Wong Kar-wai’s Films and the Culture of the Kawaii

Introduction

Since 1988, the year of the release of As Tears Go By, many academic texts have been written about Wong Kar-wai and his films. Among the themes dealt with are 1) Wong’s emergence from the Hong Kong cinema scene and the exceptional status he enjoys within that scene; and 2) the similarities between Wong and an extremely wide range of Western directors. The twofold concentration on Wong’s Hong Kong origins on the one hand, and his compatibility with Western cinema on the other, can be explained through Wong’s almost unique ability to make films that appear to be equally Chinese and Western, or equally local and global.¹ However, in my opinion, any limitation of analysis to a dialectics of Eastern and Western elements runs the risk of bypassing by the real sources of Wong’s oeuvre. I am not aware of a single study that attempts to integrate Wong in the wide, though limited, cultural sphere of modern or post-modern East Asia. Stephen Teo points to Wong’s Asian literary influences, such as the novels of Osamu Daizai and Haruki Murakami. He even sees “a film like 2046 [as] living proof of Wong’s global and pan-Asian strategy (it features stars from all the Asian territories mentioned, while the device of having these stars speak in their own mother tongues is also part of the strategy)” (152–53). I want to extend Teo’s anticipations and explain Wong’s work by not reducing it to a selective amalgamation of “East” and “West,” but by understanding it as a phenomenon flowing out of a sphere that must be considered as having a culture of its own: the sphere of modern East Asian culture. By using this approach, I seek to avoid relativism like that expressed by Jenny Kwok who claims that “the Third World is so infiltrated with First World images and narratives that it is not possible to identify Third World ‘national’ symbolic products anymore” (22), a relativism that affirms that national characteristics do not exist at all. On the other hand, I want to avoid the essentialism that sees films and all cultural productions as expressions of national culture. Wong’s world is neither the traditional Chinese one nor the “globalized” or international one, but that of lower middle-class inhabitants of “modern” Asia who profit only indirectly from the effects of globalization. For lack of a better word, I designate as “Pan-Asian” the cultures of those East Asian countries long under Western influence. These countries have not simply been “Westernized,” but have created a cultural style driven by a dynamic of its own, able to exist as an autonomous unit alongside “Western” or “Asian” culture. They are mainly: Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, Japan, Korea but not (so far) the Republic of China. Of course, a link between the Pan-Asian sphere and China exists, but only—precisely as in Wong’s films—though a memorable “Shanghai-past” that brought forward its own original culture in the 1930s and 1940s.

The title of this article, which links the culture of the kawaii to a study of Wong Kar-wai, points to an underlying cultural pattern that is, in my view, present in the cultures of the aforementioned countries. Kawaii means “cute” in Japanese, and denotes a common popular culture closely linked to aesthetic expressions of kitsch, and which developed remarkably distinct features in all modernized East Asian countries.² Modern East Asian popular culture bears traits of a social crisis that is most obvious in Japan, and which some people characterize as being “all style and no substance.” A disillusionment with society as well as a psychological helplessness has created a youth culture that engages in consumption and the creation of a commodified dreamworld. Though these features are not necessarily explicit and prominent in Wong’s films, I believe that they are implicit, as hiddenexpressions of the Pan-Asian cultural sphere that I am attempting to describe. Unquestionably, Wong’s nihilistic and detached, “dandyist” manner conveys emotive lifestyles without substance, determined by...