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   Swordsman II (top) and The East Is Red |
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This article originally appeared in issue 13 (1994) of our discontinued print edition. This issue, devoted entirely to Hong Kong cinema, has been used as course material in university film studies classes and has been cited in several scholarly articles. Long out of print, the entire issue is now available online. See the table of contents below.
Alive and Kicking: The Kung Fu Film Is a Legend Achievement and Crisis: Hong Kong Cinema in the '80s A Brief Historical Tour of the Hong Kong Martial Arts Film Swordsman II and The East Is Red: The "Hong Kong Film," Entertainment, and Gender A Better Tomorrow? American Masochism and Hong Kong Action Films |
Swordsman II
Many recent publications sanction and valorize the Hong Kong film as entertainment, but what has been said about why and how these films are entertaining? Entertainment seems to be served easily, consumed readily, and accepted casually. The notion that entertainment is such an obvious, self-evident, commonsense idea has encouraged Hong Kong films to slip easily into our mainstream spectatorship without much scrutiny. Furthermore, part of the meaning of the notion of entertainment is "anti-seriousness, against coming on heavy about things." Hence entertainment is uniquely able to act as its own justification: I like it just because it is entertaining, it is entertaining just because I like it. Thus the notion of entertainment is at once a channel that opens up accessibility and allows viewers to willingly receive a product, and a force that binds the product and acts as a protective barrier, resistant to probing.
The Hong Kong film is easily administered to and accepted by the mainstream audience, not only because it is bound by entertainment, but because it is gagged by it. Hong Kong, the distant location of the product’s originating culture, becomes merely "Hong Kong," a phrase emptied of all its meaning and "foreignness" except for, and because of its association to, the notion of entertainment. In this way, films from Hong Kong become herded and flattened as "Hong Kong film." Thus serious questions about the individual Hong Kong films have been as seemingly inappropriate3 and absent as serious examinations of notions of entertainment.
ENTERTAINMENT
The purpose of this article is to investigate a notion of entertainment through a specific analysis of the 1992 film Swordsman II and its 1993 sequel The East Is Red. Richard Dyer, in his recent groundbreaking book Only Entertainment (Routledge 1992), claims that film studies has been rich in the "but also" approach to studying entertainment. Such work claims that such and such is entertaining, granted and that's fine, but that it is also something else, and then goes on to talking about this something else: "Time and again, we are not told why Westerns are exciting, why horror films horrify, why weepies make us cry, but instead are told that, while they are exciting, horrifying and tear-jerking, the films also deal with history, society, psychology, gender roles, indeed the meaning of life."4
Although this article does indeed deal with gender roles, history, society, and possibly even the meaning of life, it is not written to map out (sexual difference, for example) in Dyer’s "but also" fashion. My point is to explore why the Swordsman films are entertaining by arguing how this particular film incites a pleasurable engagement for the viewer through its play on the social terrain of gender.
Dyer sets up several approaches to looking at "entertainment." In the sugar on the pill approach, entertainment is the sugar and ideology the pill. Defining entertainment itself as an ideology is "sugaring the pill" (5). The direction Dyer finds most interesting (which is also most appropriate for my investigation) is "conceptualizing radical pleasure." He describes this methodology as that which is concerned with the ideology of entertainment, but is also not anxious to throw the baby of enjoyment out with the bath water of ideology.
This pleasure is one that is unclouded by misgiving. Dyer refers to Roland Barthes’s distinction between the "plaisir" of order and the "jouissance" of abandon, and Mikhail Bahktin’s notion of the "carnivalesque." Such definitions are of a kind of enjoyment that evades the constrictions of "conservative" pleasure. Dyer terms this enjoyment "unruly delight"; an interest in, and valorization of, kinds of pleasure that seem to break free from the discipline of formally well-behaved narrativity and staid, coherent points of view.5
Swordsman offers precisely such unruly delight. This "radical pleasure" can be located in an examination of the way the film utilizes notions of cross-dressing, through the depiction of the character named Fong/Invincible Asia. Fong’s guise remains fairly consistent throughout the film, and the following discussion is not exactly about transvestism or "drag." Beyond garb, it is the dynamic of recognition and misrecognition that is radically at play in Swordsman II.6 It is this specific employment of signification that lends itself to Annette Kuhn’s discussion of cross-dressing, in the chapter "Sexual Disguise and Cinema," from her book Power of the Image (Routledge 1985).
GENDER
Kuhn's work discusses the construction of stories that pivot around the mistaken identifications of gender. Swordsman II is outwardly structured as the narrative of Fong's power-mad struggle to rule all of China. His desire for power is so great that he castrates himself in order to attain invincible and mystical powers. Although at the outset Fong is clearly identified as heterosexual and masculine, mistaken gender identification is pervasively discussed through the progression of Swordsman II. Ling, a swordsman who meets Fong coincidentally, identifies Fong as a nameless female, and the two become infatuated. Later, Ling sleeps with a woman believed to be Fong but actually Fong's mistress Cici, who has been instructed by Fong to act as a stand-in. As a result of Ling's identification of Fong, Swordsman II is ultimately about Ling's extraordinary relationship with Fong. In fact, the story at the heart of the film, and the one that the viewer is thoroughly engaged with by the end of it, is not the narrative of Fong's power struggle, but this relationship between Fong and Ling. Although Fong plainly tells his mistress Cici early on that his ambition is to have his name go down in history, and for all people to remember him as the invincible and the great, this statement is curiously transformed by the end of the film. In the final scene, as Fong's death approaches, he refuses to tell Ling whether or not they actually slept together, for Fong's final wish is that Ling remember her/him and mourn her/his death for the rest of his life.
Swordsman II
Kuhn claims that the narrativization of such themes of mistaken identifications of gender may provoke questions about the way in which gender is constructed. It is this discussion, which "may even subject to a certain interrogation, the culturally taken-for-granted dualities of male/female and masculine/feminine,"7 that applies direct pressure to what is at stake in the pleasure of Swordsman II through its deployment of the Fong character. The concept of idealized love set forth by the end of Swordsman II is not defined clearly as staid, coherent, and heterosexual. Although Kuhn notes that the transgression of such a strategy is surely limited, she crucially points out that: "Perhaps the pleasure of the most popular films of sexual disguise does nevertheless lie in their capacity to offer, at least momentarily, a vision of fluidity of gender options; to provide a glimpse of a world outside the order normally seen or thought about — a utopian prospect of release from the ties of sexual difference that bind us into meaning, discourse, culture."8
In Richard Dyer's words, Annette Kuhn is talking about radical pleasure. Thus, tracking the descriptions of such a utopian prospect leads us to an analysis of the entertainment of boundary-breaking pleasure in Swordsman II.
Kuhn introduces what she terms the "view behind" of cross-dressing/mistaken identification of gender films. This "view behind" is the spectator's knowledge of the true gender of the character in drag (the actor's true gender). Kuhn argues that this knowledge creates a source of humor when watching the travesty of the character in drag. For example, in the popular American film Tootsie (1982), the perspective of the male character of Michael is made clear to the viewer, and it is precisely in the fact that we know it is Michael in drag as Tootsie that the tension of the comedy rests: we are privileged extreme close-ups of Michael's lip sweating, expressing nervousness, or adjusting his wig when he wants to kiss the female protagonist Julie. It is this "view behind" that allows us to see and laugh at the travesty, not to mention deflecting a potential lesbian encounter from the viewer.
NEXT PAGE: Looking beyond the narrative
NOTES
1. Jeffrey Ressner, "Hong Kong's Flashy Films Battle for American Fans," The New York Times, May 9, 1993.
2. Bob Stephens, "Hong Kong Goes Hollywood One Better," San Francisco Examiner, April 18, 1993.
3. Alan Stanbrook's article "Under Western Eyes: An Occidental View of Hong Kong" begins: "First, to clear up any misconceptions, let me say what this article is not. It is not a learned treatise on Hong Kong movies, it is not semiological, psychoanalytical, structuralist or imbued with any kind of "ism', political or aesthetic." (Hong Kong International Film Festival Catalog, 1991).
4. Dyer, 3.
5. Dyer recognizes that this points to a "fantasy of being beyond responsibility and cerebration, the fantasy of regression." But he also points out the reality of delight of abandon, and queries the implication that abandon is not itself a social construction. He writes however, that, "whatever the theorization, there is a recourse to unsocialised pleasure ... this takes the form of a simple assertion that something is, after all, enjoyable and why not, even if it is ideologically unsound, a kind of born again hedonism ..." (7)
6. The fact that Fong's gender identity is misrecognized through his/her silence, rather than purposefully executed and performed via drag, is boundary-breaking in its connotations of "passing": "Passing demands a desire to become invisible. A ghost-life. An ignorance of connections ... Passing demands quiet. And from that quiet — silence ... Passing demands that you keep that knowledge (of history) to yourself." Michelle Cliff, "Passing," from Land of Look Behind (Ithaca, NY: Firebrand Books, 1985).
7. Kuhn, 50.
8. Ibid.
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