Kaili Blues portrays a way of life that foregrounds in modern ruins with details
requiring equal attentiveness. Under rapid capitalization, modern ruins demonstrate a special kind of aesthetics and overthrow our common explorative strategies in the face of classical heritage. In this thesis, the first step thus rests at locating the values of modern ruins in terms of their proximity of temporalities and their bizarre closeness to
nature with still-very-fresh human living processes. The discussions, however, will not solely focus on the issue of modern society as a “wasteland,” but more on how the
role of body can be inspired or rediscovered in the fields with indefinite inner-outer structures. The core lies in the effects of the “texture” of modern ruins on our
perception, which seem to be masked or discarded in the time of technology. The
“embodied experiences” in modern ruins will be emphatically addressed.
The Merleau-Pontian perspectives initiate from here. In the words of
Merleau-Ponty, “The visible itself has an invisible inner framework, and the invisible is the secret counterpart of the visible” (VI 215). Such a concept denotes meaning constructions that require emotional and bodily investments through full immersions into the surroundings, and makes clear that we should not take what we observe for granted or consider things with fixed qualities. To examine modern ruins from such a perspective is thus to reckon with their innate attributes: the collectivity of
spatial-temporal absences and presences. Such features then render modern ruins capable of arousing a state of hypersensitivity. For example, I will be naturally guided
to be meticulous, in case of a collapse, or to be curious to the scattered fragments on the corner. The role of the body in modern ruins, therefore, reveals its significance. By
re-addressing modern ruins’ lyrical qualities of ambiguity, evocation of sentimentality, and layeredness, Chen’s reactions toward certain events, especially his journey in the
mysterious village of Dangmai (盪麥), can be deemed as essentially hinging on his body’s “trust” to the “uncertainty” of the spaces he resides in. In this manner, the
explications on the characteristics of modern ruins and the correspondent corporeality will serve as the grounding basis for the later discussions on “situation” and “flesh.”
According to Merleau-Ponty, our body is situational, and a situation is
individuated. That is, our perspectives toward the world are initiated from a bodily standpoint. However, a “situation” is more implicative than we commonly presume. It
refers to more than the outer part of a space and the happenings within that space; it
involves our sensory fields that fuse and connect with other objective things. That is, the ontology of situation entails a type of bodily recognition, and such “body image,”
or “body schema,” further demonstrates a manner of being that is more than a
collection of sensory data, but the “intuitive understanding of one’s own body and its position in space” (Bullington 31). That is, actions and movements are gestures given
to a particular circumstance. The adjustment of perspectives to grasp on various situations then further reveals what Merleau-Ponty calls “the phenomenal body,” as
relative to the objective body (commonly regarded as a physiological entity.) Unlike an objective body that is derived from empiricism, the phenomenal body calls for synaesthetic perception that is not only engaged with a specific spatial-temporal setting, but also with situations that require imagination. In other words, the phenomenal body, itself as a potentiality, reckons with possibilities.
A situation can elicit more than fixed responses in that our behaviors ultimately generate from a sense of “situation” sedimented through past experiences and future
anticipations. We learn to form personal messages and respond to diverse phenomena in modified manners. According to different situations, our emotions and rationality will arrive at a responsive and practical method through innate negotiation. A situation, encompassed with past, present, and future (memory or projection), thus achieves a primordial determinacy via our perceptual experiences within it. From such an aspect, the cinematic spaces of modern ruins in the film can be approached as particular situations that evince a specific type of bodily reactions. Chen’s movements are motivated by such spectacles of historicity, and the significance of modern ruins is also reversely elevated by Chen’s bodily projections. In this manner, Chen’s unique bodily answering to the world represents a form of aesthetic resonance to poetic situations, and it is through such dialectical relationships that the village of Dangmai is indicative of a “fleshy” significance. In Merleau-Pontian phenomenology, flesh is
“a general being, midway between the spatial-temporal individual and the idea, a sort
of incarnate principle that brings a style of being whenever there is a fragment of being” (VI 139). Our body is constituent of flesh, and so are the world and all other phenomena. It is neither material nor transcendental. It is an “element” that renders all
human bodies and the world to co-exist together, suggesting an underlying continuity.
The idea of flesh is the ultimate philosophical concept developed from the reversible characteristic of perception. The phenomenon of circularity then contributes to the notion of chiasm, namely, the chiasmic structure of flesh. Merleau-Ponty provides us with no clear definition of flesh (probably due to his untimely death), but its
reversibility/ chiasm feature implies the overlapping, or “encroachment,” of our bodies, others and the world. Under such notions, when Chen encounters a woman who looks like his late wife and a teenager that seems to be the grown version of his niece in Dangmai, we should halt at the simple interpretation of the mystery as a
time-travel. Rather, Dangmai should be considered as a region of the world, where Chen’s desires are concretized or facilitated through deep involvement in every
perceptual contact. Therefore, when the narrative structures and camera works also involve varying degrees of “the visible and the invisible,” Chen’s detour in Dangmai
also demonstrates the visual rendition of certain moments in life that give rise to the realization of the latent interconnectedness. All in all, Merleau-Ponty’s notion of flesh
provides a lens to the essence of meaning formations in Kaili Blues. From the poetics of modern ruins to that of our bodily manifestations, this thesis aims to highlight a poetic attitude with which we can come closer to the disclosure of “depth” in our daily experiences.