Reconstruction Vol. 16, No. 2
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Queer Love in Wong Kar Wai's Happy Together (1997) / Chin-Yi Chung
Abstract
Wong Kar Wai often treats love in his films as an ephemeral vapour, a missed opportunity, a fleeting emotion that never acted upon becomes an ephemeral memory buried by time. In Happy Together (1997), however, he takes a different approach. Here, queer love represents not a form of fulfilment but a means to misery, as pathological and indeed dysfunctional. Wong's explorations of queer love are discussed at length in this essay.
Keywords: queer love, pathology, dysfunction
<1> In Wong Kar Wai's Happy Together (春光乍洩 Chun gwong cha sit, 1997), queer love is not treated as a form of fulfilment but a means to a terminal end in misery, as pathological and indeed dysfunctional. Ho Po Wing (Leslie Cheung, 1956-2003) and Lai Yiu Fai (Tony Leung Chiu-wai, 1962- ) are constantly seeking to re-invent their relationship in order to keep their passions alive. In one such move, they take the brave step of migrating to Argentina, where they hope to "start over." In fact, starting over is a recurrent motif in their relationship. There, their relationship soon sours when they fail to find the magical Iguazu Falls (Figure 1). Instead, their car breaks down, and soon finding each other tiresome, they part company. Yiu Fai lands a job as a doorman at an Argentinian club; Po Wing embarks on a downward spiral of promiscuity with white men. Wild, promiscuous and abusive, he seeks out his partner only when he wants sex or runs out of money. Eventually, he is badly beaten up by one of his lovers and seeks out Yiu Fai's care. He expends all of his time and energies nurturing Po Wing back to health, only to be abandoned when no longer needed. What passes as love is an obsessive pathology of dependence, indeed portrayed throughout the film as a disease that brings out the worst in the two and results in mutual suffering in place of mutual edification. The absence of a clear-cut male and female dichotomy within the relationship-as roles are not clearly defined though Po Wing comes across as the more feminine and fickle of the two-signals a larger pathology of intoxication but degeneration, of co-dependence and lack of accomplishment.
<2> I will hereafter focus on the pathological aspects of their love.
<3> The relationship between Po Wing and Yiu Fai is characterized by a series of jump starts and fizzles, intermingled with seething animosity throughout. Any passion they share is at best described as grudging and tempestuous. Early in the film, after Po-wing parts company with Yiu Fai, the latter receives a call from Po Wing to visit his apartment. He turns up, bitter and hostile, angry that his lover has thrown himself into a string of decadent affairs. He drinks and rants at Po Wing for his showing off his loot from his prostitution and demands to know why he had called him up. Po Wing makes an attempt to kiss him but is met with a violent response. When pressed further Yiu Fai makes an attempt to strangle him for having landing them, stranded, in Argentina. Po Wing has, after all, spent their money and abandoned his partner to struggle on his own, all the while engaging in an aimless life of self-gratification and prostitution. Yiu Fai departs in a rage, and Po-wing breaks into tears, suggesting that he does feel affection for him. However little genuine affection they share between them, their constant struggle and the ensuing violence makes it all the more apparent that he still desires Yiu Fai sexually.
Figure 1. The Magical, if Elusive Iguazu Falls
<4> In fact, violence continually marks their relationship. Po Wing continues cruising and behaving promiscuously, until one day he lands on Yiu Fai's doorstep, badly beaten by one of his lovers. Feeling compassion for him, he takes him in and starts caring for him, cooking for him and bathing him. Any attempt at intimacy by Po Wing, however, are met with rejection and violence, as his fought off. Yiu Fai refuses to be used sexually any longer. It is a curious state of affairs in which sexual advances and intimacy, are stalled at every corner: Yiu Fai threatens, for example, not to fondle him when Po Wing does manage to coax him into sharing the bed for a night. Later, after persuading him to trek in the cold with him, Yiu Fai falls ill with a violent cold; Po Wing feels no sympathy or obligation and instead insists that Yiu Fai cook for him, all the while remaining blissfully unfaithful and uncaring. Yiu Fai becomes the Other.
<5> As Blanchot describes the Other:
In the relation of myself to the Other, the Other exceeds my grasp. The Other, the Separate, the Most-High which escapes my power-the powerless, therefore; the stranger, dispossessed. But, in the relation of the Other to me, everything seems to reverse itself the distant becomes the close-by, [and] this proximity becomes the obsession that afflicts me, that weighs frown upon me, that separates me from myself-as if separation (which measured the transcendence from me to the Other) -did its work within me, dis-identifying me, abandoning me to passivity, leaving me without any initiative and bereft of the present. And then, the other becomes rather the Overlord, indeed the Persecutor, he who overwhelms, encumbers, undoes me, he who puts me in his debt no less than he attacks me by making me answer for his crimes, by charging me with measureless responsibility which cannot be mine since it extends all the way to "substitution." So it is that, from this point of view, the relation of the Other to me would tend to appear as sadomasochistic, if it did not cause us to fall prematurely out of the world-the one region where "normal" and "anomaly" have meaning. (1995: 19)
In effect, Blanchot elevates the Other to absolute, as the persecutor and oppressor of the self who leaves the self dis-encumbered, overwhelmed and bereft of identity.
<6> Applying such an observation to Happy Together, it is seen that Po Wing is the oppressor, who robs Yiu Fai of his identity as he lords over him, refusing to allow him any semblance of autonomy or opportunity to assert himself. What ensues is a seething bitterness from he who is victimized, abused in the relationship. Indeed, theirs is an asymmetrical relation of dominance, where the powers of sexuality and emotion serve to bleed another dry.
<7> Bolstering this observation, it is perhaps helpful to view Iguazu Falls as a symbolic representation of their relationship, for their passion is indeed torrential, destructive, always pounding away as it falls head forward and spirals downward towards an uncertain end. Based on no more than mutual needs and sexual "pacification," it is no wonder that the relationship spirals beyond control. It lacks not intensity but a mutual recognition and regard for the Other, as Blanchot asserts. Indeed, their relationship resembles Blanchot's "disaster," as outlined in The Writing of the Disaster (1995), an all-consuming and overwhelming force. Disaster defined an encounter in which one suffers trauma and is victimized, and it is particularly acute in its encountering the Other. It becomes the situation in which one individual is relegated to a position of passivity and victimization in the encounter. It effaces subjectivity and leads to suffering with the Oppression of the Other. Following Blanchot, such suffering is demonstrated through our readings of the disaster by the afflicted in the aftermath. Actively forgetting is the conscious effort to expel traumatic experience from memory, which according to Freud in Beyond the Pleasure Principal (1950), we are doomed to repeat.
<8> Furthermore, as Blanchot reminds us:
If forgetfulness precedes memory or perhaps founds it, it or has no connection with it at all, then to forget is not simply weakness, a failing, an absence or void (the starting point of recollection but a starting which, like an anticipatory shade, would obscure remembrance in its very possibility, restoring the memorable to its fragility and memory to the loss of memory. No, forgetfulness would be not emptiness, but neither negative nor positive: the passive demand that it neither welcomes nor withdraws the past, but, designating there what has never taken place (just as it indicates in the yet to come that which will never be able to find its place in any present, refers us to nonhistorical forms of time, to the other of all tenses, to their eternal or eternally provisional indecision, bereft of destiny, without presence. (1995: 85)
Alterity, then, is the space beyond experience that is brought about by forgetfulness; it is the step beyond experience in the effort to transcend suffering. "Disaster ruins everything," writes Blanchot, for it is a phantom that has destroyed and yet its marks of destruction are invisible, leaving suffering and trauma in its wake.
<9> Indeed, Yiu Fai's experiences are tantamount to Blanchot's disaster, in this instance as a lingering trauma that he can only express through refusal (of sex) and by absence (hiding his passport). His break down and crying into the audio recorder reflects the degree both of his unhappiness and of the rift in the relationship. Yiu Fai cannot forget the trauma inflicted upon him by Po Wing, cannot deny that every attempt at "starting over" is selfishly thwarted by his partner's hedonism and promiscuity. Indeed, his subjectivity is effaced; he is in effect reduced to passivity and victimization. Likewise, Po Wing is effaced and bereft of his identity, robbed as he is by his own persecutor, Yiu Fai.
<10> The repeated, doomed attempts at renewal are symptomatic of a break in their relationship that cannot be mended-based as it is on an asymmetrical assertion of power and abuse. Po Wing's claims of love inflicted on Yiu Fai are devoid of any consideration of his needs. Instead, sexual gratification, the ends to which he manipulates him, nature of their relationship, turning up on his doorstep only when injured and abandoning him once he is satisfied and sated. Yiu Fai's trauma results in his emotional breakdown.
<11> The film emphasizes the nuanced negativity of their relationship, fuelled by emotional dependency and need as opposed to a genuine sense of love. Both men use each other to placate any sense of loneliness, and the result is resentment: Both fail to fill the void that each of them desperately feels. The emotional sterility of such a relationship is devoid of respect. In its place, we experience something akin to "white noise": constant shouting, frequent attacks, verbal abuse, all because they resent being thrown together in the absence of options.
<12> This is not to say that there are no tender moments between the two men. Eventually, Yiu Fai quits his job as a doorman and becomes a cook in a restaurant; thereafter, he routinely calls Po Wing to check on him and ask what he wants for dinner. In a particularly poignant scene, Po Wing teaches Yiu Fai to tango (Figure 2). After a series of missteps, Yiu Fai gets the hang of it, and they share a passionate moment while dancing, pressed closely and caressing each other, ending with the drama and passion of a French kissing. But such moments are rare. More often, they quarrel, and their words only stoking the destructive flames and the ensuing misery between them.
Figure 2. A Passionate Tango
<13> In a very real sense, their relationship deconstructs into a series of jealousy and pettiness. Po Wing's ill-timed call to the restaurant when Yiu Fai has temporarily been called away leads to an interrogation and further questions about imagined sexual liaisons. Flabbergasted, Yiu Fai extracts his own confession from Po Wing as to the number of boyfriends he has had-countless meaningless encounters and rendezvous. Inscribing their relationship is a double standard: Po Wing expects faithfulness and commitment, in spite of his own infidelities. Possessive and controlling, his only response results in Yiu Fai's ill-treatment.
<14> But Po Wing is not the only source of possessiveness and jealousy here. Yiu Fai is every bit his match. Recovering from his beating, Po Wing takes to dressing up and cruising for sex. Frustrated and jealous, Yiu Fai resorts to buying a considerable number of cartons of cigarettes, ostensibly to prevent Po Wing's using a lack of cigarettes as a justification to go out. But when faced with boxes of stored cigarettes, Po Wing resorts to throwing a tantrum and, in doing so, he flings the boxes to the floor. Yiu Fai chases him out of the apartment, all the while throwing a single aspersion in his direction: "slut."
<15> In response to the repeated abuse, Yiu Fai retaliates by hiding Po Wing's passport. He repeatedly denies having kept his passport-until he can no longer do so. In retaliation, he defiantly announces that he will not under any circumstances return the passport to him. The result is an impasse between them, and their relationship turns bitter, resoundingly cold. Yiu Fai takes a moment to reflect that the happiest days included Po Wing's recovering while under his care, too weak to be promiscuous. This reflection is accompanied by a moment when he tenderly strokes a sleeping Po Wing, his action suggesting that, in spite of the abuses on multiple levels, he still cares for him.
<16> A deeply rooted sense of unhappiness overtakes Yiu Fai.
<17> Whereas he cares for Po Wing, he cannot accept the constant ill-treatment, the abuse and being taken for granted. Worse, the destructive impulses in their relationship have left him lonelier than ever (Figure 3). He goes drinking with the colleague with whom he has developed a close friendship, and his friend, noticing his deep unhappiness, asks him to leave a voice recording as a memento since he is departing Argentina to journey "to the end of the world." Later, only after he succumbs to temptation and has sex with a stranger does he realize that he is no different from Po Wing: lonely people are, without exception, all the same.
Figure 3. Yiu Fai's Loneliness
<18> Certainly, the degenerative nature of their relationship permeates all that they do. Both men cannot live together, they cannot tolerate each other, and yet neither can live alone. Theirs is a relationship heavily rooted in need. Any so-called love between the two men has degenerated into mutual hostility and violence, an overriding sense of frustration and ill-will (Figure 4). In spite of the title of the film, Happy Together, their time together becomes a battle of will and mutual manipulation. Indeed, it is all the more remarkable that Yiu Fai maintains any affection towards Po Wing. In fact, their love fails; it cannot transcend the most base of needs, magnified all the more by each other's loneliness.
Figure 4. Yiu Fai's Frustrations
The hostility between the two men arises from their trapped together abroad, without the necessary funds to return to Hong Kong. Their attempt at reviving their relationship is destined to fail miserably precisely because they do not love and respect each other. Their constantly fighting becomes their only act of personal definition in a world lacking in options. The film might be more aptly titled "Lonely Together" or "Miserable Together."
<19> Further complicating matters is a latent, if internalized homophobia the two share, and this manifests itself in a lack of respect and goodwill for each other. Because society has marginalized homosexuals and they make every effort to remain within those social confines, they are unable either to love themselves or each other genuinely. Happy Together is then not so much about the failure of homosexual love as it is the failure of achieving a reciprocal relationship that transcends physical and monetary needs, personal wants and petty desires and jealousies.
<20> It needs be noted at this point that, aside from casual sexual encounters they have outside of their relationship, both men lack genuine friends. This absence further contributes to the destruction of their relationship. More to the point, to be involved in a taboo relationship is simultaneously to be in a relationship that is invisible to the outside world, and because it lacks the usual heteronormative networks of support available to heterosexual relationships, their toxicity becomes a matter of pathology. Certainly, the director Wong Kar Wai affirms as much when he that this is not a "gay film" but an exploration of loneliness while in the presence of someone else. The highlight of the film is, thus, the lack of connection that takes place even in the midst of frequent interactions and time spent together.
<21> In this sense, Happy Together is an examination of the essential loneliness of the human condition. Because we are unable to transcend differences and petty needs and wants, we launch into destructive relationships based on physical needs rather than transcending those needs and giving reciprocally out of genuine agape and Other-directed love for each other. The protagonists are unable to love because they are unable to transcend themselves. Their self-interests are at the heart of every conflict in the relationship, and while it is true that Yiu Fai makes the most of his personal sacrifices, he does not do so willingly. He responds out of a grudging need for company and a desire to overcome his own personal loss and loneliness. In this sense, the film becomes a study in solipsism and of the narcissism that brings relationships to a destructive end. To use each other continually out of emotional dependency necessarily dooms even the possibility of a relationship. Were they able to trust and respect each other or transcend themselves into seeing the Other for what he is, in a Buberian sense in an I-Thou rather than I-It relationship (Buber 1971: 47-58), they might be able to sustain a lasting relationship as a couple. This moves beyond any commentary on the nature of homosexual relationships to speak to larger issues of abuse and emotional dependency of characters and to an inability to find solace in already defined by its absence.
Acknowledgement: Unless otherwise noted, all images were acquired under a Creative Commons license.
Principal Cast and Characters in Happy Together (1997)
Director: Wong Kar Wai
Writer: Wong Kar Wai
Ho Po Wing (Leslie Cheung)
Lai Yiu Fai (Tony Chiu Wai Leung)
Chang (Chen Chang)
Lover (Gregory Dayton)
Works Cited
Blanchot, Maurice. The Writing of the Disaster. University of Nebraska Press, 1995.
Buber, Martin. I and Thou. Trans. Walter Kaufman. New York, NY: Touchstone, 1971.
Freud, Sigmund. Beyond the Pleasure Principal. London: Hogarth Press, 1950.
Happy Together. Dir. Wong Kar Wai. Film. 1997.
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