commentary 3
‘Your tender smiles give me strength’: paradigms of masculinity in John Woo’s A Better Tomorrow and The Killer
J UL I A N S TR I N G E R
Recent studies of film masculinity overwhelmingly still tend to concern themselves with the products of Hollywood. The focus of attention has seldom been switched to representations of masculinity in non-western national cinemas. In repeating once again a central argument of ideological film criticism – namely, that conflicting images of what it is to be male are produced at moments of social and political crisis – I would like to suggest that one of the most interesting examples of historical crisis in film masculinity today is that of the modern Hong Kong action cinema. It is impossible not to treat the contemporary Hong Kong cinema
historically because of the immanence of 1997, the year when one period of the settlement’s history will end and another will begin with its return to Chinese sovereignty after one century under British colonial rule. The contradictory masculine images generated by this rapidly evolving situation have come to appeal to some western audiences. The profound uncertainty of the times in Hong Kong has produced narratives of loss, alienation and doubt, imprinting upon many movies the traits of an anxiety. Typically, this has been evidenced either by the manic pace and nervous energy of sequences in titles like Do Ma Dan/Peking Opera Blues (Tsui Hark, 1986) and Fong Sai Yuk (Yuen Kwai, 1993), or by a broad tone of sadness and
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1 Yvonne Tasker, ‘Dumb movies for dumb people: masculinity, the body and the voice in contemporary action cinema’, in Steven Cohan and Ina Rae Hark (eds), Screening the Male: Exploring Masculinities in Hollywood Cinema (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 243.
2 See Berenice Reynaud, ‘John Woo’s art action movie’, Sight and Sound, vol. 3, no. 5 (1993), pp. 22–4.
longing, experienced at both the action and non-action ends of the genre spectrum, as in the use of ghost metaphors by such important films as Qiannu Youhun/A Chinese Ghost Story (Ching Siu Tung, 1987) and Yanzhi Kou/Rouge (Stanley Kwan, 1987). However, it looks as if a special reception is being offered by the West to the nervous, anxious gangster films of John Woo. The best of these feature male characters who pull together the former tendency’s energy and kinetic capability with the latter’s feelings of sadness and loss. Woo has consolidated his position as the primary representative in
the West of the new Hong Kong action cinema on the basis of a number of masculinist texts. With the interest generated by the firearm extravaganza Lat Sau San Tam/Hard Boiled (1991), his arrival in North America to shoot his first English-language title, Hard Target (1992), and his stylistic influence upon Quentin Tarantino, in Reservoir Dogs (1991) and True Romance (w. Tarantino, d. Tony Scott, 1993), Woo has come to enjoy as much publicity and recognition as any of his Chinese contemporaries. One might certainly conclude from this that such success only goes to show how John Woo is currently the Hong Kong director most amenable to the taste of a popular western audience. While other directors, such as Jackie Chan, Tsui Hark, Wong Jing, Samo Hung and Ringo Lam, have achieved varying degrees of cross-cultural success with similarly spectacular action movies, Woo is the only one so far who has been invited to insert himself into the Hollywood system. Although he has been directing features since 1973 and has worked
within a variety of Cantonese genres, Woo’s action film concerns have done most to aid his reception in the West as they are ideologically of a piece with the recent masculinist traditions of the commercial North American cinema. The US action cinema is habitually influenced by trends set in Hong Kong, a Chinese connection that raises two interesting questions. Firstly, as Yvonne Tasker points out, the close links that exist between the Hong Kong and US mainstreams have yet to be properly appreciated, which means that John Woo’s ascendancy provides a useful opportunity to think more about the comparative treatment of western and non-western film masculinities.1 Secondly, however, it is also true that John Woo represents a troublesome case – his films might not be the best way to tell us about these things. Amid uncertainty over what the levelling process of Hollywood will do to the cultural individuality of a Chinese director, some critics in Hong Kong have seen his success abroad as yet another example of cultural misunderstanding or orientalism, while Woo himself has expressed misgivings about his own ‘un-Chineseness’.2 In this sense, Woo’s films might contribute to a western fantasy about Chinese cinema, one which is implicated in the complex and shifting power relations which mediate between the Hong Kong film industry’s desire to achieve overseas success, and the West’s ability to grant Asian films such international visibility.
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In this article I want to suggest how two of Woo’s most famous films are expressive of a uniquely Hong Kong perspective. Moreover, in enlarging the possibilities of the action film, in taking the genre in directions that are new or unforeseen, the films are interesting for the ways in which they construct competing paradigms of masculinity and for what they tell us about the city’s historical situation. The titles I shall be referring to are Yingxiong Bense/A Better Tomorrow, the keynote 1986 gangster picture that revitalized the director’s career by becoming a huge box-office success in Hong Kong (and a film that Woo has recently sold in the USA for a Hollywood remake), and Diexue Shuang Xiong/The Killer, a 1989 high point of the new Hong Kong action cinema triggered by the success of the earlier movie, and a film that has gone on to achieve cult hit status in the West. While it is important to remember that these two films never challenge or move outside of patriarchal relations, I shall argue that they can be seen to offer instructive variations on the vicissitudes of the masculinist text. The critical approach I will take studies the emotional tone and feel
of the two films, the affective economies they encode and encourage. This means that in largely passing over questions of male spectacle and display, sexual difference and gender as a masquerade, I will be stepping away from the Freudian and Lacanian paradigms that so dominate Anglo-US discussions of masculinity in the movies. This is in no way to deny the importance and interest of such reading strategies, nor is it to suggest that psychoanalytic concepts should not be used in the study of Chinese cinema. Rather, I take this approach because I would like to illustrate how psychosexual readings of masculinity need to be tempered by more ideologically-attuned, contextual work.
A Better Tomorrow concerns a gangster leader, Ho (Ti Lung), who is sent to prison after being double-crossed and then arrested in Taiwan, and his subsequent attempts to go straight. After his release, his old sidekick, Mark (Chow Yun-Fat), tries to persuade him to take up their old life again. However, Ho is more concerned with achieving reconciliation with Kit (Leslie Cheung), his brother in the police force, who holds Ho responsible for the death of their father. Ho’s former position as gang leader has now been filled by his old subordinate, Shing (Waise Lee), who connives to play brother off against brother. As Kit becomes more estranged from his wife, Jacky (Emily Chu), Ho sets Shing up for arrest and prepares to let himself be taken in by Kit. In the end, Mark and Shing die violent deaths, while Ho and Kit are reunited at the very moment that the older brother must once again head back to prison. The Killer concerns Jeff (Chow Yun-Fat), an assassin with a
conscience, who accidentally blinds a singer, Jennie (Sally Yeh), during a hit in a night club. Tormented by guilt, Jeff is convinced by
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Chow Yun-Fat with Danny Lee (above) and friend (right) in The Killer (John Woo, 1989).
Picture courtesy: Jerry Ohlinger’s
Movie Material Store.
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inspector, Lee (Danny Lee). After the reconciliation of Jeff and
Sydney (Chu Kong), his old partner, to take on one more job. Betrayed after its completion, Jeff finds himself pursued by both a gangland leader, Johnny Weng (Shing Fui-On), and a rogue police
Sydney, and the death of Randy (Kenneth Tsang), Lee’s partner, the killer and the police inspector meet and start up a friendship. In the end, Jeff, Sydney and Weng die violent deaths, while Jennie is left blind and alone. Lee cries for the loss of his gangster friend as he prepares to meet the wrath of his superiors.
3 Craig D. Reid, ‘Fighting without fighting: film action fight choreography’, Film Quarterly, vol. 47, no. 2 (1993–4), pp. 30–35.
4 Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, ‘Minnelli and melodrama’, in Christine Gledhill (ed.), Home is Where the Heart is: Studies in Melodrama and the Woman’s Film (London: British Film Institute, 1987), pp. 70–74.
As these two brief synopses suggest, the films have many features in common: both are extremely violent (the cliche, repeated most recently by Craig D. Reid, is that Woo has remade traditional martial arts genres by replacing swords and knives with guns),3 and both star Chow Yun-Fat, one of Asia’s most popular and charismatic stars (indeed, it was his appearance as Mark in A Better Tomorrow that made him a household name); both revolve around the story of a gangster or other ‘agent of the underworld’ who is trying to go straight; and both feature important scenes where close male friends talk about loyalty, friendship and the impermanences of life as they stand on a road side overlooking the beauty of Hong Kong harbour. These similarities may very well constitute the trademark signature of a genuine film auteur, but they are also means by which the films can explore the ambivalent nature of Hong Kong-Chinese masculinity and construct a historical viewing subject. In saying this, I am happy to fall out of line with many other
observers of Woo’s action films by trying to understand their notorious scenes of violence, rather than simply celebrate them. Western critics often refer to the ‘Peckinpah-esque’ comic strip goriness of Woo’s movies, their ‘ballet-like’ orchestration of perforated and pulverized bodies, as if movie violence is fine and good so long as it is artily done or campily excessive. The question of why such bloodshed is there in the first place, how it functions in the textual system and how it relates and gives meaning to other aspects of narrative articulation, is seldom at issue.
If A Better Tomorrow and The Killer are masculinist texts, they are also caught up in the instabilities of a historically specific conception of patriarchal masculinity. In terms of a western reading formation, it is possible to see how the Hong Kong social environment of both films is marked by an ambivalent treatment of male subjectivity. This contradiction within male identity is achieved by what might be regarded as the mixing of two film genres. Geoffrey Nowell-Smith has identified a particular historical
trajectory whereby US popular cinema split itself off into male action or ‘doing’ genres (the Western, war films) and female ‘suffering’ genres (melodrama, the woman’s film). Film theorists have given a great deal of attention to these genres in their enquiries into how different kinds of films create different kinds of male and female central characters, and so engender certain kinds of viewer response. For example, Nowell-Smith suggests that when it comes down to the construction of male identity, ‘doing’ genres delineate an ego-ideal male hero, whereas ‘suffering’ genres often impair the man’s masculinity – ‘at least in relation to the mythic potency of the hero of the Western’.4 Such ideas can be adapted into the context of the modern Hong
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Kong action cinema to suggest that Woo’s films collapse these two paradigms of masculinity into one. They combine simultaneously doing and suffering heroes. The films oscillate between scenes of extreme, sadistic cruelty and violence (such as the beatings of Mark in A Better Tomorrow and Sydney in The Killer, Mark’s shooting up of the Fung Lim restaurant in the former film, Jeff’s contract hit during the opening of the latter), and scenes of melancholic sadness and longing (Ho’s father’s bedside decree for his son to give up the underworld, the composed, ritualistic deaths of Sydney and Randy). Often suffering provides the catalyst for the leap into violence. Kit’s inability to forgive his gangster brother in A Better Tomorrow causes him to act intensely, passionately, erratically, while Sydney’s anguished desire to honour his ‘best friend’ in The Killer results in his being beaten to a bloody pulp by Johnny Weng and his henchmen. In all of these examples, violations of the body are outward manifestations of internal traumas, while painful inner conflicts can only be resolved by the outward projection of feats of incredible heroism. At first sight, it might be recognized that these kinds of narrative
tendencies are not altogether uncommon in US action films. Yet a filmmaker combining the gangster film with the melodrama is perhaps more uniquely in line with the hybrid nature of the Hong Kong film industry, where genres are more quickly mixed in with each other as a means for producers to stay one step ahead in the marketplace. In addition, something else is going on when the gangster film can become so entwined with the melodramatic mode, so conducive to melodramatic tears and the impairing of the male hero’s mythic potency. Both A Better Tomorrow and The Killer are male melodramas, and both carry their doing and suffering, primarily by creative formal means, particularly a spectacularly affecting use of local music. Consider the work of composers Joseph Ko, David Wu and James
Wong for A Better Tomorrow. The film as a whole is suffused with wonderfully expressive Cantonese pop songs, but two orchestral themes predominate. The first is an action score associated mainly with Mark. An arrangement of this score opens the movie, as the gangsters are shown at work printing counterfeit money, and it is repeated during some of the film’s most symbolic and emotionally charged moments. The strong pulse of the music connotes action and doing, just as its mix of orchestration and rock guitar recalls the music from old James Bond films and the soundtracks for such macho blaxploitation pictures as Shaft (Gordon Parks, 1971) and Across 110th Street (Barry Shear, 1972). At the finale, it is hard not to be carried along by the fully-stated thrill of this theme as it accompanies Mark turning around in Hong Kong harbour in order to head back to save Ho, his ‘best friend’. As the music guides the pace, Mark steers a speedboat with his feet and sadistically blasts his enemies to pieces
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with a machine gun. If the first theme puts masculinist strength and power in the service
of loyalty to a good friend, the second connotes family relationships and obligations. (A Better Tomorrow is all about the disaster that can strike if that Chinese network of interpersonal relationships is severed.) First introduced as Kit and Ho meet in the police academy, it is then used in the following scene between Ho and their father. A lilting, haunting melody that is maddeningly hard to forget, it denotes pain, suffering and emotional trauma. The music here is used to accompany such perennially melodramatic themes as separation from a loved one, the break-up of a family unit, and the masochistic subject position occupied by those who do not do, so much as are done-to. One of the most moving uses of this theme links all of the above to the geography of Hong Kong itself, as it accompanies a panoramic track away from the harbour after Ho leaves Kit in order to embark on his fateful journey to Taipei. During the final scene, it is also this theme that helps reunite the two brothers.5 The brothers are brought together at the end of A Better Tomorrow
on the words of a (mistranslated?) line from the theme song, ‘Your tender smiles give me strength’. The emotional impact of this particular moment is overwhelming, partly because of its strategic placing at the end of the narrative, and partly because its lyrics provide the film’s dramatic resolution. As Claudia Gorbman has pointed out, in commercial cinema ‘songs require narrative to cede to spectacle, for it seems that lyrics and action compete for attention’ – lyrics ‘threaten to offset the aesthetic balance between music and narrative cinematic representation’.6 The final song here is the fully-developed version of the second thematic melody I identified above, and its withholding until the final frames, in a film so suffused with mood music, produces an overdetermined music–image relationship of great emotional power.7 In Woo’s film, ‘A Better Tomorrow’ is sung by one of the stars,
Leslie Cheung/Kit, thus pointing to an important melodramatic component of the pleasure of these masculinist texts. Apart from being a famous movie actor, Cheung is also a Hong Kong pop star whose songs are popular all over Asia. As an original prime mover of the style called Cantopop, Cheung has contributed to that genre’s cultural and political importance. Cantopop is a melodramatic style of popular song that recognizes the political realities of 1997 and migration from Hong Kong, and explores them through the affective coding of nostalgia and sentimentality.8 When Leslie Cheung or Anita Mui sing the narrative, or in the comparable moment near the beginning of The Killer, when Jeff walks into a club and confronts another Cantopop star, Sally Yeh, performing her own sad diegetic song, film music speaks to a domestic audience about issues it knows are of very real concern. The line ‘Your tender smiles give me strength’ can be taken as the
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5 Having said this, I would want to point out that A Better Tomorrow and The Killer go beyond any strictly binary use of music. For example, an orchestral variation of the chorus of the second theme is used over images of Mark’s death – that is, a character who has been explicitly linked with the first theme. This suggests to me that Woo uses music primarily for its melodramatic intensity, its emotional affectivity.
6 Claudia Gorbman, Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), p. 20.
7 This technique is put to even more effective use when Anita Mui begins her theme song at the very moment her diegetic character dies in Tsui Hark’s 1989 A Better Tomorrow 3 (aka Love and Death In Saigon).
8 For cultural political readings of Cantopop, see two articles by Joanna Ching-Yun Lee: ‘All for freedom: the rise of patriotic/ pro-democratic popular music in Hong Kong in response to the Chinese student movement’, in Reebee Garofalo (ed.), Rocking the Boat: Mass Music and Mass Movements (Boston: South End Press, 1991), pp. 129–47; ‘Cantopop songs on emigration from Hong Kong’, 1992 Yearbook for Traditional Music (Ontario: Brown and Martin, 1992), pp. 14–23.
9 It is significant that the dubbed version of A Better Tomorrow recently released in the UK and USA sports a completely rearranged soundtrack. Aside, of course, from bluntly gagging all traces of the Chinese language, the Cantopop songs have been completely hacked from the mix. Such barbarity changes the feel of the entire film, just to bring it more into line with the perceived requirements of a (tone-deaf) western audience. Leslie Cheung’s final song has been given the chop, replaced by a macho, upbeat ending that forces us to exit smiling rather than crying.
10 See Emily Lau, ‘Out of the closet: government to decriminalize most homosexual acts’, Far Eastern Economic Review, 26 July 1990, p. 24; and Neil McKenna, Hong Kong ends gay ban’, The Advocate, 27 August 1991, p. 53.
perfect example of how the two films embody what I term the ‘male melodrama of doing and suffering’.9 The emotionally intense suffering the individual undergoes because of his attachment to a friend, brother, father, wife or employer is there in order to provide the strength needed for the superhuman acts of heroism and violence. This situation is indicated well enough by one of the publicity photographs used to promote The Killer. It depicts the scene where Jeff meets Inspector Lee in Jenny’s apartment. The men are photographed holding guns to each other’s heads while they gaze passionately into each other’s eyes, the same kind of long, deep male looks that are also very apparent in the scenes between Mark and Ho in A Better Tomorrow. Such male bonding around both passionate violence and passionate
suffering can be taken in either of two ways. On the positive side, the loving, anguished, pained look of one impaired male melodramatic action hero at another embodies a same-sex bond of intense feeling to which a heterosexist culture does not normally permit access. On the other hand, such views privilege the male, patriarchal, masculinist, woman-excluding point of view. It is as if, in patriarchal capitalism, when a stable base of social security is lacking, men will strive that much harder to establish emotional links with each other. A Better Tomorrow and The Killer are probably not gay movies
because, like the American buddy film of the 1970s, they repress rather than foreground sexuality. And while violence in these films certainly does act as a displacement for one man’s erotic feeilngs towards another (as in Mark’s final flourish with a tommy gun after he sees Ho and Kit, bloody but reunited, at the harbour), they are also characteristic of a more general way of treating sexuality at work in the mainstream Hong Kong cinema. Again, there are two ways of handling this. Firstly, Woo’s conception of masculinity in these two films seems noticeably different from the ‘hard bodies’ tradition of 1980s US cinema in its refusal to assert phallic power through the fetishistic display of the spectacularly pumped-up male body, and this opens up the possibility of a slightly different definition of masculinity. Secondly, the intensely painful or rapturous look of one man at
another still needs to be returned back to changes in the law as it relates to homosexuality in Hong Kong in the 1980s. At the time of the release of The Killer, laws prohibiting gay sexual relations were in the process of being revoked, although actual sexual contact between men could still result in heavy penalties.10 Along with the sex and nudity offerings of the so-called Category 3 films first popularized in 1990, the infamous designer lesbianism of isolated action titles like Tung Fong Bat Bai/Swordsman 2 (Ching Siu-tung, 1991) and the occasional movie about Hong Kong’s gay community, such as Samo Hung’s 1989 comedy-thriller Tsifan Seunghung/Pantyhose Hero, Woo’s films, in this sense, work to capture a prevailing undercurrent
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11 It might be interesting to disentangle gay themes by looking at the input of Woo’s producer, Tsui Hark, on these two titles. From Diyu Wu Men/ We’re Going to Eat You (1980) onwards, Tsui has consistently offered presentations of Chinese homosexuality. For some discussion of gender ambiguity in films Tsui has either produced or directed, see Rolanda Chu, ‘Swordsman 2 and The East Is Red: the ‘Hong Kong film’, entertainment and gender’, Bright Lights, vol. 13 (Summer 1994), pp. 30–35, 46; Julian Stringer, ‘Peking Opera Blues‘, Film Quarterly, vol. 48, no. 3 (1995), pp. 34–42.
12 Mas’ Ud Zavarzadeh, Seeing Films Politically (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991), p. 113.
13 Ibid., p. 114.
of sexual liberalization in Hong Kong society. At the same time, they also compensate for the prohibition on depictions of actual physical contact between people of the same sex by giving their male characters such emotionally charged relationships. In other words, they kick against a prevailing orthodoxy, but only so as to reinscribe repression.11 So far, my analysis of genre-mixing and masculinity in John Woo’s
films has not really begun to answer the question of why A Better Tomorrow and The Killer are so emotionally moving, so full of desire, anxiety and nostalgia. As narratives of machismo, the two films do not have to be so compromised, so conducive to tears and affection. So why are they?
The bond that links cop to gangster in the Hong Kong action cinema tends to exhibit an affective obsession with mutual survival: both the law and the underworld are in the same boat, their moralities blur and cross over, and male characters who both rapturously, sadistically do and painfully, masochistically suffer, are brought together in their actions. The utmost concern is to visualize a man’s ability to feel something very intensely. It is worth standing back from the emotional contract these two
films offer in order to ask some historical questions of how they deal with what Mas’ Ud Zavarzadeh terms ‘the cultural politics of intimacy’. For Zavarzadeh, discourses of ideology,
Represent intimacy as inevitably ‘natural’ and thus as private, asocial, personal, and, most important, transdiscursive – they mark it as situated outside the cultural series. This ideological representation of intimacy is politically critical because if intimacy can be represented as outside the reach of history and culture then, it follows, those who are intimate with each other derive their relationship not from a given historical and social situation but by virtue of their own panhistorical individuality.12
In seeking out a different, more ‘interrogative intimacy’, one that recognizes how forms of intimacy are ‘always already limited by the historical situation in which the subject is located and thus by the subject positions available’,13 we can ask several more contextual questions of these two films. Why is it that such an ostensible exercise in masculine fantasy as A Better Tomorrow became such a success, appealing in the process, presumably, to both male and female viewers? Why is Chow Yun-Fat’s suffering gangster figure such a contemporary archetype? And why does he die in both films, given that he is one of the Chinese cinema’s top stars? Certainly, the intensity of the domestic audience’s response to the
earlier film suggests that the Hong Kong audience perceived these male melodramas of doing and suffering to be more than just stories
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14 A key problem in the return of Hong Kong to China is the near certainty that Mandarin will replace Cantonese as the official language. This issue is raised in a recent Chow Yun-Fat title, Treasure Hunt (aka American Shaolin) (Ricky Lau, 1994). Here, Chow/Cheng goes to China and falls in love with a telepathic girl, with much linguistic comedy.
15 John A. Lent, The Asian Film Industry (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990), p. 114.
16 Chiao Hsiung-Ping, ‘The distinct Taiwanese and Hong Kong cinemas’, in Chris Berry (ed.), Perspectives on Chinese Cinema (London: British Film Institute, 1991), p. 162. It might be suggested that these kinds of deadlocks as reinscribed by Quentin Tarantino films are just that, empty gestures which, divorced of any real context, signify nothing.
17 Li Cheuk-To, ‘The return of the father: Hong Kong New Wave and its Chinese context in the 1980s’, in Nick Browne, Paul G. Pickowicz, Vivian Sobchack and Esther Yau (eds), New Chinese Cinemas: Forms, Identities, Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 174–5.
about panhistorical individualities. The box-office validation they gave A Better Tomorrow in 1986 is such that other determinants suggest themselves. If Woo’s masculinist films construct a historical viewing subject
through the extreme emotional pulls of his doing and suffering heroes, then the historical context is provided by Hong Kong’s uncertainty over 1997, an uncertainty that has changed dramatically over the last decade (roughly since the signing between the British and Chinese Governments in 1984 of the Sino–British Joint Declaration on the Future of Hong Kong) as the relationship between the countries involved shifts in diplomatic fortune. Very often, the popular Hong Kong cinema has implicitly or explicitly registered such shifts.14 John Woo, along with other industry personnel, has now left the territory, and has spoken pessimistically about the imminent reunification, but his films are left behind, as historical evidence. The historical context for the success of the breakthrough film, A
Better Tomorrow, has been sketched by a number of writers. John A. Lent refers to such factors as ‘the political climate in Hong Kong . . . the people need a hero, a winner in the theater. Vicariously, they see the hero killing China.’15 Chiao Hsiung-Ping points out that, in many Hong Kong movies from this time, the line between enemy and friend is often blurred, forcing the need for an appeal to some notion of ‘brotherhood’ and heroism (‘Chow Yun-fat is a typical example of this sort of character’) – she also sees the kind of guns-in-the-face stand-offs I have described between Jeff and Lee in The Killer as expressing ‘China’s deadlocked disunity of the last forty years’.16 For Li Cheuk-To, A Better Tomorrow was released at just the right time to satisfy the ‘audience’s need to vent its frustration and anger’ over the Daya Bay incident of August 1986, wherein China proceeded to ignore the wishes of the majority of the Hong Kong people by building a nuclear power plant in the Guandong Province of Southern China, not far from the border with a totally vulnerable Hong Kong. ‘What better way for a frustrated people to give vent to pent-up feelings? But . . . all the film offered was a means to let off steam rather than a sympathetic response to the predicament of the Hong Kong people.’17 In A Better Tomorrow and The Killer, the historical viewing subject
constructed out of this uncertain political climate is placed in an ambivalent position of identification vis à vis the camera and the characters – he/she is invited to identify with both actively doing (‘killing China’) and passively suffering (there is nothing Hong Kong can do to reverse 1997, and all that is left is the question of how the settlement will survive the Chinese takeover). To qualify these readings, however, it is important to remember that the cross-cultural reception of John Woo by western audiences can significantly alter how his films are perceived. If you go by North American and British reviews of The Killer, for example, you can expect to be exhilarated
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by the action, as if western viewers can happily identify primarily with the camera and its ability to bind us into a narrative image of action, enigma and resolution. But in Hong Kong, the emphasis may be on other things, with the camera and the star actors coming together to effect a ‘magical’ bringing together of impossible political contradictions. Chow Yun-Fat has an important part to play here. While he may be
known in the West primarily as an action man, Chow also brings comic, tragic and romantic sensitivities to his roles. In North America and Europe his image circulates as that of the consummate gun fetish only because we are not yet sensitive to the actual diversity of his output. Starting out as a television soap opera star, it did not take long for
Chow Yun-Fat to make the transition to big-screen matinee idol. He quickly gained industry prestige. In 1985, he won the best actor award at the Asia Pacific Film Festival in Tokyo and the Golden Horse Award in Taiwan for his role in Dengdai liming/Hong Kong 1941 (Leong Po-chih, 1984). In 1986, he walked away with the Hong Kong Academy Award for Best Actor in A Better Tomorrow, and was back again three years later to collect the same award for his appearance in Johnny To’s All About Ah Long. Between buying cabinets big enough to hold his trophies, Chow found time to act in countless films, including work for art-house directors Ann Hui (Qingchengzhi Lian/ Love In A Fallen City [1984]) and Stanley Kwan (Deiha tsing/Love Unto Waste [1986]). What holds the range of such roles together are his good looks, easy charm, and a slippage between his being both totally in and totally out of control. His appearance in A Better Tomorrow might have sparked off fashion statements by Mark-identified young men in Hong Kong (many of whom took to wearing long dark overcoats, despite the humidity), but Mark still loses out by the end of the film; in A Better Tomorrow 3, Chow can’t save the girl; in Love Unto Waste he’s on his death bed; in Dou san/ God of Gamblers (Wong Jing, 1990) he is king of the casinos one minute until he bumps his head and becomes as dependent as a new-born child the next. This instability in Chow Yun-Fat’s star image between being in and
out of control helps the sense of how the masculinist nature of narrative in A Better Tomorrow and The Killer is put in the service of a historical situation seen in terms of paternity and survival. The male melodrama of doing and suffering is perfectly in keeping with the situation of a city caught in this impossible position, wanting to both acknowledge its real, impotent position, and also storm its way out of it. And both sides of the genre-mixing equation are pertinent too. The gangster film has been interpreted as itself an allegory about the need for Hong Kong people to possess survival skills (and the genre’s popularity there may also owe something to the notorious underworld connections inside the film industry: Chow Yun Fat and Danny Lee
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18 Mary Ann Doane, ‘Melodrama, temporality, recognition: American and Russian silent cinema’, Cinefocus, vol. 2, no. 1 (1991), p. 13.
19 In an extreme fort/da scenario, Sydney leads assassins to Jeff no less than four times, but Jeff still sees him as the loyal sidekick.
were among those industry workers who marched for Showbusiness Against Violence on 16 January 1992). The blurred boundaries between cop and gangster suggest a common social project, while the figure of an intermediary, intimate with both the law and the underworld (such as Kit or Lee) provides an apt enough metaphor for the resources that are needed to get by. On the other hand, melodrama as a genre is all about survival, not
so much in visualizing which skills can be actively deployed in order to reconcile one’s will with the world around, but in terms of being overtaken by a temporal order that one cannot command. As Mary Ann Doane, quoting a number of other influential writers, has noted, time in the melodrama is often ‘foreshortened and condensed’, so that melodrama’s ‘rhetoric of the too late’ demonstrates the ‘irreversibility of time, its unrelenting linearity’.18 Needless to say, the historical reality of 1997 is conducive to melodramatic narratives of temporality and recognition, of having ‘too much too soon’, or ‘too little too late’. With this in mind, certain textual features of intimacy in Woo’s
films take on new light. For example, Jeff and Lee’s desire to shoot their way out of the church combines with the impossibility of these two blood-spattered heroes ever doing that. The need to stick together in both films is combined with an anxiety over whether anyone can actually be trusted (the pointed political Cantopop lyrics from The Killer, its sad and sentimental theme song – ‘Who needs tomorrow when we have today?’, ‘Perhaps there will be no tomorrow/Only time will tell if we are meant for each other’ – resonate in this context). The love a friend feels for another friend is compromised by a changing situation, one where the rules of the game are being violated, overturned and accelerated by people much uglier than the two friends themselves.19 Sometimes, men are unable to transcend these forces because they
are blocked in their attempts to physically leave Hong Kong. There is a clear suggestion of migration in each film. In The Killer, just before the climactic moment when Jeff and Lee meet each other face-on in Jenny’s apartment, there is a montage sequence showing Jeff pensively sitting by the Hong Kong seashore. Jeff has money to flee the city, but he is too emotionally attached to other people to actually go – he is left behind, trapped and suffering, as a boat floats past, a plane slides across the sky on its way to Canada or the USA, melancholy music plays on the soundtrack, and Sydney’s voiceover sadly intones, ‘Why didn’t you leave Hong Kong? What made you stay?’. (Woo then cuts to the interior of the apartment house as an old woman chastises Randy for the neglect of his undercover work – ‘I can’t afford to fly away like a phoenix’ – and the killer enters, about to be trapped by the cop.) In A Better Tomorrow, aside from the moment when Mark turns his
boat around and decides to fight side by side with his friend, or the initial separation of the two brothers by Hong Kong harbour, there is
36 Screen 38:1 Spring 1997 · Julian Stringer · ‘Your tender smiles give me strength’: paradigms of masculinity
20 While watching the Chinese-language version of A Better Tomorrow, first distributed in North America by the video company Tai Seng, the pleasure I take from this text is inadvertently enlarged by the less than perfect subtitles. Confronted with my favourite one-liners (‘Singing jollity like the sunbeam’, ‘Learning. That’s what you’ve to learn!’, ‘Don’t trust those cunny!’) I am left lost and linguistically floundering, adrift on an ‘alien sea of undecipherable phonic substance’. (Robert Stam, Subversive Pleasures: Bakhtin, Cultural Criticism, and Film [Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1989], p. 68).
one particularly poignant moment. After a scene with Kit and the Police Chief, full of dramatic shouting and the latter’s command to the former to ‘be practical’, Woo suddenly cuts to a jarring transition shot of birds scattering across water. Then, we are in a school rehearsal, where a group of toothy children sing for their teacher, Jacky, Kit’s wife. The children are all smiles, but what they are actually singing about is nothing less than the diasporic consciousness of an entire settlement. The scene is played out as low camp, a feeling only enhanced by the English translation of the lyrics.20
Who can leave behind their homeland And forget their childhood?
Who dare to look at yesterday’s sorow To take away our smiles?
The youth don’t understand the world And dirt their purity
Let the teardrops to roll down your face.
Sing out your warmneso Stretch out your arms and hold your dream
And the real you Your tender smiles give me strength . . .
On these words, Woo cuts to Ho meeting Jacky backstage. He tells her that he is leaving Hong Kong that night, and proceeds to give her the tape that will help his brother capture the villain. Jacky asks whether he will come back, and Ti Lung’s acting brilliantly conveys the historical reality of Chinese migration from Hong Kong. A bashful smile to Jacky, as if to say ‘What do you think?’, a quick look over his shoulder at the children singing away behind him, another sad smile, just to confirm that he and the audience are all in on some big secret, and then a half-turn, a hesitation, a final walk back into the darkness. This is not the kind of intimate scene that you might expect to find
in a macho gangster film, and if by this time the hero has already had his mythic potency threatened and impaired, it is not so much because his actions have been critiqued by a woman (‘You’re giving up?’, Jacky asks), as by the social forces which make all his actions conditional. Those forces affect every relationship in the two films, and they call into being the violence that is the fantasy solution offered by those who are left behind. Just as there is no better tomorrow for the Hong Kong action hero, the male melodrama of doing and suffering can only register the contradictions of Hong Kong’s historical situation, not resolve them. However, one symptom of A Better Tomorrow and The Killer‘s
masculinist status is that the intimacy shared by their central male characters is of a different order than that shared between men and women. The scenes between Jacky and Ho are moving, but between
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Jacky and Kit there is constant antagonism. While audiences lap up the relationship between Ho and Mark, or between Jeff and Lee, the films squeeze intimacy out from where it would normally be socially sanctioned – romantic or familial relationships with women. Instead, in the male melodrama of doing and suffering, men take over the woman’s right to tears and feeling, while simultaneously preserving their virile, active masculinity. Melodramatic reunions and expressions of love are played out under male eyes, producing contradictory texts – A Better Tomorrow and The Killer sadistically push, lock up and blind women, while placing centre-stage men who will not just be beaten but thrashed senseless, not just shot but ripped apart by bullets. The spectacle being offered here is as much masculinity as masochism as it is masculinity as active agency.
I would conclude from all this that while these two films of John Woo are undeniably masculinist and patriarchal, they do seem to recognize the instabilities within a historically specific conception of patriarchal masculinity. That last line from A Better Tomorrow, ‘Your tender smiles give me strength’, exerts a weird mingling of both the passive and the active, the suffering and the doing, together with a recognition of the fundamentally social nature of the construction of masculinity, its habitual dependence upon some form of intimacy and social contact. Moreover, in terms of how western critical theory conceptualizes
non-western masculinities, the two films also point out for us how hard it is to come to terms with any construction of gender identity outside of specific historical contexts. It seems to me that it is most useful to return Woo’s films to the more psychoanalytically-inflected models of analysis favoured by recent film studies only after we have begun to open up some of the questions concerning the social and political nature of male subjectivity I have already touched on. Inevitably such an approach will lead to questions of western
spectatorial pleasure and appropriation on which I shall not elaborate here, but it is interesting to ask some tentative questions concerning the interrelation of race and gender in the West’s reception of Hong Kong cinema. Steve Neale’s influential 1983 Screen article on heterosexual masculinity, for example, is clearly of use in helping to analyse the John Woo phenomenon. Neale organizes some of his central arguments around a brief analysis of how Jean-Pierre Melville’s 1967 French gangster film Le Samourai represents the ‘gradual and eventual disintegration’ of a (western) ‘image of self-possessed, omnipotent masculinity’. Neale describes the film’s dramatic turning point:
Alain Delon plays a lone gangster, a hit-man . . . Delon is sent on a job, but is spotted by a black female singer in a club. There is an
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21 Steve Neale, ‘Masculinity as spectacle: reflections on men and mainstream cinema’, in Cohan and Hark (eds), Screening the Male, p. 12.
22 Sun Longji, ‘The long march to man’, in Geremie Barme and John Minford (eds), Seeds of Fire: Chinese Voices of Conscience (New York: Noonday Press, 1989), p. 163.
exchange of looks. From that point on his omnipotence, silence and inviolability are all under threat.21
Le Samourai is one of John Woo’s favourite movies, and The Killer starts out as a remake of this scene, wherein Jeff carries out an assassination at a club, accidentally blinding in the process Jennie, the singer with whom he had previously exchanged looks. Clearly, the trajectory of The Killer will now mirror that which Neale sees Le Samourai as taking – the male hero is disturbed in his illusion of unified and unitary phallic assurance, his body is violated and punished, his position as an ‘ego ideal’ is shattered by the threat represented by a woman. Also, as in Melville’s film, the hero carries the burden of existential philosophy. Jeff is a single, solitary individual, his actions the mark of a tragic spiritual isolation. In the psychoanalytic lines pursued by Neale, such a position registers the narcissistic anxiety all men are supposed to feel over the recognition that their subjectivities are formed through the intricacies of sexual difference. This very intriguing line of enquiry might then be tied into other
approaches developed in the recent academic analysis of New Chinese Cinema. One writer whose work has achieved a degree of currency in this regard is Sun Longji. He makes a number of interesting assertions that might allow us to get some purchase on how the intercultural transposition of a 1967 French existential gangster picture into the 1980s Hong Kong cinema has repercussions for a comparative treatment of western and non-western film masculinities:
In Existentialism, a man [sic] ‘exists’ by virtue of retreating from all social roles and searching his own soul. If he fails to go through this process, he cannot become a man in the philosophical sense. By contrast, a Chinese fulfills himself within the network of
interpersonal relationships. A Chinese is the totality of his social roles. Strip him of his relationships, and there is nothing left. He is not an independent unit. His existence has to be defined by acquaintance. . . . In Chinese, the words ‘single’ and ‘alone’ have the
connotations of ‘immoral’ and ‘pathetic’.22
It may be that, in the context of the American cinema’s return during the 1980s to the image of the isolated, singular masculine ego ideal – the ‘hard bodies’ tradition of Rocky, Rambo and the Terminator, men who are encased in unified, self-sufficient shells for survival – A Better Tomorrow and The Killer utilize compulsory social intimacy in such a way that their extreme violence, when seen in relation to their extreme suffering, indicates an anxiety over the severance of those interpersonal relationships. This is to say that they are more about the threat of the withdrawal of intimacy than the stable security of an illusionary, omnipotent masculinity. And this may very
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23 Jillian Sandell, ‘A better tomorrow?: American masochism and Hong Kong action films’, Bright Lights, vol. 13 (Summer 1994), pp. 40–45, 50. Tony Williams, ‘The crisis cinema of John Woo’, cineACTION, vol. 36 (February 1995), pp. 42–52.
24 Tania Modleski, Feminism Without Women (New York: Routledge, 1991), p. 7.
25 Berenice Reynaud, ‘China’s shadow falls across Hong Kong’s films’, New York Times, 15 March 1990, p. 24.
well constitute a more ‘interrogative’ form of intimacy. As an ‘un-Chinese’ Hong Kong filmmaker, John Woo seems to assert the importance of masculinist, interpersonal relationships (Your tender smiles give me strength) while, simultaneously, throwing them to the wind in a cynical admittance of the transient nature of anything that might be worth holding on to. I started this article with the notion that the Hong Kong cinema is
in a period of transition and crisis, and it is certainly the case that the language of crisis occurs in two other recent articles on John Woo’s films.23 However, I am not unaware of Tania Modleski’s trenchant criticism of the ‘masculinity in crisis’ model of recent film studies. As she puts it, the most useful criticism of masculinity is that which is concerned with the effects of changes in masculinity on the female subject, and every word of her assertion that ‘male power is actually consolidated through cycles of crisis and resolution . . . men ultimately deal with the threat of female power by incorporating it’24 rings true. My response to this criticism would be to acknowledge its appropriateness here, but to add that, yes, while A Better Tomorrow and The Killer have very little diegetic interest in women, the interest taken by some women in John Woo action films is a subject worth investigating. Secondly, I would suggest that Hong Kong action cinema is somewhat unique in its crisis-ridden logic precisely because it cannot provide the system within which any new masculinity can be reconsolidated – if a forthcoming change of political fortunes brings the antithesis of the current system, what is left except uncertainty and crisis? (These two responses do not ‘excuse’ the films’ patriarchy and chauvinism. I am only trying to suggest the very real strain undergone by their male characters.) Finally, it is worth pointing out that A Better Tomorrow and The
Killer are not Tweedledum and Tweedledee – there is still a shift of emphasis between them, alerting us once again of the need to see Woo’s work as contingent upon historical context and the conditions of reception. Writing of the production of Tsui Hark’s A Better Tomorrow 3 during the time of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre in Beijing (Woo’s own Diexue Jietou/A Bullet in the Head was being filmed at the same time), Berenice Reynaud asserts that as a western critic it is ‘no longer fun to watch Chinese killing Chinese’.25 Reynaud’s statement and passing critique of western spectatorial pleasure is one of which viewers of John Woo’s films have yet to take heed. Western fans of what the British Hong Kong fanzine Eastern Heroes likes to call ‘Heroic Bloodshed’ gangster pictures do not seem to have begun to confront the same kinds of challenges and dilemmas raised for white spectators by the work of new African–American filmmakers – namely, how do we respond to representations of violence against and between ethnic groups other than our own? And how do we make good connections between such violence and wider political issues?
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One way to answer such a question might be to ask whether the positioning of John Woo’s films in relation to the western spectator’s powerful gaze approximates Hong Kong’s position in relation to 1997. At a crucial moment in A Better Tomorrow, Ho asks Mark the existential question, ‘Do you believe in God?’, to which Chow Yun-Fat replies, ‘I’m the God. Anyone who can control his own fate is a God.’ The scene is loaded because while the individualized, western male hero, worshipping his hard body by making it into the shrine of his own omnipotence, often strives to be a God, and while the existential hero strives to master his own fate by understanding his own identity, it is clear that with 1997 breathing down their necks, nobody who stays in Hong Kong would seem to be able to control their own fate. Patriarchal men – international gangsters operating under the cover of a multinational corporation, as in A Better Tomorrow, for example – illustrate this process particularly well because they are the ones with most to lose. By 1989, as Sydney opens The Killer in a church full of doves by
asking Jeff exactly the same question about whether or not he believes in God, Jeff replies simply, ‘No. But I like the tranquillity here’. With that, there is a shift in tone. Sadder, more world-weary, more knowing in the gazes exchanged, the two men in the latter film play out its male melodrama of doing and suffering with an air of deeper pathos and resignation. Released at the time of Tiananmen Square, as real Chinese killed real Chinese, at the time when Hong Kong movie personnel fed money to the democracy leaders in Beijing, and when Tsui Hark, producer of Woo’s most successful films, and Chow Yun-Fat, Woo’s star actor and alter-ego, wept on the set of A Better Tomorrow 3 as they heard the news from China over the radio and then injected their anger into the production of the movie, it is not hard to comprehend why The Killer should be that much more melancholic – or, indeed, why the stylized violence that western audiences like to hoot at and point to should now be that much more extreme, that much more apocalyptic, that much more despairing.
With thanks to Barbara Klinger and James Naremore for their helpful comments and good advice. I have learned a lot, too, from Yingjin Zhang’s thoughts on the Hong Kong cinema.
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