Queering Hong Kong Cinema:Lan Yu and Happy Together featuring Laura Mulvey

By Oscar Wild

In a note in her famous paper, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Laura Mulvey states, “There are films with a woman as main protagonist, of course. To analyze this phenomenon seriously here would take me too far afield” (Mulvey 40). From this particular statement, we understand that her essay focuses on narratives featuring male protagonists, and thus develops a set of theories, namely voyeuristic pleasures of looking that come from scopophilia, the darkness of the auditorium, the cinema having structures of fascinations, the to-be-looked-at-ness of the passive females, the identifications with the male protagonists, the castration anxiety of the male unconscious, etc. These are all derived from the basic principle that men are the bearers of the look and women are the objects of the gaze. Such a rationale, as Mulvey notes herself, excludes those films having females as main protagonists. I would try to argue here that there seems to be a total omission of a noticeable aspect of narrative cinema in Mulvey’s account – gay films.

I refer to gay films here as the mode of male with male in queer movies, which distinguishes it from lesbian films in the could-be-problematic, vaguely termed homosexual cinema. Needless to say, gay films consist of men, while the roles and presentations of women are certainly less important. If, according to Mulvey, visual pleasure in narrative cinema is largely generated from (heterosexual) gender relations, gay films would then become non-pleasurable at all – since the object of the gaze – women – is out of the realm. However, one can never deny the influences and imperativeness of gay films in narrative cinema. “Without homosexuals there would be no Hollywood, no theatre, no Arts.” (Murray 157). Elizabeth Taylor’s pronouncement is quoted by Raymond Murray in Images in the Dark: An Encyclopedia of Gay and Lesbian Film and Video. Indeed, queer studies conducted by homosexuals as well as non-homosexuals have been gaining importance. Gay films as cultural texts are no longer alternatives but central to issues worth examining. Whether Taylor’s saying is plausible or not; gay films are definitely included in narrative cinema, not to mention their engendered visual pleasures notwithstanding heterosexual gender relations.

Hong Kong, for instance, is a cinematic site where a remarkable number of gay movies have been made. With a more open and less conservative motion picture market nowadays, these kinds of films not only succeed in the marketplace, but have also been dissolving into Hong Kong popular culture. This essay, therefore, aims at revising and evaluating Mulvey’s essay and examining its applicability to gay films as part of narrative cinema. I will also consider two Hong Kong gay films – Wong Kar-wai’s Happy Together (1997) and Stanley Kwan’s Lan Yu (2001), to see how they attain visual pleasure without the specific type of gender relations posited by Mulvey, and lastly, why the two gay films have or have not achieved popularity in Hong Kong popular culture.

Let me firstly summarize the plots of the two films under discussion. In Happy Together, Ho Po-Wing (Leslie Cheung) and Lai Yiu-Fai (Tony Leung) are lovers when they go to Argentina from Hong Kong. Something goes wrong when they are seeking adventure by car.. On the road, Ho walks away from Lai, who then works as a doorman at a tango bar in Buenos Aires to save enough money for his rental of a small flat as well as a ticket to go back home. Eventually Ho reenters Lai’s life after all his suffering and one-night-stands, and Lai offers Ho a bed but refuses to reengage in a sexual relationship with him. Stability and domesticity do not suit Ho, who sooner or later spends nights again outside. Lai quits his job and works in a Chinese restaurant’s kitchen. There, he meets a Taiwanese kid, Chang (Chang Chen), with whom he subtly and unconsciously falls in love. Meanwhile, Ho’s life continues to crumble and collapse.

In Lan Yu, a simple love story is told, provided that one is able to accept that the relationship involves two men instead of the love being a heterosexual one. The film is set in Beijing, where Chen Handong (Hu Jun) is a mature businessman with a more or less wavering tendency to homosexuality and marries a woman by the middle of the film. He sort of ‘takes care’ of a desperate college boy from the countryside, Lan Yu (Liu Ye), who is going to do anything for money to support his studies. Eventually they develop a rather fine relationship, incorporating wild and passionate sex. This lasts until Handong has an affair with another teenage boy and his subsequent surprising marriage with a translator Jingping (Su Jin). Lan Yu then decides to leave Handong. After many years, the two of them are together again, becoming even closer and cherishing each other more than before. The film ends with the tragic, heartbreaking death of Lan Yu.

With reference to the above plot summary, one can easily notice the almost absence of women. In Lan Yu, we have at least Handong’s wife though the role she plays is not a crucial one. In Happy Together, we have no female protagonists at all. A point worth mentioning hereby is that Shirley Kwan, a semi-retired and low profile Hong Kong singer, was originally casted in Happy Together. Her role is comparable to that of Chang, the Taiwanese kid whom Lai encounters in the kitchen. Without really appropriate reasons, Wong Kar-wai decided to cut all of Kwan’s parts. Although Wong does not fully reveal his mentality behind in doing so, I would argue that this very act can already provide a refutation of Mulvey, who has written, “In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female. The determining male gaze projects its fantasy onto the female figure […] [Women] can be said to connote to-be-look-at-ness.” (Mulvey 33) The exclusion of Shirley Kwan owing to Wong’s decision has an impact here. If Wong buys Mulvey’s approach, or, in a macro sense, if visual pleasure obtained from narrative cinema does follow the route suggested by Mulvey, then Kwan’s part would definitely be kept and preserved, since she might be the only female protagonist in Happy Together “to be looked at”, to employ Mulvey’s terminology.

However, Wong does not do so. He abandons Shirley Kwan and embraces Chang Chen at the same time. Expectedly he would not believe that the male gaze, be it determining or not, projects its fantasy onto women. That particular male gaze is from the viewpoint of Lai Yiu-Fai who is, significantly, gay. It becomes natural for him/Wong to choose Chang to (problematically) gaze at instead of Kwan. Thus, the pleasure in looking in gay films as one of the instances of narrative cinema is not essentially spilt between the passive female and the active male. As proven by Happy Together, the males can be both active and passive: Active in the sense and in Mulvey’s stand that men are still, in cases of gay films, bearers of the look; and passive in a way that the males are being gazed at equally as women do in most of the narrative cinema, and the “to-be-looked-at-ness” from Mulvey’s account does not just apply to female protagonists. The above argument evidentially rebuts Mulvey’s saying that “[t]he presence of women is an indispensable element of spectacle” (Mulvey 33).

Recalling the last paragraph, I have claimed that the gaze from a male (Lai) to another male (Chang) is problematic. What I meant by problematic there was not the (gay) gaze between two male protagonists, but rather, the nature of the gaze itself. There is nothing wrong with two men looking at one another, given that they are gay or whatsoever. The point I would like to make is: Why is Mulvey so adamant in the notion of the gaze? Is the gaze with which she is obsessed that obligatory in contributing to visual pleasure in narrative cinema? What about those, gay films for instances, that lack certain gender relations as prerequisites as required by her theories? Let’s move on to Lan Yu in connection with Mulvey’s insistence of the gaze.

“[Freud] associated scopophilia with taking other people as objects, subjecting them to a controlling and curious gaze.” (Mulvey 30) Mulvey goes in line with Freud that “looking itself is a source of pleasure” (Mulvey 30). I cannot totally agree with that. I would say yes to the assertion that in a heterosexual relationship, or, in a broader sense, in heterosexual narrative cinema, female protagonists being depicted as objects of gaze might be appealing and ‘visually pleasurable’ to (male) spectators. Yet, I would argue that visual pleasure in narrative cinema is not exclusively attained by the gaze. Referring back to Freud’s allegation, there are, as a matter of fact, gazes that are not curious or manipulated at all. The gay couple in Lan Yu is thus helpful in elaborating my claim.

If one tries to integrate Mulvey’s ideas into the observation of Lan Yu, it would turn out to be a mismatching. If it is really a pleasure in looking at and taking people i.e. the (female) protagonists as objects of gaze, Lan Yu and Handong certainly do not have anything to do with eroticism (at least to straight viewers). Shall we then follow Mulvey’s extension of her point that, since this group of heterosexual audiences may not find something that “continues to exist as the erotic basis for pleasure in looking at another person as object” (Mulvey 31), Lan Yu therefore does not constitute to any sort of visual pleasure? Perhaps it is a good idea to twist an angle from Mulvey’s over-reliance on gender relations and the gaze in achieving visual pleasure to the many moments in the film that contribute to the construction of gender-unrelated and ‘visually pleasurable’ elements, as well as a sense of voyeurism (in Mulvey’s terminologies) that all have nothing to do with the problematic gaze.

Richard Dyer suggested in Now You See It: Studies on Lesbian and Gay Film that straight actors/actresses are more promising to show the positive images of homosexuality. He says, “The imagery selected to show lesbian/gay life as positive depended upon prior assumptions about whether what is positive about it is the degree to which it is like straight life or the degree to which it differs from.” (263) Subconsciously, Stanley Kwan, director of Lan Yu, might be brought to the determination of portraying two gay men on screen who are actually straight. In an interview conducted by Ming Pao, an authoritative Hong Kong newspaper, it is reported that Liu Ye has a girlfriend and Hu Jun is married. Kwan speaks in the same interview that he did refuse some gay actors in the casting held in Beijing’s Central Theatre Academy. There, he finally found his ideal Lan Yu – Liu Ye – whose outstanding performance in his debut Postman in the Mountain (1999) Kwan found gratifying. Likewise, the casting of Hu Jun for Chen Handong was similar. Hu graduated nine years earlier than Liu in the same Academy coincidentally; he thus has a longer and more detailed history and experience.

All these above are closely related to the creation of visual pleasure, even out of the sphere of gender relations. To shed light on Dyer’s concepts, audiences can be conformed and identified to these straight actors who act as gays through a smoother access, so that the difference between the two parties is narrowed down. These channels or accessibility to audiences can be expressed, as Dyer points out, by “scenes of everyday domesticity and playful interaction” (Dyer 264). This serves as an echo to the many normal, daily, close-to-life activities of Lan Yu and Handong throughout Lan Yu, ranging from driving out to the countryside and searching for a flat and Lan Yu’s career as an architect plus Handong’s corruptions in his business, to their sometimes little, close, sexy and intimate chats about each other’s penis size.

Here, the visual pleasure comes mainly from two sources. First, in accordance with Mulvey’s voyeuristic approach, viewers are just like peepers who are situated in an “extreme contrast between the darkness in the auditorium (which also isolates the spectators from one another) and the brilliance of the shifting patterns of light and shade on the screen” (Mulvey 31) as she insightfully highlights. Spectators in the auditorium simply sneak and look into the secret, unrevealed, mysterious yet romantically built relationship between Lan Yu and Handong. These may or may not entail the love/sex scenes in which they explicitly show their sexual organs – it depends on one’s interpretation whether this particular depiction leads to visual pleasure – presumably gay audiences find these scenes more, so to speak, tempting. Secondly, spectatorship that engages in visual pleasure is also gained by acknowledging the sentiments and what is (naturally) going on in the gay circle – a proclamation that love out there is nothing distant and dissimilar from that of the heterosexual world.

After comprehending the not-that-necessary and overwhelming nature of gender relations and particularly the gaze in constituting visual pleasure in narrative cinema, observant readers should then pay special attention to Mulvey on what she says about identification too. She asserts, “As the spectator identifies with the main male protagonist, he projects his look onto that of his like, his screen surrogate, so that the power of the male protagonist as he controls events coincides with the active power of the erotic look, both giving a satisfying sense of omnipotence.” (Mulvey, 34) From her statement, we once again arrive at Mulvey’s conceptions that visual pleasure of (male) spectators is to be gained merely by their identifications with the male protagonists. As she points out, they participate in the actors’ powers and possess the female characters, so that an ultimate supremacy is obtained. Even for heterosexual cinema, I do not completely appreciate Mulvey’s account. Not all men, in fact, are presented as strong and powerful whereas, by the same logic, not all women are weak and vulnerable figures. Under these circumstances, if male protagonists are shown on screen, Mulvey would probably fail in fostering those male viewers to identify with them. One major weakness of Mulvey’s premise, I would then say, is her overemphasis on the males. It turns out that the women are barely objects of gaze, and what’s more, female audiences have got nothing to identify with at all (so why do they go for a movie and/or why bother watching a film?). In contrast, I will try to point at some identifications in the two gay films in question equally shared by the both genders, which in some way do not only generate (visual) pleasure, but also verify once again that gender relations are not a must in narrative cinema to contribute to any sort of visual pleasure at all.

A nostalgic mood is channeled throughout Happy Together and its characters, detailing the pathological relationship between two homosexuals in despair. It is classic Wong Kar-wai, obsessed by metaphorical musings of repetitious romance. Audiences are invited to ride on the romantic yet painful love journey of Lai Yiu-Fai and Ho Po-Wing, which involves repetitious reunions and departures. It is this seemingly unrealistic yet reachable and approachable relationship, occurrences and happenings that tend to receive identification from viewers, be they male or female. What matters, instead of hackneyed gender relations, is the tedious relationship between Lai and Ho that is typical of any heterosexual relationship. This is certainly an aspect where spectatorship is warmly welcomed and received.

As for Lan Yu, if we follow Mulvey that we are to identify with the male protagonists so as to ‘control’ the female character, i.e. Handong’s wife, the argument seems not that plausible. First, her character does not appear frequently and there is hardly anything to ‘control’ about her. Second, when compared with Lan Yu, she is not involved very much with Handong. To tell the truth, gender relations as constantly emphasized by Mulvey could, in fact, be homosexual relations apart from heterosexual ones. To identify with Lan Yu/Hangdong, (visual) pleasure gained in spectatorship is the dreamy and idealistic love between two men that is comparably analogous to that of any ‘normal’ love in most of the viewers’ eyes. Stanley Kwan reinforced this mentality in the interview mentioned above: “Lan Yu is not simply the name of Lan Yu. It also means a blue universe [literally Lan in Chinese is the color blue; Yu is the Universe]. Why can’t we view love in a more extensive angle?” (Ming Pao, my own translation). Again, it is demonstrable that the gaze which leads to her notion of identification in Mulvey’s assertion is not an inevitable element in generating visual pleasure in narrative cinema, to me, be it gay films or not.

Throughout my paper, I have been disapproving of Mulvey’s analysis as I think that her stand is too confined to the arena of male dominance in regard to females as objects of gaze, especially when this is applied to gay films. Nonetheless, I would like to end my discussion by concurring with her affirmation on the cinema’s structure of fascination, which is to account for the diverging popularity of Happy Together and Lan Yu, and whether they are absorbed into Hong Kong popular culture. Mulvey indicates that “the cinema has structures of fascination strong enough to allow temporary loss of ego while simultaneously reinforcing the ego […] the stars centering both screen presence and screen story as they act out a complex process of likeness and difference (the glamorous impersonates the ordinary).” (Mulvey 32)

This is one of the few areas I find myself agreeing with Mulvey. The fascination of narrative cinema comes from the film stars who are apparently so close to us (we are sitting back and actually looking at them), yet at the same time they seem to be a bit far away from us because of their stardom. That is what Mulvey terms as the “likeness and difference” between audiences and the stars on screen. Putting aside the matter of ego formation, the use of stars in narrative cinema is of great importance in attaining the gaze and gender relations in Mulvey’s essay, and in achieving visual pleasure in (gay) films as well as their popularity.

Take Happy Together for instance. Wong Kar-wai’s main concern rests on creating a heavy sense of nostalgia, which involves numerous layers of interpretations. As a result, many critics argue that it would be too simple and naïve to consider the movie as a purely gay film. But my point here is the use of stars by him. To me, Wong makes a somewhat commercial decision in casting Leslie Cheung and Tony Leung respectively as Ho Po-Wing and Lai Yiu-Fai, especially the former one who is gay in real life. The choices of these two males are certainly not random. Apart from their frequent appearances in Wong’s films, in Happy Together, they have successfully presented the image of a gay couple and generated the visual pleasure mentioned above to readers.

“It’s fine if straight actors want to play gay roles because I’m a gay actor who also wants to play straight roles” (Murray 375). This is a line from a gay actor, Alexis Arquette, quoted by Raymond Murray in his encyclopedia. Indeed, one of the debates (of gay film being a part of narrative cinema) is about the validity of straight actors playing gay roles, and vice versa. Happy Together provides an answer. For Tony Leung as Lai Yiu-Fai, his staging is not that compulsive. Being irked by the past, he is blinded to oncoming opportunities by miasmas of melancholy. Homosexuals’ serious depressions are densely represented by him. Leslie Cheung, on the other hand, being a genuine gay man himself, plays the role of Ho Po-Wing who leads an emblematically portrayed gay life featuring insecurity and instabilities. His meaningless existence without any memories of the past is to be defined by relationships with others. It is convincing to claim that the portrayal of Leslie Cheung, as an authentic homosexual, makes the characters believable.

In contrast with the “likeness” of Cheung, Tony Leung’s “difference” would be his heterosexuality in real life. The fascination as suggested by Mulvey reaches its climax when Leung, a straight man, is depicted as gay. The tension between likeness and difference and the tension between spectatorship and stardom not only contribute to visual pleasure, but also to the essence of narrative cinema and in Wong Kar-wai’s Happy Together, where the director has purposefully made use of the portrayal of a gay couple to embody nostalgia, be it homosexually related or not. It is lucid that Wong intentionally utilizes a gay relationship to maintain a distancing between the screen and spectators, since alienation and estrangement are crucial elements in stories that are nostalgically told. Yet, such a gap is also narrowed down at the same time by the starring of Leslie Cheung and Tony Leung, who have been famous and enchanting celebrities in Hong Kong. Mulvey’s notion of “the glamorous impersonates the ordinary” is consequently mechanized, which results in the possibility of this particular gay film penetrating into Hong Kong popular culture.

In contrast to Happy Together, Lan Yu, which features two totally unknown actors Hu Jun and Liu Ye (to Hong Kong audiences at that time), had a lukewarm reception in Hong Kong. Although Happy Together was not that enthusiastically received compared with local mainstream grand productions, it is certainly more popular than Lan Yu. Lan Yu gained its popularity somewhere else – Taiwan, whose viewers are equally unfamiliar with the two actors. It did much better in the box office there than in Hong Kong. On top of that, it captured some significant awards, including the Best Director and the Best Leading Actor (Liu Ye as Lan Yu) in the 38^th Golden Horse Awards in Taiwan on 8^th December 2001. Reasonably, Mulvey’s saying of “the glamorous impersonates the ordinary” does not work within Lan Yu; how and why then that its popularity was gained in Taiwan but not in Hong Kong? This will be another controversial topic that remains to be debated. But one thing for sure is that the visual pleasure, or, in a wider perspective, the successes of Happy Together and Lan Yu have already been established by their awards-winning triumph (Wong Kar-wai was honoured as the Best Director at the Cannes Film Festival for the film). Although this may not directly contribute to popularity among mainstream cinema, it once again refutes Mulvey’s insistence on the gaze, gender relations, identification with male protagonists, and females as objects of gaze, etc. as generating visual pleasure in narrative cinema. Gay films absolutely serve as a counterexample to what Mulvey has been arguing.

To sum up, the narrative cinema is indeed filled up with possibilities. Mulvey herself reminds her readers, “The alternative cinema provides a space for a cinema to be born which is radical in both a political and an aesthetic sense and challenges the basic assumptions of the mainstream film.” (Mulvey 29) In this regard, gay films may be considered as one of the alternatives in Laura Mulvey’s Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. They do defy the fundamental postulations of her narrative cinema in question, namely, sexist versus feministic narratives; and another form of visual pleasure, not of necessity politically but aesthetically is being altered and transformed into another kind of narrative cinema – gay films. All in all, Mulvey’s paper must have its own stand. It is so influential that many scholars from different streams, ranging from feminists and cultural critics, continue to use her piece of work to explain and illustrate various beliefs, theories and suppositions with the aid of her essay. The authoritative position of Laura Mulvey’s Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema is surely undeniable. However, it is also vital to hold a neutral stand when evaluating her piece. Otherwise, visual pleasure in narrative cinema, in omitting gay films, would only be inevitably related to the gaze and gender relations, together with the active males and passive males and their identifications engaged in Mulvey’s paper. A wider perspective and broader perspective shall be employed adjustably after all.

Bibliography

Dyer, Richard (1990). Now You See It: Studies on Lesbian and Gay Film. London: Routledge.

Mulvey, Laura (1990). Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, in Patricia Erens (ed.), Issues in Feminist Film Criticism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 28-40.

Murray, Raymond (1994). Images in the Dark: An Encyclopedia of Gay and Lesbian Film and Video. Philadelphia: TLA Publications.