COSMONAUTiCAL•net Case Study: Farewell My Concubine
I. Introduction
In 1993, Farewell My Concubine became the first Chinese film to win the Palme d’Ore at the Cannes Film Festival (Festival de Cannes, under the Chinese title “Bawang Beiji”). Since then, it has been considered a classic example of Chinese film.
This essay will seek to understand the film through various theoretical lenses, centering on issues of gender and sexuality through applied feminist, queer and spectatorship theories using the character of Dieyi/Yu Ji as played by Leslie Cheung as the center point of the analysis. His role as dan, a male actor who plays female characters in Bejing Opera, creates his social identity as a woman on stage the continues in some ways into his life offstage. The third section will move to a study of spectatorship of a transnational Chinese film in an American context. Finally, the strengths and weaknesses of film theory will be explored in general terms using the analyses of Farewell My Concubine as a reference.
II. I am by nature a boy girl, not a girl boy.
“Imitation and Gender Insubordination” in Farewell My Concubine
In Judith Butler’s 1991 essay, she asserted that gender is not a natural or innate identity, but something that is learned through imitation of others, who in turn have imitated others, and so on; “gender is a kind of imitation for which there is no original” (Butler, 371).
Using this as a theoretical background, this essay will examine the character of Cheng Dieyi in his dual role of male and female, Dieyi and Yu Ji. In Women Through the Lens, Shuqin Cui argues that Dieyi’s innately masculine nature has been suppressed by society because of his role as dan, male actors who play female characters in Beijing Opera (Cui, 168). This essay is going to argue that assertion using Judith Butler’s theory of gender as performative and imitative; any “inner sense of maleness” that Dieyi has is as artificial as Yu Ji’s “femininity” (Cui, 168).
Gender is taught by society and learned by the individual. In Dieyi/Yu Ji’s case, two genders have been learned: Dieyi’s masculinity and Yu Ji’s femininity. However, Dieyi/Yu Ji has put a more concentrated effort into learning Yu Ji’s femininity than Dieyi’s masculinity. Dieyi, at the tiem Xiao Douzi, did not choose to be assigned the role of dan, as most people do not choose the gender assigned to them by society. Usually, gender assignment is based on primary sexual characteristics; the only difference in Dieyi’s case is that he is assigned his role based on tertiary sexual characteristics. Cui argues that in the scene in which Dieyi’s mother cuts off the sixth finger on one of his hands she is symbolically castrating him and foreshadowing his role as a woman within the world of Beijing Opera (153).
This argument falls apart when the viewer takes into account the character of the eunuch. He has been literally castrated, but this has not made him a woman, emotionally or socially. Dieyi’s identity as a Yu Ji, a woman, is not based on symbolic castration but the literal learning process he underwent in order to be able to properly perform the gender assigned to him by the society of the Beijing Opera.
The use of Beijing Opera as the premise for the learning, performance and imitation of gender, Farewell My Concubine makes explicit these processes. Dieyi is taught how to be a woman; he is physically punished by the father figure (the school teacher) and the husband figure (Xiaolou) for incorrectly reciting his line, “I am by nature not a boy, but a girl,” transposing “girl” and “boy.” (Cui) Offstage, gender is enforced through the threat of violence, symbolic or literal; this argument is the basis of Joan Riviere’s 1929 essay “Womanliness as Masquerade.”
As in the case study in “Womanliness as Masquerade,” Dieyi/Yuji over emphasizes femininity in order to avoid retribution. Offstage, Dieyi has spent so much time and energy learning femininity that performing femininity has become as “natural” to him as performing masculinity, if not superceded it; on and off the stage, Dieyi acts in a feminine manner: close-ups on his delicate hands held in the lotus position; attending to Xiaolou’s robes in the photo shoot; applying make-up before performances, like a wife would. Dieyi has spent more of his life learning a feminine role than a masculine one; it is one of the many ways that Dieyi is unable or unwilling to break character.
Thus far, this essay has focused on the character of Dieyi, but what about Yu Ji? Yu Ji, the imposter, imitation female, is supposed to be the ideal woman: she is beautiful, pious, and loyal to the end. Nobody denies that she is a construction, a conglomeration of ideal feminine traits projected onto a single ideal body. (Ideal in that Yu Ji poses no castration threat, something that will be addressed in the next section.) Dieyi’s rival for Xiaolou’s affection, Juxian, meanwhile is an “imperfect” woman; a prostitute who, as a human being, has character flaws and a natural female body: her face is not the smooth, stark white of a woman in a painting on stage, but a natural face with flaws and expressions.
This does not mean that Juxian’s femininity is innate, unique or original. However, there is a tension between Yu Ji’s performance of femininity and Juxian’s performance of femininity that adds another layer to Dieyi and Juxian’s rivalry over Xiaolou. Despite being physically male, Dieyi has undergone intensive training in how to be the ideal woman, while Juxian has learned through imitation of women around her. In one scene, Dieyi says that if she can’t sing opera, she should stop overacting – even though he is the one who plays the much more exaggerated femininity.
III. Castration Anxiety and the Eroticized Imposter Female
“Woman As Image, Man as Bearer of the Look” in Farewell My Concubine
A character like Dieyi/Yu Ji does not throw gendered identities into question within the film narrative, but in the production of the film itself. Laura Mulvey’s 1975 essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” is built on the assumption that the gender binary holds true, that there are “women” (female, feminine, attracted to men) who are looked at by “men” (male, masculine, attracted to women). As the previous section discussed, Farewell My Concubine questions the gender binary through the character of Dieyi/Yu Ji. The Mulvarian analysis in this essay will tweak Mulvey’s original argument to include a more diverse range of gender identities outside of the binary male/female system and focus on gender more as a constructed rather than inherent trait.
Accepting this idea as the basis for analysis of the film’s treatment of women, this essay will focus on the way the camera treats the “real” woman, Juxian, and the “imposter,” Yu Ji, the two women of the film.
Yu Ji embodies the ideal woman: she is pretty and passive, as Mulvey says is typical of women in film. Significantly, Yu Ji also lacks the castration threat because she is a man. Yu Ji’s body is not symbolically chopped up by the camera or staging because she does not inspire castration anxiety because she herself has not been castrated.
At the same time, however, Yu Ji’s perfection relies on a certain amount of aesthetic distance; many of the shots of her onstage are from far away, so that the film audience experiences her presence the same way that a theater audience in the universe of the narrative would: from a distance. Up close, her beauty is overwhelming; her painted on features are greatly exaggerated, the detailing of her costumes, so delicate from a distance, seem gaudy and overwhelming. Yu Ji also presents a different, but related, threat to a male spectator: she is, after all, a man. There is a fine line of suspension of disbelief that allows the male spectator to appreciate her beauty as a woman from a distance, but if the camera gets too close, the viewer is reminded that she is a male “imposter” pretending to be a woman, potentially threatening the male viewer’s heterosexuality. For this reason, Yu Ji is subject to much less invasive camerawork than the “real” woman, Juxian; there are considerably fewer close-ups of Yu Ji’s face and none of her legs or other body parts, other than her hands -- which are symbolic of her idealized femininity because of their carefully constructed posture; the absence of the castration anxiety threat creates a new anxiety. There is no need to investigate Yu Ji’s body the way Juxian’s body is investigated, but the narrative does punish Dieyi for his “transgression” against the gender binary. When Yu Ji is broken up, her body is hidden; for example, there is a close-up on her face during the scene in which the theater is trashed by the Nationalists when Yu Ji peers out from behind a curtain, which serves to hide her male body from the viewer. This is different from a close-up only on the face; Yu Ji’s body must not be ignored for optimal visual pleasure on the part of the male spectator, it must be hidden.
Juxian, the “real” woman, is subjected to much more invasive camera treatment. There are numerous close-ups on her face, more than Xiaolou or Dieyi/Yu Ji combined, and her body is not hidden, it is broken up by the set. The first time the audience is introduced to her in the House of Blossoms, she is on the balcony of the second floor, a railing between her and Xiaolou, who’s gaze the audience follows. Intentional or not, this scene is strongly suggestive of the classic scene in Double Indemnity; the banister visually divides Juxian’s body into smaller pieces and places her in a symbolic cage. Just as the maid in Double Indemnity tells Walter that Phyllis is not available, the madam at the House of Blossoms tells Xiaolou that Juxian cannot see him that night. The scene in Double Indemnity is a classic example of Mulvey’s theories about camerawork and women’s bodies at work in film and the scene in House of Blossoms is reminiscent of that, down even to the woman (Phyllis/Juxian) seducing the man (Walter/Xiaolou) and this being a source of conflict in the narrative. Again towards the end of the film, Juxian’s body is cut up, this time as she is hanging from the rafters of the home she had shared with Xiaolou; at first, all the camera shows is her legs, swinging slightly back and forth. She is wearing her wedding dress, reminding the viewer of an earlier scene that also focused on her feet and legs, when she showed up barefoot at Xiaolou’s home, ultimately tricking him into marrying her. Juxian is also investigated and ultimately punished; though she has been a virtuous wife to Xiaolou, she had been a prostitute and, as the madam tells her, “once a prostitute, always a prostitute.” She kills herself after Dieyi denounces her in front of the Red Guards and Xiaolou divorces her, ostensibly to save them both.
Farewell My Concubine does not only question who is looked at, but who does the looking. While there are times in the film, such as the scene in the House of Blossoms, when the camera follows Xiaolou’s gaze and sexually objectifies Juxian, there are no comparative scenes in which the camera follows Dieyi’s gaze and sexually objectifies Xiaolou. This is related to the threat to the male viewer’s heterosexuality; it would not be erotic for a male viewer if the camera were to focus on Xiaolou as a sexual object. Although the film narrative is a queer one that provides many reasons and opportunities to focus on Xiaolou as a sexual object while still aligning itself with a male gaze (Dieyi’s), the visual pleasure of the hypothetical heterosexual male viewer is placed above the possible visual pleasure that could be derived by a heterosexual female or homosexual male viewer.
IV. The Normal is Exotic
“Haggling” Meaning in Farewell My Concubine
Farewell My Concubine is not the film’s original title; it is (presumably) the translation of the Chinese title, usually rendered Bawang Beiji in the Roman alphabet, written as 霸王別姬 in traditional Chinese characters. This viewer, like many viewers outside of China (and even those inside of China who speak a dialect other than Mandarin), must accept the translations provided for the title and dialogue. Viewed outside of its intended audience, the film changes meaning as diverse audiences access the story from a range of cultural backgrounds and approach the text from varied standpoints.
American audiences often lack cultural and historical knowledge about the events portrayed in the film and so their significance is lost or the meaning is altered because it is not part of an American viewer’s cultural history. In his 2003 essay, “Theorizing ‘Third World’ Film Spectatorship,” Hamid Naficy writes about his experience as a citizen of the “third world” watching American movies and the process of creating an oppositional or negotiated reading; this essay will contend that these same theories of spectatorship can be applied in reverse. The spectator here is an American haggling with the meaning of a Chinese film. Just as Nacify brings his identity with him to the theaters, so too does an American spectator.
Farewell My Concubine takes place against the backdrop of the sweeping historical drama of the last century of Chinese history. The invasion by the Japanese, the Nationalist revolution, Communist take-over and Cultural Revolution are crucial events in modern Chinese history. The way in which these events impacted or did not impact the lives of the characters is an essay unto itself about power and class and twentieth century China, but that is best left to a historian. A base understanding of these events will deepen a viewer’s understanding of their significance in the lives of the characters.
Even with a working knowledge of modern Chinese history, an American viewer does not have a Chinese identity. The events depicted in the film are not part of an American audience’s cultural history. Sometimes the events are unknown to the American viewer, or are inaccessible because of different cultural heritage, but at other times the reading must be oppositional by default: the takeover by the Nationalists, who trash the theater, cause Juxian to miscarry, and arrest Dieyi, was supported by the United States both financially and morally.
Although the political drama in the film only serves as a backdrop for the stage on which the characters perform their lives, the events depicted have a profound impact on Chinese cultural consciousness. The memory of the Cultural Revolution still looms large over China, a painful memory; scenes like the one in which Dieyi, Xiaolou and Juxian denounce each other played out in reality and in the memory of many living citizens. This scene stings for an American viewer to watch as the characters destroy each other, but even for someone with a background in modern Chinese history, the true emotional weight of the scene is difficult if not impossible to access because it did not happen here. Lilian Lee, the screenwriter and author of the book on which the film is based, may have lived through the Cultural Revolution herself and her parents almost certainly did; the actors and producers of the film likewise have a much more personal understanding of the events, even if they did not live through it themselves.
To the American viewer, however, the film is “exotic” (Farewell, box). Made for and by Chinese people, the film takes on a different meaning in the United States. It goes from being a story of “our” culture to a story of “their” culture.
Being aware of the limitations of spectatorship because viewers are unable to ever fully cast aside their identities is crucial for properly understanding a film text for what it is. An oppositional or negotiated reading must first fully understand, if only on an academic level, the dominant reading, even if it is so the dominant reading can be rejected. If the dominant reading is not fully understood, a new alternative reading will be born. While this reading is not incorrect or inauthentic, in order to truly analyze a film text the dominant reading must be sought and understood even if the ultimate goal is deconstruction of the original intention.
V. The Strengths and Weaknesses of Applied Theory
This essay has focused almost exclusively on the character of Dieyi/Yu Ji and given almost no time to Juxian, a complex character worthy of analysis in her own right as the only important female character in a film dominated by male characters, reflecting her role as the only important woman in a world dominated by men.
Additionally, the theories used for analysis are problematic, particularly the Mulvarian analysis of the film, which has discounted this viewer’s experience of the film in favor of examining the cinematography through the eyes of an imaginary male spectator/self. In using feminist film theory, a female viewer must watch the film with a male gaze. Dieyi/Yu Ji inspires a different anxiety in a female viewer than a male viewer: the anxiety of being usurped by an imposter better at playing femininity than the “real” woman. Mulvey would ague that women already watch a film as though they were the male spectator, identifying with the male protagonist if not also eroticizing the female spectacle; an analysis does not change patterns or pleasures of viewing, only makes explicit the processes and responses of film creation and spectatorship. Mulvey has a section in “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” entitled “[d]econstruction of pleasure as a radical weapon,” devoted to this very idea; understanding the mechanisms of oppression is the first step in overthrowing the oppressive system, in this case of film creation and spectatorship (Mulvey, 203).
Viewing film through the lenses of various theories not only allows for a critical interpretation and more nuanced viewing of the film itself, but of the subtle messages the film conveys and a better grasp of the theory itself. Feminist film theory is useful outside of the realm of film; film provides a safe starting point from which a new feminist can practice using new skills and ways of seeing and thinking. Because of Dieyi’s role as dan in the film, Farewell My Concubine provides a tangible example of Butler’s concept of gender as imitation and the contrast in the camera treatment of Yu Ji and Juxian.
VI. Conclusion
Theory can be convoluted and difficult to understand, particularly primary sources; the best way to learn it is to apply it and see how what the theorist says holds true, or fails to, for a particular piece. Meanwhile, applying theory to film is also a way to examine what the film says about, for example, feminist or queer film theory or how spectatorship can change the meaning of the film depending on the cultural context of the screening. Film and theory support each other to build a better understanding of both, together and separately.
Works Cited
Butler, Judith. “Imitation and Gender Insubordination.” The Routledge Critical and
Cultural Theory Reader. Eds. Neil Badmington and Julia Thomas. Routledge:
Abington, Oxon, 2008. 25-33.
Cui, Shuqin. Women Through the Lens: Gender and Nation in a Century of Chinese
Cinema. Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi P, 2003.
Farewell My Concubine. Dir. Kaige Chen. Perf. Leslie Cheung and Gong Li. VHS.
Miramax, 1994.
Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” The Routledge Critical Cultural
Theory Reader. Eds. Niel Badmington and Julia Thomas. Routledge: London,
2008. 202-212.
Nacify, Hamid. “Theorizing ‘Third-World’ Film Spectatorship: The Case of Iran and
Iranian Cinema.” Genre, Gender, Race and World Cinema: An Anthology. Ed.
Julie F. Codell. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2007. 369-387.
Riviere, Joan. “Womanliness as Masquerade.” The Routledge Critical and Cultural
Theory Reader. Eds. Neil Badmington and Julia Thomas. Routledge: Abington,
Oxon, 2008. 25-33.