miserable living conditions. Spatially, the only place in which the protagonists can move freely beyond their homes and families is in their neighborhoods. However, this
“outside” is limited and the neighborhood is not that friendly as it first appeared. We can see that, in this space, the protagonists still encounter bullies and violence from the ones they care most. That is to say, the neighborhood is not so much a carefree place as a kind of shelter in which lost teenagers gain the power to recover. How these working-class teenagers’ react toward pressure exemplify the power and strength beneath the surface of industrialized Taiwan. We can adapt Lin Wen-chi’s view on the presentation of urban neighborhoods by Hou Hsiao-hsien and other 1990s Taiwan directors to illustrate the common thematic arrangements of Chang. Lin argues that
“after the ’90s, Taiwan films have begun to describe the contemporary urban space in considerable quantities. Obviously, this urban space was totally different from the one it used to be in the historical context because of extensive development” (102).48 In other words, confining living environments and economic circumstances are the outcomes of capitalist exploitation.49 Teenagers are forced to integrate into this brand new urban space in which they have no previous models to follow. The harsh
48 The original text in Chinese is: “九零年代的台灣電影開始大量正視台灣的都市空間後，發現這 個空間在急速的發展下已經與過去的歷史空間斷然決裂了。” Lin in this essay says that the style and ideology of films experienced a transition during the 1980s and 1990s. The films began to focus on urbanized and capitalized Taiwan, especially Taipei city. Lin points out three directors, Hou
Hsiao-hsien, Wan Ren, and Stan Lai, who are particularly aware of these changes. In his argument, Lin says that history itself cannot connect the past and the present. As well, the urban space is changing from the concrete into the electronic.
49 Lin has applied in his work Jameson’s ideas about postmodern urban space, wherein the
“wholeness” of a city is hard to present. The only image the audience can comprehend is a postmodern collage. As a result, the confined environment of the teens in both Hou and Chang;s films represents a confined experience in the postmodern city.
experiences teenagers have in industrialized society reverberate with Chang’s protagonists, forcing them to mature faster.
The teenagers in Chang’s films bear witness to changing urban or industrialized human relationships, and his disfranchised teenaged protagonists serve as metaphors for people and sites in the same predicaments. For example, respectively, his three films document three of Taiwan’s declining slums, located in Guan-du, Keelung, and Xin-dian. Like other neighborhoods built on the margins of the city, these areas are populated mostly by veteran soldiers who came from mainland China in 1949, and who were then laid off, took up low-paying jobs or became involved in illegal activities, ultimately with little financial support. The spots are definitely out of date and wait for the government to evacuate and reconstruct. Chang tries to capture the life and livelihoods in the communities, but his films do not set out to become documentaries. His concern is more an attempt to reveal the humanity of certain struggling people. For example, the final sequence of The Best of Times suggests a direct humanistic attitude, with symbolism used to enhance the meaning of salvation.
Water, the recurring image around the neighborhood, plays an important role in this salvation. Of this, David Stratton writes that “Water imagery abounds. Min has painted a seascape, and Wei [both in The Best of Times] is fascinated by the tropical fish in a tank in his home (Min’s ex-boyfriend, who helps the boys after the killing, has an identical tank). Water also features in the film’s concluding sequence, which opts for fantasy rather than realism and, to a degree, detracts from the overall impact of the basically tragic story” (35). We see here how Chang tries to provide a sense of
hope in the constrained neighborhood.
In a sense, Chang’s films mourn the death of innocence at the hands of the adult world. That is, the more vigorously teens try to fit into the adult world, the more destructive and desperate they become. This contradiction is most clearly visible in Chang’s counter-bildungsromans.
Violence and Grassroots Life
While watching Chang’s films, many viewers fixate on the violent acts and grassroots language. The most representative sequence comes in Ah Chung when Ah Chung angrily smashes the wine bottle against his head, which reminds us of the earlier part in the film, when he had practiced the folk ritual ba-jia-jian and smashed himself with a knife. At that moment, the protagonist’s expositional gesture
interweaves with his expressive emotion. These factors, together with the narrative that directs the story into destined revenge sequences, place his films squarely in the cultural and aesthetic tradition of social realism, a category in which harsh reality and struggle create a world molded by interpersonal conflicts, social dissatisfaction and achievement anxieties. According to this position, violence acts out disaffection toward the world, while the helplessness and hatred associated with the disaffection spread through the entire narration.
Many critics have made intelligent connections between the expressive, violent acts and the bereft and hopeless experiences of teenagers coming of age in Chang’s films. Chang’s obsession with violence has dogged the critical response to his films,
so that many reviewers have remained less attuned to the specific historical and social realities dramatized in the films than to the psychological outbursts, dramatized thrills, fantasies and violence. Exploring the social drama of Chang’s films reconnects them more concretely to their original historical context and makes clear that his films are about social and political unrest and outburst, both of which are far more historically tangible than the more-commonly acknowledged vulgarity and violence. In The