“Goodbye, Dragon Inn”: On the afterlife of cinema house culture

Among the many self-regarding films that may seem to pose the question, “What is cinema?,” Tsai Ming-Liang’s Goodbye, Dragon Inn (2003) singularly focuses on the experience not just of spectatorship, but of being-there in a theater: a seat tenant or theater worker, looking at the screen on occasion or distractedly. Cinema theaters are spaces of art, which in our world is important, somehow. Tsai poses the question in a moment of twilight; this theater, if not cinema itself, is closing shop; this is its last show. 

From the outset, this dubious idea of ‘importance’ is thrown at its viewers, and us: the film (being screened) within the film (that we are watching), King Hu’s 1967 marital arts/historical epic classic Dragon Inn, begins with a soundtrack over title credits, telling us what to look for, or at. Like a teacher admonishing school kids goofing off to pay attention, the narrator announces the identity of the characters and story to come, underscoring the aesthetic of monumentality that the film we’re in is bidding farewell to.  

Tsai is a cinematic poet of darkly funny scenes of urban alienation, whose characters inhabit spaces and times of a post-post-neorealist everydayness. This film is concerned with the banal, unheroic lives of the theater’s denizens. No longer a reassuring given, the meaning and value of the viewing experience has become a puzzling question. These people are not buying glamour; they, and we, are left attending to what appears while sojourning in such a place for a certain time. The theater’s paying viewers and its workers, answering to different forms of compulsion, are thus similarly situated. Spectacle displaced onto spectators, this is cinema not just slowed but shifted in thematic focus, onto what is at most the threshold of a narratable imaginary world. Heir, certainly, to the neorealist concern with everyday life and the post-Warhol evisceration of value, which opposes both spectacle, by definition extraordinary (in a reversal, anything and anyone is interesting, as the fascinating is what is looked at), and narrative, which in being eventful both satisfies a desire and surprises as exception to the expectations of a norm.

A well-dressed man stands on a landing, smoking, contemplating (—what?), then walks off. A man approaches another, with the curiosity of unbridgeable strangeness. He volunteers that he is Japanese (an official stranger, as if that explained or changed anything), and acts the part (“sayonara,” a bow). In the theater, he gyrates in his seat, approaching, sans speech or touch, his older male neighbor, looking ahead impassively at the screen. A woman theater patron approaches a man, takes the seat behind him, and eats candy from a bucket noisily. Men posed adjacently at urinals, with the togetherness of a fishing expedition, an arrangement not unlike in the theater seats. The limping theater manager woman examines objects in the theater’s attics and alleys with the same blank, inarticulate curiosity others devote to their fellows, whom she never meets, while ambling through the various spaces of the theater building; though, in a final disconnect, she will thoughtfully leave some food for her lone colleague, the male projectionist disclosed to us uniquely at the end. In the projector room, she watches a cigarette burning near an overstuffed ashtray while we hear the sounds of the machine. We see her shadow on the wall she faces, staring with impassive concern, and hear the film’s soundtrack, a suggestion of something eventful elsewhere. We later see her in her sole, dramatic, encounter: an artful play of light from the projector displaying a pattern of white polka dots on her face and body introduces a unique shot/counter-shot between her enraptured gaze and the screen heroine in momentous, heroic, violent action; she is entranced, as if she has found an identity to change into or be recognized recognizing. What are all these people, whom we see curiously, anxiously looking, thinking? What they encounter may not be important, but it’s there. 

There is a social life of encounters missed because they are oddly demotivated and depersonalized, framed as it is by an overwhelming ennui. (This concept, which has no good English equivalent, became known through French novels (Flaubert) and poetry (Baudelaire) as characterizing modern life, suggesting lassitude, melancholy, and indifference as well as boredom; the experience is no stranger to film and life in our time: think of the New York of Edward Hopper’s paintings). Men wander about, like flâneurs with uncertain purpose, in the auxiliary spaces of the theater building, a delapidated near-ruin that looks like an empty warehouse, encountering others, inspecting them as they might the detritus of things. Their essentially silent encounters are uncertain, tentative, and lead nowhere; aptly, one of them remarks that this is a place of ghosts. They are unconsummated (no stories to conclude) because fragmentary and because the spectral bodies are untouchable in this place of visible disconnect. Are we to compare what these people are mostly not looking at, on the theater’s screen, with what we are? A traveling detective on screen explains the object of his search; cut to one of the theater patrons, checking out his neighbor. Enigmas are unresolved, and ritual encounters lose their revelatory magic, as the spectacular devolves into the spectral. 

Affectively, we are in new territory as well. With, as in Warhol, and Beckett, the object of desire no longer defined by exceptionality, hope and despair may give way to a wistful, bittersweet melancholy, poised between regret and contentment, as what was once enchantingly alive becomes a memory. Hence the melancholy Chinese song played at the end, in the empty street outside, as the theater’s (only) two principal workers leave, separately, alone, like us going home probably, in any case somewhere else. 

The film’s queer themes are set in these scenes of modern life and adapted to its character, with eroticism as a possibility, in (what are for both the women and men) cruising-like encounters with anonymous encounters with strangers, in these derelict spaces, with an interest de-centered from spectacle, where the gaze of the one looking, as important as always in cinema, is freed from movement with purpose and sense. It as if the remoteness of screen personas, which structurally are untouchable, were transferred to real life, and the fascination remains, but without a clear object, and so becomes a puzzled curiosity. 

Cinema at its most confidently spectacular was the most lifelike art form, its totalizing perceptual character and consequent experiential intensity giving it enormous aesthetic power. This situates classical cinema at an extreme. Inasmuch as art is defined as the creation of significant form, the difference between contemplating an artwork and being involved in a creative process concerns the boundary between it and chaos. The spectator in classical narrative cinema is supposed to not see that boundary, but artists are concerned with it constantly. Lacking completely that mania for a form that hides its failures, there is an art of our time that concerns itself with this boundary and its chaotic nether side. Rather than, as in many films from The Godfather to Barbie, a critique of the false satisfactions of the very spectacle and identification that the film itself depends on, it starts from the accomplished impoverishment of eventfulness, lacking any will to mastery. (The theater manager embodies this with her limp, which is not an injury, but another condition; and something you might not buy but could well be. Such conditions need not have value but may just be, as in some Zen aesthetic, what is real, as there). The contrast of the film’s theater and screen spaces figures that difference, with the well-wrought screen space in utter eclipse. For us filmgoers, Tsai is interested in our poverty of experience, the weakness of our aesthetic enchantment, our lassitude, potential for distraction and boredom, for a perhaps (though this remains a question) affirmative ennui.

Film as entertainment is an art form understood, in the modern world, as a mode of experience and activity that is the ‘other' of labor’s utilitarian and servile character, teleological and deferred; a site of the more autonomous, and autotelic or immediate, realization of desires. Art gives a “promise of happiness” to people who may be unhappy otherwise; no wonder it’s such big business. Many people seem to want to live entirely inside this frame, today’s device-connected world being perhaps the most extreme form yet of this condition, which would stave off loneliness and boredom in a mandatory enjoyment. That must be for many why they would spend afternoons, when having nothing better to do, in places like Taipei’s Fu Ho Grand Theater, seen here showing its last picture to a handful of viewers, distributed, together or apart, in its thousand seats. Seeking excitement perhaps, they are willing to be bored; their (interesting) alienation may not be a complaint. This is cinema in crisis, showing us what we see when it is falling apart. The breakdown is not an event in the narrative, but has already taken place when the film begins. The theater is being deprived of cinema itself. Maybe Tsai thinks we no longer know what to do with cinema, and it is just in realizing that that we realize we don’t know what to do with our lives. His late (or post-) modernity means that he finds this more a truth than a problem. 

Theatrical cinema spaces are a curious inflection of theater as an art form bound to such spaces (in a way that film is not, a fact that grounds some qualified hope). Indeed, not just most ideas of cinema, but much of our ethical and political language, and thus also our ideas of life, come from theatrical models. At first, theater staged, without resolving, social conflicts. In Plato, spectacle and spectators had become separate domains of being, the one dissembling and false, the model for modern ‘ideology’, the other a space of assembled prisoners, confined to seats, enslaved by their credulous enjoyment. In Aristotle, the prisoners become subjects of spiritual therapy effected by representations. Today, some theorists find imprisoning the forms of our therapeutic society. Imprisonment structures time without event or expectation, hopelessly enduring, in an experience deprived of teleology, perhaps of meaning. In fact, while film is the art form most saturated in the activity of experiencing, the theater (or other) worker is an ideal ‘bound’ observer in this sense: Doing time in some place where you have to be is precisely a mode of laboring, still its principal one, whether or not the devices world is poised to change these conditions by making everyone their own, freely and wildly communicative, entrepreneur, responsible for their own labor and exploitation. Plato’s passive prisoner cannot act, but that model may be passing, along with the theater, a place, like factory and prison, office and classroom, of assembly, with a massed public. But, even with the film on your phone, the infra-screen subway or whatever remains; Agamben’s ‘infancy’ of being always partly outside and ‘before’ language, image, or meaning remains. 

An elderly man, a grandson in hand, is hailed after the show by one who recognizes his former teacher. “Have you come to see the film?” “No one comes to the movies anymore,” the older informs the younger ironically, “and no one remembers us anymore.” Twenty years on, we know this isn’t quite true. And we seem ‘fallen’ in a way that admits, and needs, no saving. Our experience lacks the tragedy or comedy of narrative, though admitting much comedy of incident, like unexpected encounters. If moving images abandon theaters, their/our capacity for wonder and making sense of experience, is, along with our ennui, distraction, and truancy, here to stay.