"Heroic Grace" catalog - UCLA Film & Television Archive

what heroes mean when they say “my kung fu is better than yours.” The
war between the sexes is enacted as a competition between the “Tiger”
and “Crane” styles of kung fu, and when Hong Xiguan (Chen Guandai)
meets the beautiful Fang Yongchun (Li Lili), their duel is ironically accompanied
by a tune from Carmen (“If I love you, woe to you!”). Romance,
then marriage is in the air, but on their wedding night, the drunken jokes
of Hong’s companions annoy Yongchun so much that
she uses her “Crane” techniques to lock her legs closed. Hong counterattacks
with an assault on a secret pressure point, and the scene ends
on the joyful sounds of kung fu moves being used as foreplay. Yongchun
is as close to a feminist superwoman as the wuxia pian has yet produced:
she can fight, but she can also cook, clean, do the laundry, and
rule the roost. From alluring sex object she is elevated to the status of
Mother/Goddess, yet is not given a chance to fight the villain herself.
COME DRINK WITH ME depicts a darker version of fighting-as-sex.
Entering the temple where the gangsters are hiding, but now dressed as
a woman, Golden Swallow is at once surrounded by Jade-Faced Tiger and
his cronies. Her long gown hides the daggers she has slipped into her
boots, and the basket she carries shields her against arrows and
weapons. Dueling with her, Tiger slices through her clothes, and, laughing
with “the boys,” promises to “undress [her] right now.” More than a
match for her adversary, Golden Swallow nevertheless loses her composure
when her top is (slightly) undone, and as a result is hurt by Tiger’s
poisonous dart.
Tiger’s sexist spite in this scene may have another source. At the
beginning of the film, we see his face light up at the prospect of testing
himself against such a famous warrior as Golden Swallow. To his secret
disappointment, he has to fight a girl.
THE GAZE
Zhang Che’s films create what has been interpreted as an unabashedly
homoerotic space in which men fight men; admire, kill, compete with
men; and court the friendship of other men. 27 They stage the “passion”
of the suffering male body, over-exerting itself, wounded, bleeding, tortured,
transfixed by sharp objects (even, in later works, impaled), lying
down, with limbs extended, after a violent death. Within the fiction, this
spectacle is constructed for the male gaze, with, sometimes, the female
gaze functioning as a relay or substitute.
In the beginning of ONE-ARMED SWORDSMAN, handsome Fang Gang
(Wang Yu) removes his jacket to chop wood, while his master’s spoilt
daughter, Qi Pei (Qiao Qiao) looks on. Her repressed attraction for the
young man may be read as a tragic metaphor for unrequited homosexual
desire; she pines for him, but, dismayed at his “arrogance,” refuses to
admit it. Shortly thereafter, out of spite, she cuts his right arm off. Since
Wang Yu spends the rest of the film dressed in a way that hides the
character’s wound (and the actor’s carefully concealed right arm), the
wood-chopping scene is the only moment in which he is given a chance
of displaying his muscles. Fang Gang’s wound becomes the equivalent of
the female’s “castrated genitals” and has to be carefully hidden.
Zhang Che was obviously convinced that weapons shouldn’t be handled
by women, and his distrust of the feminine applies to male characters
that are guilty of treachery. In ONE-ARMED SWORDSMAN, the villains’
27 See in particular Stanley Kwan Kam-pang’s film, YANG+YIN: GENDER IN CHINESE
CINEMA (NANSHENG NÜXIANG, Channel 4, UK, 1995).
28 His “castration” has liberated Fang from the lure of the feminine. It was not
always so. At the beginning of the film, because of his secret attraction to Qi Pei, he
is distracted by her pouting and moaning, unaware that she prepares to maim him.
29 Kaja Silverman, Male Subjectivity at the Margins (New York and London: Routledge,
1992), p. 199.
30 Gilles Deleuze, Masochism: An Interpretation of Coldness and Cruelty (New York:
Vintage Books, 1980), p. 58.
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secret weapon—a two-pronged “sword clamp” device that captures the
opponent’s blade—brings to mind one’s worst fantasies of the mythical
vagina indentata (“tooth-lined vagina,” a metaphor for the castrating
female). It is because the hero is “castrated” (and forced to fight with a
shorter sword) that he won’t be “caught” by the feminine device. 28
In Zhang’s BLOOD BROTHERS (CI MA, 1973), the female protagonist, Mi
Lan (Jing Li), intervenes from the outset, spelling trouble between the
men. As the two brother-thieves, Zhang Wenxiang (David Jiang Dawei/
David Chiang) and Huang Zhong (Chen Guandai), and would-be general Ma
Xin (Di Long/Ti Lung) lay the foundation for their relationship, Mi Lan
arrives on horseback to steal Ma Xin’s bag of gold. She is doing so on her
husband’s, Huang Zhong’s order, but her entry into the all-male tableau
nonetheless has a jarring effect. Later, when Mi Lan stops acting as a wife
to behave as a subject by falling in love with Ma Xin, she causes catastrophe.
The real culprit, however, is Ma Xin, who betrays the “brotherhood,”
first through personal ambition, then when he yields to his passion
for Mi Lan.
What one remembers in BLOOD BROTHERS, however, are the spectacular
scenes in which each of the three “brothers” is put to death. Here
exhibitionism is clearly linked with masochism, and the work of the narrative
is to bring us to the moments where these beautiful bodies are
displayed in pain. It has been noted that by stressing the importance of
intricate, lengthy rituals and preparation, masochism creates a certain
form of narrative suspense. 29 Zhang Che’s flamboyant sexual economy
brings to light the true relationship between the narrative elements and
the moments of fighting and killing. The “plot” is there to delay those
moments of pleasure, in which the spectator can vicariously experience
the thrill of being simultaneously the executioner and the tortured,
bleeding body.
And whose gaze represents that of the spectator? For the killings of
Huang Zhong and Ma Xin, other men (soldiers) are looking on. However,
the public execution of Zhang Wenxiang, carried on with minute sadism
by Ma Xin’s minions, is a more complex affair. Indeed, the last shot is a
freeze frame of the executioners gloating. But, in a tower, hidden behind
curtains, Mi Lan, in tears, is looking on.
Married to Zhang’s brother, Mi Lan is virtually put, by virtue of the
incest taboo, in the position of the forbidden Mother. Like Prometheus on
his rock, it is for her gaze that the hero suffers. Offering the annihilation
of his own cumbersome masculinity to her, he hopes to end the
symbolic debt to a dead father, to a brotherhood of men, as well as the
relentless training/killing/revenge scenario on which the jiang hu is
based. For Gilles Deleuze, the male masochist yields to an all-powerful
Mother/Goddess figure from a “mythical and timeless realm” to “exorcise
the danger of the father.” In his submission, the masochist seeks to “kill
the father in him.” 30
Unfortunately, the hero is mistaken—and this is why so many wuxia
pian end tragically. The Mother had given him a book to read. It was full
of gaps. Instead of concentrating on the gaps, like a Zen Buddhist meditating
on the void, he thought the text was important. So he became a
fighting hero, reproducing the endless cycle of violence. And he lost the
Mother forever.
copyright @ 2003, Bérénice Reynaud
Bérénice Reynaud is the author of Nouvelles Chines, nouveaux cinémas
(Paris, 1999) and Hou Hsiao-hsien’s “A City of Sadness” (London, 2002).
Her work has been published in Cahiers du cinéma, Libération, Sight and
Sound, Screen, Film Comment, Senses of Cinema, Cinemascope, Cinemaya,
and the Asian Film Quarterly, among others. She teaches at the California
Institute of the Arts.