The Terrorizers
Released in 1986, directed by Edward Yang
The Terrorizers is an excellent example of high-achieving post-modernism narrative, a work behind which we can sense a powerful analytic intelligence in motion, but which translates this working into aesthetics while withholding the analysis – Edward Yang has a lot on his mind, and lips shut tight. Yang had a varied career before turning to film. He was a drawing prodigy, and later a computer engineer – note the evidence here for a strong ability to conceptualize complexity – and I like to imagine the result if he hadn’t become a filmmaker. I picture him as a second Wallace Stephens, toiling away at his desk job, and in spare moments creating a compacted, self-signaling art. Instead film led him into the close, cohesive society of the Taiwanese New Wave, for which his house in Taipei eventually served as the informal headquarters.
Within the New Wave, Yang is usually classified as the urbane chronicler of the professional-class; his body of work is contrasted with Hsiao-hsien’s more rural and rough-and-tumble films. However Yang’s charisma - and he is very charismatic – is if anything high-suburban, the charm of the well-accepted, whose cynicism is mostly self-directed. While The Terrorizers is intentionally a bit ragged in places, in terms of plot and pacing, its shot-by-shot composition is serenely competent, a procession of images so polished that there is an anonymity to them. The personality comes out in the effortful consistency of the beauty.
From its name and its surface qualities of violence and cruelty, one might imagine that beauty is not in fact a goal with which this film is concerned, or that it is anti-beauty; but that I think it to mix things up, and this is a film about the dangers of mixing things up. Yet mix-ups are also encouraged – there are at least three main plots, linkages are hazy, and data from one will at times spill mindfully into another (a favorite technique is to allow the audio from one plot-stream to play over a scene from another, often in a way that is deceptive). We spend the most time with Zhou Yufen (Cora Miao), a would-be novelist, and her husband Li Lizhong (Lee Li-chun), a doctor. They are comfortable but dissatisfied, typical victims of ennui, and in themselves not very interesting – none of the characters in the film are interesting in and of themselves, they all require structure and contrast to resonate. Lizhong wants to be promoted at his hospital, and behaves badly in the process; Yufen wants to feel more alive, and starts an affair. This is all mostly just sketched in – the promotion stuff in particular is bare bones. If it were done more lavishly the film would be much longer, and that is a direction Yang eventually went in, producing almost a soap opera aesthetic. Here however by compressing the plot he is able to focus more on mood, on imagery – in short this is an art film, even as it is suspicious of art.
The other two plotlines originate in the film’s opening sequence, a shoot-out on the streets of Taipei. Documenting is Ma Shaojun (Ma Shao-Chun), a rich young man, just drafted, interested in photography; escaping is a young woman (Wang An), a criminal who at first seems small-time, and who is referred to in the film as White Chick (her father is an American soldier). Shaojun gets some photos of White Chick, and in the way of these things becomes obsessed with her. Eventually he rents the apartment where she was holed up during the shoot-out, and there sets up a darkroom/shrine to her image. White Chick, who has injured her leg in the escape, knows nothing about this and spends her convalescence making poisonous prank phone calls. One of these by chance reaches Yufen – White Chick pretends to be her husband’s lover, eager to confess, and asks Yufen to meet her in person. The address she gives is her old apartment; Yufen goes there and comes face to face with Shaojun, a meeting that means nothing to either of them – at the time – and ends without a word. This is the first time all three of the plots converge; they will converge twice more, and then through a daring act of subtraction, once less.
Yang conceived The Terrorizers as a puzzle box, and not the least puzzle is who is doing the terrorizing and who is being terrorized. Good answers might be “everybody” and “everybody”. As it progresses the film squishes its characters around in haphazard, lifelike fashion, releasing the tension on one only to exert it on another, before circling back again for more punishment of the first. One critical read is that this is all being done as an illustration of pains of modernity, the alienation of the city – although Taipei, with its lushnesses and its scenic jumble of decay and clean modernity is hardly, as presented by Yang, alienating. I would differ in any case, and would place the malady internally. Characters suffer to the extent that they lose touch with the real; and, quite specifically, mistaking art for reality is positioned as a dangerous mistake (again, a mix up). Shaojun, when he finally crosses paths with White Chick again, shows her a mural he has made, a grid of papers taped to the wall which together display a massively enlarged photograph of her face – a physical instantiation of his outsized (artistic) conception of her. They spend the night together and he lays out a potential future, her waiting for him while he does his military service, then presumably matrimony. Meanwhile we know that since mending her leg White Chick has been picking up johns and robbing them. When Shaojun falls asleep she considers robbing him too. She doesn’t, she just leaves. Shaojun wakes up and opens a window to watch her go, and in one of Yang’s effortful, beautiful images a breeze comes into the room and sets the pages making up her face to fluttering, decomposing Shaojun’s fantasy for us.
Yet the most deceived character is certainly Lizhong. Eventually Yufen leaves him for her lover, telling him that their marriage has been essentially empty ever since she miscarried their first, only child. Now independent, she publishes her novel to great acclaim. The subject matter is a man who cheats on his wife; she discovers the affair and leaves him, he kills her. Through a tricky bit of storytelling Lizhong finds out about White Girl’s prank call, and decides that the fake affair was transmuted into Yufan’s fiction, which thus serves as an accurate record of why she left him (and thus also as a prophecy that he will kill her for doing so). Armed with this information, he tries to win her back; it’s left to Yufan to point out that art is art and reality is reality, and that she left him for comprehensive reasons that a single corrected fact can’t outweigh.
Lizhong continues to spiral downwards, and at this point I began to worry that the film would conclude with a somewhat boring scenario, The Man Who Cracks. And it does: after a further setback, losing his chance of promotion at the hospital, Lizhong steals a gun and goes on a shooting rampage. This is the final convergence of the plots, a violent yanking of the narrative threads together that carelessly defies logic, and that looks forward to the baroque structures of coincidence that films like Crash would eventually deploy – and yet it is also a critique of them, because at the height of Lizhong’s violence his actions are abruptly cancelled, and we are thrown back to Yufang who, in bed with her lover, now startles awake, seemingly distraught. Lizhong’s rampage has been a fantasy or dream or delusion (whose is unclear – maybe the viewer’s) – he has killed only himself. We at first think that his death has created a kind of psychic disturbance in Yufang, but a moment later – in the film’s final shot – she leans over and vomits. She has morning sickness, and we realize that she is pregnant. The failure that she had identified at the core of her marriage has a chance to be remedied, now that she is with someone else; and the film, which had seemed poised to end in an explosion of Lizhong’s righteous masculine violence, now dismisses him as incidental, and his rampage as too flagrantly cinematic to be believed. The pain of fiction is, in this instance, subsumed by the mundane progress of the real.
