In a memorable scene late in Three Times 最好的时光 (2005), Hou Hsiao-hsien’s 侯孝賢
remarkable triptych about love and memory, the photographer Chen 震 (Zhang Zhen 張震) receives a couple of e-mails from his new lover, the punk rock singer Cheng Jing 陳靖 (Shu Qi 舒 淇), and finds an S&M-ish photo of her with her mouth literally taped tightly shut. Accompanying this image is a description of how she had been born prematurely, and consequently suffers from a number of physical ailments, including epilepsy as well as having a literal “hole in [her] heart” 心脏破洞 (in addition, she is also going blind in her right eye). This self-description then concludes with the remark that she has “No past, no future, just a hungry present.”
Jing’s claim here that she exists solely for the present moment is ironically contrasted with the overall theme of the film within which she is embedded, as it itself explicitly concerned with issues of memory and nostalgia. As director Hou Hsiao-hsien remarked in an interview at Cannes last year,
The best moments we've experienced are lost forever. The only way to retrieve them is to call upon your memory. Cinema is a tool which enables me to preserve these memories. I think that everything a person experiences is liable to become one of his own future ‘fondest memories,’ and that's why I wanted to shoot these short sequences, which capture different moments.
Three Times is an exercise in historical nostalgia, in which the same two actors (Zhang Zhen and Shu Qi) play star-crossed lovers from three different historical moments: “A Time for Love,” set in 1966, featuring a spontaneous romance between a young man on a brief leave from military service and the pool hall hostess he meets just before enlisting; “A Time for Freedom,” set in 1911, the last year of the Qing dynasty, featuring a romance between a courtesan and the political reformer who is fond of her but refuses to marry her or purchase her freedom; and the final short, “A Time for Youth,” which feature the tormented romance between the rock singer and photographer in 2005 Taipei. Two nostalgically historical pieces, and a third which, although it is set in the present moment, also has, as Stephanie Zacharek observes in her review for Salon, “something wistful about it too, as if Hou were acknowledging that part of the business of filmmaking is building the memories of the future.”
Three Times not only juxtaposes three pivotal moments in Chinese and Taiwanese history, but furthermore the work as a whole functions as a pastiche of the themes and techniques developed in several of Hou’s earlier films. For instance, “A Time for Youth” recalls the frenetic contemporary settings of Millennium Mambo (2001) and Goodbye South, Goodbye (1996), the rail-travel in “A Time for Love” (when the soldier, while on a short leave, travels around the island in search of the hostess) recalls the frequent train scenes in Goodbye South, Goodbye; and the late imperial brothel in “A Time for Freedom” unmistakably evokes Hou’s Flowers of Shanghai (1998). Beyond sharing the same historical setting as Flowers of Shanghai, furthermore, “A Time for Freedom” also evokes what is perhaps Hou’s most celebrated work, City of Sadness (1989), in its conceit of mimicking early twentieth century silent film conventions by using intertitles for all dialogue (though, as Elbert Ventura notes on IndieWire, the segment “isn't filmed in silent film's visual vernacular--it keeps Hou's long-take style, with not a single shot-reverse shot”). Rather than using intertitles, City of Sadness achieved a similar effect as a result of having made Tony Leung Chiu-wai’s character be mute, and consequently having him carry out all of his interactions, including his courtship of the nurse Hinomi, entirely through written notes.
[The decision to make Leung’s character a mute was originally an exceedingly practical one, given the fact that, being from Hong Kong, he could not speak the Taiwanese he would need for his role. This practical exigency, however, ultimately came to be one of the defining themes of the film, wherein the character’s muteness evocatively symbolizes the official cloak of silence which had come to surround the infamous February 28th massacre of 1947—a stain on the Nationalist Party’s past which Hou’s 1989 film was one of the first works to address directly].
This relation between muteness and the written word, in turn, brings us back to the disturbing e-mail image of Jing with her mouth taped tightly shut—appearing literally muted precisely at this moment of mediated self-introduction. This paradoxical conjunction of muteness and voice, moreover, is precisely one which characterizes the entire film. In each of the three segments, Shu Qi’s character is figuratively silenced in one way or another. In “A Time for Love” she and the soldier become infatuated with each other, though never seem to have very much to say to each other when they are actually together. Similarly, in “A time for Youth,” the two lovers typically speak very little when actually together. Ironically, Shu Qi’s character is perhaps most prolix in the second segment, “A Time for Freedom,” though in that segment we of course never actually hear her voice either (because all of the dialogue is presented in intertitles).
Jing’s self-introductory e-mail concludes with a reference to the distinctive ¥ -shaped tattoo that is “branded” along the front of her neck. Explicittly juxtaposed with the visual image of Jing with her mouth taped tightly shut, this references to her ¥ tattoo speaks to the ironic tension between her career as a singer and her comparative silence in interpersonal interactions. Inscribed over her voice box, this monetary symbol serves as a reminder of her career “selling” her voice, but also of her status as a token of exchange within a symbolic economy of desire and commodification. Just as Shu Qi’s character May, in “A Time for Youth,” literally replaces Haruko 春子 (Chen Shishan 陳詩姍), the pool-hall hostess with whom Chen had previously fallen in love (and she, in turn, is replaced by yet another young woman while Chen is away doing his military service); and just Shu Qi’s un-named courtesan character in “A Time for Freedom” is intended to be replaced by the younger courtesan (also played by Chen Shishan 陳詩姍) as soon as she is bought out of her contract (though the younger woman ultimately ends up getting bought out first--to be a patron's concubine after she "accidentally" got pregnant with him), similarly the singer Jing in “A Time for Love” represents one node within an extended economy of desire, commodification, and exchange (this symbolics of a “traffic in women” is underscored most dramatically in the scene in which Jing visits the photographer’s apartment for the first time and sees an entire hallway wall plastered with photographs of other women—many of whom are presumably former lovers whom she is now replacing).
Jing’s ¥ tattoo stands for the commodification of the female figure, the reification of her voice, and the objectification of her visual image. It not only serves as a reminder of the degree to which Jing, in the film, is embedded within symbolic economies of substitution and desire (e.g., she substitutes for the photographer Chen’s former lovers which she sees in the photograph, and is also a substitute for the other two characters played by Shu Qi in the previous two segments of the film), but also signals the real-life figure on which the character of Jing was modeled: the Chinese-American hip-hop rapper Jin Auyang 欧阳靖.
Said to be the one of the first Chinese American singers to be signed by a major US record label, (though there have been other prominent precedents, such as the LA Boys), Jin tries both to capitalize on her ethnic-racial identity, as well as to transcend it. For instance, the first song on her debut album, “The Rest is History” (2005) is called “Learn Chinese,” and uses a musical style (rap) which carries strong connotations of African-American culture (and Jin herself grew up in a predominantly African American neighborhood) in order to try to bring attention to some of difficulties faced by Chinese Americans. In the song, she explains (in Chinese), “I sing ‘you will all learn Chinese,’ not in order to have them literally learn Chinese, but rather to understand, through my song, that Chinese people are not necessarily computer and math whizzes, or just open up laundry mats and restaurants in Chinatown. I hope that every time I destroy one of their prejudices, they can then view Chinese Americans with new eyes.”
One news report describes how, in high school, Jin suffered from manic depression, and consequently resorted to tattoos and piercings to regain a certain degree of control over her life. One of those tattoos, meanwhile, is the “¥” icon on her throat. While the blog 浅墨の草 quotes her as explaining that the tattoo is “Just the figure [图形] for [the PRC currency] Renminbi,” the point would actually appear to be that the monetary symbol chosen by this Chinese American is precisely not a Renminbi symbol (元) (or a “$” sign for that matter) but rather the sign for the Japanese Yen—a detail which speaks to the transnational dimension of the network of cultural production within which a figure like Jing is embedded.
[Similarly, it is significant that the pool-hall hostess whom Shu Qi’s May replaces in the first segment of Hou Hsiao-hsien’s film is named 春子 (literally meaning “spring”)—which is pronounced with the standard Mandarin reading “Chunzi” the first time it appears (during a voice-over reading, in Mandarin, of a letter she has written to Zhang Zhen’s character), but then is pronounced using the Japanese reading of the characters, “Haruko,” when the Zhang Zhen’s character comes to the pool hall and asks May (in Taiwanese) if Haruko still works there. Mediating between Mandarin and Taiwanese, the 春子’s Japanified name stands as an evocative reminder of the Japan’s former colonial presence in Taiwan. Furthermore, given that all three of the youths in the 1966 “A Time for Youth” segment appear to be in their early twenties (like Hou Hsiao-hsien, born in 1947, would himself have been that year), 春子’s name is doubly ironic, standing as a nostalgic gesture for the Japanese colonial culture precisely at a historical moment (during the late 1940s when she was born) in which the new Nationalist government was in the process of consolidating its new authority over the island.]
Cheng Jing, in Hou Hsiao-hsien’s film,meanwhile, not only borrows Jin Auyang’s distinctive tattoo, but borrows her name as well: 靖. Meaning “peace” or “to pacify,” the character is pronounced “jing” in standard Mandarin, though Jin Auyang, in Romanizing her name, drops the final “g.” The resulting “Jin,” in turn, happens to coincide with the standard Mandarin romanization of the “gold” 金 character in the professional name of the prostitute in Golden Chicken II: “啊金” (pronounced “Ah Jin” in Mandarin, and “Ah Kum” in the Cantonese of the film)—a name which is really a non-name, a signifier which denotes, not so much a specific individual, but rather a general category (compare the name of Wang Ti 王媞, the runner-up in the 2004 “Supergirl” contest).
In one scene in the latter movie, the eponymous Ah Kum, thinking that her cousin and husband-for-a-day is in need of her help to pay his legal bills (he has just been arrested for embezzlement), pawns off a lot of her jewelry, including a large decorative chicken literally made out of gold. Here, Ah Kum ironically asserts her potential autonomy (selling off the jewelry purchased with her prostitution earnings in order to regain the lover from whom she does not aspire to derive remuneration) precisely through a symbolic reaffirmation of her own commoditized status and monetary value (the golden chicken, clearly stands for herself—“chicken” 鸡 being Chinese slang for prostitutes, and her professional name literally meaning “Ah gold”). Similarly, in “A Time for Freedom,” the courtesans can only gain their freedom through explicitly reaffirming their own monetary value (i.e., through the act of being literally purchased out of their indentured sexual servitude). Finally, Jin’s and Jing’s ¥ tattoo arguably has a similar significance—contesting the rampant commodification and reification of the female image in contemporary culture (particularly the music industry culture within which they are both embedded) by themselves ironically reaffirming that same logic of commodification.
It is, finally, appropriate that Jin/g’s ¥ tattoo is located at the chiasmatic junction of their voice and muteness. As Mldaen Dolar observes in “The Object Voice,”
To hear oneself speak—or just simply to hear oneself—can be seen as an elementary formula of narcissism that is needed to produce a minimal form of self. […]
There is, however, inside that narcissistic and auto-affective dimension of the voice, something that threatens to disrupt it—the voice that affects on at the most intimate level, but which one cannot master and over which one has no power or control. [….]
As soon as the object, both as the gaze and as the voice, appears as the pivotal point of narcissistic self-apprehension, it introduces a rupture at the core of self-presence. It is something that cannot itself be present, although the whole notion of presence is constructed around it and can be established only by its elision.
As a symbol of both the valuation and literal erasure of voice, Jin/g’s ¥ tattoo suggests that this logic of
the voice (or mirror image) standing at “the pivotal point of narcissistic self-apprehension” could also be extended to the processes of commodification and monetary valuation by individuals perceive their symbolic value (and, by implication, self-worth) though the mediated lens of the symbolic economy within which they are inextricably embedded.
[For additional perspectives on issues of voice and voicing, see Jodi Dean's recent piece on blogging and transference, Monika Jaeckel on blogging and recording, and Steve Shaviro's review last month of Dolar's A Voice and Nothing More]
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