Wong Kar Wai - Fallen Angels
or, the failing of the dream
I’m e rathke, the author of a number of books. Learn more about what you signed up for here. Go here to manage your email notifications.
Catch up:
sandstone
I was excited to rewatch this movie. Really, I was.
When I first watched it on my laptop in Ireland, I was disappointed by it. Felt it was a mess and lacking much of what I’d come to love about Wong Kar Wai’s movies.
But I was willing to give it another shot. I’m often wrong. I am, after all, an idiot. Yet even as I looked forward to giving this another chance, I ended up skipping it and watching Happy Together (essay coming next month and on time since it’s already written!), which is one of Wong’s very best, but it also led to me missing my schedule of releasing these the third week of every month.
Not that anyone besides me really cares about this schedule. I find that my essays about a series like this are not exactly the most popular, in part because they ask the audience to be familiar with the topic at hand. Each and every one of these that I’ve done has performed poorly.
Yet I persist.
Perhaps this, more than anything, is what keeps me glued to Wong Kar Wai.
Fallen Angels is, in Wong’s own words, the other half to Chungking Express. Where Chungking Express was the light of Hong Kong, Fallen Angels was the night.
He’s said that, for both movies, Hong Kong is the true main character.
And maybe that’s true. It’s an interesting idea and I, too, would have driven towards this conceit, especially after the success of Chungking Express. But I see the weaknesses here far more clearly than ever before in his style and approach to filmmaking.
You’d think the disastrous production of Ashes of Time would have taught him his lesson, but, alas, I sympathize here, especially, with Wong. For I am a fool, and the Fool will always fall in love with his failures.
No doubt he did, too, which is where a bit of his defensiveness comes when talking about it. But he persisted with his vision, even when it seemed to fall apart. Maybe because it fell apart on him, like sandcastles caught in the rain.
a brief aside
in korea in 2009 on a weekend to busan where the beaches were full of bodes there were also these enormous sandsculptures meticulously constructed that were large enough for me to sit inside though no one would ever be allowed to sit inside them and the rain fell never but instead i fell asleep outside drunk as shit and woke up at a table full of strangers who passed me a beer and i kept drinking and one of them told me that i was sunburned pretty bad and i asked them if they’d seen my sunglasses and they told me i was still wearing them and i saluted to them and wandered off to try to find my friends and even though i didn’t have a phone i still somehow found them in time to catch the bus back to gwangju
end aside
I like that. Like what it says about him.
While many people disliked Ashes of Time for its elliptical plotlessness, its meandering digressions, its characters who talk around but rarely about what matters most to them, I loved all that. However, we see it here, too, in Fallen Angels, and I find that it’s quite tedious, really.
Tedious as waking up in the middle of a conversation with strangers.
Why did I love one but not the other?
Well, I don’t know. Maybe it’s because ancient warriors hanging out in the desert hits closer to my heart than the ennui of my contemporaries. Call it the Beowulf effect1.
But part of it may be because Fallen Angels feels like Wong retreading ground. In a career that has mostly felt fresh and vibrant, I feel that Fallen Angels is a regression.
It returns to the noirish trappings of As Tears Go By, but it also is far less connected to that narrative even than Chungking Expresses first story with Brigitte Lin and Takeshi Kaneshiro. But it also tries to manic pixie dreamgirl Kaneshiro in a way that reflects Faye Wong’s narrative with Tony Leung in the second half of Chungking Express.
But neither of these narratives feels successful or even essential.
They drift and they meander and they fail to coalesce.
And they don’t even manage to give me what I always wanted from Wong Kar Wai.
When I was younger, it was the romanticism, the style, the camera work, and the howling need, the longing.
I have less of that now. The need. The longing. I am a melancholic sort, prone to bouts of depression, large and small, but I have what I always longed for, what I need.
I’m still lonely and unhappy, but that’s no one’s fault and certainly no one’s problem but my own. I have all the ingredients to be happy and, honestly, I’m often happy. Happier than I’ve ever been.
But happiness—well, I have much to say about this.
the crowned crow’s caw
In The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness, Miyazaki is asked about happiness.
How could that be our ultimate goal?
I have said before that I don’t ever feel seen or represented by things I see in media. I don’t seek out such things because, perhaps, I don’t need validation. Or perhaps I’m simply still afraid of mirrors.
But I don’t watch movies or read books to see myself. I don’t even want to find myself in them.
I have loved Miyazaki since I first saw a boar god curse a prince. I’ve felt a strong kinship to him for no real reason, other than that his art is in my blood and bones and I felt the touch of a mind like my own. Here, though, was that moment when I first felt seen, as the kids say. And it hit me in the chest like a sledgehammer, giving language to things I had already long agreed with, lived out in the wilds of the world beyond words and screens.
Seeing him talk about happiness and dismissing it was the most relatable thing I think I’ve ever encountered in my life.
This was not always the case. Longtime readers have already read flashes of my life wandering the world trying to find hope and love and happiness. But what I found, spending my life seeking happiness, was that I could never find it.
I don’t believe you can find happiness. More than that, I think obsessing over happiness is the surest path to sorrow, to depression, to unhappiness.
My wife sometimes asks me if I’m happy. I don’t even really know, honestly. I no longer think about it. To me, the question has become meaningless.
Am I happy?
Who cares?
When I was younger, had you asked me, the answer, unless I was lying, would always have been no. I used to know a girl named Sarah who I haven’t seen in seventeen years but I used to talk to her almost daily on AIM for a few years. It was a relationship that existed almost entirely over instant messaging. But we were in high school together and she often thought the funniest thing about me was that when she’d ask me how I was doing I would tell her the truth.
Which is to say, instead of just saying, “Doing well, how are you,” I’d say, “Not great,” and always did I mean it. Because I was never doing well when I was seventeen or sixteen or eighteen or fourteen or pick an age.
I once had a teacher, Ms Johnson, who tried to do me a true kindness by reaching out, trying to approach me about my insomnia, which had become notable enough that teachers were discussing it. Which is, you know, a teenager’s nightmare.
She wanted to help me.
Many people have wanted to help me in life. I don’t know why. I mean, I know why: they were kind and they cared. I mean that I don’t know why they wanted to help me. And I don’t know why I refused to be helped, but I rebuffed Ms Johnson the way I rebuffed everyone.
I wanted to be happy. Needed to be happy. But I didn’t know how to be. Didn’t even know what happiness was.
Even now, I probably couldn’t tell you. It’s why this movie review is already getting out of hand, spinning off course.
I learned to live not by seeking happiness but by discovering that I did not need to be happy. And when this shift happened in me, I stopped ever thinking about it. That’s not to say I was no longer depressed, but I stopped fussing about the whole thing.
It is, perhaps, why I find it strange when people wear their mental illnesses like a nametag.
My simple view is that no one cares so you may as well learn to get over yourself. The fact that you’re anxious or depressed must be the least interesting thing about you2.
I hope so anyway.
I drag my depression along with me, along with all my ghosts. It’s back there, sometimes light as air, sometimes heavy as my eventual corpse, weighty as the earth and I must Atlas my way through every waking moment, but I’ve found that if I keep holding it, embrace it3, keep walking, keep carrying on with my day, I can Pascal’s Wager through it all, and eventually I just kind of forget about it.
And maybe that is happiness, in a way.
An analogy:
When I became a father and was doing the middle of the night wake ups, pacing the living room while holding a colicky baby who only wanted to scream in my stupid fatherly face until my mind shattered, people asked me how the transition to fatherhood was going.
And while the previous paragraph may cause you to assume that I’d tell people that it was not going well, the truth is that it didn’t feel like a transition.
The moment my son was born, my entire life changed, yes, absolutely. But this required no shift inside me. The first time I woke up to his screaming and bounced him and sang to him and held him against my chest, trying to teach his tiny rapid heart to beat in time with mine, to live by the tempo I’ve set for his days, for his dreams, for his times in betweens, I had no thoughts about it.
I simply did it.
Rather than go through some transition, it all felt quite normal. Normal as carrying your own bloody bleeding heart in the chest of another hollering in your face through every whispered word of love and hope.
Yesterday, I was not doing this, yes, but now I am, and I will continue to do this until it stops.
This is life.
I live it.
I do not think about it.
There is no need for thought4.
There is no need for anything but action.
Am I happy?
I do not care.
I have but one life to live and I don’t have time anymore—especially with two children running about, hootin and hollering, cacklin and cascading over the banks of my life to reshape them like the shores of the ocean whose loving embrace shifted and transformed for billions of year—to wonder about the questions philosophers5 have convinced people matter.
What is my goal in life?
Am I happy?
What do I want out of life?
What is a good life?
How best to use this life to achieve these goals?
I don’t care, babies. Maybe you do. That’s okay. You’re probably smarter than me.
I am but a dummy with an endless bag full of words.
Here are some more.
sandcastles in the rain
Fallen Angels is a mess. It’s full of the familiar Wong Kar Wai trappings. You have characters desperate for love but struggling to find it, struggling, even, to connect with one another.
And they long for this connection. They need it. Not even romantic connection, but simple human connection. Something to tether them to their lives, to anything. They drift and they dwindle, they simmer and they bubble, but never once do they boil over and allow themselves to be vulnerable.
They float off in the wind, smothered in night, choking on all that they cannot say, that they cannot feel, that they cannot touch for the night will never embrace them but with fingers deathly.
And even if we take Wong Kar Wai at his word, that this is the other half to Chungking Express, that these four collective stories across two movies are not about their characters but about the city, Hong Kong, I feel this movie does far less to reveal the city than Chungking Express.
And maybe that’s part of the point. The muddiness. The mystery. The ineffable alienation of living in a city with so many people crowded together.
For who can name a city in 90 minutes or even 180?
I felt this strongly on a different continent back when I was a very sad boy but after I stopped worrying about happiness. I stopped worrying about anything back then and allowed my strange life to expand and unfurl and contract.
But it was an alienating year all the same. Surrounded by people. So many people. And yet I had rarely felt so alone. Not all of it was the language barrier, though that would be a proper and good excuse.
No, the truth is that some of the best times I had in Korea were in the company of people who didn’t speak English. People who I spent hours with, neither of us really able to say anything to one another, yet communicating all the same. Sometimes in halting broken Konglish but sometimes in nothing more but gestures.
Finding joy and friendship even across this chasmic divide.
A strange experience. It complicates much. This feeling of connection contrasted with the alienation that I still feel, even now, here, on the world wide web, in my hometown, in my home country among people who look and speak like me.
Wong captures this muddiness but he manages to make a muddy movie out of it.
And perhaps it must always be so. For I have spent my life flailing at words, failing to capture those simple truth reverberating always in my chest.
And so sandwiched between two of the best Wong Kar Wai movies is this one, Fallen Angels, which feels like him revisiting himself but with less success.
As I said paragraphs upon paragraphs ago, I’m sympathetic to this persistence in one’s obsessions, digging deeper and trying to say again what you’ve already said in hopes that this time you’ll say it the way you meant, the way you wanted, because you didn’t quite capture it the first time. Never mind the praise and all that. You had a vision. You had words. You had a sensation that you wanted to live in the audience’s chests, beat through their blood. And even if they say you got it, you did exactly that, you know what was missing. You know how you fell short of your own dream, how your words failed you.
You try again.
You fail again.
You fail again better.
Next time, we have one of Wong Kar Wai’s best movies: Happy Together.
I can’t wait for you to read that review. And, hopefully, you’re watching along with me. That was my intention, anyrate.
For those looking to get into my fiction, these are good places to start:
Glossolalia - A Le Guinian fantasy novel about an anarchic community dealing with a disaster
Sing, Behemoth, Sing - Deadwood meets Neon Genesis Evangelion
Howl - Vampire Hunter D meets The Book of the New Sun in this lofi cyberpunk/solarpunk monster hunting adventure. Currently on sale!
Colony Collapse - Star Trek meets Firefly in the opening episode of this space opera. Currently on sale!
The Blood Dancers - The standalone sequel to Colony Collapse.
Iron Wolf - Sequel to Howl. Coming 7/25/2023
Some free books for your trouble:
someday I’ll write about Beowulf and everyone will hate it except for the five of you who have also read a dozen translations of it
probably no one needs this essay from me
It occurs to me on rereading this that this may be a topic of interest
When I tell people that I don’t think about anything ever, they think I’m joking. But I’m not. I’ll write about this someday. But you reading this essay now probably imagine that I sit around thinking thoughts throughout my day, but I truly do not.
I guess this is the essay where I threaten to write other essays, but maybe someday I’ll write about how I hate philosophy and think it’s largely a process of justifying atrocities