Putting the World Inside the Human Being — Ang Lee’s Cinema
When I was young, I did not like Ang Lee’s films. The posture of the “human” in them felt too familiar, too sticky—repression, imbalance, compromise. This was also the cultural landscape I resisted inheriting. Whether in content or form, Ang Lee’s films felt so steady that they made me feel stifled. It was not the stifling quality of narrative pacing, but a membrane clinging to my skin: the suffocation of all those rules of human feeling and worldly reasoning that I had borne firsthand, frameworks that kept life from unfolding freely.
Perhaps my younger self needed a fresher field of vision. Perhaps my younger self did not yet have the capacity to return home.
Not until I set foot on Fårö Island in Sweden, and saw Ang Lee’s signature at the Bergman Center. While filming Lust, Caution, Ang Lee was in great pain, so he went to Fårö to seek out the mentor who had first awakened him to cinema. When they met, Ang Lee leaned on Bergman’s shoulder and cried. Strangely, on that Swedish island so far from home, as I looked at Ang Lee’s handwriting, I realized this: compared with Bergman’s middle-period films shot on Fårö, with their solitude and collapse of the individual, their sense of rupture in which dialogue and salvation cannot be found through the relation between self and group, Ang Lee, from the very beginning of his filmmaking, never gave up seeking a new ethical position for the individual within multiple, conflicting cultural relations. His resistance is not one of tearing apart. It is an active search for connection, an insistence on putting the world inside the human being, struggling to widen the scale of what a person can contain.
What is good in Ang Lee is not only the warmth and generosity on the surface, but those spaces of reversal in his films where what is false becomes true; the cunning and goodness of human nature, at the end where there is nowhere left to retreat, can give birth to a solid wisdom.