Exploiting East Asian Cinemas by Ken Provencher Mike Dillon

Author:Ken Provencher,Mike Dillon
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury USA

Re-Gifting the male stare

In the 2012 blockbuster film, Ren zai jiong tu zhi tai jiong (Lost in Thailand), Fan plays “herself,” the famous movie star, and an aspirational romantic object for Wang Bao (Wang Baoqiang), a dim-witted comic sidekick to straitlaced scientist Xu Lang (Xu Zheng).23 Despite the film’s queer coding of Wang Bao through his fixation on Thai “ladyboys,” tight clothing, bleached-blond bowl-cut hair, and “feminine” mannerisms, Wang Bao insists that he has gone to Thailand to honeymoon with Fan, although he eventually confesses that this was a lie constructed to please his dying mother. By the end of their Thai road trip, Xu Lang bestows upon Wang Bao, whose nickname is Bao Bao (Baby), a honeymoon photo-shoot with Fan as a gesture of friendship. Occupying the role of an imaginary “beard,” Fan ultimately provides assurance of Bao Bao’s conformity with heterosexuality by eliciting his “straight” reaction to her beauty, as she transitions from fantasy to woman-as-gift within economies of male homosociality.

The gift exchange functions on several levels in this scene. Within a narrative reading, Fan symbolizes the token offering of male friendship or guanxi. Her body is a site/sight of exploitation; her willingness to lend her image to re-produce Bao Bao’s romantic wish affirms the masculine prowess and heterosexuality inscribed within men’s socioeconomic spheres. Verbally summoned by Xu Lang, Fan appears onscreen, long hair flowing (courtesy of an offscreen fan) with her corporeal beauty accented in slow motion as a non-diegetic male chorus sings over electric power chords, enunciating phallic desire. This beauty shot serves multiple functions: in its most superficial operation, it provides an “affective shot” (a term that speaks doubly to the affective jolt induced by visuality and to the basic unit of a film scene) of heterosexual relief after watching a homosocial romance develop between the male leads for an hour-and-forty-minutes. Rendered speechless and “stunned” by Fan’s sudden appearance, Bao Bao’s reaction shot externalizes both a “proper” heterosexual response and a “correct” affective response to beauty, performing Freud’s observation of the “peculiar, mildly intoxicating quality” of beauty contact.24 Moreover, this scene neatly visualizes Irigaray’s argument concerning the exchange of women-as-objects within a hetero-sexist masculinist economy. However, when we pivot toward affect as the primary analytic with which to examine the scene, the sight of beauty provides the possibility for an affirmativ e exchange between beauty and partaker.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.