Edward Yang is, by any measure, a master of the cinema. Like his other films from this era (late 1980s and early 1990s), Terrorizers is a merciless dissection of the lives of the Taiwanese urban middle-class. I’ve been reading a Chinese review/essay on the film, and I think it brings out some interesting concepts. For
one, it mentions that one of the major themes of the film is the middle-age crisis, especially as it revolves around the Li Lizhong and his wife Zhou Yufen. He’s a doctor obsessed with trying to get a promotion by hook or crook, and Zhou is a writer who seems to have lost her creative spark. What at first seem like minor speed bumps, over the course of the film,
get magnified into something else–a crisis of meaning. Their marriage is on the rocks, there is adultery, both real and imagined, and soon Zhou wins a literary award and moves out just to shack up with her old/new lover.
Of course, things go pear-shaped for Li and he goes on a murderous rampage–or at least we think he does. It turns out this is just a dream. It’s a strange thing: a dream sequence in the film that for the most part remains staunchly on the outside of the characters, observing them from afar. However, when we get back to reality, we find that
instead of killing others, Li has blown his own brains out. The Chinese reviewer’s point is that the emotional cruelty inflicted upon us by “modern society” , so that it is impossible to just take Li Lizhong’s self-destruction as individual tragedy–the lives of all the characters, not just Li’s, are comments on or representations of what Yang thinks of life
in the present society. The reviewer also claims that the two younger characters–Xiao Qiang, the scion of a rich family who slums it as a photographer, and Shu An, the girl involved in the criminal underworld–are rebelling against the strictures of society; they do what they do because they are, each in their own way, rebelling against their lot in life, running away from the clutches of middle-aged meaningless that would no doubt overtake them otherwise.
This whole theory seems a bit too pat for me, but I think that the overall gist is right, if only because the overall gist of Yang movies is really hard to miss. I don’t know if it really amounts to some broadside against modern society per se–I think that like anyone, Yang sees both the good and bad things about the times we live in–but I think, like a trust artist
Yang has made it his mission to take an unflinching look at the darker side of things: the anomie, the desperation, the specter of meaningless that lurks inside and around even the most normal of lives. Anyhow, I think this essay is also quite interesting for the way that it discusses not only the movie but Yang himself: Yang, he says, takes a surgical knife
to modern society, peeling away its layers, exposing what lies inside and beneath. He/she claims that the title of the film refers not only to Shu An, the most regularly “violent” of the characters, but to all those characters who stand in opposition –or perhaps find themselves, unwillingly perhaps, thrown into a situation where they must go against grain. They are the “terrorizers” because they terrorize us into seeing what is normally repressed. In some sense, the darkness that exists beneath the calm veneer of the middle-class ego and middle-age stability and position is even darker than naked violence between say rival gangs or mafia families. That kind of violence is open, and in some ways, transparent–people know the rules, there is a ample cause and effect, but the kind of violence that erupts from the relatively staid and normal people in Yang’s films is altogether something different. It’s inchoate, and unpredictable. The victims aren’t even aware of
the fact that they are targets.
One last digression. The author of the review says that the first ten minutes of The Terrorizers reminds him of Antonioni’s Blow-Up, but says that the contrast between the two directors lies in the fact that MA explores the philosophical nature of things and existence, whereas EY takes his surgical knife and exposes the core of Taiwanese society for what it is .
影片的前10分钟让我想起了安东尼奥尼的《放大》，同样行尸走肉一般的社会环境，同样带有悬念的故事，还有同样以照相机记录事件的人物。两部影片为了达到纪实的效果自始至终都没有配乐，但安东尼奥尼的主题是想探讨事物存在与真实的哲学命题，展示社会情境只是他加入其中的附属品；而杨德昌的镜头就像一把外科医生的手术刀，抽丝剥茧层层递进地揭示出台湾社会的内核。
Interesting food for thought.
Unfortunately, scrolling up and down, I can’t seem to find a name attached to it. You can see the original link here.
