In a footnote added in 1920 in “Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality,”
Freud writes that “behind the first recollection of sexual development. . . . The fetish, like a “screen-memory, represents this phase and thus is a remnant and precipitate of it” (Standard Edition 7:154 n.2). In other words, Freud remains receptive to the potential truth that a fetish can be more than just a simple material object, such as a pair of shoes, dress, and cigarette as well as a masqueraded female body as discussed in the earlier paragraphs, it can be a cultural construct as well. In praising the aesthetics of nostalgic evocation in In The Mood for Love, Teo explains,
Wong’s key elements—what older critics might call “atmosphere”
and “characterizations”—are thus grounded in abstraction rather than plot, and it’s hard to think of a recent movie that offers just such abstract ingredients that are by themselves sufficient reasons to see the picture. But it is precisely this quality of aesthetic abstraction that makes up an ideal dreamtime of Hong Kong, which is Wong’s ode to the territory. (“Wong Kar Wai’s In the Mood for Love”)
Probably the most extraordinary aspect of Teo’s charting of the role of
“atmosphere” in Wong’s film comes in his assertion of its association with nostalgia.
In this sense, the film itself is a fetish object par excellence whose identity is vested in an elusive “quality of aesthetic abstraction” that exists in the space between individuals, objects, and cultures, transforming and being transformed at the same time. In the Mood for Love is less the description of an extra-marital affair than of its nostalgic mood as re-envisioned and fetishized in the mind’s eye. Thinking through the lens, Wong has taken many shots emphasizing an aura of the good old times of Hong Kong in the 1960s: the film’s crowded quarters and narrow alleys are illustrated to show a continuous sense of claustrophobia that symbolizes the restricted belief systems and the mores of society.
In “A Souvenir of Love,”5 Rey Chow actually points out two modes of nostalgia: the first one is “linear and teleological in orientation;” yet the second is
“a loop, a throw, a network of chance, rather than a straight line” (211). If the former reflects emotional retrieval of a lost object, then the latter continually restores a hope to grasp the rhythm of longing tinged with an unfulfillable “loss.”
Chow explicates the hidden ideology behind the regional restriction to convey a nostalgia not triggered by a lost object in the past, but a repeated feeling of “a sense of loss and melancholy” (211). Wong’s film is certainly complicit with the logic of the second mode of nostalgia, which takes us on a voyage into an evocative mood of the past, based on Blanche Chu’s interpretation: “an antithetical counterpart to reaffirm the ‘prosperous and stable’ present” (43). Fascinated with his childhood memory of Hong Kong in the 1960s that is also a reflective 1930s Shanghai, Wong drives from the lush retro imaginary characterized by a multiplied nostalgia. His late ‘90s depictions of 1960s Hong Kong mirroring 1930s Shanghai atmosphere displays his own fetishistic desire of a continuous wistfully pinning for a lost maternal love for home.
Somehow, Wong uses his talent to give the nostalgically visual representation a rapturous flavor that reflects a misty quality through a series of freeze-frame shots of old photos, clocks, noirish tableaux vivants, and relics to show the motifs of loss through time and the maternal yearning for unrequited love.
In his article “Photography, Phantasy, Function,” Victor Burgin develops a notion about the experience of looking at photographs from the spectator’s point of view. Based on the Freudian psychological aspect of looking, he focuses on voyeuristic and fetishistic investment in looking, arguing that the “photography is like the fetish, is the result of a look which has, instantaneously and forever, isolated, ‘frozen,’ a fragment of the spatio-temporal continuum” (189). In the beginning of Wong’s film, camera captures two female photos hanging on the wall, then moves on to the landlady Mrs. Suen’s backside, finally to Mrs. Chen who opens a window and has a moment gazing at the camera. The fetishistic old wall photos of women and Mrs. Chen’s gaze, accompanied with Mrs. Suen’s offscreen voice saying, “Eat up, the fish is very fresh today.” This way of juxtaposing the visual and auditory is pregnant with the power to encompass an entire nostalgic narrative in the film, an allusion to the fetishistic maternal craving. In disavowing the threat of separation, Wong seeks fulfillment in substitute fetishistic images such as realistic photos of women in the 1960s. The photos foreshadow the fictional
5 In the article, Rey Chow makes a comparison of Kwan Stanley’s film Rouge and the novel it is based on.
characters of a mother-daughter relation between Mrs. Suen and Mrs. Chen, who will eventually become one of the portrait ladies, fetishized inside the frame of conventional patriarch hegemony that “eats up” women’s sexuality. The function of the old photos prefaces a lost memory of Hong Kong in the 1960s which is the moment that lives forever in the director’s mind. The city’s imaginary story of the past, present and future are interwoven by the stories of Mrs Suen and Mrs. Chen.
In a similar vein, in Cinema 2, Gilles Deleuze claims that a freeze-frame shot from the movie is qualified with the ability to encompass the whole film, or at least to allude to it.
The paralleling images to this are noirish tableaux vivants of the leading couples. A tableaux vivant is a living image where actors or actresses would take on the poses of the characters in important narrative plot and hold them for periods of time. Being frustrated by the normal visual conventions, Wong luxuriates in confining the two images to the narrow corridor of a hotel Room 2046 with their back freeze-frame shots. The camera first takes a medium close-up shot of Mr.
Chow’s back, then pans out to his full portraiture with a dimmed light. As for Mrs.
Chen, her back freeze-frame is also frozen in the end of the corridor, as if both of their back postures are consumed by a lost memory they can neither recapture nor escape left within Room 2046.
It is like the moments of death, or of loss, what Roland Barthes calls
“mortification” in Camera Lucida, the suspended moment that will be remembered.
At the same time, there is a different hidden dynamic to illustrate no sign of
“mortification” because the camera is still working, and a sense of continuity has been perceived. For the couples in the film, the back posture tableaux vivants provide an aesthetic vision to reveal a notion of fetishistic disavowal and affirmation at the same time. In Freud’s words, “In very subtle instances both the disavowal and the affirmation of the castration have found their way into the construction of the fetish itself” (Standard Edition 21: 156). In The Sublime Object of Ideology, Žižek explains “a fetish conceals the lack around which the symbolic network is articulated” (49). Just like their dishonorable spouses, Mrs. Chen and Mr.
Chow develop a kind of forbidden love while writing a novel in Room 2046. The
“back” posture has a melancholy to it as a shadow self, the otherness being definitely attached to it, too. That’s the “disavowal” part of it since the self is to be regarded by others, yet the borderline experience for the tableaux vivant brings up the “affirmation” of resurrected love that sublimates the pain caused by lack.
A visible fetishization of the past is at the centre of the metaphorical symbol
of a clock. In one scene the camera dollies down from a huge Siemens clock hanging overhead first in Mr. Chow’s office, then moves to Mrs. Chen’s workplace to catch their indulgence in the “pregnant moment.” Wong has always been obsessed by the image of time, especially the lost time in the 1960s. In Image, Music, Text, Barthes tells us that the “pregnant moment6 is just this presence of the absences (memories, lessons, promises)” (73). In In the Mood for Love, the pregnant moment of nostalgia, whether embodied in the old photos, tableau vivants, or freeze-frame shots, has the power to attach representations of the absences of memories of maternal yearning to Hong Kong in the 1960s, an imaginary spatio-temporal continuum.
“Nostalgia,” according to Mulvey, “is selective memory and its effect is often to draw attention to its repressions, to the fact that it always conceals more than it records” (Fetishism and Curiosity 67). In Wong’s film, the connotation of the
“absence” is always haunting in the visual image. The ending lines speak to its fetishistic quality of loss and its basic tone of nostalgia: “That era has passed.
Nothing that belongs to it exists anymore” and “The past is something he could see but not touch.”7 Highly connotative but elusive and contrasted images accordingly are Mr. Chow’s trip to the ruins of Angkor Wat, accompanied by a newsreel clip of de Gaulle visiting Cambodia. There is cohesion between personal and historical memory, while the former is constructed by Mr. Chow’s memoir of the lost love;
the latter is a public documentary of lost empire. Even though the aesthetic tone is obviously distinctive, the two memories are not mutually exclusive but exist rather in symbiosis. As Rey Chow indicates in “A Phantom Discipline,” “What are on the screen are not people but images. . . . [They] liberate us from the constraints of literal, bodily identification, while reminding us of the undertheorized relation between economics, on the other hand, and fantasy and identity, on the other”
(1393).
The most phantasmagoric and feminine metaphor conjured up in the ruins of Angkor Wat is the stone hole in the wall where Mr. Chow whispers a secret of lost love. The weeds growing out of the stone hole evoke both a nostalgic motif of the passing of time and an association with the female vagina. The fetishistic eroticization of the stone hole and the male lead’s gesture of whispering into the hole indicate his sexual desire for Mrs. Chen. The image enables a sense of erotic
6 G. E. Lessing coined the term “pregnant moment” in his discussion of the famous Greek sculpture, Laocoön. See Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry (Baltimore: John Hopkins UP, 1962). Original version published in 1766.
7 Wong has borrowed the lines from Liu’s short story Intersection.
sexuality that is nostalgically reminiscent of that pre-subjective moment of image recognition in the Lacanian mirror stage—the primary union with the mother. The motherly figure that will outlive all, like the cave hole, is Mrs. Chen, who eventually leaves her unfaithful husband to let him bear the burden of his own fetishism and abjection. She now raises her 4-year-old son independently at the cost of her secret lover, Mr. Chow, whose ritualized abjection of being an exile in a foreign country. Mrs. Chen’s son, the result of their one-night stand, is a miracle born from the remains of their love. The mother and son move back to the old house that nurtures the affairs, whose hostess has left for the United States to raise her grandson. Mrs. Chen and Mr. Chow could have a chance to get together but destiny prevents such an opportunity. Love remains loss.
In Kristeva’s conception, abjection, serving to privilege the maternal body as a site of rejection, facilitates the primal separation from the other by positioning an initial boundary between self and other. It is precisely this mobility of the process of signification that should be of paramount importance, the instability of which can never be prohibited, and which returns, as a “disturbance of language and/or of the order of the signifier” and even “destroys the symbolic” (Revolution in Poetic Language 5). In The Picture of Abjection, Chanter follows Kristeva to write,
“Abject figures become the repositories of a world in which shifting boundaries allow various dejects to mark the limits of socially acceptable, purified, civilized imaginary norms” (19).
Wong’s nostalgic mood of Hong Kong acts as a source of a whole visual poetics and discourse of fetishism that pose a threat to the Symbolic order. His repression of maternal identification constitutes the basic melancholy color of the film. Foregrounding his fetishistic aspects on the old pictures, clocks, tableaux vivants, and relics, he develops a new trope of visual representation to build up a simulacrum of Hong Kong in the 1960s. The film starts with the old pictures of ladies sitting for portraits and ends with the haunting relics at Angkor Wat, both of which bring completeness to the visually nostalgic narrative and demonstrate a very consistent visual elaboration on the fluidity of imaginary, amorphous, excluded otherness that constitutes the logic of abjection.
III. Feminine Enigma: The Desire to Desire
In the Mood for Love modifies the male gaze framework to include the female gaze and feminine sexuality, and to make a case for female agency during
spectatorship and the process of abjection. Mrs. Chen relies heavily on fetishistic imagery that inscribes a state of revulsive epiphany, creates a dialogue of self and other, and eventually rejects an absolutely polarized binary of spectacle and spectator, all of which echo the language and processes of Kristevan abjection.
According to Kristeva herself, the visual image of abjection is “what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite” (Powers of Horror 4).
Clarifying the matrix of abjection to observe possible parallel relationships of Mrs. Chen’s fetishistic desire contributes to a discussion of feminine sexuality. In the film In the Mood for Love, viewers are surprised to discover Mrs. Chen’s inability to detach herself from the substitute mother figure, the landlady Mrs. Suen, who offers an image of the traditionally archetypal ideal-woman, going to such lengths as to make a proposition for her to live in her house after she moves to the U. S. On the other hand, she cannot refuse the temptation of masquerading in Mrs.
Chow’s role of seduction that disturbs “system, order.” Situated in “in-between, the ambiguous” zone, Mrs. Chen is an archetypal idealization of woman fraught with sexualized tension (Powers of Horror 4). She intends to solve the riddle of sexuality that is intimately bound up with the desire for knowledge; that is, a quest for the truth of female femininity.
As Mulvey explains in “Pandora’s Box: Topographies of Curiosity,” the myth of Pandora may provide a model for reading a secret of feminine sexuality. Pandora, Mulvey advocates, is the ultimate idealized spectacle of femininity, whose box contains unspeakable anxiety-provoking secrets of femininity. With a strong sense of impulse to look inside the box no matter what danger might be lurking, her curiosity encapsulates a desire that cannot speak its right name. Mulvey writes,
“curiosity projects itself onto, and into, space through its drive to investigate and uncover secrets, carrying with it connotations of transgression and danger”
(Fetishism and Curiosity 60). Mrs. Chen’s desire to know and desire to look are driving forces behind a feminine enigma. Like a modern Pandora, she becomes an undeniable representation of the female psyche and its secret desire. Being the phantasmatic caricature, she is the symbolic-and-therefore-real content of the unconscious and a role model of the autonomous self. Fetishism continues to play a key role in broadening the scope of feminist psychoanalytic film theories in association with Kristevan approach of abjection that witnesses Mrs. Chow’s abjection. Wong opts to read female fetishism as a strategy rather than a perversion.
His film is an appropriation of the fetish’s oscillation between disavowal and reaffirmation of castration, thus a refusal to reduce sexuality to a single pole, and
finally a yearning for the maternal embrace and empowerment.