Manifesto caution

Posted on | February 11, 2008 | 5 Comments

On Saturday night some friends and I went to see Ang Lee’s latest film, Lust Caution. At the time, it felt long, exhausting and tragic — especially given I was already tired from the night before and dissecting the week that spawned not one but two quasi-manifestos from lady bloggers. Was there something in the internets?

We all left the cinema feeling vaguely depressed and graceless, having been transfixed by the incredible performance of Wei Tang as the heroine Wong Chia Chi. As if to confuse us even more, we ate dinner backing on to a carpark in Chinatown, where one restaurateur was celebrating the New Year in a quite bizarre fashion, singing personal interpretations of John Denver mixed with Christmas carols and dedicated to the hundreds of diners by then smoking and drinking under temporary marquee (this latter reappeared in my dream that night, where another ubiquitous blogger tried to beg his way into my beachfront wedding).

After Kenny Rogers, the ABBA megamix got going, and it was like being forced to spy on a well-catered suburban Australian wedding of the type I used to waitress for in Hobart. It couldn’t have been further from the vision of China for which we had just witnessed the most intense and committed displays of bravery, and in spite of an apparently endless suite of flawed men. I’m still feeling unhinged by the whole thing.

But it did help me appreciate the complicated, chaotic, compromised world we live in, and how regularly it seems to involve being constantly buffetted by the most incongruent trivia just to make sure we don’t ever remain completely comfortable in our response to something. This lack of certainty and my resignation to it feels closely tied to what I understand by ‘having a scholarly temperament’, even though I also lament the way it prevents me from accessing many familiar kinds of mundane reassurance.

Instead Saturday night left me overwhelmed with desire for histories we can hardly dream of, let alone hear about, even if we had time to read all the books we own, or were quiet enough to be able to listen well. It also made me crave more scholars and writers who are driven to blog for reasons other than marking career achievements or articulate position taking (conscious that these are all things I am also seen to be doing); perhaps because they are vulnerable or courageous enough to use this medium to reach out for others who might have their own much better sense of what might be worth caring about.

On this: if you are an Australian reader and you haven’t heard about GetUp’s campaign to help aboriginal elders get to Canberra by Wednesday, they are taking donations here. Any excess funds are being used as part of a long term campaign to make sure ‘sorry is the first step’.

Category: Out in Vegas, Politics, Viewing, Web studies

Comments

5 Responses to “Manifesto caution”

  1. Jason W
    February 11th, 2008 @ 8:54 pm

    Oh, the problems
    manifestos can lead to.

  2. Rachel O'Reilly
    February 11th, 2008 @ 9:35 pm

    I love your description of the carpark carolling John Denver for Chinese NY (and want to know more about the beachfront wedding dream. i.e. is it a _good_ beach front wedding dream, despite the presence of the bloggers?) I spent the night rescuing a good friend from being fondled by red 3-person dragons who could not see outside of their costumes particularly well, the greatest disappointment of our evening being the paper-cup ice-cream delivered still in the packet at the end of our ‘budget’ banquet (the next menu up cost $560 so I guess we benefitted from being on the margins of those that had payed for the ‘Chinese’ evening).

    So yes, vision of China is right. I’ve not seen the film but know that one of the story’s motifs is cinema (Chang was a reviewer and scriptwriter for some of the most influential independent studios in the 40s(China) and 60s (Hong Kong). Importantly, she wrote Lust Caution much later in her career while living in Hong Kong (the preferred city of exile for Shanghai’s ‘wantonly’ cosmopolitan artists, the ‘new’ Shanghai, etc). The spy drama is important: the interior “personal” passages of her fiction, that don’t, I imagine, quite make it to Lee’s screen version, would be as mistrustful of, or at least compromised by, national feeling / identification as they are of the colonized spaces that her characters inhabit, this all playing out as a romance script of course, because that’s what the ladies ‘get away’ with as literary concern. Which is just to say that the hetro spy drama genre is important.

    Rey Chow writes about this stuff VERY well – contemporary Chinese cinema’s sentimentality being not about revolution but about compromise, not radical departure but moderation, endurance, and accommodation. i.e. sentimentality has uses in prescribing ‘national’ readings to a global cinema audience.

    Which is just to say that to be exploring ‘Chineseness’, through Ang Lee, after thinking about dubious feelings of authenticity and belonging at an Aussie China town New Year is perfect, because it will get you in a lot of trouble. For the record your experience of it would have been more in the spirit of Eileen Chang than Ang Lee. Perhaps she would have enjoyed the colours and sounds a bit more, but heaving chest amidst desolate feeling was Chang’s thing.

    Do academics still use quotation marks to note emphasis and loaded/ironic usage? Or was that just a nineties thing. I tried to delete them but they need to be there.

    The shortened version of this post, btw, would have been something like, LADY!, you totally missed this: http://apt5.asiapacifictriennial.com/cinema/hong_kong,_shanghai_cinema_cities/eileen_chang

    Which makes _me_ sad about Brisbane. A little.
    Rx

  3. M-H
    February 12th, 2008 @ 5:16 pm

    I want to know who you were marrying… :) Last night I dreamed that my work team had become completely unmanageable (only partly true irl) and my boss was my mother (who died in 1981), and she kept telling me how disappointed she was in me.

  4. melgregg
    February 16th, 2008 @ 9:13 am

    That is one seriously bad dream, M-H. Hope you’ve had some happier ones since to even it out. Rachy, why only a little bit sad? Kidding. But surely the cinema options are one of the very good things about Brisbane?

  5. Craig Bellamy
    April 19th, 2009 @ 1:08 am

    Your blog is looking excellent Melissa. You have spent a lot of work on this; hats off to you.

    I worry about my own blogging sometimes. I should put a warning on it ‘things look bigger on line than they really are’.

    Craig
    E1

Leave a Reply