The Good, the Bad, and the Generic: Translation and Transference in East Asian Westerns
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Michelle Cho The Good, The Bad, and the Generic: Translation and Transference in East Asian Westerns As the blue sky that fills the opening frame of The This essay offers a theoretical perspective on Good, the Bad, and the Weird, Korean auteur Kim genre’s role in producing grids of intelligibility Ji-woon’s 2008 “kimchi Western,” gives way to a crucial to cultural translation by arguing that panning shot of the arid desert landscape, viewers generic conventions function in these recent “Asian are given a literal bird’s eye view of the scene. A Westerns” as a staging ground for transference— hawk, from whose perspective we’re seeing this an engagement that offers a new approach to space, swoops down to steal a carcass off a set of cultural translation. I would like to suggest that, railroad tracks and narrowly avoids the speeding in these films, genre citation is both a source of train that abruptly enters the frame, announcing inspiration for themes, plot points, or characters the human drama that will follow. Takashi Miike and a set of constraints which makes possible also enlists the visual motif of the bird of prey to the act of addressing an audience that is not yet frame the confrontation of man and nature in the stably formed, an audience that emerges out of bizarre, theatrical prologue to Sukiyaki Western self-consciously ethnic and nationalist structures Django (no need to append a representative of identification, yet simultaneously disavows “flavor,” since Miike spells it out in the film’s title). and exceeds them. This essay develops an anti- This device is familiar to fans of the Western, the hermeneutics of genre to underscore the contexts genre that has arguably most relied on archetypes, of reception and circulation that serve both as the stock characters, and the romantic hypothesis condition of possibility for these films and as a that human impulses are, like nature, savage and crucial factor in envisioning the transnational as an elemental. In many ways, both Kim and Miike’s analytic category. films deliver on the genre’s implicit promises, First, though, I’d like to provide some yet their very fidelity to genre conventions also context for the term transference and the model underscores their otherness. For, these films of translation that it offers. While it might seem transpose the Western, spatially, ideologically, and incongruous to bring psychoanalysis, a theory of culturally: in the case of Kim’s film, to colonial subjectivity focused on the structural conditions Manchuria in the 1930’s, and in Miike’s, to a for the formation of the individual ego, to bear hybridized space, where cinematic visualizations of on an analysis of the Western, which seems to feudal Japan and the 19th century American West jettison interiority or psychological depth in favor coexist, not so much in competition, but like two of predetermined character dynamics, narratives, overlaid transparencies. and motifs, I would like to suggest that theory, Translating Media 19 Chera Kee, editor, Spectator 30:1 (Spring 2010): 19-22. THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE GENERIC and in particular, the work of analyst and theorist and wishes. The subject engages in amotivated act Jean Laplanche, provides conceptual touchstones of translation in the face of an enigmatic message. for exploring the question of genre and cultural For Laplanche and others, the work of translation in these films that go beyond some translation might be succinctly put as the of the limitations of existing discussions of registration and management of difference, whether transnational film, especially those that aim to in the conventional sense of linguistic translation track the movement of influence across particular or translation between orders of signification, as national boundaries or works.1 While genealogical in the example of the transposition of unconscious studies can be helpful and illuminating, I find that to conscious intelligibility. Thus, when Steve these critiques sometimes run the risk of reducing Neale writes that “difference is absolutely essential transnational cinema and global screen cultures to the economy of genre,” he underscores the to an epiphenomenon of globalization, in all its historical, intertextual, and intercultural processes of unevenness, fueled by “fan-boys” and cosmopolitan translation by which genre frames the engagement cinephiles. between films and audiences.3 Genre is built out Thus, I hope to elaborate the concepts by of a dialectics of sameness and difference. Though which I will establish my reading of Miike and genres are designated by virtue of an identified Kim’s films in the following theoretical excursus. paradigm, which is then transported or transposed, Laplanche revises the Freudian schema by as we all know, exemplarity relies less on the work’s replacing the concept of interpretation with that of inherent qualities than on the practices and criteria translation as the center of his theory and practice of judgment applied to the work. As such, genre of psychoanalysis. In so doing, he not only de- is itself always engaged in a process of translation emphasizes the interpretive agency of the analyst, and retranslation and is a vehicle of transference. but also posits a model of translation that could According to Laplanche, “the fundamental be said to take place in every instance of human dimension of transference is the relation to the interaction, informing human creativity in all enigma of the other.”4 What is enigmatic about of its diverse forms. Laplanche explains that he the other? In Laplanche’s view, the message of prefers the linguistic metaphor, translation, over the other (and we could think of the other here interpretation, because it indicates something of as anything exclusive of the individual psyche) the specificity of a message or an address: is necessarily enigmatic because it contains elements of the other’s unconscious (notably, Interpretation may mean that you interpret this is beyond intention or volition, but rather, some factual situation. Translation means a structural dimension). Laplanche goes on to that there is no factual situation that can relate transference and the domain of culture; be translated. If something is translated, he writes: “the principal site of transference, it’s already a message. That means, you ‘ordinary’ transference, before, beyond, or after can only translate what has already been analysis, would be the multiple relation to the put in communication, or made as a cultural, to creation or, more precisely, to the communication.2 cultural message.”5 It’s to the cultural message that I would now In this context, translation does not denote a like to turn and thus return our attention to Kim’s relation of mimicry or mirroring between an and Miike’s films. Given the problematic status original and its copy, but rather, a communicative of the genre object—its unlocalizability in either situation in which a message that consists of known production, reception, or film text, and its inherent and unknown (because unconscious) elements is malleability and historicity, I would argue that the registered and assimilated by a receiver, always in generic framework of these films, their generic provisional form and always incompletely. Crucial discursivity, is a key dimension of their enigmatic to the operation of translation is the dynamic of cultural message. As you may have noticed already, transference, in which the subject assimilates the both of these films explicitly cite other films in message according to her own unconscious desires their titles; The Good, the Bad, and the Weird, is a 20 SPRING 2010 CHO rip off of Sergio Leone’s The Good, the Bad, and the Tae-goo, the Weird, pulls the tattered map out one Ugly, and Sukiyaki Western Django indexes Sergio last time, wondering if he’s come to the right spot, Corbucci’s Django.6 Leone and Corbucci’s films and then a gust of wind tears the map from his already present a translated and transnational fingers into the oblivion of the endless desert. The form of the American Western. Other intertextal oilfield, the catalyst for the entire chain of events references abound in these films, too (notably, in constituting the film, confounds Yoon Tae-goo Sukiyaki Western Django, Shakespeare’s Henry VI and cannot be bound to an assimilable meaning and Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill films). Indeed, for him. The missing treasure, not missing Tarantino makes a cameo appearance in the role because it was not found, but rather, because it of misogynist cowboy narrator in Sukiyaki Western is invisible (illegible) to its seekers, creates a hole Django. in the narrative into which also falls the Korean I want to underscore the fact that my nationalist subplot to thwart the advance of the juxtaposition of Miike and Kim’s films is not Japanese imperial army, but also creates a space intended to suggest that the two films are the of transference—the audience knows what is same or interchangeable. They are very distinct, in impossible to know inside the diegetic space—we fact, stylistically and ideologically. However, the know black gold when we see it! point of commonality that I’d like to turn to in In another climactic fight-to-the-death, two key scenes is that they both include figures of the gunfighter hero and the head of the Genji the enigma (though very different) and they both clan present Tsukiyaki Western Django’s final traffic in an excessive symbolism that both evokes confrontation between the cinematic traditions of and evacuates the possibility of identification and the samurai film and the Western. A fresh canvas intelligibility in terms of ethnicity and nation and of snow blankets the scene, throwing its actors into that illustrates the operation of transference as clear relief, as Yoshitsune, the Genji leader, forgoes cultural translation.