wayward cloud
I took my UNDERGRADUATE film class to see Tsai Ming Liang's latest film Wayward Cloud.
I would never have dared to do so in Minneapolis -- I am sure that I would have been reported to the Dean, the Student Ombudsman, the President, sued perhaps even for requiring my students to watch a man dressed as a penis in one of the musical numbers.
Tsai's film is about the unlikely love between a porno actor and a docent at Gu Gong Museum and takes place during a drought that has dried up all water sources in Taiwan. Ravishingly beautiful, the film features Lee Kang Sheng as a cross between Charlie Chaplin's tramp and Mark Wahlberg. Lee's physical beauty and his sly, streetwise, thuggish sexuality have never appeared more compellling.
The climate of the University of Minnesota, located in the heart of the Upper Mid-West is not really conservative, but it is religious. And there is a subtle and pervasive moralization that makes "offending" some one else's sensibilities a vice more than crime that must be punished. This phobic reaction to the other, the alien, the provocative, the disturbing, the erotic, the immoral, the failed has been encouraged by both left and right-wing in that city and is reflective of the growing narrowness of the American mind. I am no admirer of Allan Bloom, but he did get his title right. It's just that his right-wing cronies had as much to do, if not more with the door slamming on a spirit of free and critical inquiry in American public discourse and universities.
My Taiwanese undergraduates here were stimulated, delighted, disgusted and willing to talk about the film and all of its tragicomic complexities.
In Taiwan, the recent massive expansion of the universities has left an unevenness in teaching quality and research projects, but it is no small irony that I have encountered greater receptivity, curiosity, less resentment, and more open-mindedness here among my students in a country that shed its military dictatorship in 1987, that saw free presidential elections for the first time in 2000, than I did in my students in the Mid-West.
I would never have dared to do so in Minneapolis -- I am sure that I would have been reported to the Dean, the Student Ombudsman, the President, sued perhaps even for requiring my students to watch a man dressed as a penis in one of the musical numbers.
Tsai's film is about the unlikely love between a porno actor and a docent at Gu Gong Museum and takes place during a drought that has dried up all water sources in Taiwan. Ravishingly beautiful, the film features Lee Kang Sheng as a cross between Charlie Chaplin's tramp and Mark Wahlberg. Lee's physical beauty and his sly, streetwise, thuggish sexuality have never appeared more compellling.
The climate of the University of Minnesota, located in the heart of the Upper Mid-West is not really conservative, but it is religious. And there is a subtle and pervasive moralization that makes "offending" some one else's sensibilities a vice more than crime that must be punished. This phobic reaction to the other, the alien, the provocative, the disturbing, the erotic, the immoral, the failed has been encouraged by both left and right-wing in that city and is reflective of the growing narrowness of the American mind. I am no admirer of Allan Bloom, but he did get his title right. It's just that his right-wing cronies had as much to do, if not more with the door slamming on a spirit of free and critical inquiry in American public discourse and universities.
My Taiwanese undergraduates here were stimulated, delighted, disgusted and willing to talk about the film and all of its tragicomic complexities.
In Taiwan, the recent massive expansion of the universities has left an unevenness in teaching quality and research projects, but it is no small irony that I have encountered greater receptivity, curiosity, less resentment, and more open-mindedness here among my students in a country that shed its military dictatorship in 1987, that saw free presidential elections for the first time in 2000, than I did in my students in the Mid-West.
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