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The Hole
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The Hole uses a specific corpus of old pop songs by Grace Chang, a star of glamorous Hong Kong musicals of the 1950s, popular throughout South East Asia. These songs are mimed, within fantasy sequences, by the two principal cast members, Tsai Ming-liang regulars Yang Kuei-mei and Lee Kang-sheng. If one were to subtract these scenes, The Hole would be rather like previous Tsai works, such as Vive l’amour (1994) or The River (1997): minimalist films, mostly wordless and bleak, in the Michelangelo Antonioni mould, about emotional repression, disconnection and social breakdown. But The Hole was made for a series of films about the year 2000, so it has a futuristic, almost sensational sci-fi element. Or, as I like to call it, Tsai Fi. The Hole narrates, essentially, a millennial apocalypse, with Taiwan overrun by a deadly virus that is seemingly carried by rainwater (and the rain never stops pouring down), reducing people to an insect-like (and “photophobic”) state before they die, crawling into dark spaces. Beyond this bare plot context (carried by the sound of radio and TV bulletins), what we mainly see are two separate people in two apartments, one atop the other, in a complex that has been mostly abandoned by the authorities – and the hole in the floor that might, in some way, serve to connect these young professionals who are presumably living out their final days on earth. As Robin Wood astutely asked: “Is this the first – and perhaps last – musical about the end of the world?” (1) Wood much preferred Tsai’s queer vision of insect-apocalypse to that of the critic’s nemesis on Canadian soil, David Cronenberg! Are the songs really fantasies? Tsai never gives us that much solid information. Wood decides to take them as representing, independent of the character’s subjectivities, “the escapist fantasies that capitalism has expediently provided, by which we have been at once captivated and distracted”. (2) But they do seem to correspond to certain turning-points in the fiction: her attraction to him, his hand reaching down to her. Other connections are more associative: her first ominous sneeze (while lying in the bath), for example. What is clear is that Tsai has found the perfect point of intersection between the form and content of a musical and his own cinematic universe – both of which explore paradoxes of solitude and community. These superficially sunny songs and dances – staged with enormous zest and conviction – contain many ironic echoes and reversals of everything else we see in the film’s story-world. The ambiguity of this juxtaposition of incommensurable worlds is wrenching for the viewer, and is capped off by a final postscript in the end credits signed by the filmmaker: “The year 2000 is coming. We are grateful we still have Grace Chang’s songs with us”. Ouch! So Yang Kuei-mei sneezes – a sign that the virus is upon her, and also a signal that a wry song is coming on, a wonderful tune called “Achoo Cha Cha” (aka “Sneezing” by Yao Ming, choreography by Joy Lo). In this number, Tsai ingeniously reinvests the elements of what I will reluctantly call the Dennis Potter Style. This is a mode in what I have elsewhere called the history of cinema’s musical mutations. The Potter Style was, beyond that auteur’s life, brought to its worthy apotheosis by Alain Resnais in Same Old Song [1997]). The place – here the apartment block – remains in situ for the duration of all the songs; we never leave this physical world for another. Here, however, the grim, worldly stage is at least dressed and prettified. But what is it dressed in? All the objects – such as hanging, fluttering material and rolls of fabric – recall motifs and props back in the story world: the tissues with which the woman endlessly tries to mop up her space, or the paper peeling off her walls. Richard Dyer’s seminal essay on the musical proposed that musical Utopias conjure abundance – physical, material abundance – where, elsewhere in reality, there is only scarcity. (3) Tsai gives this aspect of musical form a vicious new twist. As in Potter’s Pennies from Heaven (film version 1981) or Chantal Akerman’s Golden Eighties (1986), problems, worries and obsessions relating to money are everywhere, underwriting all flights into fantasy. The world is a pinched place. So, in song, everything is abundant, overflowing, a fantasy of consumption: surplus, wasteful materials, plus chorus lines of adoring, interchangeable men and women – so different from that other, real world in which not even one man and one woman can connect. Tsai’s way of staging, framing and cutting “Achoo Cha-Cha” is all his own: neither sympathetic nor antipathetic, the mise en scène is full of life and performance energy, but also sparse, diagrammatic, almost geometric in its reversals of direction (shooting up the stairs, then down the stairs), isolated camera movements, and sudden changes of locale (such as when the hero enters a tatty field of white streamers). Once again in cinema history, the frame borders carve out a static unit of fragile, ephemeral magic. Adapted from a passage in the 13,600-word essay “Musical Mutations” (2000), which is the Tier 2 bonus for supporting my Patreon campaign supporting the continuing existence of this website: www.patreon.com/adrianmartin
1. Robin Wood, “Singin’ in the Rain: The Hole”, Cinema Scope, no. 2 (Winter 2000), p. 29; originally published in CineAction, no. 48 (December 1998). back 2. Ibid. back 3. See Richard Dyer, Only Entertainment (Routledge, 1992), pp. 17-34. back
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, Tsai Ming-liang, Taiwan/France, 1998)
