An Attempt at Perfection

A common theme throughout almost all of the films we have watched this semester. One theme seemed very important to me. That theme being, there is a significant value to how you are seen by the world. Within the films, A Better Tomorrow, The Drunken Master, Raise The Red Lantern, Fists of Fury, and Farewell, My Concubine each display this idea with stunning clarity, but each in their own narrative arcs. Cheng Chao-an in Fists of Fury is fighting the urge to fight so he can be seen as a proper citizen. Dieyi from Farewell, My Concubine at first fights the urge to play a girl on stage, because he wants to be seen as a man, then fights to keep his spot in the sunlight. Jackie Chan’s character Wong Fei-Hung is forced, rather unwillingly to fight to regain honor and respect from the world so he might return home. Mark from A Better Tomorrow is determined to pull one last job, because he has fallen so far after being injured. Even woman are faced with this problem as well, Songlian the newest wife in Raise The Red Lantern has to fight for a perfect image. The idea of being perfect in the eyes of the world is at the route of these character’s motivations.  Their worlds range from large cities to an oppressive compound, but each has an audience for these people to perform their roles in front of, and if they fall from their pedestal they must fight tooth and nail to get back on top. By examining their individual journeys through each story one can see the pattern more clearly, each character fighting for their place on the stage of life.
            Cheng Chao-an in the beginning of Fists of Fury is a reformed young man. He has sworn to his family, on his honor, not to participate in another fight. He wears his mother’s locket as a reminder of that promise. As an adult he is expected to be loyal and perform as an upstanding gentleman. It is that fact, rolling around in his head, that keeps him nonviolent, though it seems to be a part of his nature, firmly rooted inside him. During his time with his cousins he looses more and more control over his actions. He gets cornered into fighting. Instead of being non-violent, it becomes imperative that he use violence. It is the only way he will survive.  When his cousins begin to disappear after going to meet the Big Boss he must make the choice to leave passivity behind. Stepping into a fight and saving his family from a brutal thrashing by the Boss’ men however, only garners him a position on the wrong side of the fight. Cheng is easily led astray, and falls from grace in a matter of speaking. He makes some bad choices while he’s drunk and afterward, when even more of his family disappears it becomes time for him to take a stand and face what is really being asked of him. Upon discovering what actually happened to the missing family members he’d been searching for, and the ones he left at home, Cheng is faced with the bloody truth. His honor has been compromised by not protecting his family. He hurt them by falling prey to manipulation. Revenge becomes his only option. Then for good measure he accepts that he must be taken away by the cops after killing all those people. He broke the law and fought, but regained his honor by taking revenge. He fulfilled his role and rose to the pedestal he was meant for. A hero, though only his love interest is left to praise him for it.
            Both Dieyi and Xiaolou of Farewell, My Concubine both provide interesting characters, bent on literally remaining on the stage, in the limelight.  Dieyi, however, is the better example when examining a character fighting to perfect their image for the world.  At a young age Dieyi is forced to become sexualized as a female, though he is in fact a male. His thin frame and feminine features do not help his case. Trained to play the Concubine he begins to exude that femininity in his everyday life. He learns his role and it becomes his life. It is everything to him, every part of him. Throughout the film there are continuous references to his need to be the Concubine, and play his role. Upon first seeing him as an adult, as a famous actor, everything about him, except his biological sex, screams female, the way he sits and the way he talks, all of it is the exact opposite of Xiaolou. He is his role; he is exactly what his audience wants him to be. But when his counterpart, Xiaolou fails to live up to his role, the pressure gets to Dieyi and it becomes too hard for him to keep up his high standards and remain on the stage. He cracks as times change and looses the person he was. At the end he is willing to die because his art was inevitably taken away from him. It was so essential to his life, that without it. Without being free to act, and for that matter act alongside Xiaolou he cannot go on. His not willing to die for his art, but forced to die because it has been taken from him, and he has no way to rise back to the person he once was.
            Songlian, from Raise The Red Lantern, is performing a similar dance on a much smaller stage. After her entering into her marriage with a stone face of blind acceptance she finds that she has given up her life as a student for a life of confinement and competition. At first she does not see the good at being chosen by the master, but soon, with so little an option she is forced to participate in the competition for affection. There is a very small stage within the compound and if she is not successful in garnering her husband’s attention, which often she is not, her world grows very lonely and dark. Her position is entirely unstable; the only stability she can find is by performing as the dutiful wife and getting the lanterns lit up in her portion of the massive home she is now resident in.  Success is marked by the lanterns. Her grey world only finds color outside her bedroom when the lanterns are lit. Everything is bathed in their light.  When she falls from grace and it is revealed she’s faked her pregnancy they cover her lanterns in black bags. Black is the utter absence of color. She is shunned and darkness over takes her part of the house.  After she goes mad, she even returns to her black and white attire she wore upon arrival. When she can no longer please, she must lose everything imaginable, without dying like the third wife.  She falls because she cannot rise to the challenge.
            Wong Fei-Hung from the drunken master and Mark from A Better Tomorrow are no different from the rest of these characters, but these two, start out on top of the world. They believe they have everything, but it’s a false victory. They are only in possession of a false kind of fame. Each of them actually runs before fulfilling their true goal, before stepping into the role they are supposed to play. Fei-Hung is a trickster kid, a bully. He even attacks his own aunt when she threatens his position on the top of his rag tag gang. He makes a fool out of his teacher before that. All of his actions lead him to being proverbially dethroned by his father. A fighting master is called upon to track Fei-Hung right from wrong, but he literally runs away causing even more trouble first. During his training he does everything he possibly can to avoid fully committing to his training. He first is forced to fall as far as he can. His father has kicked him out of his comfort zone and then he encounters Thunderleg who utterly humiliates him. Fei-Hung truly hits bottom. When he finally is shown the true reason of his training he does what he’s meant to do and learns the drunken fighting style. For the first time in his story he accepts the challenges set before him. All of this adventure culminating with a final battle, him vs. Thunderleg, the fighter who is trying to kill his father.  It is only by standing up, and regaining the honor of his family, is he found to be successful.
            A Better Tomorrow is a gangster’s story. Mark beings on top of the world with his partner at his side. They are powerful, but when they are double crossed, and Mark loses his partner, and then proceeds to lose his position among his peers he becomes virtually worthless. He is wounded and cannot even move like he used to. Based on his old job alone, Mark is a bad guy, but we feel sorry for him. The viewer is forced to pity him, because he has some redeeming qualities. When he finally gets the chance to regain some of his stature, pulling off a final job with his partner, he runs. He leaves Ho to die. The entire film is a series of events where Mark fails to step up in a good way, but it is at the end that he earns the viewer’s respect, when he steps up. When that boat turns around and he comes back to fight with his friends, we finally can like him through and through. He dies for his cause and earns our love.  Each of these characters is playing a role, and forced to live up to expectations in one form or another. They each follow their own narrative arcs to get to their individual ends, but each are forced to rise and fall. Songlian and Dieyi fall because they cannot be their versions of perfect. Everyone wants perfection, but perfection is not for everyone.

Kurosawa: The Mutibility of Idenity and Truth

       Akira Kurosawa likes to play with the ideas of truth and identity.  Two perfect examples of this are his films Rashomon and Ikiru. Though both films are very different in content Kurosawa uses similar techniques in order to set the stage for two questions. Who are we and what is truth? The narrative arch creates a language for these questions so that they might be asked indirectly, through silent implication. He uses distinctive shots and the motives of his characters to present the viewer with his message, but forces them to participate in finding the answer. The major techniques Kurosawa uses are flashback storytelling and point of view. Both techniques are present in Rashomon and Ikiru, but used very differently just so they can promote the same ideals. These films examine human decision and what it says about who we are when we make choices that are out of the realm of acceptable.
            Takashi Shimura stars in both of these Kurosawa gems. Ikiru, 1952, begins with a shot of an ex-ray. It says that this is an image of the stomach cancer that will kill the protagonist, but he does not know that yet. The viewer gets to watch as Shimura’s character Mr. Wantanabe deals with his sickness once he learns of it. He faces the fact that his choices have made him a life where he is the equivalent of someone already dead. He realizes by hearing this that he must make some changes. He cannot die without making some kind of effort. He eventually decides he is going to help a group of women who’ve come to his office. They want to build a park in their neighborhood. After letting all those women get sent through the bureaucratic run around he stands up and offers a hand.  He chooses to help them rather than just pass them on from department to department. Not one person around him understands why. It is in this change and how it’s treated that we are delivered our two main questions. What does Watanabe’s change in character say about him? What does his choice to help the women say about him?
             The second question, what is truth, comes out through the second half of the film.  In the middle of the story we cut to after Watanabe has died. The viewer isn’t privy to story in a linear fashion. We get to see  it through the eyes of the people who knew him. We arrive at the man’s funeral. The park has been built, but the people recounting the process in which it came to be are full of bias and speculate wildly about the deceased man’s motivations. They don’t know the full story, because they never bothered to ask, not that they would have listened. Only a few men recall Watanabe in a good light, as a determined man who wouldn’t take no for an answer and others recount him as a fool. Which is true? What were his motivations? Unlike Rashomon in this film the viewer has been given  the truth, but are forced to watch as Watanabe’s coworkers try to make sense of what this old sickly man was trying to do. By reflecting on his actions these coworkers are able for a brief moment to see the error of their ways.  To realize that our choices can lead us down very dark paths, and our inaction can kill us even before we are truly dead.  Thus we see Kurosawa present us with the two questions yet again. What is the truth, which version of Watanabe was the real one? What do our choices mean, what do they say about us?
            Rashomon, 1950, was around Kurosawa’s twenty-third film, and both of the aforementioned problems come about in this film much like they did in Ikiru but for an entirely different narrative purpose. What is truth, through point of view, and what do our choices say about us, through flashbacks. The film begins with a priest, a woodcutter, and another man forced to take refuge form a rainstorm under the Rashomon ruins. Shimura played the woodcutter, who begins the narrative. Inciting the beginning of a series of stories told about a murder and rape. The woodcutter and priest were summoned to testify at a trial regarding these crimes. Shimura’s character is utterly confused. He is unsure of how to take what happened in the woods and at the trial. The third man has the woodcutter tell his story so that he could maybe help him understand what’s going on.  It comes to light that the woodcutter a few days earlier had found the body of a dead samurai in the woods.  As we proceed through the narrative, the story is told from five different points of view. The priest tells of how he saw the samurai and his wife on the road before they were attacked by the bandit. Then after his story three others tell their own versions: the wife, the bandit, and the samurai himself through a medium. Each version has a thread of similar events, all culminating in the death of the samurai but it comes about in many different ways. The wife is portrayed as a victim, a manipulator, and a whore.  This play with point of view creates the platform for the question, what is truth. Is the wife crazy or a victim? How was the man killed? The second question comes in the guise of the woodcutter. He didn’t tell the courts what he’d really seen, and then at the same time he offers to take the abandoned child home with him. What do his choices say about him?
            Both Rashomon and Ikiru are both in-depth looks at human nature. Kurosawa takes us deep into a culture that is founded on the ideals of honor and respect.  Then he forces the viewers to participate and questions what it means to go against those ideals. He uses the manipulation of perception in flashback and point of view to show that truth is fluid. Our choices are what define us and that’s all that matters.  The flawed human beings in Kurosawa’s films are ones who make judgments and see things in their own persepective, all in all that makes them more human than the viewer is truly aware of.  These facts are part of a reality we all know exists. No two people see things the same way, and both Rashomon and Ikiru show us that. Truth and reality are not as strict as we’ve been lead to believe, there is mutability to what we think we know and who we really are.

               

Mise-en-scene of Raise the Red Lantern and Women

When making a movie a director has a hundred different little choices to make.  Should line x be said a certain way, should the light point on her face like this or that.  Everything idea or item that helps create an image or series of images flashing across the movie screen is a result of one or more of those choices. Mise-en-scene is the term most often used for the construction of the scene.  A director is able to use the set, the lighting, the costuming and the thousand other aspects of the film to create meaning outside the narrative. Raise the Red Lantern is a stunning example of this.  This particular film addresses the inescapable position women and their obligations. The world of the wives in Raise the Red Lantern is oppressive and as mentioned previously wholly inescapable.

                Songlian enters her marriage with an expression of nothingness. She has no passion for the idea of marriage yet she is in a way forced to accept it.  She was an academic, yet she still makes the decision to marry a very rich man and become his fourth mistress.  Upon entering the compound she enters her massive new home. It is gigantic, to the point of being a monolithic prison.  The further into this ‘home’ she goes the further she gets from freedom.   The sheer size of her new home is one signifier of how inescapable her new life is.  We never see the master’s part of the house yet we get to see the wives rooms.  Each has what in modern America would qualify as a huge individual house. Songlian herself walks much of the compound and reveals that there are many places to disappear within its walls.  There are very few staff members so she remains alone for long periods of time, with no one else but one maid to push around.  She finds the third wife on the roof of the houses singing. She wonders around and finds the son of the master’s first wife playing his flute. She even finds the room where women have an infamous tradition of dying, and later watches as the third wife gets dragged into that room and is hung.

                She watches everything from distances. When she finds the third wife singing on the roof, she doesn’t approach her right away. She listens to her singing, trying to show herself to be not bothered by the disruptions to her solitude and her time with her new husband.  Later she watches from a balcony as the same wife dances and sings in her courtyard. When the man reveals who gets the visit from the master they each stand away at their door ways, and she is the furthest from the entrance. She and the master’s son watch each other from a distance.  Her prison keeps her distanced therefore from the world. She is solitary and alone, with no connection to the outside world, that could stand for freedom.  When the master first looks at Songlian he looks at her from a distance. He sits across the room from her. He tells her to lift one of the famous Red Lanterns and shine light on her face.

                Another testament to the instability she is obligated for survival to entertain the master.  Success in this venture was marked by the lanterns.  The red lanterns were only lit when that wife was chosen for a night with her husband. The entire compound without the lanterns is grey, even the weather is grey. The only other real color we get outside the rooms of the wives is the white snow. The color red is bright and very noticeable.  The lanterns glow painted everything red. Inside Songlian’s room and even the servant’s room the lights bath everything red. Then conversely when it comes to light that Songlian had faked her pregnancy the lanterns are covered with black bags.  Darkness falls over her part of the house.  Then after she’s gone mad and lit the lanterns in the deceased third wife’s she returns to her dull black and white outfit she arrived in. She is trapped by her own black and white nature. She is either in favor or out. The color in her world or lack of it literally translates to how bright a future, or how happy a time she can have. By lighting the lanterns at the home of the third wife she is showing that the wife is free from her prison. She may have lost her love but she has been given a proverbial way out.

                 The size of the compound, the distances at which the characters interact, and the colors of the film all illustrate that Songlian is trapped in a prison. She is oppressed by the sheer size of her home and the solitude of a life she did not really want to have.  She is continually faced with walls, dull colors and solitude to escape is impossible. The only option she has is to find the lights or find madness. For a time she finds the lights, but then when she loses the light she succumbs to madness.

Loyalty and it's Obligations By: Chelsea Callahan

It becomes very clear by examining the three films Fists of Fury, The Drunken Master, and A Better Tomorrow that the culture of Hong Kong, or at least the version of it that gave birth to these films is deeply rooted in the importance of loyalty and fulfilling obligations. Considering a single character in each film you can see that almost anything goes when it comes to remain loyal to one’s family and honor them. When wrong doing occurs then action becomes necessary out of obligation. The act of being loyal is defined as keeping someone’s trust and living up to the obligations they place on you.  Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan and Chow Yun Fat all take action in their aforementioned films to uphold this promise of loyalty because they have to. There exists no other choice for them. Each becomes violent in their own right but for the same reasons. They each elicit a different and character specific reaction from the audience but come from the same place.  As Cheng Chao-an in Fists of Fury Bruce Lee leaves his audience respecting his character. By living vicariously through him we can see that murders find the justice we wish the law would give them, but to keep all parties grounded in reality Cheng faces the consequences.  Chan’s character in The Drunken Master , Wong Fei-Hung, is by no real means similar to Cheng but he still is faced with the choice of being a spoiled child all his life or living up to his family’s honor. It is a true coming of age story, and we are only able to like him because of Chan’s comedy and the fact redemption is possible for him.  Mark played by Chow Yun Fat in A Better Tomorrow is entirely different from Cheng or Wong.  He begins his journey outside on the darker side of right and wrong. His brotherhood with his friend is one of few things that makes him worth paying attention to. Each man is redeemable because they remain loyal when tested and fulfill the obligations to that loyalty.
            Cheng Chao-an  during the beginning of Fists of Fury is a reformed young man. The viewer discovers that he has sworn never to fight again, on his honor in the name of his mother. It is important to him that he keeps this promise and remains loyal to his word. As a reminder of his promise he wears his mother’s locket to symbolize what he’s sworn to do.  Familial loyalty keeps him nonviolent because he is obligated to remain a reformed and upstanding young man. It’s expected of him as an adult.  A viewer might even believe that this is a reverse coming of age story if they were swayed away from liking Cheng as a character but he is redeemable. During his time with his cousins in becomes increasingly more difficult for him to keep his word. His family members are not held to the same standards as he is and one in particular even takes on a fight in front of him. Cheng struggles to not get involved.  However, when His cousins begin to disappear after going to meet with their Big Boss it becomes impossible for him to remain passive. Cheng steps into a fight and defends his family from the boss’s henchmen and then is unceremoniously thrust up as the leader of their quest to find out what really happened to his family. It is his newly acquired duty to lead the charge demanding answers.  This seems like another redeemable opportunity for this former bad boy, since to get there he has effectively broken his vow. Yet, Cheng is easily side tracked. The manager of the ice factory easily manipulates him, and Cheng’s naivety leads him astray from his ultimate goal. He makes some unsavory choices, drunk out of his mind but we know in that he must step up. It’s his obligation and he holds those in great importance. When he discovers what actually happened to his missing family members and learns that the rest of his cousins have been killed Cheng is faced with a choice. Do nothing or stand and fight. By doing nothing his loyalty is nonexistent so he must act. It is in his nature and he must avenge the dead or his family has lost its honor.  Not a single one of his cousins was spared so he must spare none in return and does exactly that.  On the screen we witness what truly happens when you live by the code, an eye for an eye.  He murders many thugs but still by the end of the film is arrested.  We know he has taken action and is redeemed because he has proven that not everyone in his family is so easy to kill. His love interest is alive, but he must also graciously accept that there are consequences for murder. To remain in this reality any action with so grand an effect as taking another life must have some consequence, and for Cheng it does.
            Wong Fei Hung in the Drunken Master played by Jackie Chan is quite different that Cheng as a person. This film is a coming of age story at its core going in the proper direction. From the very beginning Wong is a spoiled child of a martial arts teacher. He has attitude and doesn’t take well to authority. One of the first times we see him he ends up schooling his teacher, by making fun of him and proving that he knows more, and better. As a result of his foolishness Wong is to be forced to learn right and wrong from a very strict teacher. Therefore, hearing the scary tests he must endure and what’s coming for him he fights back by running away, as fast as he can from his obligations.  He doesn’t want to be a grown up, he presumably doesn’t care about his family’s honor and therefore just is out to protect himself.  It isn’t until his encounter with Thunder Leg and his utter humiliation at being beaten by the assassin that Wong realizes the importance of what his family is trying to teach him.  Still a bit rebellious he starts to commit to learn discipline from his teacher. He cheats a few times but each attempt at going against his obligation backfires on him. Even when he has finally learned and mastered the Drunken Gods kung fu, he’s taken a short cut and refused to learn and practice Mistress Ho’s style.  This too backfires on him. However he does what he must to finally beat Thunder Leg and is redeemed in the eyes of the viewer and his father.
            Both Cheng and Wong operate in the sphere of good people, though they don’t always make the right choices. When one considers Mark’s profession and attitudes at the beginning of A Better Tomorrow he is not in that same sphere. He’s the polar opposite of Cheng’s reformations, and is long past becoming an upstanding citizen like Wong.  However we are still able to find him likable. We find him cool, but why? He’s a mobster, he kills people without a second thought and falls from the grace he thought he had and becomes an all around bad person. Yet he does possess one redeeming quality and that is friendship with Ho. It is his brotherhood that keeps him from running away in the end like a coward. We can respect him for returning and killing as many of Ho’s enemies before he himself gets killed.
            All three men come from different places in life, different backgrounds, and different stations and yet they all have a common ground under the banner of loyalty and obligation.  It is because of this loyalty that even their worst offences can be forgiven by the viewer and we can be allowed to admire them or at least like them on a superficial level.  The cultural norm presented underneath all of these films is that maintaining loyalty and fulfilling obligation are the two most paramount things in one’s life. Without them you are nothing, you are the bad guy.