Wong Kar Wai - an introduction
or, all memories are traces of tears
A quick note: I’m making a scheduling shift to the fiction I mentioned a few weeks ago. I’m going to be releasing a book every month now. Because why not.
Then first one is coming in two weeks. It’s a YA romance that will be a digital only release. I’ll say more about this on Thursday.
My vision blurs. A dozen times. Maybe more. Every time, I reach new heights. Every time, I find new ways to collapse.
For years, I watched Wong Kar Wai’s In the Mood for Love followed by its sort of sequel 2046 every six months. Sometimes I’d throw in Chungking Express or Happy Together in there too. Sometimes Ashes of Time made an appearance.
But always I returned to In the Mood for Love and 2046.
When I was fourteen, I stumbled across a biographical movie about Arthur Rimbaud starring Leonardo DiCaprio.
It’s not an especially good movie, but it taught me who Arthur Rimbaud was, which was transformative for the young version of me. It was also, probably, the first time I’d really encountered a gay romance, which I hadn’t thought of until just now. But within a few days of watching this not-so-good movie, I went to Borders (what an old fashioned statement!) and bought the collected poems of Arthur Rimbaud.
I inhaled that book. Then read it again.
This became like a ritual for me. I’ve read these collected poems dozens of times. For about ten years, I’d reread these poems a few times every year.
His poetry did something hard to explain to me. Changed me, certainly. But it’s something more than that. More like he rewrote how I saw my own life. Rewrote what I wanted out of life. It’s easy to say that I never would have shown my writing to anyone if not for him. Would probably never have worn dresses or makeup or gaudy baubles. Would never have seen my body the way I came to see it: as an instrument, fluid in its meaning, in its significance to me and those around me.
More even than that, Arthur Rimbaud made me less lonely. He had been dead for over a hundred years by the time I’d heard of him, but he felt like a friend. More than a friend: like a model for life (what this said about me is slightly alarming), a way to navigate the horrors of my own brain, the fears and disgusts of my own body.
Strangely, Arthur Rimbaud’s apocalyptic poetry taught me how to like and love myself. How to be proud of me.
Since him, I’ve never really needed that from others.
It’s quite nice.
What Rimbaud did for 14-year-old me, Wong Kar Wai did for 18-year-old me. He taught me fashion, the syntax of movement, the elegance of a single hushed sentence, the overwhelming power of unspoken desire, of burning love and gaping loss.
I have never been a very happy person. Probably I never will be. There’s a strange comfort in a certain kind of sorrow.
Wong Kar Wai taught me how to use that sorrow. How to take the howling need within me and express it. How to turn emotion and atmosphere into language; how to take a moment in time and stretch that singular sensation over an entire story.
Rimbaud made me believe in my own words, but Wong Kar Wai showed me how to use them. Showed me that words are nothing to bodies in motion, to almost-touches.
I remember Dublin nights that felt like they’d never end where all I wanted was to hold your hand as you danced ahead of me down rainy street beneath a hooded moon that felt like it belonged to only us. I remember the way you smiled when I brushed the hair from your face on German mountains when you told me about your boyfriend. I remember you like times of day, like hours spent on Busan beaches, in hostels where we came to know one another even if only for minutes, hours. I remember the crisp winter Gwangju nights when we breathed smoke and made our bodies sweat as one in shrieking nightclubs.
I remember all of you. Love all of you. Even if only for the brief moments we shared. The love you gave me. The love I hope I gave in return.
These transient moments of time have meant the world to me.
When I think of love and the slurring mess of my heart, I remember Tony Leung and Faye Wong or Maggie Cheung or Zhang Ziyi or Leslie Cheung. I remember all the love and loss and hope and sorrow and desire and need. I remember them all because I felt this way daily for nearly ten years.
Just a disaster of a human.
But when I saw Tony Leung—brokenhearted and hopeless—smile as he fell apart, as she walked away, as he let her go, I saw myself so clearly that I started holding my breath and don’t know if I’ve ever fully let that breath leave my lungs.
For me, art has always been a path of salvation. I don’t look for myself in art or expect to find my heart in the images and words of another, but I find myself continually tumbling through all these unexpected mirrors of myself.
I learned to live through books and movies, through games and music. I learned to love, to speak, to write by inhabiting imagined realities, sneaking into the skin of imaginary people, wearing their faces and speaking with their voices because my own face and body and words never felt wholly right, wholly me.
I have never been able to say what I truly mean.
I must write it out. Think through my fingers because there are ten of them but only one stupid hole of a mouth in my head. Call it democracy, maybe.
But I have only ever been able to reveal myself in the words I invent for imaginary people. Have only ever been able to be myself when I chop me apart, shatter me to fragments, and then dispense the pieces across a dozen imaginary people spread across dozens of novels and novellas, hundreds of short stories, thousands of poems.
What I mean to say is that I was gifted Criterion Collection’s Wong Kar Wai collection.
I’ll be writing about his movies in the coming months. Likely one per month.
I hope you’ll join me. Think of it like a bookclub but for movies.
A movieclub.
February - As Tears Go By
March - Days of Being Wild
April - Chugking Express
May - Ashes of Time
June - Fallen Angels
July - Happy Together
December - In the Mood for Love & 2046
Wonderful idea! I’m looking forward to the discussions (and my husband--whose tastes are more highbrow than mine--will for once be eager to watch the movies I suggest).
The way you describe Rimbaud's poetry and its effects on you is similar to how Mishima Yukio's work made me feel when I discovered it at 16.
And, I must admit that I'm not much of a cinephile, and have never seen a single one of Wong Kar Wai's films. I should endeavour to do so. At least some of them.