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Taiwanising the World? Lee Ang and Global Cinema

The terms “globalisation” and “global culture” easily evoke a mass phenomenon, a development that no single individual can escape. However, participation in globalisation, no to speak of shaping it is not evenly shared by all people and this is true both in scope and in density. In many instances, “global culture” is an elite culture in the sense of Peter Berger’s term “faculty club culture” (Berger, 1997) or Samuel Huntington’s “Davos culture” (Huntington, 1996) both emphasising the relative smallness of that group of people which in the end do successfully inform and live a global culture. Another manifestation of globalisation, the “McWorld culture” coined by Benjamin Barber (Barber, 1995) obviously attempts to address masses around the globe, yet it addresses local people basically as consumers of global food (burger, pizza, sushi etc.), global entertainment (music, film, TV series), and global lifestyle products (perfumes, cigarettes, cars, fashion, especially sports wear). On the other hand, there is a range of newly emerging social movements, often critical towards the effects of the globalisation process (labour, environment, human rights, identity). Social movements are heavily influenced by members of the faculty club, yet they are also dependent on their ability to create popularity and address other than elite individuals. In many cases, these attempts to resist globalisation are no less global in their rhetoric, their narratives, their modes of claiming legitimacy, and not least their organisational structures (for instance Attac, Greenpeace, Peoples Global Action and others1). In the wake of postcolonial and cultural studies a critical stance towards the cultural effects of the globalisation processes has gained momentum. The vulnerability of local space and time which are increasingly occupied by global structures is emphasised. And it is warned that global products (McDonalds, Starbucks, Nike, MTV), global places (shopping malls, restaurants of the burger and coffee shop chains, hotel lobbies, airports), and global time-management (especially the notion of efficiency in working time, active recreation time, education time) are more and more repelling notions of locality. However true or adequate this may be from an ideological point of view, an important, yet often underestimated aspect of the praxis of any global culture is (quite on the contrary) its limitation in terms of space and time. Hunter and Yates argue that “in quite tangible ways, these globalizers inhabit something of a sociocultural bubble that is generally insulated from the harsher differences between national cultures.” (Hunter & Yates, 2002: 336) They refer primarily to a stratum of American globalizers, but their argument seems to be equally true for most members of the global elite culture. Globalised space and time (as being the framework of practices, products, values and ideas) form a matrix of spots which mutually share specific forms of connectivity: that is language, education, communication technology and travel connections, flexibility, common ideas and designs, modes of behaviour and so on. Yet, they constitute a world which in many ways remains unconnected to local or indigenous places and local organisation of time. The inhabitants of the elite global space are rarely forced to leave these islands or to interact with local “outsiders.” Important and influential as these global structures may be in terms of economic, political, social and cultural power or as desirable models of wealth and opportunities, they are relatively small recluses within local space. Although the impact on local structures is generally highlighted, the aspect of limited interaction seems also to be true for locals who get into contact with globalisation primarily as consumers or workers. Many people consuming global products or visiting globalised places can hardly afford to do so very often. Most of their time, they spend in a local environment rather than in a global one. While for the group of the global elite the bubble structure often serves as a protecting shield that is seldom lowered, border crossing is rather normal for locals and generally a daily experience for

1 One of the most striking examples is surely the international cooperation of extreme right wing racist nationals. Carsten Storm Taiwanising the World? Lee Ang and Global Cinema – 2 –

!! DRAFT – NOT FOR CITATION !! local elites. Furthermore, the global and local worlds are therefore not harshly separated, but intertwined; their borders of inclusion or exclusion are in a constant flow. The dichotomy of global vs. local is therefore by far too exaggerated to describe the actual phenomena. Homi Bhabha introduced the term “hybridity” to describe the effects that postmodernity has on self-awareness and identities. Globalisation – in its present form deeply connected with postmodernism – is consequently another agent fostering hybrid structures, especially a hybridisation of space and time. Peter Berger has argued “that evangelical Protestantism, especially in its Pentecostal version, is the most important popular movement serving (mostly inadvertently) as a vehicle of cultural globalization.” (Berger, 2002, 8) Its success is rooted in its capacity to indigenisation. More than most other forms of global culture it includes local culture and local practices, while at the same time promoting “a morality singularly appropriate for people seeking to advance in the nascent stage of modern capitalism” (ibid.) and a notion of public engagement for values like equal rights, individualism, and others deeply connected to capitalism. This indicates that those values, products, and practices which can be adapted to or merged with local cultures and which consequently allow compartmentalisation, are likely to be most successful within a global popular culture. What globalisation impinges on local cultures is therefore a high level of hybrid lifestyles, practices, structures of space and time. Additionally, hybridity is not only a fundamental framework of Western globalisation. It is also its very modality since the dominant Western culture itself is in many ways heterogeneous. In the package are neo-liberal market ideology and environmentalism, junk food and health food, freedom and human rights as well as political correctness and restrictions legitimated by security concerns (Berger, 2002: 15). On the other hand, it is a truism that in most cases the image of a homogeneous indigenous, now scrutinised culture which had offered a holistic and lifelong identity and lifestyle is also a mere construction that creates a notion of premodernity and/or locality as the radical other of (post-) modernity and the global. Local and indigenous life is and was not free from conflict and choice. It is common knowledge by now that cinema is one of the vanguards of globalisation. Films are increasingly produced in global frameworks. This includes nearly all aspects, like production units and financing, locations and casts, merchandising, distribution and audiences. However, more than many other global products films do not only transport values and ideas through the practices and lifestyles connected to them, for instance notions of competitiveness, coolness, health and consumerism that are transported via the latest Addidas sports shoe. Film, like other explicitly cultural products, can pick such values and ideas as their central topic. The following considerations on globalisation and the Taiwanese director Lee Ang regard his films as global products in all these aspects. Although modes of production, distribution, and reception as well as notions of contents, ideas and values transported arbitrarily or by intention are inseparably intertwined, I will, for the sake of the analysis, distinguish between formal and content related aspects since the main issue of my argument is about transcultural flows of ideas.

Global Products: Lee Ang’s Films Currently, Lee Ang is the most successful director in the international arena that Taiwan has, an estimation that is legitimated by the number and quality of awards he receives in Asia and the West, the box office success of many of his movies, and his film budgets. The scope of topics Lee puts to screen covers the Chinese, American and European world, history, the presence, and utopian fantasy likewise. Lee’s success can easily be measured by two categories: (i) finances: that is the increase in budgets that were made available to him by production companies and the box office takings, and (ii) artistic quality as it is mirrored in nominations and awards.2

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(i) Lee’s first film, Pushing Hands, was produced with a small budget of estimated US $ 400.000. With his 4th movie, Sense and Sensibility he reached what can be regarded as a normal Hollywood level for drama-cum-comedy productions of roughly US $ 15 million. Ride with the Devil, a historical drama including mass battle scenes shot outside, cost US $ 35 million and Hulk due to lots of special effects 137 million. Despite the companies’ trust into his work and their willingness to invest money, only half of Lee’ films were economically successful. In relative terms Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon was the most successful with a ratio of US gross to budget of 8.54, while Ride with the Devil can only be regarded as financial disaster, having a ratio of 0.02. Table 1: Budgets and Grosses Year Title Budget Gross in Gross others ratio US (mill. USA (US $ unless gross to US $) (US $) indicated) budget 1992 Pushing Hands 推手 0.4 152.322 -- 0.38 1993 The Wedding Banquet 1 6.933.459 (non-USA) 6.93 囍宴 30.000.000 1994 Eat Drink Man 1.5 7.294.403 -- 4.86 Woman 飲食男女 1995 Sense and Sensibility 16.5 42.993.774 (non-USA) 2.61 92.100.000 UK £ 12.343.433 1997 The Ice Storm 18 7.837.632 UK 0.44 £ 939.110 1999 Ride with the Devil 35 630.779 UK 0.02 £ 100.722 2000 Crouching Tiger, 15 128.067.808 UK 8.54 Hidden Dragon 臥虎藏 £ 9.356.176 龍 Hong Kong HKD 15.514.532 2003 Hulk 137 132.122.995 (world-wide) 0.96 245.284.946 2005 Brokeback Mountain 14 83.025.853 UK 5.93 £ 9.469.032 2007 Lust, Caution 色,戒 15 4.602.512 Hong Kong 0.31 HKD 38.726368 Taiwan TWD 128.213.080 Time of measurement includes some estimated 6–8 months after first screening. Grosses do not include DVD releases and fan articles. Source: The Internet Movie Database >http://www.imdb.com<, see entries for respective titles, accessed 2007.12.11.

Among other factors, budgets and takings are related to the cast. International stars receive higher fees but the film is on the other hand more likely to earn higher takings. In economic terms, casting stars is therefore often an investment thought to bear only minor risks – although this is surely only half of the truth as the examples The Ice Storm or Ride with the Devil easily elucidate. Although Lee as a director is only one among others who are responsible for casting he was able to

categories like best director or best film it also represents what the respective evaluating boards regard as cinematic quality, which also takes aesthetic aspects into account. Carsten Storm Taiwanising the World? Lee Ang and Global Cinema – 4 –

!! DRAFT – NOT FOR CITATION !! cooperate with an impressive list of actresses and actors, which also includes the casting of young actors who later on in their career became international stars. After his first three movies of which the best known actor was probably Taiwan star Long Sihong, Lee had his first encounter with Western stars when cooperating with Emma Thompson (as screenwriter and leading female role), Hugh Grant, Alan Rickman and the young Kate Winslet in Sense in Sensibility. The most impressive Western cast was probably assembled in the The Ice Storm, listing names as Kevin Cline, Sigourney Weaver, Joan Allen and the youngsters Tobey Maguire, Elijah Wood, Cristina Ricci, and Katie Holmes. Tobey Maguire was again starring in Ride with the Devil. Turning back to a Chinese story Lee worked with Asian superstars Chow Yun-fat, Michelle Yeoh and youngster Zhang Ziyi among others well known to the Asian audience in Wo hu cang long, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Next, Nick Nolte appeared in Hulk and Heath Ledger in Brokeback Mountain. Asian superstar Tony Leung Chiu Wai and young actress Tang Wei featured in Lee’s latest movie Se, jie, aka Lust, Caution. (ii) Lee Ang is a highly decorated director. Counting only awards and nominations that were personally attributed to him as director or the respective movie as a whole, i.e. in the category “best film”, Lee Ang won 88 awards and got 53 further nominations. Additionally his films won 17 awards for best screenplay, 15 of them for James Schamus. Furthermore, he received another 5 awards, for instance for “Outstanding Contribution to Chinese Cinema” at the 2006 Shanghai Film Festival or the “Lifetime Achievement Award” at the 2002 Gotham Awards. Furthermore, his films have won countless awards in other categories like acting, costumes, music and so on. The success Lee has in Asia and the Western world raises the question whether Lee simply obtains an instinctive sureness to please regionally and culturally diverse audiences or whether a specific cultural message can be deconstructed in his movies. James Schamus, screenwriter and (co- ) producer of many of Lee Ang’s films, hints to the second point when he states that “Ang and I do indeed want everyone in the world to be, in a nontrivial sense of the word, Chinese.” (Schamus, 2004: 43) Then what constitutes this Chineseness? Or, to turn the question upside down, what meaning does globalisation have in the context of Lee’s film? Lee, born 1954 in Pingtung, Taiwan, graduated from National Taiwan College of Arts in 1975, received a B.F.A Degree in theatre direction at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and earned his Masters Degree in Fine Arts and Film Directing at New York University in 1984. Already still being a student at NYU, he worked as assistant director on Spike Lee’s student film Joe’s Bed-Stuy Barbershop: We Cut Heads (1983). Two of his screenplays won awards in Taiwan and Lee was then financed by a major Taiwan film company, Central Motion Picture Corporation (CMPC), to shoot a picture from his first screenplay, Pushing Hands. Starting with his first movie, Lee cooperated with James Schamus, who was then together with Ted Hope running a newly established independent production company, Good Machine. Schamus evolved to be a partner of Lee ever since, cooperating at most of Lee movies as screenwriter and/or producer. Lee’s movies are therefore linked to globalisation in a triple sense: as a topic within his movies, as a mode of production throughout his entire career, and regarding his own biographical background. Not surprisingly, many critics have emphasised the global character of Lee’s movies. Starting with his first two movies, the mixture of Taiwanese and US capital with US production units and places, of Chinese and Western casts was seen as an impact of globalisation. Eat Drink Man Woman, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and, latest, Lust, Caution have been interpreted as movies that have contributed to the globalisation of Asian cinema, alongside of productions by the mainland Chinese fifth generation directors, namely Zhang Yimou and Chen Kaige. (Ma, 1996; Kemp, 2000; Chan, F., 2003, Chan, K., 2004; Ti, 2005, Kemp, 2000: 15). Globalisation in the later issue is connected to strategies of marketing and distribution, to global audiences and language. Globalisation is not an equally strong issue in the critique of his other movies like Sense and Sensibility, The Ice Storm, Ride with the Devil, Hulk, and Brokeback Mountain. Although some of these have been globally successful at the box offices, the global character of crews, financing, Carsten Storm Taiwanising the World? Lee Ang and Global Cinema – 5 –

!! DRAFT – NOT FOR CITATION !! casts is limited compared to his “Chinese” films. Yet, his Taiwanese-Chinese origin is still marked as a sign of globality in those of his films that are located in the West and describe Western topics. What Lee puts to practice is a complex mixture of Taiwanese or Chinese and Western cinema, of art house and blockbuster cinema, of independent and big business Hollywood mainstream cinema. Although up to now, there is an overall tendency towards blockbuster and mainstream, 3 Lee himself noted that after the success of The Wedding Banquet, “the international market model for my works was formed: the ‘mainstream popular market’ in Taiwan and Asia plus the ‘art house cinema’ in the US and Europe.” (quoted after Ti, 2005: 110; see also Kemp, 2000: 13).4 However, it has to be acknowledged that at least two of Lee’s films, namely Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Brokeback Mountain have been blockbusters in the West. In terms of the globalisation discourse the Western art house serves as an internal alternative that is often styled as resistance to mainstream. The negative images of globalisation are thus attached to Western mainstream while art house is attached to qualities like originality, authenticity, locality, creative quality, and intercultural equality. This is, of course, a projection which in the end delimits alternatives and forms of resistance to a specific Western notion of the marginalised, but noble other. However, the image of infiltrating dominant Western production modes attracts additional audiences that normally restrain from visiting the blockbuster action or drama movies. For these audiences, neglecting blockbuster productions serves as a lifestyle expression and as an act of resistance referring to a notion of the Western mainstream as the dominator and destroyer of cultural diversity. While these audiences usually emphasise their social awareness and political sensibility to define a border towards a cliché of the mainstream, they now find themselves seat to seat with the typical hedonistic mainstream audience seeking fun. In this sense, Lee succeeds to create a global atmosphere within the cinema hall. As noted above, some studies link this subversive tendency to his being the “exotic” Asian “other.” Felicia Chan quotes a Taiwanese office worker who “is reported to have exclaimed: ‘I am so proud of Ang Lee … . He never forgot his roots in Taiwan, and he also traced his roots back to China’.” (Chan, F., 2003: 58) These arguments constitute two intertwined readings: on the one hand they argue that it is precisely his Asian “otherness” within the Hollywood mainstream that works as a source to establish alternative meanings and constructions. Despite the Hollywood production modes of his later movies his otherness implements the aspect of art house into his movies. I am quite critical towards this argument since it installs origin and heritage as quasi-essential categories making both a prerequisite of discursive change. On the other hand the argument holds that within Hollywood mainstream Lee is but the alibi exotic phenomenon hinting to the democratic and equal constitution of the Western system of values and chances: if you are good enough, you can make your way, you can voice yourself, you can have success. This reading resembles very much the function of the black Huxtables family in the US Cosby Show TV series. The obvious success of the extraordinary or exemplary “other” marks any failure of the marginalised majority as their fault due to individual disabilities instead of structural inequalities. (Chiang, 2002: 289, Ti, 2005: 108; Barker, 2004: 268–269, Jhally & Lewis, 1992: 137, Gray, 1996: 142) The impact of globalisation is recognised very differently by different groups. People within the film business might take globalisation as a “normal” way to tap resources and revenues, for the academic realm it has turned into a well established discourse. The case is, however, most probably different for most audiences. Apart from a relatively small percentage of especially interested recipients most visitors in the movies do know very little about the origin of the capital, the national or cultural background of crew and staff. Also some constructions within film analysis

3 Ti links images of culture within Lee’s first three movies “to the trajectory of his career, as it moved from locally to globally oriented production,” (Ti, 2005: 101) thus transforming developments of several levels (creative imaginary, biography, production modes) into a holistic picture. However tempting such constructions may be, they are often characterised by streamlining a fragmented and initially undetermined past into an arranged teleology. 4 With regard to Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Lee said: “Think of the challenge. In China I have to deliver this movie as a summer blockbuster but here [that is, in the US] it has to hit the arthouses to begin with. It takes a lot of pain to keep that balance ...” (quoted after Kemp, 2000: 13) Carsten Storm Taiwanising the World? Lee Ang and Global Cinema – 6 –

!! DRAFT – NOT FOR CITATION !! informed by cultural studies’ epistemology which emphasise the subtle shifts in a film’s meaning, which are caused by actors’ biographies and film records, rely on an elite audience that is instantly aware of highly complex additional information. (see i.e. Gay, 2003: 90–91) However, the label “global cinema” itself is a weak and rather inconsistent term. The discourse lacks a common sense, what exactly it means to label a film “global” and what the legitimising categories are. Detecting international or intercultural modes within aspects like capital, production, distribution, cast, audiences, genre, plot, aesthetics or intention usually serves as a sufficient signifier.5 Some of these aspects refer to the film as a product and others to film as an imaginary and a vehicle of messages and contents. Both categories are generally merged and/or randomly connected. While it is, of course, inevitable to deal with film in economic and artistic measures one is often left with the impression that marking a film as “global” is little more than an academic device to activate a certain range of analytic modes. Yet, the meaning of both categories and of their mutual impacts on the processes of globalisation is problematically vague. Furthermore, the terminological difference between the terms “inter/cross-national” and “inter/cross-cultural” on one hand and “global” on the other remains an open question.6 While the label clearly denotes a classification, it is far from meeting systematic terminological requirements. On the contrary, it is ill-defined in terms of its borders and internal structures which reflect, of course, the ambivalences and vagueness of the phenomenon of “globalisation.” Is the cooperation of production units originating from two countries, or a cast that brings together actors from different nationalities or cultures a sufficient marker to speak of a global phenomenon? One can easily imagine having a film financed from production companies located in different countries plus having an international cast, but nonetheless transporting an image of unchallenged locality through its story and aesthetics. Compared to other “global” products like food, perfumes, or fashion, the meaning of the label is different in the case of film, or more precisely in the case of cinemas that are not American. An important impact of the label “global” is the inherent reference to Western dominance that often is interpreted as a new cultural cum economic form of imperialism. Quite different from studies on film, the question whether or not responsible staffs within Coca Cola, McDonalds, or Benetton are international or intercultural, whether the companies’ investment money is international, or whether intercultural efforts are taken to create transculturally attractive products, lets say an Asian styled burger, is of little interest in the bulk of studies. These products are seen as Western, more specifically American products, which refers to the categories of nationality and culture, and they are taken as evidence for the Western dominance in shaping a global world. Following canonical writings of Cultural Studies like Edwards Saids Orientalism among others, the relationship between the West and the non-West is seen as a mono-directional flow, which at best leaves opportunities for the marginalised economies and cultures to shield and preserve remnants of authentic codes and lifestyles, which are nonetheless infected.

5 See for instance Elizabeth Buck in Asia and the Global Film Industry: “… the dynamics of the film industry are changing rapidly, moving toward a more international product that has creative and financial roots in several countries. Now the industry talks about a ‘global cinema’ where any single film may have stars, producers, director, scriptwriters, and financing from various countries, all aimed at a global audience of two hundred million people.” (quoted from Ma, 1996: 192). Schamus also highlights the economic factor of the term ‘global’: The financing of this movie [Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, C.S.] is an index of what the global film business really is these days. We had a French bank and an LA-based bond company; we had seven different pre-buyers and different distribution companies throughout the major territories in Europe; we sold it to two parts of Sony, Sony Pictures Classics and Sony Pictures Asia; and of course our co-producer was in China. Our lawyers were in New York, the producers were in Taiwan and Hong Kong and the pre-production was in Beijing. The production company had to bifurcate into two separate companies which eventually became three, and the Hong Kong company had a British Virgin Islands company because of the structure of the deals for tax purposes as well as a North American limited-liability company. And all these deals had to be simultaneously closed for any money to start to flow. I was more or less mincemeat by the time we started pre-production.” (quoted after Kemp, 2000: 15). 6 This might be reason why some critics prefer to speak of transnational rather than of global cinema. (Lu, 1997; Dariotis & Fung, 1997; Teo, 2005). Carsten Storm Taiwanising the World? Lee Ang and Global Cinema – 7 –

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The almost inevitable fruitlessness of resistance, inherent in this approach, is challenged by Homi Bhabha’s concept of hybridity. Hybridity pays tribute to empirically verified knowledge showing that marginalised cultures often maintained to inform the processes of identity building of those marginalised. Identities are fragmented and consist of contesting facets of the dominating and the marginalised cultures, reshaping both in unforeseen ways. That these attempts of alteration and resistance may re-inform the globalisation process to the point that it – at least partly – is de- Westernised is seldom on the agenda. Using a phrase coined by Chen Xiaomei, it would mean to “occidentalise” the West, to turn around the process of deculturing, and to inscribe Eastern values into the discourse through a process of reinterpreting the Western world. The concept of hybridity also prevents from another assumption that implicitly underlies many critiques which focus on the threat of globalisation and consequently interpret any encounter as struggle over power and identities. Thus, both the West and its other are often constructed as homogeneous entities, which, of course, they are not. One might even say that it is precisely the lack of overall homogeneity within the West which provides non-Westerners with opportunities to shape globalisation on their own and to inscribe notions of their heritage and identities into the meaning of globalisation. Global cinema is therefore not merely to be understood as the arbitrary cooperation of production companies, or as casting actors from different countries, neither as the fact that some movies (unexpectedly) are successful abroad. This is only one side of the coin. What needs to be added is a specific texture of depiction and narration that forms the film into a product which appeals to audiences worldwide. 7 The otherwise established signifiers for globality, namely processes of despacing and detiming, certain aspects of hybridity, and a transformation of culture need to be adapted in order to frame this texture. Global cinema creates images that are “paradoxically specific to one culture, but also ‘universal’ enough to millions of viewers.” (Ty, 1996: 66) The above mentioned process of decultering is to be understood as the practical realisation of despacing and detiming. This decultering results in an open frame that allows re-inscription of memories, histories, images, values, and meanings from many angles. The possibility of identification regardless of individual origin is central to a global movie. To a certain degree, characters and issues have to be stripped of their specific cultural markers and have to be transformed into a universal notion that either enables the audience to re-strengthen the ethnic or national cultural identity or to appeal to an estranged self in the mirror image of the exotic gaze. The mixture of remnants of cultural authenticity with the exoticising mirror is constitutive for global cinema. The result is that even if locality is depicted it is done in delocalised mode that reconstructs selected local places, lifestyles, times and so on as signifiers (and sometimes as symbols) of global space and existence.

Global Entertainment and the Exotic Gaze The act of deculturing, reculturing, and acculturing is fundamental within globalisation.8 The ability to enact these flows of cultural meaning (in space and time) is a prerequisite for a global product to be successful; in other terms, the ability to shape a delocalised image, meaning, or story which provides a frame vague enough to be simultaneously globalised and relocalised by different audiences and individuals. For instance, criticism of the US TV series Sex and the City was made by Taiwanese young women on the ground that the lifestyle and problems of the depicted New York heroines does not adequately mirror their own life. Accordingly, Japanese TV dramas were esteemed better, although they are produced with much smaller budgets and often lack

7 The margins of such a texture are not easy to define. Yet, the difficulty of the task does not allow refraining from it or even avoid it saying that, “perhaps the cultural phenomenon may be better explained as an economic phenomenon” (Chan, F., 2003: 57) which reduces globalisation to a capitalist notion. 8 Wang and Yeh use these terms to describe the tension between the Chinese heroine in the 1998 Disney production Mulan, Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and American multiculturalism. (Wang & Yeh, 2005, 180) Carsten Storm Taiwanising the World? Lee Ang and Global Cinema – 8 –

!! DRAFT – NOT FOR CITATION !! cinematographic quality. (Ota, 2007: 135–136) This awareness of a lack of cultural proximity elucidates that insufficient possibilities to relocalise the constructed images deteriorates the products quality of being global – even despite the much stronger marketing power that American broadcasting companies have. The act of globalising and relocalising demands a contesting negotiation of a complex matrix of cultural proximity and distance. Both globalising and relocalising can address aspects of proximity as well as distance. A reading of Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon elucidates the complexity of these processes. A major aspect within the huge amount of studies on this film is the issue of feminism that was transported within the martial arts genre. (Young, 2006; Martin, 2005; Chan, K., 2004; Madsen, 2005). This issue addresses a global audience taking up images of global human rights advocated within the “faculty club” and many social movements. However, for Chinese audiences the role model of the female heroine was in fact quite familiar within the wuxia (swords fighting) and gongfu (fist fighting) film genres. (Martin, 2005: 154–157) The familiarity even dates back to late Qing novels of the wuxia-genre,9 like Wen-kang’s 1878 novel Ernü yingxiong zhuan 兒女英雄傳 (A Tale of Heroic Lovers). Yet, the impact of the role within the story and female life as a whole was severely reconstructed along modern Western notions of female liberation. On the other hand, escaping the pressure of decorum and familial bonds on the search for a self determined female life also reflects modern traditions set up during the May Fourth Movement of 1919. Although the May Fourth Movement as a whole was inspired by and intellectually dependent on Western modernism in many ways, it has by now turned into an authentic tradition in China. The issue of feminism may therefore be read as a globalised and/or a localised topic. Other issues which allow fractured relocalisations are the wuxia-genre itself, traces of Chinese nationalism and Buddhism,10 and a distracted imagery of the Chinese landscape which transforms into what Zong Baihua, a critic of Chinese aestheticism, calls “ideascape” (yijing 意景). Ideapscape “conveys a poetic sense of the idea of harmony between the human mind and the surrounding nature, which is always already tinged with human emotions and is thus not subject to codes of verisimilitude.” (Xu, 2007: 40) These aspects appeal differently to a non-Chinese audience. The unreality of typical wuxia- choreography, the beauty of actresses and actors in their fancy costumes, the tourism-like depiction of places and landscapes turns the film into an exotic space. Despite all the possible mis- interpretations of an authentic Chineseness that are inherent in an exotic gaze, the act of exoticising reduces the film to a kernel of the plot and its meaning, especially in regard to emotions, desires, and relations between the character roles. Referring to the Wedding Banquet, Martin hints to the possibility of cross-identification which results in floating identifications. (Martin, 2005: 153) The film is thus turned into a representative mode or into a sample of pseudo-mythic archetypes, which are seen as universal. The representative mode allows identification from both inside and outside. The exotic film operates as a conveniently distant mirror of the exoticising self. The term “exotic” is burdened by its history and deeply intertwined with the term “oriental.” While both are constructing the other at a periphery, it has to be stated that the mode of construction and the characteristics and functions of these peripheries differ widely. Both terms are often, yet incorrectly, used as synonyms in academic studies, especially within cultural and postcolonial studies. Pham refers to a review by Salman Rushdie on Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, published in the New York Times (“Can Hollywood See the Tiger”, 2001.03.09: A21), in which “Rushdie claims that the staggering numbers of multicultural moviegoers to Crouching Tiger, including Asian Americans, delegitimizes any possible accusation of Orientalism.” (Pham,

9 There is a still valuable study in English language by James J. Y. Liu entitled The Chinese Knight-Errant (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul 1967). The translation “knight-errant” is nonetheless misleading, since it evokes images of the Western knight-errant stories depicting European middle ages. 10 Atchley (2003) and Baker (2006) analyse the film under the framework of Buddhism referring to aspects like Buddhist wisdom. Ang Lee himself has pointed out that “we embraced the most mass of arts forms [cinema] and mixed it with the highest – the secret martial arts as passed down over time in the great Daoist schools of training and thought.” (quoted in Berry & Farquhar, 2006: 70). Studies on the Daoist impact in the film are still missing. Carsten Storm Taiwanising the World? Lee Ang and Global Cinema – 9 –

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2004: 127) Rushdie, who normally is not suspicious of advocating a stance too uncritically towards Western dominance, makes an argument here which is only convincing if the terms “exotic” and “oriental” are properly separated since it would, of course, be nonsense to claim that the film delegitimises any possible accusation of exoticism. The exotic differs from the oriental in many ways, of which three aspects are of importance here: the focus on an exoticised other as a mirror of the self, the politics of pleasure, and the impact on the other. (i) The exoticising subject seeks the other as a mirror of the self and departs from his/her own society. For Victor Segalen, who first conceptualised the “exotic,” the traveller was the true exotic being who becomes a transmitter of the spectacular foreign and thus an outsider at home. (Segalen, 1994) Exoticism works “as the means for the subject of a powerful, dominant culture to counter that culture in the very process of returning to it.” (Célestin, 1996: 3) In contradiction to this, the oriental vision of the other does not challenge the orientalising self, but it reconfirms the hegemonic and dominant self-awareness. (ii) While orientalism constructs the other as subaltern emphasising incapability, lack of civilisation, lack of agency, cruelty, and ugliness, exoticism focuses on other aspects. The exotic other is a much more positive image linked to temptation, eroticism, beauty, curiosity, excitement, or fascination. The exotic rarely includes the ugly and if it does so, it resembles the ugly of a horror movie depicted to create the pleasure of a mental thrill. (iii) Orientalism only becomes effective when it dominates public discourses on power within the orientalising society which then creates concrete impacts on the orientalised society (typically by trying to enforce hegemonic power). Exoticism on the other hand operates in both a collective and an individual framework; it may affect the exoticised culture, but if it does so, the impacts differ strongly from any implementation of orientalist power. One might argue that the figure of exoticism is logically connected to a Western audience’s attitude towards an Asian film, especially if it depicts elements of fantasy. Yet, employing exoticism to arouse interest is also a method Lee uses in his ‘American’ movies as the example of Brokeback Mountain elucidates. No doubt, the film is mainstream cinema. Seen from a mainstream position, the protagonists are described as the exotic others this movie. The mainstream heterosexual audience gazes at the display of homosexual desires. Yet, within the film’s narrative the culture of the marginalised other is placed in the centre while an image of a homophobic mainstream society is placed at the periphery and appears to be the other. When addressing a mainstream audience that should relate itself to the protagonists in one or the other way, a notion of proximity needs to be constructed. The protagonist is the one with whom we shall at least partly identify and whose traits throughout the movie we shall follow. His/her fate obtains a basic narrative function of suspense and tension in the plot development. The exotic positive protagonist as a signifier in a fictional work operates thus through a complicated matrix of sameness and otherness. To achieve this, the protagonist needs to be near enough to ourselves to identify with and different enough to be not banal or boring. He or she is the exemplary exoticised imagery of the individual in the audience. Even for the majority of heterosexual individuals the gay protagonists in Brokeback Mountain need to offer enough aspects of sameness to create sympathy with their characters and the construction of their way of life. Otherwise the movie would certainly not have been the box office success it had been. Homosexuality here signifies two aspects, a social one and a narrative one: the social aspect refers to the situation of homosexuals as a marginalized group especially in a homophobic rural area in the American Midwest. The narrative aspect shows the protagonists’ homosexuality as a chiffre signifying the borders society sets against the individual thrive for a free and self determined life in modern times. It also is a movie about the struggle to find and to hold on to true love against all odds, to realise one’s own fulfilment in the world. The exotic character of the Lee’s ‘Chinese’ films has often been stated. (Ty, 1996; Chan, F, 2003; Chan, K., 2004: 3) Lee’s success in addressing different audiences roots in his ability to construct an image of the exemplary exoticised other, whom the audience can gaze at. This was especially stated for Eat Drink Man Woman which due to its international success and its relative failure in Taiwan was accused of laying out Chinese people as objects for the Western gaze (Ti, 2005: 111). Ma Carsten Storm Taiwanising the World? Lee Ang and Global Cinema – 10 –

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Sheng-mei observed that “the trilogy reveals an increasing propensity towards exotic travel in search of the Other rather than nostalgic lamentation over the loss of the self.” (Ma, 1996: 195) The impact of the exotic gaze on modes of reception and apprehension are equally often criticised. Pham writes: “The exotic East is only made acceptable in the West when it is turned into a consumable commodity” (Pham, 2004: 125) Any interest in the East, in its people, histories, ideas, narratives, landscapes etc., so the statement holds, depends on its ability to be capitalised. It is the ability to animate people to spend their money. The argument leaves open how a different form of interest in anything foreign could be structured; a form which would not be infected by economic categories. However, labelling this process – correctly – as Western (capitalism) does not mean that these practices were or are alien to all non Western societies. Actively globalising one’s own culture requires making the local attractive to non-local audiences. The entertainment effect of the exotic gaze opens – in a vulnerable way – a double possibility: (i) to attract global audiences and also (ii) to inscribe local identities, narratives, practices, and values into the “global”. The price is, however, that these narratives are delocalised and made applicable for an unspecific global audience. What is often neglected in the globalisation debate is that the same happens to Western values. They are stripped off their specific historic connotations and are reconstructed on a meta-level in order to be compatible with local standards. For a global product competitiveness and compatibility are two sides of one coin.11 The ability to attract exotic desires increases the compatibility. What is exoticised, is – in the better case (!)12 – not primarily the other with its lifestyles, habits, or customs employing a traditional ethnographic cum tourist gaze, but a sample of abstract human desires or drives, like romantic (possibly restricted) love, loyalty (increasingly to one’s own destiny), mastership, dedication towards a higher aim (justice, benevolence, patriotism), enmity and revenge, hate and violence; in short, topics that are constructed as basic and universal layers of mankind. In fact, these elements can be traced in almost every culture within legends and narratives. Nonetheless, their very compilation within the globalisation process expresses an explicitly Western notion. Turning back to Lee’s movies, a range of exoticising effects can be specified. The following table shows the topics covered by Lee’s films in relation to those audiences which might be attracted by gazing at an exotic other. Table 2: Topics and processes of othering Topic Film title(s) Exoticising audiences Chinese in American Diaspora Pushing Hands; The Wedding Asian and Western audiences Banquet Chinese in China Eat Drink Man Woman; Western audiences (Asian Crouching Tiger, Hidden migrants) Dragon; Lust, Caution Homosexuality The Wedding Banquet; heterosexual audiences Brokeback Mountain Liberal heterosexuality The Ice Storm; Lust, Caution middle class conservative audiences

11 There are enough examples of local variations of global products ranging from ideologies down to concrete products. One might think, for instance, of the mainland Chinese method of sinicising Western ideology by adding the epithet “with Chinese characteristics” or of the national variations of McDonald’s restaurants around the globe, despite the rigid franchise system. This does not only affect the taste, which is ‘nationalised,’ but even place designs. Due to local customs, McDonald restaurants in Saudi-Arabia for example have a separate entrance for female customers and a ‘Ladies section’ – according to observations made by German author Norbert Kron visiting Saudi Arabia as part of an official delegation. (Die Zeit, 2008.03.19, no. 13: 48). 12 This exception needs to be emphasised by an exclamation mark, since there are enough products including movies which in fact still transport unchallenged and unproblematised exotic images and sometimes also an oriental stance. Carsten Storm Taiwanising the World? Lee Ang and Global Cinema – 11 –

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Historical life Sense and Sensibility; Ride (post-) modern audiences with the Devil; The Ice Storm, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon; Lust, Caution Rural or countryside life Ride with the Devil, urban audiences Brokeback Mountain Feminism Sense and Sensibility’; male audiences Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon Hubris of science Hulk Audiences sceptical towards modern science Human metamorphosis Hulk conservative religious audiences Extraordinary power Crouching Tiger, Hidden middle talented audiences Dragon; Hulk

The major exception to this arrangement seems to be the topic of nationalism in The Wedding Banquet, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Lust, Caution, and Ride with the Devil. Critics have repeatedly pointed out that nationalism is an important aspect in these movies. It seems difficult to specify an audience which would look with exotic amusement upon the issue of nationalism unless the whole issue is shifted to the aspect of alien nationalism. Chinese nationalism, especially in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Lust, Caution, might appear exotic to a Western nationalist or postcolonial audience, while American nationalism in Ride with the Devil might be equally exotic to non-American audiences. Most of the audiences specified in table 2 are not defined along ethnic or national borders but along social borders. The postmodern deconstruction of essentialist concepts of identity like nation, ethnicity, class, gender etc. paved way to a fragmentation of identities which are adopted in a parallel and often situational way. Hybridity can therefore be regarded as a major agent in the globalisation process since it allows situational and changing identifications of individuals with different groups which are defined by different and heterogeneous categories. Especially, it allows identifying across ethnic, national, and cultural borders as well as borders set by space and time.13 Arbitrary formations of groups which share a common interest in something, a common experience, or a common lifestyle etc. are both a prerequisite and a result of the globalisation process. However, global entertainment needs to address diverse audiences in order to be truly global. The arrangement made in table 2 indicates that Lee employs a double strategy to increase the diversity of his audiences. Some of Lee’s movies have been analysed as vehicles to voice topics of different marginalised groups like homosexuals, Asian Americans, woman etc. In fact, at least half of the topics listed above meet this criterion. Yet, Lee’s movies can not be claimed to depict an authentic image of these groups; his first two movies in which Lee, himself an Asian migrant in the US, depicts Chinese in the American Diaspora being the exception. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, for instance, was criticised by Asian audiences because of its lack of authenticity. (Chan, K, 2004: 4) Therefore, what attracts audiences who find themselves depicted in his films has to have another quality than authentic legitimacy.

13 Fran Martin speaks of „the pleasure of allo-identification: identification with an image of an ‘other’ or a subject significantly different in some way from the viewer’s own self-identification.” (Martin, 2005: 154 [emphasis in original]). Martin thus emphasises the ability of crossing well-established borders like nationality, ethnicity, or gender. However, allo-identification is only possibly if an image of the “other” is found which proves to be strong enough to replace the usual markers of separation. Carsten Storm Taiwanising the World? Lee Ang and Global Cinema – 12 –

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On the other hand, Lee’s characters are never reduced to a mono-directional representation of the marginalised. Belonging to a marginalised group, however this may affect the protagonists’ lives, is always only part of their lives. Constructing the protagonists as ‘normal’ individuals with quite universal and therefore legitimate desires, hopes, and emotions allows audiences to reconstruct the protagonists’ ‘marginal’ lifestyle as a universal human attempt to navigate the gap between individual desires and forms of decorum or social rules. The markers of marginalisation are thus de-authenticised. Important, for instance, in the marginalised love between men is ‘love’, not ‘man’. The right to love and to share life with the person one loves is emphasised. With regard to a group identity that is not defined by locality but by a range of features related to lifestyle or convictions, the act of ‘de-authenticising’ functions similar as the act of de-localising and deculturing. Consequently, it also allows reculturing and acculturing. At the same time, depicting marginalised groups in a de-authenticised form provides mainstream audiences with the possibility to construct the protagonists as exotic objects. In this case, the “other” is defined by alien lifestyles and convictions and/or by alien heritage, employing a traditional meaning of the ‘exotic’ which first of all means the ‘alien’ or ‘of alien origin’ which appears to be interesting and aroused desire. Thus, Lee formulates the topics in a way that allows multiple audiences to identify with the protagonists. Members of marginalised groups and mainstream audiences can join in reading the film in a universal human mode and at the same time reculture them according to their own experience and their specific setting of culture and ‘Weltanschauung’. The act of simultaneously gazing at the exotic display of the other and of reconstructing the gazing self in the exotic mirror reveals a complex matrix of distancing and identifying. The multitude of possibilities to take an exoticising stance can in a certain sense serve as a signifier of a film’s globality. Additionally, even a de-authenticised message can serve as a vehicle to inscribe original (local, ethnic, national, cultural, or other group-specific) notions into global narratives and practices. However, one has to keep in mind the ambivalence and the possible side effects of exoticism, even of a exoticism that is deliberately distinguished from orientalism and domesticated in the way described above.

Departure from individualism’s arbitrariness and the making of a family The possibility to inscribe an original notion (other than American) into the global narrative and to actively inform globalisation is constitutive for the concept drawn above. A “tenuous balance between exoticism and cultural difference” (Ty, 1996: 60) needs to be established. Therefore, interpreting Lee Ang’s movies as a successful global product requires negotiating their ability to contribute to two aspects: (i) the forming of a universal vision of the world and its values in a way that transcends the borders between East and West and (ii) the inscription of a notion of Chineseness into this process. Wang & You (2007) identify a range of aspects that they label typically Eastern and which Lee transports in his movies: Eastern ethics, especially an intense family consciousness (nongzhong de jiating yishi 浓重的家庭意识), a compromising mixture of sense and sensibility (lizhi he qinggan de ronghe tuoxie 理智和情感的融合妥协), and a final reunion reflecting Chinese tradition (Zhongguo chuantong de tuanyuan jieju 中国传统的团圆结局) as well as Eastern aesthetic styles.14

14 Wang & You (2007) describe Eastern aesthetic styles by a number of phrases, namely “joyous but not indecent, mournful but not distressing” (le er bu yin, ai er bu shang 乐而不淫，哀而不伤), excellent quality, literally “the antelope sticks its horns among branches at night, without a trace it can be found (lingyang gua jiao, wu ji ke qiu 羚 羊挂角，无迹可求), the practice of exaggerated mastery (shenmei zhong xuanran shoufa de yunyong 审美中渲染手法 的运用), a detailed depiction of the beauty of harmony and evenness (hexie junheng zhi mei de xijie biaoxian 和谐均 衡之美的细节表现), and the cultural sign of a natural appearance to the mind (ziran fuxian de dongfang wenhua fuhao 自然浮现的东方文化符号). Carsten Storm Taiwanising the World? Lee Ang and Global Cinema – 13 –

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Quite common in research and legitimated by statements of Lee is grouping together his first three movies to the so called “father-trilogy.” It is characterised by the central role of the father, played by Taiwanese actor Long Sihong in all three movies. The trilogy explores modern challenges of patriarchy, moral values, of family ethics, and of generational gaps. However, taking all of Lee’s works into consideration, another arrangement of movies can be set up, representing them as a row of content related pairs: Table 3: Nr Year Titles Contents 1 1992 推手 Pushing Hands Chinese migrants in the US, parents 1993 囍宴 Wedding Banquet expectations and individual life 2 1994 飲食男女 Eat Drink Man Woman 3 sisters in an interplay of decorum, 1995 Sense and Sensibility propriety, and desire; social restrictions and the inability to communicate within family 3 1997 The Ice Storm American history, ‘war’ within and without 1999 Ride with the Devil family 4 2000 臥虎藏龍 Crouching Tiger, Superpowers in a fantasy world; interrelation Hidden Dragon of individual love, loyalty, and responsibility 2003 Hulk 5 2005 Brokeback Mountain Forbidden love and sex in a restrictive world; 2007 色,戒 Lust, Caution navigating expectations from the outside and internal desire

The pair of The Ice Storm and Ride with the Devil is surely the least convincing, linked mainly by depicting two different aspects of American history. More significant are the remaining four pairs. In pair no. 1, Lee explicitly dealt with aspects of integration and a cultural clash of values in the Chinese Diaspora in the US. In pairs 2, 4 and 5, Lee produced an East-West variation on a chosen topic and explored how similar settings of characters and problems might develop in an Eastern or a Western framework. In fact, this mode of co-covering the East and the West is also expressed by Lee’s long-time producer and screenwriter James Schamus after shooting Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Before, Lee had created three ‘Chinese’ and then three ‘Western’ movies, each in a row. “We always thought Ang would go back and fourth between Chinese- and English- language movies. So we’ve had a guilty conscience that the Chinese side of Ang’s life was not being attended to. Now I hope we’ll be able to yin and yang it bit more regularly.” (quoted after Kemp, 2000: 14). Many studies emphasise a very general human aspect in Lee’s construction of characters. Kemp states on Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon that “Tiger is very recognisable an Ang Lee film – not just in its scrupulously crafted texture and attention to detail but in its humanist focus on personal relationships and its thematic preoccupations.” (Kemp, 2000: 14) Teo emphasises that the characters Li Mubai and Yu Shulian are represented “not as warriors but as repressed lovers.” (Teo, 2005: 202) Similar statements are to be found referring to Brokeback Mountain, opposing the narrowing label ‘gay movie’ (Mendelsohn, 2006) and the importance of everyday experience. (Edgecomb, 2007: 3) It is of course the second time that the label ‘gay movie’ was opposed. Concerning the Wedding Banquet Leong states: “With Lee Ang’s adroit handling, the Taiwanese film industry seems to have finally come to terms with the depiction of this sexual taboo in a humorous and incisive way. Lee neither portrays the gay relationship as weird or twisted nor does he glorify or glamorize the gay subculture in Manhattan. As a story-teller and a moralist, he shows people as they are, without passing judgement on them.” (Leong, 1994) Instead, the advertisements hinted to “5000 Years of Sexual Repression.” (quoted after Leong, 1994). It might be argued that shifting the marginalisation issue from homosexuality to sexuality in general simply met marketing demands in Asia but on the other hand it also reflects much of the films attitude towards humanity. Carsten Storm Taiwanising the World? Lee Ang and Global Cinema – 14 –

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(see also Chiang: 2002: 283; Ty, 1996: 68) The formulation of a universal notion of humanity is, of course, in a very general way under suspicion to express distinctive Western values which are defined as global in order to enact them in the non-West. Kemp quotes a phrase by Lee saying that his theme is “social obligations versus personal freedom.” (Kemp, 2000: 14; see also Ty, 1996: 68) It can be coined more exactly as: individual freedom (especially love) vs. familial expectations and societal rules. Noteworthy enough, this is a Western reading since it brings the individual in opposition to both his family and the society he lives in. Every expectation or rule delimiting the free development of the individual self is regarded as an alienating pressure enacted upon the individual in order to re-confirm familial cum societal standards and power. The line is explicitly drawn along the dichotomy personal vs. collective and family is identified as an alienating collective. (Dariotis & Fung, 1997: 187) In a modern Western understanding, family and love represent quite contradictory terms. Family is attached to conservative patriarchy, norms and rules among relatives. The mere idea of a substantial unity between family and love is marked as a bourgeois ideal. As such it was part of a discourse that re-rectified power in the course of the emerging bourgeois class in order to transform feudal power into a republican regime of public and private spaces. The whole tableau of new values like freedom or personal sincerity, among others, which were attached to aspects of enlightenment, belief in progress, the rise of technology and nation, was employed to define the borders towards the old feudal order. Simultaneously, these values were restricted to a public male sphere. Nonetheless, mutual love free of force became the legitimising factor for marriages, which, in the beginning, was quite in contradiction to the ongoing practice of arranged marriages. This contradiction led way to early feminist claims for emancipation as expressed in Ibsen’s Nora for instance, which turned love and family into oppositional terms. Love became a guarantor for individuality, freedom, an unrestricted self and is seen as a subversive power challenging conservative management of body, emotion and desire in a constraining triangle of ethics empowered by family, church, and rank. Despite the influence of the May-Fourth Movement of 1919 and its concern with women’s liberation and emancipation, the conceptual divide of the terms love and family did not became as fundamental in China as it did in the West. On the contrary, the rise of New Authorianism and the revival of Confucian values as promulgated by modern Neo-Confucians (dangdai xin rujia 当代新 儒家) like Du Weiming 杜維明, Yu Yingshi 余英時, or Liu Shuxian 劉述先, emphasised a positive impact of family ethics (jiating lunli 家庭倫理) in the modern world. The revival of family and other bond-related ethics is understood not only as something Chinese in particular but also as an offer to the Western world to cope with the negative impacts of unlimited individualism. At first sight, Lee Ang focuses on the importance of love and the freedom to share life with a partner of one’s own choice regardless of familial or societal expectations and rules and thus seems to advocate a Western notion of individuality. In Pushing Hands and The Wedding Banquet Lee describes individual choice in contradiction to familial expectations which demand filial piety and the birth of a heir respectively. In Eat Drink Man Woman the contradiction between familial expectations and individual happiness becomes a mutual aspect and extends to the older generation as well. Sense and Sensibility describes the quest of the Dashwood daughters to evade marriage that is only dictated by economic and patriarchal concerns and, instead, to establish individual desire, emotion, and love as decisive categories of marriage. The Ice Storm shows how in a typical 1968 environment the time of adolescence is extended into the age of 30 to 40. The older generation is still on a quest for individuality, experimenting with casual sex, drink, drugs, their life and their kids out of control. The kids are helplessly trying to find their own way. In Ride with the Devil the protagonist chooses to follow his friend and to turn his back on his father. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon depicts a young female aristocrat, Jen, who escapes an arranged marriage, follows her lover, engages in inappropriate sword-fighting and also rebels against the rules of sword- fighting world. In the end, Shu Lian asks Jen: Promise that whatever path you take in your life, you will always be true to yourself .答應我，不論你對此生的決定為何…一定要真誠的對待自己” (min. Carsten Storm Taiwanising the World? Lee Ang and Global Cinema – 15 –

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111) In Hulk, Lee describes the conflict between a criminal father and his son and also the meaning of individual love affecting a cure of the monstrosity of anger. Brokeback Mountain and Lust, Caution separate love from its fixed alignment with family and reconstruct it as a bond of bodily affection, sexuality, and devotion opposing family and society. Thus, Lee inscribes a Western notion of the quest for individual freedom – especially of the younger generation – as the indicator of a global notion of humanity, which in fact could be regarded as Western in origin. Yet, this is only half of the story. Different from modern Western approaches, Lee Ang does not construct individuality and familial bonds as absolute contradictions with the only “solution” to discard traditional family. Instead, he clearly constructs the repressive character of these familial bonds on one hand, but on the other emphasises the importance that the vision of a family unfolds for the protagonists. Their wish to meet what they think is expected from them elucidates that familial bonds do not merely signify a traditional system of patriarchal hegemony over the individual but that familial bonds are still valued as a source providing identity and a home (Heimat). The only category in the globalised and fragmented world of casual relationships that offers reliable bonds is the family. Even if the obligations and limits of familial bonds are regularly in contradiction to personal desires they bestow meaning upon us and they determine origin, heritage, and an essential form of identity. The very first words spoken in the film The Ice Storm show the adolescent Paul Hood alias Tobey Maguire after a night in a train back home to Connecticut. The train broke down in the middle of the night on its way out of New York due to the effects of an ice storm. We see Paul reading a cartoon of the Fantastic Four. Then he reveals his thoughts from the off: “In issue number 141 of the Fantastic Four published in November 1973, Reed Richards has to use his anti- matter weapon on his own son who annihilates and turns in a human atom bomb. It was a typical predicament for the Fantastic Four because they weren’t like the other superheroes; they were more like a family. And the more power they had, the more they could harm each other without even knowing it. That was the meaning of the Fantastic Four: that family was like your own personal anti-matter. The family is the void you emerge from and the place you return to when you die. And that’s the paradox – the closer you’re drown back in the deeper into the void you go.” (min. 3) The description of the family as a void we emerge from reveals its ambivalent status of emptiness which nonetheless is essential origin. Lee here marks family as an empty signifier, reflecting that what keeps family together is build on our assumed expectations rather than on traditional ideals or mythical bonds. Despite the somewhat virtual character of familial bonds it is the reality of our concrete and individual familial relationships and our assumed expectations that the emptiness is filled with. In Eat Drink Man Woman the father, a maitre de cuisine who had lost his taste, gains back his central sense only after the turmoil of family relations has been settled in a satisfying way. Family relations were modernised, yet they are no less reliable than before. Until then, every family member has contravened all expectations of the other family members. The youngest daughter Jianing becomes pregnant and leaves the house to live with her boyfriend as the first of the three daughters. The eldest daughter, a teacher and strong Christian believer who sets up an image of herself as a shy and conservative defender of their family, marries a cool colleague of hers all of a sudden and leaves home as well. The middle daughter Jiaqian, a successful modern business woman stepped down from her career ambitions in favour of her home. Even the father himself leaves the house and marries a schoolmate of his eldest daughter. Mutual assumptions and expectations prove dramatically wrong in this scenario. Washing dishes after a family dinner Jiaqing inquires about her elder sister’s affection towards her:

Jiaqing: And what do you know of my heart? 那妳對我的心瞭解多少？ Jiaren: Nothing. Because you never shared it! 一點也不知道。因為妳從來也不認為 我值得分享妳的心。 Jiaqian: No, you’re wrong. Ever since mother 不對。自從媽死後，妳就開始當起我 died, you acted more like a parent than a 的家長，不是我的姊姊。是妳把我擋 Carsten Storm Taiwanising the World? Lee Ang and Global Cinema – 16 –

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sister. You shut me out. 在外面。 Jiaren: I thought you hated me. 我以為妳討厭我。 Jiaqian: Never. 從來沒有。 (min 77)

Nonetheless, despite all fighting for an individual life, in the end family evolves to be a central place in life. In the very last sequence after the father gained back his taste, the family relationships are reconfirmed:

Father Chu: Daughter! 女兒啊！ Jiaqing: Father. 爸。

The eminent importance of family relationships becomes ultimately obvious in the very moment when they are inexistent or severely violated. In Ride with the Devil when Jake Roedel – again alias Tobey Maguire – turns his back on his father and his German ethnicity to fight in the American Civil War as part of a brutal gang of Southerners called Bushwhackers opposing the Unionists. As the poster reprinted on the DVD cover states: “In a No-man’s Land between North and South, you didn’t fight for the Blue or the Grey… You fought for friends and family.” Jake joins the Bushwhackers because he wants to be together with his friends. The national uproar of some of his comrades in arms is alien to him and soon he finds himself in a precarious position within the group due to his German origin even though his father does not openly join the other Germans in their pro-union solidarity out of fears for his son. Despite row between father and son in the story’s beginning, Jake feels an essential yearning for a family’s unity and his home. When he calms down at the end of the movie and marries a girl that had cared for him and his friends while they were hiding from their enemies in a cave-like hut in the forest, marrying marks two coincidental aspects: he departs from the inhuman condition he lived in and he finds a new family. His father was killed by pro-Unionists because Jakes did not join the Unionists like the other German Americans. Jake put his private concerns over public expectations and thus caused his father’s death. Marriage is therefore not only a fulfilment of love but in a very general sense the making of a new place one belongs to. Lee thus shifts the border between individual and any collective (family and society) and rearranges this dichotomy as individual and family vs. an anonymous society and thus sets up a border of direct personal vs. only indirect and to some sense virtual relationships. Lee thus tries to combine Western subjectivity based on psychology with the Chinese intersubjectivity of the traditional Confucian bonds. Chris Berry argues with regard to The Wedding Banquet that the Chinese family ethics film (jiating lunli pian 倫理片) “is itself a modern and hybrid form that stages the tension between different models of subjectivity, with competing value systems for judging behaviour.” (Berry, C., 2003: 186; see also Ti, 2005: 105). It is, however, not only the Eastern tradition of seemingly harmonious familial relationships that is challenged, but also the Western emphasis on individualism. First of all, the images of both traditions seem to be exaggerated in their historical reconstruction as overall homogeneous concepts. The story in The Wedding Banquet reveals that the father Gao, a general of the KMT who fled to Taiwan, turned his back on his family in a much harsher way than his son by breaking all connections. The father followed national cum ideological ideals, thus violating his familial obligations. (Chow, 2007: 138) To choose one’s own path in life regardless of familial commitments is therefore not completely alien to the Chinese world. The modern aspect lies in its being negotiated within family, even if a restricted form. On the other hand, it is the Western film Sense and Sensibility in which the ideal of sisterhood is displayed stronger than in any Chinese film by Lee, even though social restrictions, the inability to communicate properly, and silencing, construct family as a place struck by wrong assumptions about the other members motifs. (Gay, 2003: 91, 104–105) Carsten Storm Taiwanising the World? Lee Ang and Global Cinema – 17 –

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Ding Fuyun argues in an article on family ethics as seen in Chinese family novels (jiating xiaoshuo 家庭小说), that in the 20th century the principle relation was shifted from the father-son to the husband-wife relation. A major effect of this change is an ongoing readjustment of the relationship’s character from a hierarchical ideal to an ideal of equality. (由“主—客”关系向“ 主—主”关系转化, Ding 2008: 133) Notwithstanding the gap between ideal and reality that Ding does not mention, it is an important impact of modernity on Chinese family ethics is that in general the traditional five bonds have become more equal and have thus been modernised. The modernisation and equalisation of each of the traditionally hierarchical bonds manifests a formative Western influence on a threshold of Chineseness, yet Lee’s handling of relationships in his “Western” movies also inscribes a Chinese notion of mutual bonds into the modern Western tradition.15 Without any doubt, the most important familial bond in Chinese tradition as well as in Lee’s movies is the father – son relation, or in Lee’s modernised version: father – child, explicitly including daughters. The role of the father and of patriarchy features prominently in most of his films, even in the adaptation of the Jane Austen novel Sense and Sensibility in which the death of the father elucidates the vulnerability of his 2nd wife’s family while the oldest and only son was born to his 1st wife. The absence of the patriarch fundamentally determines the protagonist’s lives and their desire to marry in order to regain a secure position in society. In an attempt to categorize the “father trilogy”, Ma Sheng-mei argues that the genre term “‘domestic tragicomedy’ is an appropriate description for Lee because of the existence of the Chinese term Chia-t’ing Pei-hsi-chu (family tragicomedy) with its suggestions of Chia-t’ing lun-li (family ethics), which is exactly one of the axes on which the films are constructed. Family ethics revolving around a patriarchal figure is, after all, the foundation of Confucian cosmology.” (Ma, 1996: 193) Ma thus tends to neglect the modern developments within the father – son relationship in favour of a homogenous vision of Chinese tradition. At stake is, in fact, rather the issue of transforming the institution of fatherhood in order to meet demands and expectations of the contemporary world. (Schamus in Chiang, 2002: 274) Quite generally the conflict driven relationship between fathers and their children, both sons and daughters, is central to Lee’s plot development. While The Ice Storm, Ride with the Devil, and Brokeback Mountain owe important aspects of the protagonists’ psychological handling to the father – son conflict, thus acknowledging the still existent strength of this relationship in the West, the conflict comes to a peak in Hulk. Lee turns a comic book story about the hubris of science, the genesis of a transforming super human being, and the struggle for ultimate power into a drama about the relationships between Bruce, the son, and his father as well as between Betty, the daughter, and her father. The ambivalent and sometimes contradictory forces of these relationships unfold a matrix within which the plot takes place and which serves as the basic source of the protagonist’s action and reaction. The film’s topic includes ethics of military scientific research, responsibility for its results, prosecution, interference of military forces into public matters and one might imagine what a leftist Western director would have made out of this subject. Lee succeeds to reduce the political issues inherent in Hulk to a studio theatre like play of interpersonal thrives, desires, and ideals that culminate in visions of personal rectification and of bonds determined by love and family. Lee states that constructing father – son conflicts in his movies was caused by his relationship to his own father. “I must have had a plan to weaken my father movie by movie. It is funny, by the

15 The whole debate about Western influence on Chinese and other traditional practices and identities is distorted by an inadequate homogenisation of both traditions. Neither is the Chinese or any other tradition as homogeneous as the epithet on 5000 years suggests, nor is the whole of the Western tradition covered by the aspects of enlightenment, imperialism, and modernism. In fact, in terms of tradition, modernism is quite new in the West as well, no matter how radical and sustainable the shifts and rearrangements have been. It also needs to be emphasised that Confucian ethical core concepts like ritual (li 禮), righteousness (yi 義), benevolence (ren 仁), or filial piety (xiao 孝) have changed dramatically during the Chinese tradition and their understanding in Qing times differs widely from that of Han times. Carsten Storm Taiwanising the World? Lee Ang and Global Cinema – 18 –

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Hulk I ended up blowing him up.” (Berry, M., 2005: 336) Yet, he went on reformulating the father later on. Lee refers to Brokeback Mountain and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon in an interview taken on January 21, 2005. (Berry, M., 2005: 356) In the latter as well as in Lust, Caution the agency of authority is shifted from fatherhood to a master and a mixture of secret lover cum commanding officer respectively. Like family, the relationship master – pupil, which is one of the core elements in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, impose rules and codes of propriety upon people. The depiction of the sword-fighting world unfolds an exotic fascination for its image of freedom, which the young Jen Yu (aka Jiao Long in the English dubbed version) played by Zhang Ziyi refers to: “I guess it is wonderful being a Wudang, being totally free 在江湖上走來走去的是不是很好玩？” Yet, the seemingly independent and sovereign Shu Lian (Michelle Yeoh) replies: “Even our jianghu world has a certain code, integrity, trust, friendship. Without rules none of us would survive long 走 江湖，靠得是人熟講信、講義。應下來的、就要做到。不講信義，可就玩不長了.” (min. 10)16 Shu Lian as well as later on Li Mu Bai (Chow Yun-fat) try to preserve and simultaneously reform the rules. (Atchley, 2003: paragraph 24) Lee not only pays tribute to the dominance of Western modernity but simultaneously undermines typically Western, bourgeois and capitalist constructions of subjectivity. The decisive element in his construction of personal freedom, familial bonds and societal rules is the severely Western figure of conflict. Especially the understanding of the father – son relationship is heavily informed by psychological knowledge which first of all reflects mental formations within Western bourgeois society. Yet, different from the usual handling of this conflict in Western art forms, where the conflict is constructed as inescapable and irresolvable, Lee rearranges it in dialectical manner. Conflict leads to a rearrangement of the relationship and then to a new position of harmony. In the end family is reunited, or reformed, or a new family is found and forms a vulnerable but practical worldly version of “the void you emerge from and the place you return to when you die.” (The Ice Storm, min. 3) The ability to overcome the conflict and to reform the traditional bonds is surely a Chinese notion of ethics that Lee inscribes into the process of globalisation.

Freedom from the Public Sphere Looking at the whole of Lee’s movies, the most striking element to observe is Lee’s overall strategy to use the family and the private sphere as a signifier of a wide range of public problems. Every public aspect described in his movies places society, values, homosexuality, nationalism, heroism, and so on in a challenging transition. Most important, it is depicted within the private realm of family and the individual. I suggest that this realm is in fact much more than merely a narrative signifier for Lee. It is the central place in which life with its joys, its absurdity, and its conflicts takes place. In modernity, it is among the main achievements of national societies and their ideal of the community of (enlightened) citizens, who are eager to participate in decision making of state institutions, to have placed the ‘political’ in the centre of the state discourse. The public sphere became almost identical with the ‘political’ sphere. At the same time, modernity is characterised by a convergence of the public and the private spheres. Hannah Arendt wrote in the late 1950s that the modern nation is that “curiously hybrid realm where private interests assume public significance.” (Arendt, 1958: 33) The convergence undermined a (pre-modern) border between things which were meant to be public and those which were meant for seclusion. (Arendt, 1994: 67) Uncovering the private results in the figure of the ‘uncanny’ representing those things which were drawn from the hidden (heimlich) into the public and thus became ‘unheimlich’. 17 Arendt’s

16 The translation is not always accurate. I quoted from the respective language versions, which are slightly different. 17 The figure of the ‘uncanny’ has become popular in Cultural Studies bearing a strong focus on Sigmund Freud’s use of the term. Although there is some overlapping, Arendt’s notion of the uncanny differs from Freud’s in her emphasis Carsten Storm Taiwanising the World? Lee Ang and Global Cinema – 19 –

!! DRAFT – NOT FOR CITATION !! observation is strongly influenced by early 20th century history and thus connected to the question of totalitarian ideology, namely in Nazi and communist states. In the late 1960s the political sphere increased dramatically. In a different way than before, private life was lifted up into the field of public debate and turned into a political signifier. The development of the late 1960s was initiated from below in an attempt to reconfigure the own life in a political framework in order to participate actively in public discourses. It was thus an expression of (mostly) leftist cum democratic convictions. In totalitarian states on the other hand, the attempt to regulate the subjects and to interpret private life as a signifier of ideological consciousness was initiated from above. It was an instrument of state repression carried out by state institutions. This new Western view of the late 1960s was coined in a key sentence, saying: everything is political, and especially: everything private is political. The Western modern history of art provides numerous examples illustrating this convergence and the impetus of making the private public. Many Western films depict how marginalised protagonists fight for their right to voice themselves in a public arena, making the film itself a political statement. The 1993 film Philadelphia on aids, directed by Jonathan Demme and starring Tom Hanks and Denzel Washington is a typical example. Lee’s mode of constructing life opposes this vision. On the contrary, Lee’s credo might be: everything is private. The private here includes the individual, family, and at the utmost a small in- group as the swords-fighting pseudo-family in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Lee points to the fact that still most of peoples’ life is determined by their everyday interrelations with family, friends, or colleagues and that this is the very concrete world which first and foremost is affected by public affairs. The public here is no longer the sphere in which all individuals are collectively participating to shape their polis. It has turned into an alien element that intrudes the only form of life that guarantees self-fulfilment and identity: the private. It has already been stated that Hulk reduces the aspects like hubris of science and the struggle for ultimate power in favour of personal relationships. The father – son/daughter and the lovers’ relationships are formative elements of the protagonists’ motifs and behaviour. In fact, this is rather astonishing. Different from other comic book adaptations like Spiderman, Batman, X-Men, or Fantastic Four, Lee presented his film not as the typical fun movie but a self-reflecting myth- inspired allegory. The central element was not about the significance the Ovidian metamorphosis might have for the public but about the transforming power of anger and fury within the protagonist’s psyche. (Wood, 2003) In Ride with the Devil, the central conflict, the abolition issue, is mentioned only randomly. Ideology plays no important part in the mental design of the protagonists nor does it influence their decision making. Brokeback Mountain, another movie that in a Western sense would call for constructing societal significance in the handling of the topic of homosexuality, reduces the topic to the realm of the two lovers and their family and a few incidents with people whom they personally know like their boss at Brokeback Mountain, Joe Aquirre, played by Randy Quaid, who refuses to hire Ennis Del Mar alias Heath Ledger again because of his sexual orientation. Yet, none of the protagonists try to voice themselves in public discourse in order to claim rights. Here, the ‘uncanny’ becomes in an ambivalent way hidden again. Most striking in this sense is Lust, Caution about an espionage affair in World War II Shanghai. The highly sensitive story based on a novel by Eileen Chang radically reconstructs the communist narrative about mainland Chinese nationalism. The resistance against the Japanese aggressor and its Chinese collaborators is placed within the realm of the KMT secret service, thus resisting the image of the CCP’s moral monopoly vis-à-vis a KMT’s corruption, injustice, and indifference. Also the important figure of enthusiastic students being a vanguard of political consciousness and leftist nationalism, which holds a major position in the communist narrative, is shifted to KMT near students. The main plot, an attempt at the life of a high ranking collaborator, is an act of inevitable national significance. Nonetheless, Lee presents us a story about love and sex. The heroine, the Chinese student trying to spy on the Japanese collaborator, is not at all depicted as a person

on political engagement as described in the oppositional figure of vita activa vs. vita contemplativa in The Human Condition instead of Freud’s mainly psychological notion. Carsten Storm Taiwanising the World? Lee Ang and Global Cinema – 20 –

!! DRAFT – NOT FOR CITATION !! motivated by political consciousness. She joins the student resistance group because she is in love with their leader and wants to impress him and be near to him. Later on he becomes the KMT secret service officer responsible for controlling her and planning the assassination. For him she agrees to seduce the collaborator in an undercover task. Innocent as she is in consummating sex she is drawn into a sexual affair that widely excludes the outer world much in the fashion of Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1972 Le dernier Tango à Paris aka L’ultimo tango à Parigi, featuring Marlon Brando and Maria Schneider. For her the sex relationship takes place in a bubble of sexual pleasure and addiction, in which political aspects are almost absent. Despite scrutinising the official national narrative of the communist heroic and ‘clean’ anti-Japanese resistance, the film mixes prevalent Chinese notions of the ‘political’ (the resistance and assassination plot) and the ‘private’ (love and sex). Consequently, the heated debate in mainland China was as much about the film being a ‘traitor movie’ as about the ‘pornographic’ sex-scenes and especially about mixing the ‘heroic’ with the ‘filthy’.18 Within this sensitive field, Lee constructs the protagonists as driven by personal desires instead of political consciousness. In the situation in which the nation is at crisis and everything seems to be of national significance, the political and public is strikingly absent from the protagonists’ considerations. However, this withdrawal from the public sphere does not – in a conservative manner – indicate a privacy that is ignorant of political developments or that neglects the need for social engagement, for voicing and acts of resistance. The urge to life up to personal desires and the own free will, to find one’s place in the world shared with a person of one’s own choice is inscribed in Lee’s protagonists in a way too fundamental to be perceived as totally apolitical. Instead, the central place of life is shifted from an emblematic political space towards family and/or a privately organised close group of people connected through personal bonds. This re-vitalising of a private sphere reminds of some Daoist convictions which strongly oppose public engagement. However, Lee does not advocate Daoist visions of the uneducated, non- alienated, simple-mindedness of those inhabiting the “Peach Blossom Springs” 桃花源 as described in Tao Yuanming’s 陶淵明 poem. Instead, navigating the individual cum familial matrix of desires and mutual expectations is an act that itself informs public processes, yet it does so not in the intentional way of modern Western public discourse. Shifting the decisive element of informing societal processes from public representation to the private life seems to employ a modernised version of a wu wei 無為 principle, which does not aim at totally refraining from any action, but only from deliberately acting in public affairs. The importance of a modernised understanding of the traditional Chinese bonds has already been mentioned. It needs to be specified, however, that Lee depicts only four out of the five traditional bonds, which to some extent are modernised by being gendered in order to include females alongside of males: father – son/daughter,19 older brother/sister – younger brother/sister, man/wife – wife/man (until now excluding only lesbian relationships and not necessarily connected to marriage), and friends. What obviously is missing is the bond traditionally in the first place: ruler – subject. The line that is thereby drawn between the first bond “ruler – subject” and the remaining four bonds translates Arendt’s notion of public and private spheres into a Chinese framework. Lee thus determines the private sphere not only to be the more important one in human life but also to be the larger one. The political element that serves as the main impact of the public sphere and which resembles the ruler – subject bond in Confucian ethics is reduced. If the public sphere

18 See for instance Wu, 2007. A query in the databank China Academic Journals Full-text Database 中国期刊全文数据 库, available in Germany at the Staatsbibliothek Berlin, readily shows the sheer amount of articles on Lust, Caution in mainland China of which most are criticising Lee’s reconstruction of the national narrative on one of the reasons mentioned above. 19 The mother as a role model similar to the father is strikingly missing in Lee’s tableau. While sons and daughters are represented as equally strong characters in Lee’s different movies, mothers are generally quite weak characters compared to fathers. In many movies the role of the mother is missing completely within the protagonist’s families, namely, Pushing Hands, Eat Drink Man Woman, Ride with the Devil, and Hulk. Even in Sense and Sensibility, the mother, Mrs. Dashwood, is not portrayed as an equally strong character as chef Chu in Eat Drink Man Woman. Carsten Storm Taiwanising the World? Lee Ang and Global Cinema – 21 –

!! DRAFT – NOT FOR CITATION !! gains momentum it does so as part of private life. Private life is no longer an inevitable marker of the public sphere. Instead, Lee installs the public and societal as a signifier for the private, as a marker for individual and in-group phenomena with the family being their most obvious and important formation. This vision of the private and the family as the core place of importance disarticulates the unquestioned and sometimes emblematic understanding of Western modernity that everything private is necessarily a signifier of the public sphere of power, exploitation, social differences, labour etc. It is the vision of a world which is formed by personal relations rather than structural relations. However, and this is Lee’s paradox, this vision needs to be transmitted through a process of “re- publicating” the private again. The narrative of the individual cum familial private realm can only be spread through methods addressing the public as an audience, in this case the cinemas. This puts the reconstructed private sphere under a public global discourse and its specific rules of decultering, recultering and accultering. The possibility to reculture the ‘de-authenticised’ in a universal mode of human desires and hopes is a major factor of both Lee’s success and furthermore for global cinema in general. Lee thus constructs his vision of a kind of universal humanity that transgresses borders between groups defined by quite heterogeneous categories: a humanity that attempts to neglect established borders and to adopt an entertaining mode of transition (trans-cultural, trans-national, trans-stratum, trans- class, trans-gender, etc.). Exoticism can thus be regarded as a decisive factor for global entertainment. It arouses interest in alien authenticity and increases options of merchandising and addressing audiences alike. Addressability is an important factor in globalisation that combines economic and intellectual aspects. The exotic film operates as a distant mirror of the exoticising subject. However, the exotic in this version is not necessarily the ‘uncanny.’ Instead, it has turned into a source of pleasure and arbitrariness that levitates almost as freely as the warriors in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. The exotic as a device of global cinema is but an option to either reculture meaning and identity or to construct the self in the mirror. Yet, it is a option of globality offering mutual transcultural flows. Lee inscribes a modernised version of family ethics and Western individuality into Chinese culture but he also re-strengthens familial bonds and devotion to people personally known to each other instead of being obliged to individualism or ideology into the Western discourse. On a second level however, he inscribes a Chinese notion of the private sphere into the de-privatised Western culture of public affairs, a notion that installs aspects of propriety and decorum both of which are based no longer on general rules but on individual understanding of expectations that we have and that others have for us. Lee reconstructs family and the biographical coherence of the individual life as elements of constancy which inevitably structure and determine life. This hints to the difficulties the individual has in postmodern globalisation to form personal relationships and to engage in public affairs beyond a superficial level of online chats under the safety, yet also the arbitrariness of virtual identities. Perhaps, postmodern globalisation creates a public space that has become far too wide, unstructured, and intangible to reveal the uncanny modern convergence of the private and the public sphere in the sense of Arendt. Given the, in many aspects, chaotic multitude of information, the public might in fact be the best place to hide. Lee makes us – in the non trivial sense claimed by Schamus – more Chinese by reconstructing Western visions of agency, of behaviour, of desire, of mental dispositions and of the relationship and interaction between private and public realms. We are made Chinese because the Western notion of individualism is reintegrated into a world of bonds and decorum. We are constructed along a matrix of Chineseness that is a severely modernised and civil concept of Confucian cum Daoist values. This is maybe the triumph of global capitalism: success at the box office is the – maybe the only – way to voice yourself and since capitalism is Western in origin one might well argue, that restricting the process of voicing to capitalist parameters exactly elucidates the grade of alienation of the non-Western other. However, capitalism itself changes and is far from being a historically Carsten Storm Taiwanising the World? Lee Ang and Global Cinema – 22 –

!! DRAFT – NOT FOR CITATION !! fixed concept. It works different in Taiwan and Japan than it does in the US or Germany. Nonetheless, Lee is successful in inscribing Confucian values of family and love as well as Daoist values of private life into his films. And he provides us with an ambivalent vision of a modernised and de-located Chineseness being a core of global culture.

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