I finalize Part II with a suggestion. Thoreau spoke of active listening as well as active talking. What about interactive reading and watching of films?
Call me mad, but the early monks of the Franciscan order directed the sacred text to themselves. They read aloud, alone, engaging in a dialogue with the words. “Let not the sun go down on your wrath.” Lord, I went to bed last night, angry with Abba Tomas; we don’t agree about how loud the liturgy should be sung. What happens inside my heart if I defer and sing louder, as he wishes?
“Please, let the sun not set on my now uneasy heart.” Peaceful, relevant application. And so what of film? What does Ling Ling find in film that life cannot provide? How does film finally bring her and her Maoist-frenzied childhood friend together [in a park, near water, of course]? Born a child of disgrace, she becomes jealous of her baby brother, born to her mother and new father, “Uncle Pan,” the projectionist for the popular outdoor films he shows each night. When she does more to attract her parent’s attention, she receives a beating, which leaves her deaf.
Because films order the world in two hours, they are an order principle in our own lives. Of course we suspend time and logic. If we can’t, go ahead and read a book on physics and forget the film. She becomes a runaway, living, ironically, down the street from her parents. She writes in her journal, “if my life were a movie, I’d be the only one watching it.” Loneliness? I think of those lines when I write one of these blogs. This insight, easily topped by the famous Groucho Marx lament: “I wouldn’t want to be a member of any club that would have me for a member.” Electric Shadows captures loneliness, deafness, alienation, but it also captures love and reconciliation. Let the camera do its work as it helps you pick up the hints.
Jiang also helps us with symbols: Cameras, film, binoculars—all capturing the theme of perception and misperception. Here comes the old Scot, Robert Burns: “O would power gie us, the gift to see ourselves as eithers see us.” That honing of the senses begins with film when they are very young.
While my mother and I walked home from My Foolish Heart, I kept thinking about something children can’t get their minds around: Love. How could the beautiful Susan Hayworth weep so much over a man, now gone? I was 8 at the time.
Ok, I admit it. In my privacy while watching Electric Shadows, I put myself in the film. How would I have treated the outcast and beautiful Jiang Yihong, disgraced by a pregnancy, deserted by her lover, a Red Guard enthusiast, more obsessed with a fat man who killed hundreds of thousands of people as Chairman and wrote 20 pages of political and economic nonsense that sent an entire nation into madness, than the woman he loves, the child, the new little human who is his responsibility?
Could I escape the rabid world of the Red Revolution? Would I have ceased being human had I lived then?
How precious are the shadows that invade my mind, as I lie abed, drifting into sleep. How could that angel wife of mine and I join forces and help such “fallen” souls? How would we help mend broken hearts and deep wounds of those hearts and souls? Well, first, we would want a landscape as background—a brook, trees, and a little bridge, a place to sit. We’ll need the mothers and fathers of such lost runaways. Carolyn, critical in these tender moments, would hold the crying woman without a mother. She would lay her head on her lap and stroke her forehead. I would sit near, and in perfect Cantonese I would begin the words of comfort.
“You are not really responsible for all of this. Let me tell you the rest of your story--the part you don’t know. . . .”
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