國 立 交 通 大 學
外國文學與語言學研究所
碩 士 論 文
The Crying Wound:
(Re)capturing Lost Love and the Repetition of Trauma in Films
哭泣的傷口：
在電影中失愛與其創傷重複展演的捕捉/重現
研 究 生 : 張 雅 筑
指導教授 : 林 建 國 副教授
中華民國九十八年一月
The Crying Wound:
(Re)capturing Lost Love and the Repetition of Trauma in Films
研
究
生：張雅筑
Student：Ya-Chu Chang
指 導 教 授：林建國
Advisor：Dr. Kien Ket Lim
國 立 交 通 大 學
外國文學與語言學研究所
碩 士 論 文
A Thesis
Submitted to the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures Graduate Institute of Foreign Languages and Linguistics
College of Humanities and Social Science National Chiao Tung University in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements
for the Degree of Master of Art
in
Graduate Institute of Foreign Languages and Linguistics
January 2009
Hsinchu, Taiwan, Republic of China
中華民國 九十八 年 一 月
哭泣的傷口：在電影中失愛與其創傷重複展演的捕捉/重現 學生：張雅筑 指導教授：林建國博士 國立交通大學外國文學與語言學研究所文學組碩士班 Chinese Abstract 摘要 本文所要探討的要點在於分析電影如何刻劃失愛的創傷以及這類創傷的重複展演。創 傷是由突如其來的事件所造成，在其影響之下，形成一個無法言說的傷痛。對於創傷主體 而言，創傷事件是揮之不去的。因為，創傷總是不斷地並且延遲地出現；在夢裡、在某些 反覆的行為裡，創傷一再地顯現。透過分析三部電影，《2046》、《在黑暗中漫舞》、《悄悄告 訴她》，對於創傷及失愛的論述，本文旨在解讀、探討電影如何再現劇中主角的創傷；藉由 檢視他們無止盡似的執意找尋失去(或消失)的愛之行為，來分析在這些主角身上，創傷是如 何以一種強制性的模式反覆出現；同時，深入研究「觸點」(與真實的遭逢)如何在電影中發 揮作用，並且瞭解它是如何與創傷和身分認同的議題緊密結合。 本文分成五章，在序論中，我說明本文的目的及方向，並且建構本文理論的基礎。同 時，第一章為接下來各章節論點的概述。第二章探討《2046》中，創傷事件發生後的影響 以及其反覆的展演；端看劇中主角如何處於創傷的餘波中，以及愛與創傷是如何相互產生 影響。第三章分析《在黑暗中漫舞》的視覺影像，著眼創傷事件發生的經過。另外，分析 電影中兩種迥然不同的拍攝手法，分別呈現幻想與現實兩個世界，而這分裂的世界與主角 對於創傷及失愛的反應關係密切，也與主角的覺醒、存活相關聯。第四章則是分析寂寞與 失愛如何在電影《悄悄告訴她》裡慢慢鋪陳、形成創傷。在這個章節，指出了區分「失去」 (loss)與「缺席」 (absence)的重要性；如果模糊此區分的界線，創傷將無可避免的產生。論 文的最末章，總結我在這三部電影當中，對於創傷、失愛、及創傷重複展演的觀察與發現。 關鍵字：創傷、失愛、重複展演、《2046》、《在黑暗中漫舞》、《悄悄告訴她》、 觸點(與真實的遭逢)、幻想 i
The Crying Wound: (Re)capturing Lost Love and the Repetition of Trauma in Films Student: Ya-Chu Chang Advisor: Dr. Kien Ket Lim
Institute of Foreign Literatures and Linguistics National Chiao Tung University
English Abstract
My thesis studies the trauma that is related to lost love and its repetition in films. Trauma is an unspeakable injury that, under the effect, occurs as the result of an unexpected event. The traumatized are haunted by the trauma, which manifests itself, insistently and belatedly, in the dreams and the repetition of particular behaviors. The films I choose to analyze, 2046, Dancer
in the Dark, and Talk to Her, are the narratives concerning trauma and lost love. Therefore, this
thesis aims at analyzing how the films represent the traumatic experiences of the protagonists, the compulsive repetition of incomprehensible trauma through their endless and obstinate chasing after lost/absent love, and how tuché (an encounter with the real) functions and connects with the issues of trauma and the identity in films.
This thesis is divided into five chapters. Chapter One serves as the introduction in which I explain the purpose and direction of my analysis, and build up the theoretical foundation in it. This section outlines the argument for the following chapters I delve into to discuss the issues of the trauma and lost love. Chapter Two examines the effects of the trauma that has happened and the representation of trauma in 2046. It aims at analyzing the aftereffect of the past trauma and the interplay of trauma and love. Chapter Three focuses on analyzing the visual representations of trauma in love that is taking place in Dancer in the Dark. It scrutinizes how the split world of fantasy and reality is bound up with the response to trauma and lost love for the protagonist and is related to the awakening and surviving. Chapter Four explores how loneliness and lost love pave the way to trauma in Talk to Her. It also indicates the significance of distinction between loss and absence; that is, the conflation of them determines the doomed trauma. Chapter Five serves as a conclusion that summarizes my observation on these three films concerning the issues of trauma, lost love, and repetition.
Keywords: trauma, lost love, repetition, 2046, Dancer in the Dark, Talk to Her,
tuché (an encounter with the real), fantasy
ii
Acknowledgement
Fly Beyond the Rainbow
It is really a long journey to go in the course of working on the thesis. Walking along the yellow brick road, like Dorothy in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, I stumble over the obstacles, and oftentimes I feel lost, frustrated, and uneasy. Writing the thesis is much like a journey in search of myself. I become, more and more, to embrace adventure that I undergo. “Over the
Rainbow” in the film, The Wizard of Oz, is the song that I often hear when I take a break and meditate.
Somewhere over the rainbow, skies are blue
And the dreams that you dare to dream really do come true Someday I’ll wish upon a star
And wake up where the clouds are far behind me Where troubles melt like lemon drops
Away above the chimney tops That’s where you’ll find me
Somewhere over the rainbow, bluebirds fly Birds fly over the rainbow
Why then, oh why can’t I? If happy little bluebirds fly Beyond the rainbow Why, oh why can’t I?
Now, it is the moment that I am finally home and my dream comes true. It is a task that I accomplish with the help and support of many wonderful people around me. The completion of the thesis would not have been possible without them. Therefore, I would like to show my thanks to them for their important contributions on my journey.
First of all, I would like to express my sincere gratitude and appreciation to my advisor, Prof. Kien Ket Lim, who tirelessly offers his help and constructive suggestions for me with his greatest, unfailing patience and kindness. Without his expert guidance, inspiring instructions, and
encouragement, I would not gain enough confidence to fulfill the task, and this thesis would be impossible.
Also, I would like to thank Prof. Chia Yi Lee, Prof. Iris Tuan, and Prof. Lili Hsieh for spending time reading my thesis and offering valuable comments. Their help is really appreciated. What’s more, I want to say thank you to all of the professors at the Graduate Institute of Foreign Literatures and Linguistics in National Chiao Tung University. For the past three and half years, I have really learned a lot due to their teaching.
Moreover, I am deeply thankful for the support and love from my family; especially, my sister is the one who always does her best to comfort, support and encourage me. My thanks iii
also go to my lovely friends for their wholehearted friendship. Last but not least, I want to thank Alec, with his unconditional support, for being there for me, pushing me forward, and teaching me to be positive all the time.
I want to thank all of you for accompanying me on my journey. With your love and help, I have attained love, wisdom, and courage at the end of my thesis journey.
Contents
Chinese Abstract ...i
English Abstract ...ii
Acknowledgement ...iii
Contents ... v
Chapter One ... 1
Introduction...1
Chapter Two... 14
Wondering/ Wandering in Love: Trauma, Repetition, and Afterimage in 2046 ...14
Chapter Three... 37
Dancing to the End of Life: Trauma, Fantasy, and Death in Dancer in the Dark ...37
Chapter Four ... 53
Scarring the Mind: Obsessive Love, Loss, and Sexuality in Talk to Her ...53
Chapter Five... 73 Conclusion ...73 Works Cited ... 80 Filmography... 87 v
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Chapter One
Introduction
Trauma is the pivot of my study, in which I attempt to probe into the enigmatic territory of the trauma and its nature of repetition, rivet on the issue of the trauma that is related to lost love, analyze how the trauma in love is portrayed and represented in films, and examine the subtle relationship between trauma and love.
Therefore, in my thesis, the main concern is to analyze the problems of trauma in love. Love is the universal feeling which is shared by all human beings—regardless of what kinds of love or relationships in love—and it is celebrated in literature throughout history. With its sublime value and status, love is highly praised as the holy gift, the most sacred and important human emotion. In that case, what is the relationship between love and trauma? Due to unlimited desire and endless request for love, people may be afflicted by lost love, such as pain, fear, anxiety, hurt, and even hatred. In a way, therefore, the loss of love is painful and traumatic. Also, people intend to trivialize the problem of trauma in love as a common one, which makes trauma in love a problem, most of the time, undetected and ignored. Although trauma in love is not as major as those traumatic experiences in history, it is still dangerous to cause breakdown in people and threaten people’s lives. Most of the time, people who suffer from trauma in love carry the symptoms similar to the conventional trauma such as compulsion to repeat, anxiety, or amnesia, etc..
Etymologically speaking, trauma derives from the Greek word that means wound. This makes trauma a term that has long been used in medicine. Trauma refers to the severe wound caused by an external injury. Later the concept of trauma is adopted by psychiatrists and psychologists as a psychic injury rather than a physical one. With the increasing interests in the study of trauma, trauma is no longer a concept confined to the
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terrains mentioned above, but open to other domains. As in “Trauma and Literary Theory,” James Berger writes,
With the publication of three important new books1 on the psychoanalytic concept of trauma as it intersects with literature, literary theory, historiography, and
contemporary culture, it is worth asking why, at this moment, trauma should attract such attention and become a pivotal subject connecting so many disciplines. (569) Nevertheless, I explore the importance of the study on trauma that connects with another domain, on the ground of the cinema. Based on Berger’s comment, I learn that there are different ways of looking into the issue of trauma. Therefore, in my thesis, I assume that the cinematic representation can be another medium and way to represent and analyze the trauma through different perspectives.
In the way of conceptualizing the trauma, as Ruth Leys claims in Trauma: a
Genealogy, Sigmund Freud is “a founding figure in the history of the conceptualization of
trauma” (18). The evolution of Freud’s theory of trauma does not deviate from this focal point: the traumatic event, which is unacceptable to consciousness or the mind, returns later in the form of compulsive and repetitive behaviors or dreams.
In the context of Freud’s theory of trauma, the most manifest feature that remains central to the study of trauma is dedicated to the unconscious repetition of traumatic experiences. Freud mentions in “Remembering, Repeating, and Working-Through” that “the patient does not remember anything of what he has forgotten and repressed, but acts it out. He reproduces it not as a memory but as an action; he repeats it, without, of course, knowing that he is repeating it” (Freud, 1914g: 150). People constantly and unconsciously repeat the trauma which has been forgotten since it occurred; when they experience
1
The three books on trauma that James Berger refers to are Dominick LaCapra’s
Representing the Holocaust: History, Theory, Trauma (1994), Cathy Caruth’s Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (1996), and Kalí Tal’s Worlds of Hurt: Reading the Literatures of Trauma (1996).
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trauma—trauma of disillusion, disappointment or the loss of a lover—the re-enactment (or the repetition) connotes a way of remembering what has been forgotten or what has not been integrated into the consciousness; that is, as acted-out remembering. This is the paradox of trauma as what Cathy Caruth points out in Trauma: Explorations in Memory, “Indeed, the vivid and precise return of the event appears, as modern researchers point out, to be accompanied by an amnesia for the past, a fact striking enough to be referred to by several major writers as a paradox” (Caruth, 1995: 152). In the enigmatic repetition of trauma, people unconsciously struggle to distance themselves from the traumatic past, but they somehow, unfortunately, fail and have mired in the state of deadlock without
recognizing it. It explains that there exists a paradoxical relation of trauma with the traumatized; no matter how hard people try to get rid of their traumatic past, they are inevitably haunted by the trauma and under the control of it.
The repetition or the re-enactment of the traumatic experiences is explicated in three different examples. In analyzing the repetition, the vital importance is attributed to the case of the dream of the burning child, which is introduced by Freud, interpreted by Lacan, and elaborated by Cathy Caruth and Slavoj Žižek as well. Then, another example is the story of Tancred, which is pointed out by Freud in Beyond the Pleasure Principle and later becomes the theoretical thrust and literary reference in Unclaimed Experience: Trauma,
Narrative, and History written by Caruth. The other one is the fort/da game that is
proposed by Freud, also pointed out by Lacan, and clarified by Caruth. In these three cases, the repetition is enacted unconsciously and it is manifested in particular behaviors. Moreover, these examples illustrate and illuminate the issue of the trauma.
To be precise, in my thesis, what the trauma is has been listed on the following clarifications. Firstly, the trauma is related to the loss of love that happens so suddenly that the protagonists cannot recognize it; in that case, the trauma returns in the form of the repetition (of behaviors, dreams, or fantasy). Secondly, the trauma is taken further as the
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effect for responding to the event in which the existence, being, or identity of the protagonists in love is questioned and threatened. Thirdly, the issue of the trauma
discussed in my thesis is complicated and cannot be formed overnight, so the real cause of the trauma in love cannot be confined to the event itself. Therefore, the task of my thesis is not simply to examine the ways how people respond to trauma in love that has happened and how past trauma affects people in love. That is, the phases before or during the time that the trauma happens are endowed with considerable significance attached to the analysis of love and trauma.
To grasp the notion of trauma and its nature of repetition, the analyses will be proceeded through three films from different directors—2046 directed by Wong Kar-wai,
Dancer in the Dark by Lars von Trier, and Talk to Her by Pedro Almodóvar. They all
contain motifs of trauma and love in films. Moreover, they form interrelated patterns in my analyses of trauma and lost love. In 2046, it is a story about a man’s trauma in which the protagonist, Chow Mo-wan (Tony Leung), is reminiscent of his beautiful neighbor, So Lai-chan (Maggie Cheung)—a woman, a name that has left him but remains in his life in another form—and pursues fleeting relationships with women and tantalizing love. Flooded with shadowy melancholy and obscure ambivalence, 2046 portrays fragmented, mismatched love and inevitable loss, which are also projected into Chow’s fantasy (his science fiction). As for Dancer in the Dark, it is a traumatic story about a mother’s compensatory love for her son, in which the protagonist, Selma (Björk), is afflicted by the unremitting struggle between love and guilt, life and death, and reality and fantasy. In Talk
to Her, it is a story also about a man’s trauma in which the protagonist, Benigno (Javier
Cámara), torments himself with his obsessive and fantastic love to a woman named Alicia (Leonor Watling), who is in coma. The essence of Talk to Her is situated in the air of loneliness and absence/nothingness, which construct Benigno’s depression, melancholy, suffocating love and obstinate misrecognition of absence of love for loss of love.
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Trauma comes from lost love which is embodied in the specific objects in films. Although love is lost (or absent), it is always what the protagonists unceasingly look for or what they are reminiscent of. In this case, the objects that embody love itself or the feelings of lost love become characteristic in films. In films, trauma, the unbearable pain of trauma in love, is manifested, insistently and belatedly, in the form of the intrusive memories, repeated images, and repetitive behaviors of the protagonists; on the other hand, trauma is expressed eloquently by the animate or inanimate objects that embody (lost) love in films.
The main concern of this thesis, on the one hand, focuses on delving into the notion of trauma and its nature of repetition from psychoanalytic aspects. Why do people keep repeating? What does the repetition actually convey to us? The theoretical framework is based on Freud’s theory of trauma: the belated effect of the trauma and the uncanny
repetition of the trauma. In addition, I apply Jacques Lacan’s notion of trauma in “Tuché and Automaton”—the chance encounter with the trauma, the “tuché,” to propose that the “tuché” defines the traumatic event and helps to explore the core of the trauma in the repetition. Moreover, I use Cathy Caruth’s elaboration on Freud’s theory of trauma in her book, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History—the story of the wound that is crying—to argue that the trauma/wound cries out to be heard to address the truth to us which language cannot represent but is detected in the delicate way, the inevitable repetition.
On the other hand, trauma is something that is unintegrateable into the realm of signifiers and it has never been fully integrated into understanding, the consciousness. As the texts chosen are films, analyzing the visual/cinematic representation of the
incomprehensible and unrepresentable trauma becomes essential to the thesis as well. Cinema as an art form highlights its significant and specific characteristic of representation in sight and sound. Thus, cinema as a means of representation can subtly capture or
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recapture what is incomprehensible and unrepresentable by means of the characteristic and unique features of the cinema—the expression of sight and sound. Inevitably, the access to making the trauma present requires the help of cinematic representation even though the trauma is beyond or against symbolization/signification/representation. It is what prompts me to set my sights on the interplay between trauma and representation in the core of the analysis. Thus, this thesis also tries to analyze how the films, 2046, Dancer in the Dark, and Talk to Her, narrate and represent the traumatic experiences of the protagonists and the compulsive repetition of incomprehensible trauma through their endless and obstinate chasing after lost/absent love that is embodied in objects.
What is more, I propose that fantasies, daydreams, and particular behaviors in films function as mediators for the protagonists to cope with trauma. That is the reason why I bring into view Jacques Lacan’s notion of trauma and especially his insight into the analysis of the dream of the burning child in “Tuché and Automaton” along with Caruth’s
interpretation of it in Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Why is the “tuché”, the real as the missed encounter, so important to the analysis of repetition in
trauma and the repeated images in films? Moreover, what is the real that lies in the repetition?
In “Tuché and Automaton,” Lacan mentions the dream of the burning child—the dream of a father who dreamed about his child who had been dead—which is introduced by Freud. In “The Psychology of the Dream-Processes” of The Interpretation of Dreams, the story goes,
After a few hours’ sleep, the father had a dream that his child was standing beside
his bed, caught him by the arm and whispered to him reproachfully, “Father, don’t you see I am burning?” He woke up, noticed a bright glare of light from
the next room, hurried into it and found that the old watchman had dropped off to sleep and that the wrappings and one of the arms of his beloved child’s dead body
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had been burned by a lighted candle that has fallen on them. (Freud, 1900a: 509) The dream, as Freud suggests, is to prolong the sleep; the dream fulfills the father’s wish to sleep and bears the father’s desire to see his child alive. For Lacan, it is the dream that wakes up the father; there lies an unbearable reality in the addressee of the child, which attempts to lead the father to the awakening the death of the child but inevitably fails. This reality is “the missed reality—the reality that can no longer produce itself except by
repeating itself endlessly, in some never attained awakening” (Lacan, 1981: 58). Thus, the repetition is a way that the missed reality manifests itself and arouses acknowledgement of the reality which is shown only in the dream, in the “tuché”—the encounter with the real. According to Lacan, the encounter is “essentially the missed encounter” (Lacan, 1981:55); “the encounter, forever missed, has occurred between dream and awakening” (Lacan, 1981:59). In the dream, there occurs the in-between gap wherein the real erupts and the encounter meets. However, only in the dream can the voice be heard, “Father, don’t you see I’m burning.” Where the voice falls is at the moment when the father abruptly and unexpectedly encounters the real. The encounter with the real is necessary because it bears the testimony to the traumatic event and it leads us to see the truth, the missed reality, hidden beyond the dream. On the other hand, although the dream reveals the truth, when it comes too close to the real, it becomes unbearable so that the father has to awake. That is compatible with what Slavoj Žižek interprets in The Sublime Object of Ideology, where he writes,
But the thing he encounters in the dream, the reality of his desire, the Lacanian Real …is more terrifying than so-called external reality itself, and this is why he awakens: to escape the Real of his desire….He escapes into so-called reality to be able to continue to sleep…to elude awakening into the real of his desire. (45) Under that condition—fleeing into the external reality—the father can maintain and secure his role as a father not to be collapsed; that is, to survive. It is similar to what Caruth
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emphasizes, “to awaken is thus to bear the imperative to survive” (Caruth, 1996: 105). The repeated images in films implicate the missed truth which needs witnessing. At the beginning, living in fantasy is as a way fulfillment of the wish; however, if it comes too near to the real, the only thing they can do is to awaken for survival. The continuous back-and-forth process between falling into the world of fantasy and awakening to the world of reality reveals to some extent the unstable and anguished state of mind. In sum, to look into the lost love and the trauma via the three films based on the theoretical
backbone using Lacanian “tuché” and Caruth’s development from awakening to surviving would strengthen the integrity of my analysis.
Another perspective to interpret the repetition of the trauma in love relies on Freud’s viewpoint on loss in “Mourning and Melancholia.” Freud differentiates between mourning and melancholia: he takes the former as “regularly the reaction to the loss of a loved person, or to the loss of some abstraction which has taken the place of one” (Freud, 1917g: 243). But he regards the later as a pathological condition—the impossible and unsuccessful mourning. Why melancholia is pathological and dangerous is that the ego
identifies/incorporates itself with the object and “it wants to do so by devouring it” (Freud, 1917g: 250). This process of identification or internalization is violent and cannibalistic. By doing so, the object that the subject longs for or is fond of is eaten and annihilated along with the subject. From this perspective, it can explain the responses of the protagonists to the lost love and the reason why they repeat chasing after their lost love and are incapable of letting go of it. The distinction between mourning and melancholia can be found in distinguishing concepts of absence and loss, which are differentiated by Dominick LaCapra in “Trauma, Absence, Loss.” It is important to tell them apart. Blurring the distinction between absence and loss, it will produce some problems, such as misplaced nostalgia or endless melancholy. In film, the protagonists all suffer from either the loss of love or the absence of love, which places them in melancholia. In consequence, they are trapped in
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the situation of impasse by endlessly pursuing the loss or the absence. The insistent repetition of searching for what has been lost or what is absent shows how the relationship between the protagonists and their traumatic experiences is related and how they are imprisoned by their traumatic experiences.
The topic of my thesis is entitled “The Crying Wound: (Re)capturing Lost Love and the Repetition of Trauma in Films.” The trauma/wound is the unspeakable pain for the traumatized. However, in Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History, Caruth brings up her conception of the wound that speaks and initiates her analysis of trauma in the very act of repetition through the parable of the trauma/wound that is derived from the work written by Torquato Tasso, Gerusalemme Liberata, which is introduced by Freud in
“Beyond the Pleasure Principle.” Caruth writes,
The actions of Tancred, wounding his beloved in a battle and then, unknowingly, seemingly by chance, wounding her again, evocatively represent in Freud’s text the way that the experience of a trauma repeats itself, exactly and unremittingly, through the unknowing acts of the survivor and against his very will. As Tasso’s story dramatizes it, the repetition at the heart of catastrophe—the experience that Freud will call “traumatic neurosis”—emerges as the unwitting reenactment of an event that one cannot simply leave behind. (2)
In this case, I analyze the trauma that expresses itself in the very act of repetition. In other words, the repetition is the language or the message that the unspeakable trauma conveys to us. On the other hands, cinema puts its uniqueness into full play by representing the repetition and the trauma in diversity. In the cinema, the repetition and the trauma take different forms depending on a variety of ways of storytelling, arranging the time point of the trauma that happens, and blending some significant elements of the cinema together, such as music, light, and shots. Therefore, the main purpose of my thesis is to
recapture/capture the repetition—the message of the trauma—and hear the cry of the trauma
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in films to analyze the issue of the lost love, the trauma.
Divided into three chapters, this thesis tries to explore the psychological responses to the traumatic experiences that are related to the loss of love for the protagonists in these three films I choose, 2046, Dancer in the Dark, and Talk to Her. Putting the analyses of these films in sequence intentionally coincides with the time point of representing the
traumatic events. In 2046, trauma has taken place. Since the trauma happened in the past, there is no option for the protagonists to choose. As if shrouded in the fallout from an explosion, the protagonist is in the aftermath of the traumatic event. As for Dancer in the
Dark, trauma is being made now. The protagonist, Selma, is experiencing the explosion,
the traumatic event that is also not at her option to confront or elude. When it comes to
Talk to Her, trauma will be made. It is optional for the protagonist to involve in or to get
away from the tempest-like trauma. Therefore, through the analyses in sequence, I want to read the effect of the trauma from different stages and from different time points.
In the second chapter, thus, I focus on analyzing the first film, 2046. The title of this chapter is “Wondering/Wandering in Love: Trauma, Repetition, and Afterimage in 2046.” I postulate that the film itself is a traumatic narrative that voices the story of the wound and distressing pain for love and that of longing for recapturing lost love/memories in its deploy of unconscious repetition. It is also a traumatic space, as a labyrinth, which stores the past where the protagonist is trapped, and in which the protagonist unconsciously wanders and wonders about love. Examining the trauma in love through the particular behaviors of Chow Mo-wan is the way that reveals the feeling of love is metamorphosing in the aftermath of the trauma within the traumatic space. Besides, on closer inspection, I examine the representation of trauma, in the form of flashback, intrusive memories and particular activities. The film, 2046, conjures up the images of traumatic experience in love by very allusive way that accompanies the splendid tones, lingering effect,
fragmentation, and function of reference, namely the afterimage. I assume that it is the
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effect of afterimage or remnants that constructs the particularity of traumatic narrative and traumatic space and also exposes traumatic experience in love in the film, 2046. In this case, I connect the mechanism of afterimage to that of trauma in visual and psychoanalytic perspectives, that is to say, in cinematic representation and psychological representation. Moreover, reading the always-already missing love through a Lacanian lens becomes a primary way to understand Chow’s trauma in love. Since 2046 portrays the aftermath of the trauma, it cannot escape delineating the widely different attitude toward love due to the effect of the trauma that is no less important than the traumatic event itself. The missed or missing love forms a significant feature in 2046 and signifies the impossible and failed response to his trauma as the father does in the dream of the burning child.
In chapter three, I interpret the trauma in love from another different angle by means of its definition in the second film, Dancer in the Dark. Turning around the way of seeing trauma resituates another possibility for examining trauma. This chapter is entitled “Dancing to the End of Life: Trauma, Fantasy, and Death in Dancer in the Dark.” How the interplay of fantasy (in musical world) and reality is constructed highlights the stylistic feature of the film. The focus of my analysis in this chapter, hence, falls on studying the visual representation and auditory expression—the music and songs—in the film. Let’s look back upon the framework of the thesis: Dancer in the Dark unfolds and dramatized that the trauma is taking place and breaking forth. Once a traumatic event occurs, it takes on a life of its own. Moreover, in Dancer in the Dark, it deals with a mother’s love and her trauma. Thus, when paying close attention to Dancer in the Dark, I find the existing tension that is caused by the emotional fluctuation due to the relationship between the occurrence of a sudden traumatic event (of loss or murder) and a struggle for existence and survival for the protagonist, Selma. For a mother, sacrificing for her son is an unalterable principle and a legitimate act that is perfectly justified. Nevertheless, when sacrifices are directly involved in hereditary disease and death, they are inevitably engendered by guilt
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and related to trauma. Moreover, the musical plays a requisite and substantial role in
Dancer in the Dark and for Selma equally, and it stands for the relative world to the reality.
Thus, the film, through juxtaposition, contrast, and echo, brings the audience an unusual experience of viewing the trauma. On the other hand, what characterizes the musical in
Dancer in the Dark is its refrain, a form of the repetition in music, which is the narration of
the film, taking its distinct course of storyline. So far as the representation of trauma is concerned, the last scene—the gallows scene—of the film should be discussed in terms of witness and traumatization, which, in my analysis, combines the theory with the theatrical experience and leads us to comprehend the notion of trauma and grasp its essence all the more.
In chapter four, I relate the loneliness and the obsessive love to the characterization of the protagonist in the last film, Talk to Her. The chapter bears a headline, “Scarring the Mind: Obsessive Love, Loss, and Sexuality in Talk to Her,” in which I lay great stress on analysis of repetition and the distinguishing concepts of loss and absence that are related to the problems in love before the trauma happens. On the other hand, I suggest that the repetition should be integrated into the analysis of the trauma prior to the occurrence of the traumatic event. Owing to the deadlock/failure of communication in love, the protagonist is compelled by anguish. Blurring the line between the loss of love and the absence of love is the significant and prominent factor which drives the protagonist to construct an imaginary world and leads him to conduct the coma rape and then to ingest a lot of pills to try to put himself into a coma from the overdose in order to complete his world, secure his ideal, and fulfill his identity as a lover for Alicia at the cost of his subjectivity. In this case, I emphasize the analysis of failure in love that ignites the extreme feelings and acts which result in tragic love.
In conclusion, in this thesis, cinematic/psychological expression of trauma in repetition becomes the pivot of analysis. Therefore, at the end of my thesis, I conclude my thesis
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with a summary and what I have learned in the study of the trauma, and emphasize again the importance of reading the trauma and its repetition, the relationship between love and trauma, and that between trauma and representation as well from three different time points. What is more, it is important not only to read the texts or the meanings in the texts but also to read through and penetrate the cinematic images and its meanings. And then, I try to trace back to the dynamics emitting behind cinematic images and listen to the cry of trauma to find out the truth, another reality in it.
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Chapter Two
Wondering/ Wandering in Love: Trauma, Repetition, and Afterimage in 2046
All memories are traces of tears.2
Wong Kar-wai, 2046 The film, 2046, is about a lovelorn man who unconsciously strives to get rid of his past and to get over the loss of his idealized love which is his traumatic core, and who,
nevertheless, fails and is still haunted by his trauma in love. In a way, 2046 is a loose sequel to Days of Being Wild and In the Mood for Love. Some might take 2046 as a twin film of In the Mood for Love, ascribing to its aesthetic and thematic continuity. In his book, Wong Kar-wai, Stephen Teo brings up the statement of one critic (Di Shiwen), “the story, the characters and the dialogue of 2046 can be traced back to Days of Being Wild and
In the Mood for Love” (137). Or, in “Elusive Objects of Desire,” as Nathan Lee finds, In the Mood for Love “was an erotic depth charge; 2046 is the pattern made by its aftershocks”
(31). From this point of view, undoubtedly, 2046 can be taken as the aftermath of the trauma in love. Therefore, in some aspects, 2046 implicitly indicates the literal and insistent return to the past and the process of repeated tracing back to the experiences in the past.
The director, Wong Kar-wai, is an excellent storyteller; he is skilled in mastering time and images for narrating the stories about love in his films.3 With the subtle way of presenting memory or the past trauma in love, Wong is credited with rendering memory and
2
It is one of the intertitles on DVD of the film, 2046. The intertitle in Chinese is 所有的 記憶都是潮濕的 , which means “All memories are wet.”
3
The unique feature can also be detected in the commercial that Wong Kar-wai shoots for BMW entitled The Follow (2001). In spite of different background and scenario, the commercial shares the identical atmosphere/aura—due to the resemblance of hues,
furnishings, and shooting angle—with 2046 and In the Mood for Love; moreover, they deal with the common theme—the loss.
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the trauma visualized. As Stephen Teo proposes, “Wong strives to achieve a transmutation of memory into being, setting his memory in motion in the medium of the cinema” (5). Moreover, Peter Brunette mentions that, “many of Wong’s perennial themes remain present in this new film [2046]: the painful contradictions of love; the persistence of longing, memory and regret; and the hopelessness of ever recapturing, modifying, or getting rid of the past” (Wong Kar-wai 105). In this way, love, trauma, and memory are interwoven in Wong’s films. Overall, in viewing 2046, it seems that most of the characters in the film suffer from the pain of love, the trauma in love (disillusion, disappointment or the loss of the loved one); on the other hand, they possess their own stories or their own secrets. As a narrator, Chow Mo-wan (Tony Leung Chiu-wai) tells the stories and reveals his traumatic experiences in love. His reaction to the loss can be detected through his repetition of trauma in love and in his monologue. Therefore, probing into the issue of love, the repetition of the trauma and its effects are the main concern of the chapter.
Love Is a Question Mark
“If there is an extra ship ticket, would you go with me?”4 is the unanswered question raised by Chow Mo-wan at the end of In the Mood for love, which becomes an enigma and persistent doubt for Chow Mo-wan in 2046. Chow suffers from the pain of the
mismatched and forbidden love with So Lai-chan5 (Maggie Cheung); later, what it leaves is only a sigh of regret, and it becomes the trauma in love for Chow. At the outset, love was bittersweet for Chow; it was torturing, yet irresistible and rapturous. However, at the end, love is no longer about happiness or happy experiences which have gone in the past; love is only about separation, departure, inevitable loss, and unbearable heartbreak. Due to that
4
In Chinese, 如果多一張船票，你會不會跟我走？. 5
The name indicated here, So Lai-chan played by Maggie Cheung, is the pronunciation in Cantonese, and its Mandarin pronunciation is Su Li-zhen, played by Gong Li. In this thesis, I use these different spellings to distinguish these two roles—Maggie Cheung and Gong Li— with the same name in the film.
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experience, Chow becomes a different man in 2046 not only in appearance but also in his attitude toward love. He has grown a moustache, which as a disguise covers up his secrets. Amy Taubin offers a detailed and particular account of what in Chow has changed:
The moustache practically screams “don’t trust me.” Add to that a bit of
pomade in the hair, a smile that’s a little too wide, a chin held a little too high and a hint of strut that’s lifted from some movie gangster, and, voilà, the former Mr. Chow is no more. (28)
Besides, Chow does not let go of his lost love so that he becomes melancholic. Freud points out the differences between mourning and melancholia: mourning is the reaction to the loss of a loved object; melancholia is the impossible / unsuccessful mourning. As Freud states in “Mourning and Melancholia,”
In mourning it is the world which has become poor and empty; in melancholia it is the ego itself. The patient represents his ego to us as worthless, incapable of any achievement and morally despicable; he reproaches himself, vilifies himself and expects to be cast out and punished. (246)
Chow transforms him into a detached heartbreaker and a licentious dandy who lacks fidelity and virtues in love. In fact, “the self-reproaches are the reproaches against a loved object” (Freud, 1917g: 248); “the shadow of the object fell upon the ego,” and then “an object-loss was transformed into an ego-loss” (Freud, 1917g: 249). Self-criticism of Chow is really the accusation of So Lai-chan for her rejection and leaving. Thus, Chow’s narcissistic identification with So Lai-chan allows him to sustain and retrieve his love through the process of internalization of the lost object as a strategy to resuscitate the lost love. Therefore, the way he cold-heartedly treats women as objects in lots of one-night stands is the externalization of the refusal, retreat and departure of So Lai-chan. Or, it can be interpreted that it is the transmission of the traumatic experience. Taubin indicates that, “He [Chow] learns that, like himself, they can’t resist opening old wounds or inflicting
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similar wounds on others, as circumstances permit” (29). It is as the viewpoint that Cathy Caruth proposes in “Introduction: The Wound and the Voice,” “one’s own trauma is tied up with the trauma of another” (8). Therefore, Chow’s trauma has passed on in some way and become the trauma of the women in whom he is involved. In turn, the women experience the trauma in love as Chow does, and they mourn for the lost love. Like what Bai Ling (Zhang Ziyi) does in the film, she “weeps inconsolably over the impossibility of the fulfillment of her love for Mo-wan” (Brunette 105).
On the other hand, he meets a mysterious woman in Singapore named Su Li-zhen (Gong Li). The coincidence of the name is a trigger that confines him in Su Li-zhen due to the previous So Lai-chan. Somehow Chow unconsciously takes Su Li-zhen as the
substitute of So Lai-chan, in whom he tries to look for his feelings about So Lai-chan and look for what has lost. Later, Chow asks Su Li-zhen to go with him, but she rejects him in an indirect way and gives him an ambiguous answer. When Chow leaves alone, a close-up of his face is shot, in which Chow’s emotions flow quietly yet intensely—the excessive and pervasive despair. The crushing disappointment in love—the trauma in love
again—triggers his painful experience in love and drives the heartbroken to become a dandy, a womanizer, and a heartbreaker; Chow constantly pursues the fleeting relationship with women. Especially, it can be noticed that “the women who at various times occupy 2046 become in various ways objects of his desire” (Taubin 27).
2046 is the number of the hotel room where Chow Mo-wan and So Lai-chan rent for collaborating to write the novels and spent their happiest time in In the Mood for Love; in
2046, it is the same number next to the room Chow moves in. The coincidence of the
number seemingly posits Chow in the “labyrinthine hall of mirrors” (Taubin 26). He sees the multiple images of So Lai-chan everywhere; however, they are everywhere except the real So Lai-chan. Sometimes, he feels disorientated and lost. Moreover, everything, he feels, is related to the situation happening in the past, and, in the labyrinth, is just the
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projection of his fantasy.
The situation that Chow faces verifies that the trauma is represented in two stages: in the first stage, the trauma suddenly occurs and it is repressed; then, in the second stage, the trauma is triggered and returns. In Moses and Monotheism, Freud (1939a) goes,
It may happen that a man who has experienced some frightful accident—a railway collision, for instance—leaves the scene of the event apparently uninjured. In the course of the next few weeks, however, he develops a number of severe psychical and motor symptoms which can only be traced to his shock, the
concussion or whatever else it was. He now has a “traumatic neurosis”. . . . The time that has passed between the accident and the first appearance of the
symptoms is described as the “incubation period”, in a clear allusion to the pathology of infectious diseases. . . . namely, in the characteristic that might be described as “latency.” (67-68; emphasis added)
The trauma happens unexpectedly, and it cannot be assimilated by the consciousness. In
Trauma: Explorations in Memory, Caruth writes that, “that immediacy, paradoxically
enough, may take the form of belatedness” (6). From the perspective, we can say that Chow’s experience of loss of So Lai-chan is repressed since it occurs; he is not fully conscious during the event and looks “apparently uninjured” (Freud, 1939a: 67). His traumatic experience in love is conjured up under the specific condition—the familiar name, the identical rejection, the repeated loss, which prompt the re-enactment of the loss. It is as what Bessel van der Kolk and Onno van der Hart point out, “When one element of a traumatic experience is evoked, all other elements follow automatically” (163). However, because the enigmatic trauma is not integrated into the consciousness, the trauma is
forgotten since it occurred. Therefore, the traumatic experience implies “the impossibility of its direct access” (Caruth, 1995: 9). The repetition in the fleeting relationship is Chow’s re-enactment of the traumatic experiences in love. In some way, the repetition or the
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re-enactment retroactively renders the experiences in the past traumatic. The relocation of the traumatic experiences can be explicated by the concept of “Nachträglichkeit,” that is, “après-coup” or “deferred action.”6 In The Language of Psycho-analysis, Laplanche and Pontalis define the connotation of deferred action designated by Freud; they describe it as that:
Term frequently used by Freud in connection with his view of psychical
temporality and causality: experiences, impressions, and memory-traces may be revised at a later date to fit in with fresh experiences or with the attainment of a new stage of development. They may in that event be endowed not only with a new meaning but also with psychical effectiveness. (111)
The experiences about So Lai-chan in the past are relocated in the present experiences with Su Li-zhen and endowed with a new meaning. Laplanche and Pontalis also point out that, “the subject revises past events at a later date (nachträglich), and that it is this revision which invest them with significance and even with efficacity or pathogenic force” (112).7 In this case, the experience of being rejected by Su Li-zhen retroactively marks the loss of So Lai-chan as the trauma for Chow.
Occasionally, we can catch a glimpse of his pain, despair, and struggle for getting over the loss of his idealized love. Frequently getting involved in the transient relationship is probably the reaction to the loss of his love, or, maybe, it is the way to search for substitutes for his idealized love. That makes sense as what Freud proposes in Three Essays on the
Theory of Sexuality, “The finding of an object is in fact a refinding of it” (Freud, 1905d:
6
In The Language of Psycho-analysis, under the entry of “deferred action,” Laplanche and Pontalis list its German equivalent, “Nachträglichkeit,” (as a noun and “nachträglich” for its adjective or adverb) and also the French one, “après-coup” (111).
7
Laplanche and Pontalis further point out the deferred action specifically takes place in the traumatic events, they writes, “It is not lived experience in general that undergoes a deferred revision but, specifically, whatever it has been impossible in the first stance to incorporate fully into a meaningful context The traumatic event is the epitome of such unassimilated experience” (112).
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222). Unfortunately, he fails over and over again. That is why Amy Taubin points outs that “Mr. Chow of 2046 has a memory of a first love so perfect that nothing else can measure up. Fetishizing the past, he condemns himself to rejecting the present” (28). Therefore, he spends a large amount of time on one-night stands. However, what does
Chow really reject? Does it turn out that Chow reject himself while rejecting the present? So far as the relation with coquettish Bai Ling is concerned, Chow does not love her even though there are fine similarities between her and So Lai-chan. Having a similar figure as So Lai-chan, Bai Ling wears tight and gorgeous cheongsam, with her hair piling high and perfectly coiffed. On the other hand, they both get hurt in love—So Lai-chan is betrayed by her husband and Bai Ling is abandoned by her lover, who once promised to take her to Singapore. They share some common features in figures and in experiences; they are different in their nature and temperament notwithstanding. In some aspects, Bai Ling is the antithesis of So Lai-chan. She is the derivative character on the model of So Lai-chan; that is, the metamorphosis of So Lai-chan. Compared with So Lai-chan, Bai Ling is wild, fiery, and possessive. If Chow idealizes So Lai-chan, and then he in some way debases Bai Ling as an object of desire rather than a love. It can be explicated in the article written by Freud, “A Special Type of Object-Choice Made by Men,” in which Freud mentions that men have the inclination for choosing special types of women as their
love-objects: one is the women who are engaged (to other men), and the other is the women of bad or doubtful reputation sexually; that is, “of being like a prostitute” (Freud, 1910h: 167). For Chow, Bai Ling is the type of women “of being like a prostitute.” Their relationship is grounded in the carnal lust in which they find satisfaction of fleshly desires. Moreover, in “On the Universal Tendency to Debasement in the Sphere of Love,” Freud proposes that, “Where they love they do not desire and where they desire they cannot love” (Freud, 1912d:183). Owing to the reason that So Lai-chan is the woman who has been sublimated and has become unique and incomparable in Chow’s deep mind, what he
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can do is to take those women he is involved with as the objects instead of loves. Treating women as objects is the manifestation of debasement, and Freud also writes that, “As soon as the condition of debasement is fulfilled, sensuality can be freely expressed, and important sexual capacities and a high degree of pleasure can develop” (Freud, 1912d: 183). This explains why in the condition Chow can develop the relationship with them, he does not love, he only desires. Furthermore, when Chow chooses the women with the characteristic of being like a prostitute, the love-relationship never lasts long, because as Freud points out,
[P]assionate attachment of this sort are repeated with the same peculiarities—each an exact replica of the others—again and again in the lives of men of this type; . . . the love-objects may replace one another so frequently that a long series of them is formed. (Freud, 1910h: 168)
Therefore, when Bai Ling asks Chow for a long-term and steadfast love-relationship and asks him to be faithful to her, Chow rejects her. Bai Ling felt distressed, and near the end of the film, she poses the question to Chow, “Why can’t it be like it was before?”8 The inquiry indicates their different attitudes toward love. From the moment of experiencing heartbreak, the meaning of love has been changing for Chow.
Constant seeking out love or pondering upon the meaning of love also reflects in his science fiction—the world of his projection and fantasy. On the other hand, it is the tunnel that leads to where the secret lies. In the novel entitled 2046 that Chow Mo-wan writes, there is a mysterious train left for 2046 that indicates as a year/place to which people long to travel to recapture their lost memories for the reason that nothing ever changes there. As Peter Brunette interprets, 2046 is “a place that people seek to arrive at by means of an ultrafast bullet train, in order to preserve or relocate their memories” (Wong Kar-wai 103; emphasis mine). Similarly, in “Wong Kar-wai’s Trilogy of Desire: On Days of Being Wild,
In the Mood for Love and 2046,” Chia-chin Tsai points out that 2046 is the place that stores
8
In Chinese, 為什麼我們不能像以前一樣？.
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all memories, a “total recall” whose function is to fulfill the “lack” of the subject. That is to say, what has lost or what has been missing can be found there.
However, whether those memories of love can be preserved or retrieved is arguable, and whether what the story says is true is questionable, because no one has ever come back from there, except Tak (Takuya Kimura) — the Japanese passenger on the train. The film begins with the monologue of Tak, with his offscreen voice and the adagio as the
background—in an elegiac and melancholic tone. In fact, he is the character in the novel written by Chow; moreover, he is the projection/double of Chow himself. Pervading the feeling of sadness, and accompanied by the music, slow and sentimental, Tak tells the reason why he leaves 2046.
Tak: I once fell in love with someone. After a while, she wasn’t there. I went to 2046. I thought she might be waiting for me there. But I couldn’t find her. I can’t stop wondering if she loved me or not. But I never found out. Maybe her answer was like a secret that no one else would ever know.9
The monologue of Tak reveals that Chow undergoes the traumatic and painful loss of So Lai-chan and hints his doubt about love. By going back to 2046, he expects to recapture his lost love and to fulfill the missing part of him. Unfortunately, he fails and experiences the loss again. To sum up, impossibility, disappointment, and uncertainty construct the characteristics of love in 2046. Love is always an unanswered and unintelligible question and a mystery which drives people constantly to seek it. Consequently, Chow continues to wander and wonder in the labyrinth of love.
9 In Chinese, 我曾經愛上一個人，後來她走了，我去 2046 是因為我以為她在那裡等我， 但我找不到她，我很想知道她到底喜不喜歡我，但我始終得不到答案，她的答案就像 一個秘密，永遠不會有人知道.
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Haunted by the Enigmatic Trauma
In “Trauma, the Body and Transformation,” Kim Etherington offers us the definition of trauma, “Trauma: a wound: an injury: an emotional shock that may be the origin of neurosis: the state or condition caused by a physical or emotional shock” (22).10 Comparing trauma to the physical wound is what Caroline Garland demonstrates in “Thinking about Trauma,” Trauma is a kind of wound. When we call an event traumatic, we are borrowing the word from the Greek where it refers to a piercing of the skin, a breaking of the bodily envelope. Freud (1920) used the word metaphorically to emphasize how the mind too can be pierced and wounded by events giving graphic force to his description of the way in which the mind can be thought of as being enveloped by a kind of skin, or protective shield. (9)
In this way, people have the emotional shock or injury which causes the mental wound; that is, the wound of the mind, the trauma. As in the story told by Torquato Tasso,
Gerusalemme Liberata, Freud takes it as an example that well demonstrates the compulsion
to repeat in the traumatic experience:
Its hero, Tancred, unwittingly kills his beloved Clorinda in a duel while she is disguised in the armour of an enemy knight. After her burial he makes his way into a strange magic forest which strikes the Crusaders’ army with terror. He slashes with his sword at a tall tree; but blood streams from the cut and the voice of Clorinda, whose soul is imprisoned in the tree, is heard complaining that he has wounded his beloved once again. (Freud, 1920g: 22)
In Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History, Cathy Caruth suggests that in the story “its striking juxtaposition of the unknowing, injurious repetition and the witness of the crying voice,” best expressing Freud’s idea of traumatic experience (3). Therefore, the crying wound in some aspects functions as the reminder of the past trauma which draws the
10
It is the definition in Chambers English Dictionary (1998) offered by Kim Etherington.
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character back to the scene of the trauma and makes the character recognize the trauma in the return of the traumatic experience. As Dominick LaCapra’s analysis of trauma in “Lanzmann’s Shoah: ‘Here There Is No Way’,” he clearly states that, “Trauma is precisely the gap—the open wound—in the past that resists being entirely filled in, healed, or
harmonized in the present” (244). The resistance of the wound reflects the reaction to the traumatic experience and the demand for representation and reexamination of the traumatic events.
The idea of the trauma as the wound is vividly demonstrated in the film, 2046. It is represented in the image of injured Tak, who has been lacerated and who is bandaged up all over his body, counting the numbers for waiting the impossible response and shedding tears over the trauma in love. The incarnation of the trauma marks the emotional pain and makes it manifest and explicit. The audience can see clearly the pain of Tak through his facial expression and the pain-ridden body with lots of scars. On the other hand, the giant hole11 that appears in the film, in my opinion, is the embodiment of the wound. According to the legend, people whisper their secrets into the hole and cover it over with mud.12 The hole contains all the secrets and the stories about the trauma in love. In the meantime, the voice of the wound echoes across the hole; the resounding voice repeatedly disturbs people and enables the possibility of recognizing the trauma.
On the other hand, the repetition is marked as the specific feature of enigmatic trauma
11
The legend about the hole is derived from what Chow says In the Mood for Love. There is the hole also in the film, In the Mood for Love. At the end of In the Mood for Love, Chow whispers his secret into the hole of the wall. In the article, “In The Mood For Edinburgh,” Tony Rayns points out, the scene is “a coda set in Angkor Wat in Cambodia” (14).
12
In fact, the legend about the hold is narrated both in 2046 and In the Mood for Love. It goes, “In the old day, if someone had a secret they didn’t want to share . . . They went up a mountain, found a tree, carved a hole in it, and whispered the secret into the hole. Then they covered it with mud. And leave the secret there forever.” In Chinese, it means, “從 前的人，要是心裡有了秘密，不想讓別人知道的話 . . . 他們會跑到山上找一顆樹，在 樹上挖一個洞，然後把秘密全說進去，再用泥巴封起來，那秘密就永遠留在樹裡，沒 有人知道.”
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concerning the psyche’s response to the hidden reality. The restless trauma continually and repeatedly returns and haunts the sufferer. In “Traumatic Awakenings,” Cathy Caruth points out that, “trauma is described as the response to an unexpected or overwhelming violent event or events that are not fully grasped as they occur, but return later in repeated flashbacks, nightmares, and other repetitive phenomena” (91). Moreover, most of the time, people do not remember the forgotten or repressed memories, but they act it out repeatedly. The repetition is the reenactment of the traumatic experience which has been forgotten; in this case, the repetition serves as an unconscious way of remembering. This pattern of suffering—traumatic repetition—appears in the film and becomes the theme of the film. Most of the characters in 2046 (or in the films of Wong Kar-wai) suffer from the pain of love and keep re-experiencing the traumatic experiences.
For Chow, the past is in fact his trauma—the loss of his love and the disappointment in love; paradoxically, it is also the memories of his best time with So Lai-chan.
Disappointment in love—either loss of love or the non-fulfillment of love—indicates the inability of capturing or controlling love, which turns out to be a trauma. In “A
Reconsideration of Freud’s Views of Trauma,” Phil Mollon points out that in Inhibition,
Symptoms and Anxiety, Freud considers “the essence of trauma as the experience of
helplessness in the face of an accumulation of tension or excitation which the ego cannot master” (17). Trauma occurs when the ego cannot master and fully control the loss of love or disappointment in love (they are the experience of helplessness). That the loss of So Lai-chan is traumatic reveals Chow’s inability to control the situation, which becomes the experience of helplessness. Therefore, he struggles for getting rid of his past and getting out of the helpless experience. However, the past, in fact, is reluctant to let go of the person who bears traumatic experiences; likewise, Chow does not let go of his lost love, which results in his melancholia. The memories about So Lai-chan keeps emerging and haunting Chow, and they are in some respects repressed or forgotten. In this case, they can
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loom out only through some repeated actions. This explains Chow’s repeated behaviors of having a fleeting relationship with women in whom he reduplicates the mode, the mood, and the occasion as a replica. Therefore, situated in the context, the body as the site of the memories becomes then the site of releasing the memories or conjuring up the memories. In the film, the images are usually incomplete and fragmented; most of the time, they are shot in an extreme close-up or close-up, such as hands, legs, or faces. In this way, Chow can reproduce the situation by acting out his memory. Furthermore, he can try to reserve the passive experience of the trauma. As in the fort/da game proposed by Freud, the little boy invents the game of disappearance and return—fort for “gone” and da for “there”13—to allow him to manage the unpleasurable experience of the absence of his mother. Freud states that,
In the case of children’s play we seemed to see that children repeat unpleasurable experiences for the additional reason that they can master a powerful impression far more thoroughly by being active than they could by merely experiencing it passively. (Freud, 1920g: 35)
Similarly, Chow can try to master the traumatic experiences by playing the game of repetition of looking for substitutes. In other words, over and over, Chow actively plays “gone” with the women in one-night stands. For the child, the painful experience of the departure of his mother is overcome by the game of the creation. Freud also writes that, “As the child passed over from the passivity of the experience to the activity of the game, he hands on the disagreeable experience of one of his playmates and in this way revenges himself on a substitute” (Freud, 1920g: 17). Therefore, the painful experience of the departure of So Lai-chan is transformed into the departure from the women by Chow in the
13
In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud introduces the game in which when the little boy throws away any small objects or toys, he sends out a word, “o-o-o-o,” which represents “the German word ‘fort’ [‘gone’]” (Freud, 1920g: 15). While getting back the objects, he gives another word, “ ‘da’ [there]” (Freud, 1920g: 15).
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game in order to overcome his trauma.
Besides, the pattern of repetition becomes the pattern in Chow’s writing. In his stories, ostensibly he writes about the future; in fact, he writes his loss/trauma happening in the past. The novel is the reflection of his life and his inner world. The space in 2046 is dim, bleak and fragmented; so is his memory or trauma. Through his science fiction stories, he combines his own life and others’ to complete his desire and projection. Thus, in his world of fantasy, the materials are from the sources of the fragmented and repressed memories. By writing out in his fantasy as a way of transmission, he re-experiences the trauma and yet relieves his pain in some respects. When Tak is on the train leaving 2046— in fact, with the voice-over, we can say that Tak is the double of Chow
Mo-wan—he asks, “How long does it take to leave 2046?”14 Here, it implies how long it takes to get rid of the past/trauma. He continually writes the stories about the past or about what he has repressed or forgotten. In the film, the repeated monologue, the same words and continual questions connote Chow’s reaction to his loss of love. The film itself is the trauma that mourns for the non-fulfillment, incompleteness and impossibility of love. The incomprehensible and enigmatic mode of melancholic compulsion to repeat echoes Chow’s unconscious repetition of searching and asking for the love and the repeated returning of the repressed memories, in the form of repetition or particular activities, which haunt him; in a way he acts out his trauma. As in “Remembering, Repeating, and Working-Through,” Freud states,
[T]he patient yields to the compulsion to repeat, which now replaces the impulse to remember . . . in every other activity and relationship which may occupy his life at the time . . . The part played by resistance, too, is easily recognized. The greater the resistance, the more extensively will acting out (repetition) replace remembering. (Freud, 1914g: 151) 14 In Chinese, 一個人要離開 2046 需要多長的時間？.
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Therefore, the repetition is an unconscious way of providing a meaning upon the traumatic experience that is not assimilated into the consciousness and making it be “remembered”.
The lost love and the disappointment in love are represented in the effects of repeated images ascribed to Wong Kar-wai’s skill of dealing with time and speed in the film, which contributes to part of the style of Wong Kar-wai’s films. Tony Rayns appreciates Wong Kar-wai’s talent of mastering the cinematic technique in “Poet of Time,” and notes, “He [Wong] is also a poet of time…so attuned to the effects of time on memory, sensation and emotions. Few other directors have ever imbued their movies with such a metaphysical sense of time at work: dilating, stretching, lurching, dragging, speeding by” (12). The creation of the unstable and floating images through skillfully mastering of time and speed dazzles the visual perception of the viewer; then the images become what Ackbar Abbas calls— the images of disappointment.15 In “Cinema, the City and the Cinematic,” Abbas explicates, “Disappointment is like love in at least one respect: they are not where we expect them to be” and “Disappointment is the realization that every desire that we want to believe is unique and original is already a repetition, like an old song or an old fashion that is revived”(10). Just as Chow’s disappointment, the loss of love is not what he expects it to be and it repeats itself over and over again.
In fact, images of disappointment stand for the pain of love and highlight the psyche of characters in 2046. For example, Chow pleads Su Li-zhen for leaving with him, but he is rejected. And he walks away with deep despair. Or, when Bai Ling appeals to Chow for staying, she is turned down and left behind. What they leave is nothing but the images of disappointment, which show that the characters are disappointed in love. The images of
15
The concept of “the image of disappointment” is the concept that is designated from Ackbar Abbas when he talks about the film, In the Mood for Love, in “Cinema, the City and the Cinematic.” Abbas writes that, “it [In the Mood for Love] is entirely a question of a perverse kind of seduction; of being seduced by the power of the negative affect, which at one and the same time draws these two people [Chow and So] together and keeps them apart. This structure of proximity without intimacy is repeated in scene after scene, each one precisely setting the tone for the film’s special mood for love” (9).
