Ang Lee's America: a Study of Adaptation and Transculturation
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City University of New York (CUNY) CUNY Academic Works All Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects 5-2019 Ang Lee's America: A Study of Adaptation and Transculturation Yu-Yun Hsieh The Graduate Center, City University of New York How does access to this work benefit ou?y Let us know! More information about this work at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/3278 Discover additional works at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu This work is made publicly available by the City University of New York (CUNY). Contact: [email protected] ANG LEE’S AMERICA: A STUDY OF ADAPTATION AND TRANSCULTURATION by YU-YUN HSIEH A dissertation submitted to the Graduate Faculty in Comparative Literature in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, The City University of New York 2019 © 2019 YU-YUN HSIEH All Rights Reserved Ang Lee’s America: A Study of Adaptation and Transculturation by Yu-Yun Hsieh This manuscript has been read and accepted for the Graduate Faculty in Comparative Literature in satisfaction of the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. 04052019 David S. Reynolds Date Chair of Examining Committee 04052019 Giancarlo Lombardi Date Executive Officer Supervisory Committee: David S. Reynolds Jerry W. Carlson Giancarlo Lombardi THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK iv ABSTRACT Ang Lee’s America: A Study of Adaptation and Transculturation by Yu-Yun Hsieh Advisor: David S. Reynolds In Ang Lee’s America: A Study of Adaptation and Transculturation, I examine how Ang Lee, a Taiwanese filmmaker in the US, represents historic America while reflecting on a culturally hybrid Taiwanese identity in his five American-themed films—The Ice Storm (1997), Ride with the Devil (1999), Hulk (2003), Brokeback Mountain (2005), and Taking Woodstock (2009). By focusing on his American adaptations, I notice how Lee adopts a comparative framework to interpret American history and American texts, drawing from his Taiwanese background and familiarity with Chinese and Hong Kong cinemas. These mixed cultural references speak to a larger phenomenon: what I am calling is transnational eclecticism, a unique blend of an Eastern sensibility with Western subjects—a method I attempt to introduce here to supplement current discourses on the Taiwan issue in Comparative Literature, Film Studies, Transnational American Studies, and Adaptation Studies. The Chinese connection and American influences on post-WWII Taiwan are equally considered in this dissertation for me to examine Taiwan’s historical complexity and cultural hybridity. In Ang Lee’s America, I include intertextual and contextual readings of source texts and adaptations, bring in Fernando Ortiz’s idea of transculturation, Édouard Glissant’s notion of creolization, etc., to enrich my theoretical framework, and argue that it is Lee’s hybrid background that accounts for the adaptability and cultural blending in his representation of an imagined America. ACKNOWLEDGEMENT I want to thank my advisor, Prof. David S. Reynolds, for being the first person at GC who told me that I had to improve my writing, for teaching me how to be an English writer, encouraging me to dream big, defending me whenever you can and exaggerating my small accomplishments wherever you like. I want to thank Prof. Jerry W. Carlson and Prof. Giancarlo Lombardi, for generously joining my committee and lending their time to give me precious suggestions. I want to thank Prof. André Aciman, for taking me to the U.S. and always believing in me. I also want to thank friends I have met at the Graduate Center—Shengyu Shang, Leah Light, Michael Healy, Eugene Slepov, Jeff Peer, Tom Ribitzky, Nick Olson, Stephanie Procelli, Eva Gordon-Wallin—for reading my work and discussing with me in the past two years. Lastly, I want to thank my parents and my two brothers, Ming-Yen and Cheng-You, for your love, tolerance, and understanding over these years. Thank you for making me who I am. vi Contents Introduction: Why Ang Lee? ……………………………………………………… vii Chapter 1: Staging Periodicity in The Ice Storm (1997) …………………………… 1 Chapter 2: Imagined South, Imagined Communities in Ride with the Devil (1999)… 38 Chapter 3: Against Inheritance: Father and Son in Hulk (2003)……………………. 69 Chapter 4: East by West: Transnational Eclecticism in Brokeback Mountain (2005). 96 Chapter 5: Utopia of Relation in Taking Woodstock (2009)………………………. 140 Bibliography …….. 171 vii Introduction: Why Ang Lee? In 1993, my cousin from Taipei visited my family in Southern Taiwan. She was the so- called second-generation mainlander because of my uncle, who arrived in Taiwan in 1949 with the Nationalist Party (KMT) and served as a government architect for many years. My thirteen-year-old cousin, a year older than I, found our town boring, whimpering how much she would like to watch Ang Lee’s new movie Eat Drink Man Woman. My mom wanted to make her happy, so she brought my brothers and me along to see the movie in the neighboring city. Ang Lee inadvertently became the first Taiwanese arthouse director my brothers and I were exposed to; before that day, we went to the same theater for comedies. Twelve years later, I was alone in Taipei studying my master’s in English, and alone when I watched Brokeback Mountain in the theater, crying for Jack Twist’s closet. Little did I know I would go to Seattle for the 2015 ACLA conference to read my paper on Brokeback Mountain, arguing how the Eastern elements quietly crept through this American movie, including the Thanksgiving dinner scene, which was reminiscent of Chinese melodrama to the Taiwanese audience like me. Coming of age in Taiwan, I remember the period when Ang Lee had transformed from an arthouse filmmaker making movies for the mainstream Taiwanese audience into an award-winning director of the upper echelon of Hollywood, reluctantly being called “the pride of China” or worse, “the pride of Chinese people all over the world.” The accolade at international film festivals is always already political. I remember the younger I, still in Taiwan, like many young people of my generation, felt slightly let down seeing he never once rejected any falsifying identity donned on him onscreen. In viii his interviews in Chinese, Ang Lee seemed to embody the mannerism of an old-time Confucian gentleman, agreeable, always smiling, and sometimes would glibly say that he felt proud to represent Chinese filmmakers to be seen on the international stage. However, once I started to research for my dissertation, I found that Ang Lee did use his, however accented, English to express his strong opinions. He appeared to be a more interesting person in English, sharing his dissonance with current political climate, or his distaste for the nationalist education indoctrinated by the KMT government. By what language speaks for him? Traduttori, traditori. In an interview with a Hong Kong newspaper from 2001, Lee explained his deliberate representation of cultural hybridity in his Hollywood movies by saying, “actually my Hollywood films are more Chinese in vision than the Chinese films I made before. My first three films were just made for the mainstream Taiwanese audience. I wasn’t thinking about being Chinese or not Chinese.”1 A juicier fact shows that he even referred himself as a “Taiwanese” filmmaker in writing.2 That a-ha moment made me realize that he had consciously played the role of cultural mediation for his birthplace, feeling proud of representing Taiwan in the global arena, but there are words wouldn’t sound right had he said them in Chinese in front of some people, like his parents, or my uncle. The words need to be translated in order to maintain the harmonious relationship with others, to save face for some, and to be kind to the most. This kind of translation, beguilingly yet apolitically, bespeaks one’s gentlemanliness and sentimentalism. Ang Lee perhaps had found the alternative to expressing those words he wouldn’t want to say in Chinese: he translated them into English and transferred them into cinematic language in his American adaptations. 1 Whitney Crothers Dilley, The Cinema of Ang Lee (New York: Wallflower Press, 2015), 106. 2 See my second chapter on Ride with the Devil. ix Making text-to-film adaptations indicates a process of synthesis that converts verbal language into visual stimuli and transfers culturally specific knowledge into a matter of cinematic technique. When André Bazin wrote, “film is the novel as seen by cinema,”3 he thought that, the original artwork is like a crystal chandelier; once in the dark, only the flashlight can light up the chandelier in the corner. After working with Stanley Kubrick for the adaptation of A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess started writing for TV and once he complained about the trend of making adaptation in the early 1970s by saying, “Every best-selling novel has to be turned into a film, the assumption begin that the book itself whets an appetite for the true fulfillment—the verbal shadow turned into light, the word made flesh.” 4 Even if adaptation lights up the verbal shadow and flesh the void of words, the idea of making a “faithful” adaptation is impossible, for, as Christian Metz describes, adaptation is to present “somebody else’s phantasy”5 onscreen, and no one imagines the original text in the same way. Andrew Dudley argues that adaptation involves “borrowing, intersection, and fidelity of transformation” of the sources. As the viewer, we may ask, how can Ang Lee, as a Taiwanese filmmaker, borrow American cultural memories, translate their verbal shadows, and present his phantasy onscreen while making us believe it is American? These are some of the questions I attempt to address in my dissertation. In Ang Lee’s America: A Study of Adaptation and Transculturation, I create my own term “transnational eclecticism,” to address Lee’s blending of multicultural 3 Andrew Dudley, “Adaptation,” Film Adaptation.