Loss of Face
BY
Nick Pinkerton
On Edward Yang’s Taipei-set, corporate-world “comedy.“
A Confucian Confusion plays 7 Ludlow from January 6, as part of the series Taipei Stories.
Back in 1994, when the first audiences were seeing Taiwanese filmmaker’s Edward Yang’s A Confucian Confusion, the term “emotional labor” was still the specialized jargon of sociology departments, not a concept applied to relationships outside of the workplace, as it has come to be in more recent years. Watching or rewatching Yang’s fifth feature today, as it makes the rounds in a new restoration by The Taiwan Film and Audiovisual Institute, one of its many remarkable qualities is its prescient understanding of how the logic and language of workplace efficiency were already coloring every aspect of people’s leisure time: how the ceaseless demands of ultra-competitive global capitalism were inspiring its most dedicated servants to apply the shrewd, mercantile value judgements that helped them to survive and prosper professionally in their private lives, and how personal allegiances were being re-envisioned in terms of investments.
A Taipei-set ensemble piece, A Confucian Confusion introduces its principal characters—most of them young, career-driven, and either unmarried or separated—and defines their various intertangled connections with effortless efficacy. There’s Molly (Ni Shu-Chun), who runs a struggling cultural agency, and her fiancé Akeem (Wang Bosen), a buffoonish scion of vast wealth who’s never learned to knot his own tie. Molly seems to barely tolerate the petulant Akeem, whose family fortune keeps her afloat, while showing real vulnerability and tenderness for her old girlfriend and employee Qiqi (Chen Shiang-chyi), whose loyalty to Molly has become a sore subject with Qiqi’s boyfriend, Ming (Wang Wei-ming), a mid-level bureaucrat at a government construction inspection office who is pushing her to get out of the unstable art racket.
A Confucian Confusion (1994)
Neither love based on the matchmaker’s art nor love based on heart’s desire fare particularly well in the money-mad, upwardly mobile Taipei of 'A Confucian Confusion.'
Yang’s follow-up to his 1950s/early ’60s period piece A Brighter Summer Day (1991), A Confucian Confusion is decidedly of-the-moment, a portrait of Taipei at the height of the Asian economic boom. Or, rather, the depths—for Yang’s film shows a society where rapid gains in material wealth have been accompanied by an intolerable devaluation of honesty and a consequent erosion of trust. The era’s reduction of interpersonal relationships to a form of working capital is epitomized by Akeem’s right-hand man, Larry (Danny Deng), who explains to Molly that friendship and family are a “long-term investment, just like stocks or savings.” Later we’ll watch him unsuccessfully attempt to pitch woo to his boss’s betrothed with the curious pick-up “When I was reading your financial statements I was moved,” and, while paying off the attendants at a high-end brothel as Akeem pukes in the potted plants, tut-tutting “How much friendship have I invested in you…?”
Larry, a clammy, unscrupulous operator who seems to have been born with an abacus in place of a heart, is the only character in A Confucian Confusion who articulates an ethos of feelings as futures, but to some degree most of the film’s characters quietly engage in the kind of calculations that he describes openly. Feng (Richie Li), an aspiring actress recently released from Molly’s employ who’s carrying on a desultory affair with Larry, proves no less cunning than her partner, and whatever bond exists between them in bed doesn’t prevent her from seeking out more promising rungs on the ladder of success. (We see her reel in two different men with the same expert bit of stagecraft, pretending to need help looking for a lost contact lens.) Molly shows what appears to be an authentic desire to elevate public taste through her work, barely bothering to hide her contempt for the success that her sister (Chen Li-mei) has achieved by dispensing pandering platitudes and smug conservative soundbites on her popular chat show. (In one chestnut, she’ll state that artists “paint our society with exaggerated pessimism” and “turn a sunny word, ART, into a ghastly word like AIDS.”) Even Molly, though, can only persist in pursuing her higher aspirations by holding her nose on the way to the altar with philistine Akeem. Their engagement is the result of an arrangement reached by their well-to-do families—a matrimonial merger—unlike that of Qiqi and Ming; the latter couple, however, are no less consumed with bickering contractual negotiations, spurred by working-class striver Ming’s insistence on mitigating risks as they nurture their nest egg.
A Confucian Confusion (1994)
The character of Qiqi is the least guileful of the lot, not that this renders her immune to accusations of cant—quite the opposite, in fact. She naturally radiates the kind of chipper sincerity that Molly’s sister cultivates and makes a living from, and when "honesty" has been transformed into just another commodity to be traded on the emotional marketplace, the genuine article becomes indistinguishable from the counterfeit knock-off. One of the chapter heading–like intertitles scattered through the film—“When Fakes are More Genuine Than the Real”—reads like the first half of an epigrammatic warning, but Yang isn’t a didactic artist; he shows us how social relations are affected when appearances are valued over essence and innocent bystanders are caught in a constant crossfire of accusations of hypocrisy, then leaves us to write the ending of that epigram ourselves.
A film about the romantic entanglements of individuals working in both the culture industry and business sectors, one of the running themes of A Confucian Confusion is—quite literally at times—the uneasy bedmates relationship between art and commerce. In its opening scene, played out in one of the long-shot single takes that the film abounds in, a playwright named Birdy (Wang Wei-ming) rattles off responses to a collection of gathered interviewers at what appears to be a press junket, rollerblading in circles around the table they’re seated at. A newly converted proselytizer for pop democracy with dreams of a landslide commercial victory, Birdy has a kind-of opposite number in the film in the estranged husband of Molly’s sister (Hung Hung, also co-author, with Yang, of the screenplay), a formerly prolific producer of best-selling romance novels who has of late taken to writing gloomy, unpublished manuscripts while sequestered away in austere obscurity.
Because one of these manuscripts is titled A Confucian Confusion—a story of the philosopher returning, reincarnated, in present-day society, only to be greeted as a splendid con artist—this character might be read as Yang’s self-portrait. (He is, at any rate, a close relation to Cora Miao’s creatively stalled writer in Yang’s 1986 The Terrorizers.) But then Birdy, too, has his own parallels with his creator: he’s identified in that opening scene as having left behind “postmodern abstraction” to produce—as Yang might be said to be doing here—his first comedy, and he’s seen wearing a T-shirt featuring Osamu Tezuka’s Astro Boy, the inspiration for the name of manga buff Yang’s production company, Atom Films & Theater. Rather than interpreting either as a true authorial alter ego, then, we might consider them extreme caricatures of clashing impulses that Yang recognized in his own temperament: in Birdy, the craving for commercial success; in Hung Hung’s unnamed author, the pursuit of artistic ideals unfettered of commercial consideration.
Neither of these artists, it should be said, come off as particularly heroic figures. The novelist, a navel-gazing hermit immured from the outside world by his dusty stacks of books, is too caught up in his own self-mythologized creative agonies to respond on a basic human level to the women who visit him in his exile, his estranged wife and Qiqi, the latter of whom he chases off by trying to force her into the role of his muse and salvation. The monk-like author is less loudly ridiculous than flamboyant fop Birdy, but the film gives no indication that the novelist’s rejection of his fame, as represented by his retreat, has put him in a position any more creatively fertile than that which the overgrown adolescent showboat has arrived at by chasing after ticket sales. One embittered and involuted, one extroverted and over-eagerly accommodating, these parodic polar opposites are two sides of the same coin, both more interested in their ideas about public taste than they are in people themselves—Yang’s particular area of interest and expertise.
In their extreme positions of pessimistic surrender and opportunistic affirmation, the author and Birdy might be representatives of the widening gap between entrenched lines of what constitutes “challenging” and “popular” art—a stand-off that continues today in the cinema, much to the impoverishment of both sides. Yang, however, suggests a way out of this impasse in the author’s final scene, in which he has a sudden epiphany after colliding with the back of a braking cab in pursuit of Qiqi. Addressing his baffled audience of Qiqi and the cabbie, he proclaims that his “romantic period” and “tragic period” were both blinkered by the same reliance on opposing “fixed ideas,” then sprints off into the night to start his work anew. That he jogs out of range of hearing before he can give a name to his new “period” is significant, because for Yang the thing worth pursuing in one’s art can’t be confined by terminology: it’s life itself. For this reason, then, the label of “comedy” seems to suit A Confucian Confusion somewhat awkwardly, though when compared to the rage and dolor of Yang’s previous three features—Taipei Story (1985), The Terrorizers, and A Brighter Summer’s Day—it could be argued that the film represents the filmmaker leaving his own tragic period behind, here evincing some of the same bittersweet tone found in his swansong, 2000’s Yi Yi.
Edward Yang on the set of A Confucian Confusion (1994).
Yang was unusually qualified to make a movie about the relationship between the art and business worlds, because unlike many filmmakers, he’d had practical experience of both. After graduating with a master’s in electrical engineering from the University of Florida in 1974—and a brief tenure at the University of Southern California film school—Yang spent several years at a research lab in Seattle, a city, like Taipei, on its way to being transformed by the tech industry. While the specifics of his work involved the design of microcomputers and microprocessors, he inevitably would have absorbed some sense of corporate culture before his return to Taiwan, in 1981, with a renewed determination to become a filmmaker.
Having spent most of his twenties in the United States, Yang was perhaps also particularly attuned to the cultural influence of the US in Taipei, which, though nothing new—the voice of Elvis Presley wafts through A Brighter Summer’s Day, as that of Michael Jackson does in Taipei Story—is mostly evident in less alluring forms in A Confucian Confusion. Characters walk around with McDonald’s fountain drinks, drift in and out of hook-ups in tacky ”pubs” projecting Chicago Bulls on their walls, and hold their after-work get-togethers at T.G.I. Friday’s.
These are only a few telltale signs of global capitalism on the march, of the 1980s Taiwan Miracle that saw the country’s emergence as an international and economic powerhouse, and of Taipei’s sprouting into a metropolis of high-rises, seen bristling in the blue morning light from Molly’s office window in one of A Confucian Confusion’s final scenes. Corporate architecture, like corporate culture and the increasing necessity of personal concessions to the demands of capital, was becoming more ubiquitous and uniform than ever before, which may be one reason that Yang’s films travelled so well on the international circuit—you don’t need to go to Taipei to find the meeting rooms and elevator banks in drab government building lobbies and white-collar watering holes of A Confucian Confusion familiar, you only need to have been to Downtown Anywhere in the developed world in the last 40 years. (It is no coincidence that Olivier Assayas, whose films have dealt extensively with the interlinking of art, commerce, and interpersonal relationships, ranks Yang as a master.)
The whole messy roundelay ends not with the relief of happy consummation but with a nagging sorrow.
If the urban environment and the compromises of commerce that the film deals with are widely comprehensible, however, there are other aspects of Yang’s film—it’s called A Confucian Confusion, after all—specific to the clash between traditional Chinese culture and hypermodern globalism. Yang would describe the subject of his film as “examining what is wrong with trying to head into the 21st century with a fourth-century B.C. ideology”—namely, the the tenets outlined in the philosopher’s canonical texts, The Four Books and Five Classics, whose emphasis on the cultivation and maintenance of social harmony was distinctly at odds with the ructions and upheavals of dynamic capitalism.
Among the problems Yang pinpointed was that “wealth was never really intended for the people in Confucian doctrines”—essentially, that a secular belief system presenting ironbound ethical precepts meant to maintain hierarchical relations within families, and between a vast peasant underclass and their rulers, was perhaps a little out-of-date when many of those peasants had bought clip-on ties and were tilling away in cubicles. How, Yang’s film asks, can a system based on fealty be expected to comfortably co-exist with one based on ruthless self-interest? (That Confucian order and capitalist dynamism were essentially incompatible was not a new idea; it was this very conviction that inspired confused Confucian Ezra Pound to extol Italian fascism over western democracy.)
Yang’s had already begun exploring the friction between tradition and modernity in contemporary Taiwan with his Taipei Story, in which an ex-baseballer (played by Yang’s Taiwanese New Wave contemporary Hou Hsiao-hsien) earns the ire of his go-getter girlfriend (pop star Tsai Chin, Yang’s first wife) by bowing to the laws of filial piety and dipping into the money they’d set aside to emigrate to the US to clear up her deadbeat dad’s debts. In A Confucian Confusion, that tension is expressed by a certain stylistic discordance, as performances that often approach the neurotic energy of screwball farce are observed from a calm remove; the antic timeline of the story—which occurs over the course of three eventful days and two more eventful nights—proceeds at a measured pace; and the whole messy roundelay ends not with the relief of happy consummation but with a nagging sorrow. In a world where the old ways linger on alongside the new ones, strange hybrids appear: Akeem boasts of he and Molly’s sophisticated update on the arranged marriage of yore with a contractual agreement combining “traditional virtue” and “modern personal freedom,” only to succumb to jealous paranoia as soon as he perceives a possible threat to his lone dominion over his property. Molly’s sister, who’d once opted for a modern marriage based on love, now makes her living preaching on-air bromides about fidelity to the family, then proceeds to scheme behind closed doors to conceal the fact of her separation from the newspapers.
As it goes, the various couples introduced at the beginning of the film have mostly unhitched by the time the credits roll. Neither love based on the matchmaker’s art nor love based on heart’s desire fare particularly well in the money-mad, upwardly mobile Taipei of A Confucian Confusion, in which “mixing business with pleasure” has become less an option than an imperative. Those inclined may find a green sprig of hope in the film’s conclusion, but taken as a whole Yang’s “comedy“ offers a rather grim punchline, suggesting that mixing business with pleasure results in pleasure’s death.
Nick Pinkerton is a Cincinnati-born, Brooklyn-based writer focused on moving image-based art; his writing has appeared in Film Comment, Sight & Sound, Artforum, Frieze, Reverse Shot, The Guardian, 4Columns, The Baffler, Rhizome, Harper’s, and the Village Voice. He is the editor of Bombast magazine, editor-at-large of Metrograph Journal, and maintains a Substack, Employee Picks. Publications include monographs on Mondo movies (True/False) and the films of Ruth Beckermann (Austrian Film Museum), a book on Tsai Ming-liang’s Goodbye, Dragon Inn (Fireflies Press), and a forthcoming critical biography of Jean Eustache (The Film Desk).
A Confucian Confusion (1994)
