Essay/Term paper: It's in his mouth

Essay, term paper, research paper:  Movie Reviews

The Meaning of Chow (It's In His Mouth)


Ultimately, it comes down to his mouth.

Chow Yun-Fat is the coolest movie actor in the world today,
and the only way I can explain this is to talk about his
mouth. He does cool things with his mouth. Smoking cigarettes
is no longer an emblem of cool in the USA, but Chow does
wonders with cigarette smoke in Prison On Fire. Director
Ringo Lam understands this; like most of the great Hong Kong
directors, he loves using slow motion and freeze frames to
pinpoint important moments in his movies, and he saves a few
of the most elegant slow-motion sequences for Chow blowing
smoke and looking cool.

In John Woo's over-the-top classic, Hard Boiled (the rough
literal translation of the Chinese title is Spicy-Handed Gun
God), Chow plays with a toothpick. There are few movie
moments more violently cool than the shot of Chow, a gun in
each hand, sliding down a stair banister blasting a dozen bad
guys while letting his toothpick hang just so from the side
of his mouth. In God of Gamblers, Chow plays a gambler who
gets a bump on his head that turns him into some
quasi-autistic prodigy, like Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man. Chow
retains his intuitive skill at playing cards, but now he must
be pacified by constant pieces of chocolate that he scarfs
greedily, goofy smile on his face. Blowing smoke, dangling
his toothpick, eating chocolate, or just smiling ...
ultimately, when trying to explain why Chow Yun-Fat is cool,
it comes down to his mouth.

Everything I have said so far describes a subjective reaction
to watching Chow Yun-Fat on the screen. Fill in the name of
your favorite actor or actress, change the specific
references, and this could be your essay. We don't learn
anything new from such subjective meanderings; we only
identify taste preferences. I'm proud to be a Chow fan, but
then, I am proud to be a fan in general. With other favorites
of mine, though, I am able to get at least a little bit
beyond subjectivity. Be it Murphy Brown or X-Ray Spex, Bruce
Springsteen or NYPD Blue, at some point I can analyze my
relationship to the cultural artifact in question, place it
in some cultural context, and come to some hopefully useful
conclusions about both the particular text and our
interaction with that text. Chow Yun-Fat, however, seems to
defy my attempts at analysis; ultimately, it all comes down
to his mouth and nothing more.

Try describing Chow Yun-Fat to someone who has never seen him
on the screen. Comparisons sometimes help, so how about this:
Chow Yun-Fat is the Asian Cary Grant. He makes everything
look easy; there are always other actors chewing the scenery
in Chow's movies, but he rarely goes for the obvious and the
overdone, preferring the smile and the toothpick. He looks
good in a tuxedo; he looks good in an expensive silk suit; he
looks good with nothing on at all. And it all seems so
effortless.

Cary Grant, but there is more: in one scene from Prison on
Fire, Chow is Cary Grant taking a dump. He's gotta go pretty
badly, he's shitting and farting and talking to a fellow
inmate, all at the same time, he's waving away the smell and
sending looks of displeasure to his stomach, finally he's
asking his friend to leave the room, because Chow can't 'do
it' if someone is watching. And yes, through it all, Chow is
cool. Cary Grant taking a dump.

Cary Grant taking a dump, but there is more: in film after
film, Chow is the object of desire for men. In Ringo Lam
movies, this is often overt; in Full Contact the main villain
is a gay mobster with a hard-on for Chow, and somehow his
gayness is a positive aspect of his character, unlike so many
American action films where gay means psychopathic or
neurotic or evil. His gayness is positive because he obsesses
over Chow Yun-Fat; it is hard to find fault with anyone who
merely recognizes what Chow fans know in their own subjective
worlds, that Chow Yun-Fat is the coolest. At the end of Full
Contact, with the villain about to die, he tells Chow that he
only hopes that they will meet in the afterworld where they
can finally consummate their repressed affair. Chow kills the
bad guy, telling him in the wonderfully bizarre phrasing so
common to HK English subtitles, 'Masturbate in Hell!,'
condemning the villain to death, to hell, but also to an
eternity of fantasizing about Chow Yun-Fat.

And still I haven't gotten beyond my own subjective
fantasies. Readers who have never seen Chow Yun-Fat might
have a better picture in their minds of what he is like, but
we still don't really have an inkling of What Chow Means.
We're still at the level of establishing taste preferences.
And I am still puzzling over why I find it so hard to get
beyond the surface of Chow Yun-Fat.

Maybe the answer is in the subtitles. English subtitles in HK
movies are often unintentionally hilarious, an odd and
charming combination of fractured grammar and almost-right
cliches (in Once a Thief Chow tells Leslie Cheung, 'it takes
turn to tango'). When reading those subtitles, an American
viewer realizes that there are differences between HK and US
culture that language can't precisely express. Similarly,
when someone speaks English in an HK film, the English
subtitles are frequently different than the spoken words,
never more comically than in Woo's Heroes Shed No Tears,
where an American soldier screams 'Motherfucker!' and the
subtitles read 'Son of a bitch.' It is as if the soldier's
English is first translated into Mandarin or Cantonese, then
retranslated into English subtitles; something is indeed lost
in the translation.

Even such an excellent reading of these movies as Jillian
Sandell's piece elsewhere in this issue 'loses something in
the translation.' (Her clearly-stated analysis of Woo/Chow
collaborations is just the kind of examination I claim here
is close to impossible; I would have said completely
impossible, but Jillian has proven me wrong.) In her
discussion of The Killer (rough literal translation of the
Chinese title: A Pair of Blood-Splattering Heroes), she
mentions the nicknames 'Dumbo' and 'Mickey Mouse' which the
subtitles have given to the two primary heroes, and makes an
interesting connection to the image of Disney these nicknames
suggest. Her comments are well-taken for American audiences
of The Killer, but in the original, the nicknames for the two
characters have no connection whatever to Disney characters.
Dumbo and Mickey Mouse were chosen by the translator as
effective names to convey the 'real meaning' of the Chinese
nicknames; I have no idea whether or not the translator was
successful. We can only examine The Killer as it is presented
to us, which in the case of non-Chinese speaking Americans
means the characters are indeed Dumbo and Mickey Mouse. This
does not in any way 'invalidate' an American audience's
response to The Killer, but it would seem to indicate how
different the text is, depending on how it is seen and what
the audience brings to the movie. This is always true, of
course, but I suspect it is truest when the cultural
differences between the text and the audience are as great as
they are here.

And it is odd and charming ... yet I feel like my words have
been spoken before, by other American dilettantes, taking
pleasure in the 'exotic' Orient. Charming, because different.
Odd, because different. Above all, different. However Hong
Kong action movies are perceived in Hong Kong itself, in the
U.S. they are first and foremost different, alien, even as
they freely borrow from our own movie traditions. It is that
difference, in part, that I am responding to when I watch
Chow Yun-Fat. Perhaps I even make a fetish of that
difference; I embrace the alien, make it, for a moment, mine.

In an earlier issue of Bad Subjects, I related my discomfort
at using a person dressed in a bird costume as fodder for my
Bad Essay, noting that while this poor drone was only trying
to earn a living in tough times, I was deriding his efforts
and then writing about them for Bad Subjects. At the time, I
called this 'cultural imperialism.' My discomfort was perhaps
well- deserved; I was indeed using this bird-person for my
own enlightenment. My mea culpas began because I felt funny
writing about something I didn't like to begin with. It was
one thing to take apart Murphy Brown, I suggested, because I
was trying to understand a text I enjoyed. It was another to
take apart the favored texts of others, without properly
appreciating the value of those texts to their recipients.

I can't deny that I love Hong Kong movies, and I most
certainly love Chow Yun-Fat. Yet that love is related to my
experiences with the bird-person: I am, as we called
ourselves in that earlier issue, a 'Bad Tourist,' stopping
by, taking what I want, leaving the rest, ultimately
un-illuminated as to the essence of Hong Kong culture, but
nevertheless enriched by the experience. I don't want to
belittle that enrichment. The beginning of this essay is
testament to how much I love my relationship to Chow Yun-Fat.
But I began writing because I couldn't get beyond my
attraction to Chow's coolness, and the longer I write, the
more I come to believe that I will never understand Chow as
well as I understand myself. Because the point of my
consumption of Chow Yun-Fat, the point of the dilettante's
love of the exotic, is not really to understand what I
consume. The point is to understand me.

This is often how people of one culture appreciate the
cultures of others; as anthropology it most likely sucks, but
for enrichment, it can't be beat. It goes both ways, of
course; no one should assume that only Americans are
dilettantes. Jackie Chan has seen Buster Keaton. The
resulting movies are 'pure' Jackie Chan, but the Keaton
influence is apparent, which doesn't necessarily mean that
Jackie Chan understands the Meaning of Keaton any more than I
understand the Meaning of Chow. Jackie Chan loves Buster
Keaton, he makes Buster Keaton his own, and then he produces
Jackie Chan movies. When an American watches a Jackie Chan
movie, one of the pleasurable aspects is making the
connection to Buster Keaton. Jackie Chan helps us understand
Keaton better than we would if we didn't have Chan to help
illuminate Keaton. We use Jackie Chan to understand our own
culture.

There are aspects of Jackie Chan, of course, that cross
cultural barriers. His exuberant acrobatics dazzle an
audience whether or not we know the Chinese cultural context
for his stunts. But the Meaning of Jackie Chan escapes me, at
least, if not all American viewers. And now we are back to
Chow Yun-Fat, who is cool. His coolness crosses barriers.
When he performs a romantic dance from a wheelchair in Once a
Thief, the combination of elegance and comedic grace is
lovely beyond words. When, in Hard Boiled, he demolishes a
zillion bad guys with one hand and carries a tiny baby in the
other, cooing and shooting, he is the ultimate big brother.
This coolness crosses barriers. But beyond that, we are
victims of our subjective experience; we don't understand the
Hong Kong culture that produces these movies, and so we fall
back on cool. It all comes down to his mouth.

The clearest example of this is the homo-erotic charge that
permeates HK action movies. In one sense, this is no
different from similar relationships in American action
movies ... Mel Gibson and Danny Glover in the Lethal Weapon
series come to mind, along with countless other buddy films.
But what is beneath the surface in American movies is out
front in HK films. It doesn't take much digging to find the
homo-erotic undercurrents in Lethal Weapon, but it does
require digging. HK films, with their endless discussions
between men about love and honor and friendship, seem to
bring those undercurrents to the surface, however, in a
manner that is not exactly innocent but is accepting of the
bonds between men and willing to allow men to discuss those
bonds. Chow Yun-Fat is not the strong silent type. When the
inmates of Prison on Fire are happy, they celebrate with a
dance party unlike, say, the scene in Jailhouse Rock where
Elvis is fetishized as the focus of homo-eroticism (and we
are 'the cutest little jailbirds he ever did see'). In Prison
on Fire, the inmates are happy, and so they dance, and their
partners are their fellow inmates with whom they share their
happiness. It's not only sexual, though sex is part of it.
It's about friendship, and loyalty, and love, and bonding.

At least, I think so. Again I am confronted with the barriers
between my experiences and Asian culture. For an American to
watch a Chow Yun-Fat movie is to partake in an ultimate
experiment in audience-response theory. We don't understand
the culture that produced a Chow Yun-Fat, so we are left to
the subjective experience we bring to the movie theatre. We
watch, we react, but when we later try to analyze, all we
know for certain is that it all comes down to his mouth.

And so I am no closer to the Meaning of Chow than I was at
the beginning of this essay. I've enjoyed Chow, I've used
Chow, I've done what I could with Chow, but I fear I haven't
explained him. I've only explained myself as a 'Bad Tourist.'
Go watch a Chow Yun-Fat movie for yourself, and if you figure
out What Chow Means, let me know. In any event, I'll bet you
think he's cool.