when hou hsiao-hsien’s idea for Good Men, Good
Women changed from the problems of adjustment for a newly released
political prisoner and his daughter to a film within a film,1
the original
inspiration from Chu T’ien-hsin’s story “Once upon a Time There
Was a Man Called Urashima Taro” took on a life of its own. Hsu
Hsiao-ming’s Heartbreak Island also takes up the issue of reintegration
into society but focuses more on the betrayal of political ideals.
And Wan Ren’s Super Citizen Ko uses the iconic figure of a political
prisoner and sets up a sharp contrast between past and present. In all
three films, both the personal and the historical past are constantly
recalled to serve cinematic and ideological purposes. Super Citizen Ko,
in particular, is saturated with the past of its main character, XuYisheng,
but the film is preoccupied with atonement to the extent that
the construction and representation of his memory become a form
of redemption.
Super Citizen Ko revolves around Xu Yisheng,an intellectual who
was a member of a reading group in the 1950s.2
Like many of his contemporaries,
such as Zhong Haodong, he is arrested for reading prohibited
material and charged with intent to subvert the government.
While under torture, he reveals the name of another reading-group
member,Chen Zhengyi,who takes the blame as the leader and is later
executed. Ko is sentenced to sixteen years in prison. Shortly after the
beginning of his incarceration,Ko hands divorce papers to his devoted
wife, with the intention of sparing her embarrassment and suffering.
Instead, she commits suicide, leaving their young daughter to fend
for herself. When Ko is released, he goes into self-imposed exile in
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a nursing home for twelve years, until one day a dream about Chen
Zhengyi’s execution prompts him to reenter society and embark on
a quest for Chen’s burial site. Settling into the comfortable apartment
of his now married daughter,Ko continues to live an isolated life with
little interaction with his daughter and her family.He roams the streets
of Taipei and travels out of town, looking up old friends to ask where
Chen’s grave is located.When he finally finds it in an overgrown bamboo
grove, Ko lights up the area with candles to offer his apology.
The film starts in media res with Ko waking up in the nursing
home, and his past is relived and related to the audience through an
interior monologue during his search for Chen’s grave. Chen Ruxiu
has argued that “what he [Ko] is searching for is himself” and that
his only path to redemption is trying to find his friend’s grave.3
If
we accept Chen’s analysis that Ko’s search is a kind of self-rediscovery,
then the memory dredged up in the process becomes a form of
redemption that finally delivers Ko from his suffering.This interpretation
also is reinforced at the ending when Ko lights the candles.
How, though, is this redemption possible (or is it even necessary?),
and how, as a cinematic re-creation of the White Terror, does the film
increase our understanding of the representation of the government’s
persecution of intellectuals? Finally,how does the closure function? As
Robert Chi points out, Super Citizen Ko “enacts a cathartic closure”4
and “was lauded as being, obviously [when compared with Good Men,
Good Women], much less cool, much warmer, and hence more intimate,more
humane,more moving,”for it“offers a memory that audiences
were more likely to identify with, be moved by, assent to, and
remember.”5
It is precisely the complicity inherent in this type of film
that demands investigation, for in their appreciation of the film and
sympathy for its tormented protagonist, the public’s memory of the
White Terror is formed from Ko’s personal (and fictional) memories.
memory as interiorization
Much of what we learn about Ko’s past and present emotional state is
related in his interior monologue,which is a convenient and convincing
cinematic technique for an old man who has just come out of selfimposed
isolation.The interior monologue itself is a strategic option,
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for “soliloquy and interior monologue are cinematic codes for exteriorizing
thought.Their conventions work to the same end in making
unspoken thoughts available to the audience, whether the character is
alone or in the presence of others. . . .When this language undertakes
to tell a story, we have a narrational activity that calls for a covering
term to represent a common mental origin.Thus mindscreen narra-
tion.”6
What is most illuminating about this technique is the fact that
“mindscreen narrations were not limited to being tools for conveying
the main story but were seized on for dramatic scenes of self-confron-
tation.”7
The main character’s interior monologue in Super Citizen Ko,
in which he questions the meaning of political ideals and admits his
guilt, allows him to confront a past that he has tried to suppress.
In addition to the critical function of self-confrontation,an interior
monologue creates a subtle but important impression of Ko’s world
as a former political prisoner. Because the other characters “may be
present but do not hear the words,” his sense of isolation is intensified.
In other words, the interior monologue allows the director to
insulate Ko from society in order to stress the detrimental effects of
political persecution. Because an invisible label has been attached to
former political prisoners, they have no choice but to live in isolation.
Moreover,because the damage to their mental health and psychological
well-being cannot be easily verbalized, Ko’s interior monologue
serves as a symbolic function when he talks to himself but no one else,
similar to the attempt made by his fellow political prisoner to ensure
his own safety. During the previous year, Ko’s friend Professor Wu
suddenly begins exhibiting a form of paranoia; he wears headphones
and listens to propaganda broadcasts all day long to demonstrate to the
listening device (which, he believes, the government has implanted in
his head) that he has nothing but pure, patriotic thoughts.Wu’s wife
tells Ko that she has repeatedly toldWu that martial law has been lifted
but that he never believes her:“When the trauma is of human origin
and is intentionally inflicted, . . . it not only shatters one’s fundamental
assumptions about the world and one’s safety in it, but also severs the
sustaining connection between the self and the rest of humanity.”8
Most ironic is the fact that Professor Wu’s persecution complex
appears only after martial law is lifted.When freedom of speech and of
congregation are finally given to the people, the past comes back to
haunt Wu and plunges the victim of the White Terror into paranoia.
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He is, in essence, the victim of “History as Tragedy,” in the sense posited
by a film historian:“We might contrast these opposing visions of
history by calling them respectively ‘History as Epic’ and ‘History as
Tragedy.’In‘History asTragedy’people are seen as the product of their
context.Their structures of consciousness, their forms of perception,
their ways of being in and relating to the world have been inexorably
shaped by their historical experiences.They are caught in the past.”9
Only through such a portrayal can the devastating effects of theWhite
Terror be conveyed so poignantly.
contested memories
As a film that deals with the White Terror, Super Citizen Ko does not
rely solely on the detrimental effects of thought persecution. Instead,
it uses flashbacks and evokes various kinds of memories to advance
its central theme: “By suddenly presenting the past, flashbacks can
abruptly offer new meanings connected to any person, place, or
object. Flashbacks then gain a particularly rich dimension in the coding
of the psychology of character, and because their evidence is the
past, they immediately imply a psychoanalytic dimension of person-
ality.”10
In Super Citizen Ko, we see ample instances of such coding,
but what is most significant is that we see flashbacks of both Ko and
his daughter, Xiuqin. When their memories of the past are flashed
back to them, a discrepancy is inevitably formed.The variance can be
explained simply by means of the cliché that people remember things
differently.People do not remember an event in the same way because
the event does not have the same meaning and importance for each
person. It is through this variation in memory and the interpretation
of that memory, then, that Super Citizen Ko conveys the aftermath of
the White Terror.
The most obvious discrepancy in memory is in Ko’s and his daughter’s
recollection of the prison visit during which Ko hands his wife
divorce papers. In Ko’s flashback, his wife sits down, smiles, and looks
up at him.A reverse shot shows Ko looking at her and giving her the
divorce papers. She gets up and starts to leave, but then turns to look at
him before finally walking away.Like most of the flashbacks,this scene is
presented in complete silence, although the emotional turmoil in both
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characters’ minds is clearly depicted through the wordless exchange
between husband and wife. Later when his daughter relays her own
memory of the same prison scene, we spot her standing behind her
mother, watching the wordless exchange between her parents.When
the mother gets up to leave,the daughter hesitates and then follows her
mother out.The daughter’s flashback of the prison scene also is presented
in total silence. Even though it is not much different from what
the father remembers, their different perspectives succeed in distorting
their memories.
As MaureenTurim points out,“certain characters get certain kinds
of flashbacks at given moments, and analysis of a film can benefit
from remarking not only on the presence of a given flashback but
the absence of others, not only on what information is presented in a
flashback, but what is left out.”11
What is left out of the father’s flashback
is the presence of his daughter and,as she complains to her aging
father later, her feelings and her life after her mother’s suicide. Earlier
in the film, we became familiar with the father’s lack of interaction
with his daughter and her husband and son. Her recollection of the
prison scene serves to highlight her absence from her father’s mind.
Chen Ruxiu argues that Ko gradually realizes that he has been forgotten
by the world, just as he forgot about his wife and daughter while
he wasted his life for his ideals.12
In other words, Chen believes that
the aging Ko regrets his life and wishes he could have lived it differently,
for “he wants to prove that the past is just a dream and nothing
is real.”13
Although we cannot deny that Ko’s youth was completely ruined
by the absurdity of the White Terror, it is an oversimplification to
read Super Citizen Ko as a film about regret for one’s youth. In fact, as
Lan Bozhou’s “Song of the Covered Wagon” does, Super Citizen Ko
exemplifies the question of appropriately allocating narrative space
to the public and the private.The public, like the government control
apparatus, is constantly invading the private sphere of familial life.
Thus in these two flashbacks, we detect the competition between the
private and the public. For Ko, the intellectual who joined a reading
group, the concern was the public, the political situation of Taiwan in
the 1950s.He decides to divorce his wife,believing that it would spare
her hardships, with little regard for her private emotional state, which
is best illustrated by her suicide.
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For his daughter, Ko’s ordeal is entirely personal, which is why she
is against getting involved in politics. Her flashback of the boat ride
home after the fatal visit accentuates the contrast between father’s and
daughter’s memories. Her mother is standing with her back to the
wind, and the daughter watches as her mother rips the divorce papers
to pieces.Although Ko has no way of knowing about the boat trip,his
daughter’s recollection of it indirectly reveals the devastating effects of
theWhiteTerror on the people’s private lives. In her case, her father is
arrested because he has read some books with a few friends,and unbeknownst
to her, she will soon become a de facto orphan.The flashback
is most poignant for her, as an adult, recalling the incident many
years later, for she now knows what the papers contained and what
was going on in her heartbroken mother’s mind. Her father’s wellintentioned
plan ultimately caused her mother’s death.At a time when
serving tea to the members of the reading group cost a young woman
(Professor Wu’s sister) three years of her life, there was no distinction
between public and private, for everything one did and thought fell
into the all-pervasive jurisdiction of the police state.14
fabricated memories
The notion that private life can never be safe from an invasive and
pervasive government control mechanism is further enforced in a different
kind of memory,what I shall call fabricated,in that the characters
either dream or imagine a scene in the past that they cannot have
witnessed.In the beginning of the film,before the opening credits,we
see the headlights of trucks in the dark meandering through a field.
One of the trucks turns out to be a military vehicle transporting soldiers
who will then execute the prisoners in the other truck.Then we
see three prisoners kneel on the ground, and one after another they
are shot in the back. Except for the three gunshots, this scene, like the
other flashbacks, has no dialogue.The next scene shows a trembling
hand clawing at a blanket; the camera then slowly pans up to Ko’s
sleeping face. Ko opens his eyes and the camera cuts to the execution
scene,in which the third prisoner,obviously Chen,falls forward as the
bullet pierces his body, dark blood oozing out to stain his white shirt.
A slight variation on the scene reappears as Ko’s flashback when he
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visitsYouth Park, the former execution ground. In this scene, Chen is
shown in full frontal shot when he looks up and then falls forward at
the sound of a gunshot.
As critics have pointed out, Ko cannot have witnessed the execution
of his friend; rather, he dreams or imagines the scene after seeing
Chen’s raised hands to indicate the sentence he has received.In one of
the flashbacks, Ko hears the sound of chains clanging against the floor
and walks up to the opening on his prison cell door to see Chen being
led away. Chen raises his hands, his left showing two fingers of his left
hand and one of his right, indicating the death sentence for political
prisoners, according to article 2, section 1, of the martial law.The
knowledge gained from Chen’s hand gesture leads Ko to fabricate the
scene of Chen’s execution and also serves as the motivational force
behind Ko’s termination of self-exile. But “since Xu [Ko] himself was
not present at that event, nor does he find any witness to the execution,
the image wavers between Xu’s point-of-view dream vision and
a reality that no one in the film claims.”15
The film strongly suggests
that the execution scene is part of Ko’s dream, and it is repeatedly
shown with slight variations in the form of flashbacks.
To some filmgoers, the repetition of the gory execution may seem
gratuitous and unnecessary. In fact, its repetition may be derived from
the idea of catharsis,which“has acquired tremendous force in contemporary
culture and has become a foundational concept for explicating
the relationship between visual media content and viewers.”16
Needless
to say,we cannot resolve here the cathartic functions of screen violence,
and so it may be more constructive for us to consider the mnemonic
power of Ko’s fabrication or dream. That is, as a movie with a clear
ideological agenda, Super Citizen Ko does not simply re-create part of
Taiwan’s history (the past) but also creates a memory of that past (the
future knowledge of that past), for memory “cannot be strictly individual,
inasmuch as it is symbolic and hence intersubjective. Nor can it
be literally collective, since it is not superorganic but embodied.”17
Wan
Ren, the director, once disclosed in an interview that he was interested
in creating a contrast between past and present to conduct a sort of
reflection on Taiwan. But this process is far from being a mere cinematic
re-creation,since it has strong political ramifications,as argued by
Jonathan Boyarin: “What we are faced with—what we are living—is
the constitution of both group ‘membership’ and individual ‘identity’
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out of a dynamically chosen selection of memories, and the constant
reshaping, reinvention, and reinforcement of those memories as members
contest and create the boundaries and links among themselves.”18
In a similar fashion, but focusing again on the private domain, Ko’s
daughter, Xiuqin, fabricates in a flashback a memory of her mother’s
death from her perspective. After the mother and daughter return
home from the visit during which Ko hands his wife the divorce
papers, Xiuqin is seen sitting on the bed and letting her mother comb
her hair. Xiuqin then goes to sleep while her mother stares at herself
in the mirror and swallows some pills (presumably sleeping pills).Then
the camera cuts to the mother sitting against the Japanese-style door
frame, burning letters and a wedding photo. Because Xiuqin cannot
have witnessed her mother’s activities, she more likely inferred them
later from the ashes and perhaps from a diagnosis of the cause of her
mother’s death.This imagined scene is inserted in Xiuqin’s flashback
between her recollection of the boat ride home and her memory of
her mother playing the piano one last time. These details form the
memory of a young girl whose father’s actions inadvertently brought
on her mother’s suicide and left her a virtual orphan.
Xiuqin’s fabricated memory serves two purposes. First, by inserting
this imagined scene into her recollection of her mother’s last visit,
she points an accusatory finger at her father for having neglected his
responsibilities as a husband and a father, thus extradiegetically dispelling
the myth about the families of political prisoners.Wan Ren
revealed in the same interview his objection to the heroic and sympathetic
images portrayed in print media (fiction, magazine articles,
and biographies):“In fact, I discovered that subconsciously they [the
family members of political prisoners] were bitter and were unable
to forgive, resentful even.”19
Xiuqin’s resentment offers an important
(albeit symbolic) dissenting voice in the representation of the White
Terror and explodes the monolithic image of the victims and their
family members as understanding, magnanimous, and self-sacrificing.
A compelling contrast can be found in the character of Cai Qianhui
in Chen Yingzhen’s “The Mountain Road,” who willingly subjects
herself to a lifetime of toil and ultimately wills herself to death. Cai’s
selfless and steadfast image, as analyzed in chapter 2, serves political
and didactic functions, and Wan Ren’s character complicates the portrayals
of victims of the White Terror, dispelling the mnemonic myth
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of victims and their families. In his discussion of how Hollywood
filmmakers “establish and dramatize their portrayals through images
drawn” from American mythology, some of which derive from literary
works,RobertToplin argues that these images“emerged especially
from the movie culture itself.These visions wield tremendous emotional
force in the present day. Consequently, the filmmakers produce
part history, part myth.”20
Taiwan’s literary and cinematic history/
mythmaking presents an intriguing confirmation of and divergence
from Toplin’s assertion.To be sure, Chen Yingzhen creates an iconic
woman in “The Mountain Road,” which has, to a certain extent, created
a minor mythology of suffering women. Lan Bozhou’s nonfictional
Good Women of Taiwan, for instance, exemplifies such a literary
lineage. But Wan Ren’s Super Citizen Ko offers a differing image in
Xiuqin and may well be an alternative strand of myth.
We cannot ignore, however, that Xiuqin’s mother commits suicide
without regard for Xiuqin’s well-being,and after her mother’s death,she
is passed around among relatives and must deal with police harassment
alone. How do we then interpret the problem of culpability? Is the
film implying that during theWhiteTerror the Guomindang’s thought
police was the sole culprit and that people like Ko, his wife, and his
daughter were simply collateral damage?To answer these questions, we
must return to the issue of memory in flashback and to Boyarin’s notion
that a chosen selection of memories shapes and reshapes a social group
and an individual. Flashback films, writes MaureenTurim,
imbed the process by which memory forms the individual and the
social group within the narrative. They narrate what it means to
remember.They indicate what the power of memory can be for
a fictional character while becoming a similar extension of that
memory formation for their audience. Through their structuring
of memory sequences as subjective recall of historical and personal
experience,these films structurally underscore the process by which
memories are granted the power to define the individual and the
social group that identifies with the remembered experience of
another’s story.21
In Super Citizen Ko, we can assume that Xiuqin’s memories are
intended to represent the memories of all victims of the White Ter-
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ror as well as the memories of the Taiwanese in general. The film
appeals to the sensibility of the average moviegoer and thus lacks a
greater measure of self-reflection.There is an easily discernible parallel
between a film that creates a story of the victims of the White Terror
and the daughter of a political prisoner who imagines the last scene of
her mother’s death.Consequently,in a perverse but clearly unintended
way, the film calls into question the construction and transmission of
memory.The conclusion of the flashback, however, falls victim to the
temptation of melodrama, for toward the end Xiuqin is awakened
by the sound of her mother playing the piano and sees her mother
collapsing on the piano when overcome by the effect of the pills.22
The past remains mired in the past for Xiuqin, and her memories,
both fabricated and real, serve primarily to vent her resentment and
bitterness. In sum, she is representative of the kind of victim’s family
that dramatizes the director’s politics.Although we can be sympathetic
to the director’s intent, the scene is reminiscent of a film historian’s
observation on mourning:“Despite its insistence on the didactic and
transformative nature of confrontation with loss, the mourning paradigm
monumentalizes, schematizes, melodramatizes, and hence oversimplifies
the dynamic nature of the past and the role that the past
plays in the present.”23
floating memories
When a part of the past is presented as a flashback in Super Citizen
Ko, it is, with few exceptions, attached to either Ko or his daughter as
memory (imagined or not).Because of the difference in their perspectives,
the screen memories they impart to the audience underscore
the disastrous repercussions the Taiwanese suffered under martial law.
These screen effects are achieved through flashbacks with unknown or
unclear origins,or what I call floating memories.Shortly after we learn
about Chen’s death sentence through Ko’s flashback, the older Ko is
shown writing in his diary about Chen’s execution and its effect on
him. Next we see Xiuqin’s husband trying to convince her that politics
is no longer dangerous and that it is a good time to get involved.
The camera then cuts to Ko writing at his desk while the conversation
between Xiuqin and her husband can be heard coming from the
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living room. We are introduced to another flashback right after the
husband asks,“What are you afraid of? Do you think I’d harm you?
What do you women know anyway?”In this nearly pitch-black scene,
soldiers are searching the Kos’ house, and Xiuqin and her mother are
held back by a rifle-wielding soldier, watched helplessly by Ko, who
obviously has been brought back from prison.The next scene shows
Xiuqin and her mother running down the stairs and into the street as
the camera pulls back to show a moving vehicle.Xiuqin runs after the
truck and calls out to her father.When she stops running, a medium
shot shows Ko staring at the camera (and presumably the receding
image of his daughter).The scene then returns to the present, and she
is in the kitchen chopping vegetables.
The last shot of the flashback showing Ko’s face seems to have
emerged from his memory upon hearing his son-in-law’s complaint
about Xiuqin’s fear of political activities. Or the earlier part of the
flashback might be her memory of soldiers ransacking their house.Or
it could be a fusion of father’s and daughter’s memories, as the scene
before the flashback is the father writing in his diary and the scene
afterward is the daughter chopping vegetables.Not knowing the exact
origin of the flashback helps highlight the contrast between the past
and the present in regard to political freedom.For the son-in-law,who
obviously did not suffer political persecution,the lifting of martial law
means only an opportunity to be a player in the election game.For Ko
and his daughter, merely an interest in politics in the form of reading
and organizing a reading group can bring back terrorizing memories
of torture and death.
The contrasting attitude toward politics appears frequently
throughout the film. Earlier, when Ko begins roaming the streets of
Taipei, he encounters groups of protesters demonstrating against the
construction of Taiwan’s fourth nuclear power plant and advocating
for people’s rights. Back in his daughter’s apartment, Ko is inundated
with images of violent confrontations between the riot police and
protesters as he flips through the television channels, all of which are
new to him and serve as a stark contrast with his own past. When
we consider the cinematographic significance of these post–martial
law images, along with the floating flashback, it is impossible not to
regard the contrast as a commentary on politics in contemporaryTaiwan.The
older generation, represented by the young Ko, has higher
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aspirations and ideals, whereas the younger people, like Ko’s son-inlaw,
are opportunists with no beliefs except in the service of personal
gain.This contrast is intensified when Ko’s son-in-law is later
arrested and charged with bribery.This contrast becomes less plausible,
though, when we consider a statement made by Ko immediately after
his flashback of being tortured in prison:“What are youths and ideals?”
In other words, when the aging Ko questions his own youthful
actions, the possibility that the film is privileging the older, idealistic
generation no longer exists. Instead, the film seems to be mocking
political activities, past and present.
As discussed in previous chapters,the narrative strategy of contrasting
the past with the present can problematize the work’s political
and ideological stance if the author/director intends to privilege the
past over the present. But by casting both the past and the present in a
negative light, Super Citizen Ko seems to reject such an approach, for
the film is less interested in validating Ko’s past actions than in promoting
a kind of closure.This brings us back to the notion of redemption,
best exemplified in another flashback. In this floating memory,
Ko approaches a noodle stand,and the camera moves closer and closer,
from Ko’s point of view, finally to focus on the stand owner’s face.
The owner looks up and blinks a few times in the watery mist of the
steaming noodles, followed by a brief flashback of Ko on a truck, very
likely after the search of his house. In this flashback, Ko is shown, in
a medium shot, looking slightly to his left (possibly at a birthmark on
the soldier’s face); then the camera cuts to the soldier, who lights a
cigarette and exhales before turning to look at Ko.These two scenes
have the effect of the shot–reverse shot often used in scenes when
two characters are engaged in a conversation.We are usually shown
the face of A speaking, and then the camera cuts to B.This reversal of
perspective gives the audience the impression that they are looking at
A from B’s angle and then looking at B from A’s viewpoint.Applying
this reading to the two scenes in this flashback, from Ko’s perspective
we first look at the soldier as he lights his cigarette, and then from
the soldier’s viewpoint we see Ko. If this is the case, the origin of the
flashback is ambiguous, as it could be Ko or the former soldier turned
noodle-stand owner or both.
The uncertainty of the flashback’s perspective implies that both
the soldier and Ko are implicated in a political turmoil that is beyond
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their control. Later, when the former soldier and the former political
prisoner sit down at the noodle stand to share a drink, the former
soldier says with a straight face,“Back then I was only charged with
arresting people.”The subtext of his declarative statement is that he
was simply following orders and was only a tiny cog in the Guomindang’s
machinery of oppression and persecution.In their conversation,
the former soldier says to Ko that the Taiwanese were not the only
group targeted, as many mainlanders who exhibited any discontent
also were arrested and sentenced to eight or ten years in prison. In a
somewhat apologist fashion, the former soldier offers the explanation
for the Guomindang’s policy that in theWhiteTerror, many innocent
people were arrested in order to ensure that not a single Communist
infiltrator was spared. In the heyday of the collective anti-Communist
paranoia, everyone was a suspect, and everyone could be the
patriot who helped expose a Communist.The political climate at that
time demanded that everyone be part of the anti-Communist enter-
prise.24
As a consequence,participants like the former soldier could be
excused for taking part in enforcing the law.
Much as we would like to forgive foot soldiers like the noodlestand
owner, the scene still conveys a sense of absurdity while forcing
the audience to reflect on issues of reconciliation and responsibility.
On the one hand, we feel a sense of unease at seeing the former
political prisoner drinking with the man who ransacked his house and
terrified his family, not to mention that the organization he served
indirectly caused the death of Ko’s wife. On the other hand, we wonder
exactly how such an encounter should be portrayed cinematically.
Wan Ren’s original plan for the movie was to depict a former political
prisoner’s search for those who were responsible for his incarceration
and to seek revenge. But he changed his mind when he learned more
about the families of the victims and after reading Chen Yingzhen’s
“The Mountain Road.”25
Redemption thus has replaced revenge as
the film’s central theme, hence the floating memory of the scene on
the truck and the post-incarceration encounter at the noodle stand.
The wordless exchange of gazes on the truck becomes an emblematic
gesture toward future reconciliation, for the unclear origin of the
flashback metaphorically blurs the difference between the perpetrator
and the victim. But we cannot help but wonder whether state
terror like this can be easily forgiven by simply invoking the specter
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of the White Terror. That is, questions remain as to whether or not
the soldier did indeed believe that the formation of a reading group
threatened national security and whether all past wrongs could be
simply written off as the consequence of a less democratic time.The
fundamental issue raised by this scene has larger political and perhaps
ethical ramifications: Can a perpetrator, however minor, be absolved
of his responsibility because the political climate gave him no option
but to follow orders? And should a film addressing atrocity promote
such an approach to history? Marcia Landy’s meditation on material
monument may be helpful here:
The creation of monuments as a perpetual reminder of suffering
and as an expression of the need for restitution is addressed both
to the perpetrators and their heirs and to the handful of survivors
and their offspring. The injunction to remember, the coupling
of recollection to the motto “Never again,” the insistence on the
healing effects of memory, and the need to provide appropriate
cultural instruments to enhance this “work” are articulated for
German as well as for Jew, Gypsy, and homosexual, and perhaps
for all modern humanity.26
In the scenes of Ko’s meeting with the former soldier and the flashback
of his arrest, we detect the director’s intention of addressing the
issue of restitution between the perpetrators and their heirs and the
survivors. But the noodle-stand encounter falls short of convincing
us of the need to remember and, paradoxically, questions the healing
effects of memory.
Memory seems only to bring more suffering to Ko.In their conversation,the
former soldier,with somewhat irrepressible pleasure,reveals
to Ko that he has long retired from the Garrison Command and has
opened the noodle stand with his wife and daughter.“Life isn’t bad,”
he concedes,before asking,“What about your wife?”Well intentioned
though it may be,the question seems thoughtless and cruel,and all Ko
can do is keep drinking.To be sure, Ko’s search for the former soldier
has nothing to do with his wife or his family life; his sole concern is
finding Chen’s grave so he can rid himself of the guilt that has caused
his self-imposed exile and tormented him for thirty-four years. Also
implied in the scene is the contrast between a former perpetrator
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of terror and his victim: the former has a family and a humble but
comfortable life, whereas the latter has lost his wife and is estranged
from his only remaining family member.The recall of the past in this
scene is devoid of therapeutic power, and remembrance seems only to
heighten Ko’s determination to locate Chen’s grave.
Memory does,however,bring deliverance for Ko.But it is not until
he finally finds Chen’s burial site that Ko’s subconscious can conjure
up the memory of his wife, although the scene is not a flashback recollection
in the strictest sense.At the end of the film,when Ko returns
to his daughter’s apartment after the candle-lighting episode, he collapses
in the doorway. His daughter helps him to bed and, finding his
open diary, starts to read, with Ko’s peaceful sleeping face serving as
the backdrop.The film ends with a sepia scene of the aging Ko strolling
on a breezy open field with his young wife and daughter on either
side. Holding hands, they walk in slow motion, smiling at the camera,
and then the frame freezes. Since it is utterly impossible that the old
Ko could exist in the same time frame with his wife and daughter
when they were young, this scene can only be imaginary.The most
logical explanation is that it is Ko’s dream, but it also is possible that
Xiuqin is imagining it while reading her father’s diary. Ultimately, we
must consider the final shot to be a shared, imagined memory for
father and daughter. It is a memory of the past and at the same time a
memory for the future.
documentary memory
In a fashion similar to the use of fabricated memory, Super Citizen
Ko also incorporates archival footage at two critical junctures.These
two segments, one from the late colonial period and the other from
the early days of Nationalist rule, are strikingly similar in both their
documentary nature and their function in the film. Both featuring
the ruling governments’ display of military prowess, these documentary
excerpts appear in a nearly seamless manner after following
flashbacks of former political prisoners.They create intriguing,
ideological interpretations of historical events and offer a personalized
view of Taiwan’s past by juxtaposing personal flashbacks with
archival footage.
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The first archival footage appears when Ko succeeds in locating the
first person implicated in the reading group,You Minshun,a musician,
who lives in a dilapidated, illegal shack and earns a living by playing
at funerals and weddings. Unwilling to talk about Chen Zhengyi,
You focuses instead on an earlier time, when both Ko andYou were
classmates and comrades in arms after being drafted by the Japanese
colonial government to fight in the PacificWar.You then picks up his
saxophone and walks out into the ramshackle yard, where he plays a
march.With the military music playing in the background, we first
see a black-and-white scene in whichYou, Ko, and three others from
the same village sit for a photographer before they are sent to the
battlefield. After the photographer’s flash, the camera cuts to documentary
footage showing marching soldiers and a troop inspection by
the Japanese governor-general of Taiwan, followed by archival film of
battle scenes, including dead soldiers lying in the trenches.With the
militant music continuing to play but at a lower volume, the camera
cuts from archival footage to Ko and another soldier (possibly You)
arriving at a Japanese house where deceased soldiers’families kneel to
receive their bones.This mixture of historical documentary film and
fictional characters’ flashback ends with Ko andYou crying with the
families as the camera cuts to the roofs of illegal dwellings in Taipei
in the 1990s.
The immediately discernible significance of this segment is the
ironic effect created when the archival footage clashes with the personal
flashback.You was not a member of the reading group but nonetheless
was sentenced to six years because he had paid a visit to his
old classmate, Ko.We can infer that You, like so many victims of the
White Terror, suffered both in prison and after his release. Constant
harassment from local police and difficulties finding steady employment
were but two of the most common forms of persecution, even
after the prisoners had served undeserved sentences. It is therefore
understandable thatYou does not want to discuss Chen or any related
matter.27
Instead, he prefers to recall an earlier time, when as loyal
subjects of the Japanese emperor, they were offered the great honor
of dying for the emperor. The recollection of the delivery of dead
soldiers’ bones is clearly from Ko’s perspective, as we see the camera
zoom in on his sobbing face. Accordingly, what is glorious for You
represents only death in Ko’s memory.
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The irony of the archival footage becomes even sharper when contrasted
with other footage whose appearance is filled with ideological
and political implications. In a scene that triggers a combination of
documentary film images and personal flashbacks, Ko visits Professor
Wu, who puts on his headphones when Ko asks where Chen is
buried. Ko lifts one of the earphones and hears an anti-Communist
propaganda song. Then we see a black-and-white documentary of
the Double-Tenth celebration, with Chiang Kai-shek inspecting the
troops.As the shrill voice continues to drone on about the importance
of recovering the mainland, the image of tanks displaying the military
prowess of the Guomindang regime segue into military trucks rushing
in and disgorging soldiers to arrest Ko and other members of the
reading group.The functions of the documentary footage are many.
First, it serves as an ironic reminder to the post–martial law audience
of the absurdity through which most of them lived:
Because the historical film by definition refers to a past reality
known to most viewers prior to the film either from experience or
from representation, they enjoy the effect of recognition. . . .This
extra referent, which appeals to historical knowledge (and knowledge
that exists outside of the film’s fictional sphere), produces an
additional level of meaning and increases the meaning potential of
the film.28
The documentary footage also highlights Wu’s damaged mental
state and, by extension, that of other political prisoners. Most important,
it is a silent accusation against the fascist state apparatus that in
the name of recovering the mainland and resisting the Communists
hunted down and persecuted many people, instilled a pervasive fear
in everyone’s lives, and destroyed people like Professor Wu, Ko, and
many more.The juxtaposition of real archival footage and the fictional
depiction of Ko’s arrest has a subtle leveling effect in that it fictionalizes
the real and brings a sense of realism to the fictional.As Anton Kaes
argues in his discussion of Fassbinder’s historical film: “The viewer
senses, even if unconsciously, the unresolvable dual status of historical
narratives, as document and fiction, authentically true and at the same
time used within a freely invented story.”29
Ultimately, however, Super
Citizen Ko emphasizes more the question of how real the historical
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footage is, for as the Taiwanese who lived through the era can attest,
the troop inspection was nothing but a staged display, a myth of the
Republic of China. For all intents and purposes, the archival footage
is as fictional as the film in which it is used.
Placed side by side, the two excerpts of archival footage reveal
startling similarities. For instance, the troop inspections by the governor-general
of colonial Taiwan and Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek
are nearly identical, with the same kind of amorphous soldiers goosestepping
before the podium in front of the presidential office (the
former governor-general’s office taken over by the Nationalist government).
Taylor Downing’s analysis of history on television is also
appropriate here regarding footage in fictional films: “In newsreels,
public information films, works of propaganda or television newscasts,
film frequently not only captures an impression of what an
event looked like but gives a topical and often revealing interpretation
of that event.”30
Used several decades later, the incorporation of the
archival footage in Super Citizen Ko presents a new interpretation that
may be in direct opposition to the original intent.That is, both the
military and the governor-general/president in front of their office
are symbols of the state, but for the Taiwanese the definition of the
state (guo) is extremely complex. Post–martial law debates over the
issue of national identity inevitably return to the question of whether
the Nationalist government was another colonial government, just
like that of the Japanese.Although Super Citizen Ko does not dwell on
this question, its title does hint at the issue of national identity: Citizen
(Guomin, the original Chinese title).To which state does the title
refer? It could well be a declaration of political allegiance,in the sense
that a citizen of a given country should have the inalienable rights
to congregate freely and to read any material that he or she wishes,
without fear of persecution.
Among the films dealing with acts of government brutality and the
suppression of dissents in Taiwan, Super Citizen Ko is the only one in
which the victim comes face to face with the member of the Garrison
Command who arrested him, but the central theme of redemption
forecloses any possibility of probing the issue of culpability.To be sure,
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we should be cognizant of prosecutorial romanticism, as defined by
Paul van Zyl, which is “the notion that ‘retributive justice’ is a sufficient
response to past abuse.”“The punishment of perpetrators is crucial
to dealing with the past, but it will always be insufficient response
to mass atrocity, and any successful attempt to deal with the past must
seek to explore other strategies to make victims whole and to prevent
a recurrence of past abuse.”31
Yet Ko’s search for truth (that is, Chen’s burial site) unconditionally
validates and legitimates the need for reconciliation. Hence what
we see is the tormenting of Ko’s conscience over unwillingly revealing
Chen’s name. Perversely, Ko is the guilty one: he suffers years of
isolation in prison and at the nursing home, and his wife commits
suicide. Therefore, at the end of the movie Ko finally finds the site
where Chen and others who were not identified by their families are
buried.32
He lights the bamboo grove with candles and offers his apology
to Chen Zhengyi.This overriding concern with closure entails
an urge to move forward and contradicts the earlier moments in the
film that were invested in recollecting and re-creating a memory of
the White Terror.
I am not arguing that we need to dwell on the past but am questioning
whether in the end, Ko’s action (and, by extension, the film)
mirrors the tired slogan of forgiveness in the post–martial law atmosphere
of reconciliation. It is no wonder that Robert Chi states that
“the whole premise of political prisoner as UrashimaTaro seems to be
a pretext that prescribes and prescripts XuYisheng’s candlelit voicing
of apology for his betrayal of Chen Zhengyi.”33
While I believe that
Chi has overlooked the entire film as a process of creating memory,
I would argue that the ending hastily dispenses with many lingering
issues that still face Taiwan. Dominick LaCapra’s analysis of mourning
illustrates my concern: “In mourning one recognizes a loss as a
loss yet in time is able to take (partial) leave of it, begin again, renew
interest in life, and find relatively stabilized objects of interest, love,
and commitment. Moreover, one remembers and honors the lost
other but does not identify with the other in a specular relation that,
however ecstatic or self-sacrificial, confuses the self with the other.”34
Whether Ko is eventually able to mourn the past and, analogously,
whetherTaiwan has succeeded in mourning the loss,remains the ultimate
question.
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