through the characters’ stories, Wong’s thoughts are revealed. It is a concern for the process of Hongkongers’ searching for identity through the unintentionally created third space in which the rootless people have opportunities to find their identity and to regain a sense of belonging.
It is changeable during the process of finding an identity. As Stuart Hall demonstrates: “Cultural identity is not something which already exists ... (and) comes from somewhere, have histories. But, like everything which is historical, they undergo constant transformation. Far from being eternally fixed in some essentialized past, they are subject to the continuous “play” of history, culture and power. Far from being grounded in a mere “recovery” of the past, which is waiting to be found, and which, when found, will secure our sense of ourselves into eternity, identities are the names we give to the different ways we are positioned by, and position ourselves with, the narratives of the past.”47
The third space is also not something pre-existed but a space created in the context of the past and in the wish for the future. As argued, the third space serves as a stairwell connecting the binaries, it bears differences and allows people to reconsolidate their identities there. Road, another significant imagery in Happy Together, has a function of connecting as well. In Happy Together, when Lai and Ho drive to the waterfalls at the beginning, the image of road emerges with the desert that flanks the road. Heading to their destination, they go the wrong way all the time, which implies the difficulties and obstacles to find a right way to realize goals. They quarrel all the way and separate without reaching an agreement because of the absence of efficient communication. The endless road seems the unsolved problem confronting them. Finally, Lai goes to the waterfalls by himself. Lai is the one who is always
46 Hall, “Cultural Identity,” 237. 47 Hall, “Cultural Identity,” 225.
25
trying to communicate but fails. Considering Jameson’s argument that national allegory is produced out of the individual narrative, this scene projects the contemporary Hong Kong. The whole society was immersed in an anxious ambivalence and people felt insecure in both the issues of identity and living place for the flooding immigrants. They had no access to find out a right way to solve the problems except getting away from the situation or waiting for the time to tell. For the protagonists, they escape to Buenos Aires yet they cannot get rid of the influence of their own culture such as using Mandarin as a receptionist and playing mahjong with the colleagues, which “is a reminder of the power of cultural identity”.48 But
in this third space, they are offered opportunity to reestablish an identity.
Chapter 4: Conclusion
One of the themes of Hong Kong cinema deals with the anxiety of Hong Kong people on their cultural identity. Wong Kar-wai, as an internationally renowned auteur, created a unique cinematic style in the late 20th and 21st century which is dedicated to reflect the state of Hong Kong people. In this thesis, on the basis of the third space theory of Homi Bhabha, it is considered that Happy Together is a presentation of the process of searching for an identity in the third space. Specifically, through Wong’s disrupted narrating and presentation, the third space in Happy Together is presented as their journey to a foreign land in order to escape from the disordered home and suffocated reality. As Sheldon Lu argues, the “visual, structural discontinuities…reveal a more pervasive, existential reality, namely, the fragmented, atomized nature of urban life in Hong Kong or in diasporic conditions.”49 While
in the end they find out that going back home is prioritized after all those experiences along the journey, which exposes a desire for a strong cultural identity and sense of belonging. This third space is a contradictory one where human confrontation happens in the reflection and projects the then Hong Kong society, expressing the inner needs of Hongkongers.
Most studies on Wong Kar-wai’s cinema pay attention to the analysis of its post-modern cinematic style and the recurring motifs which is commonly connected to Hong Kong’s culture and society. While in this thesis, a post-colonial theory, the third space theory of Homi Bhabha is applied to demonstrate that the journey of protagonists composes a third space in which the confrontations and negotiations emerge and consequently new identities are formed. Intertwined with postcolonialism, the post-modern techniques in Wong Kar-wai’s cinema cunningly contribute to reflect people’s emotional state, which exerts a better effect in interpreting the process of identity seeking in the third space. However, this thesis
48 Jeremy Tambling, “Contexts: Why Buenos Aires?” in Wong Kar-wai’s Happy Together (Hong Kong: Hong
Kong University Press, 2003), 23.
49 Sheldon H. Lu, “Filming Diaspora and Identity: Hong Kong and 1997,” in The Cinema of Hong Kong:
History, Arts, Identity, ed. Poshek Fu and David Desser (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000),
26
mainly takes the cinematography and part of the narrative into consideration regarding the reflection of the third space, which means there are more aspects to explore (to name a few, the characterization, the aesthetics and the use of sound) with regard to this topic.
27
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