Transnational Affect: Cold Anger, Hot Tears, and Lust, Caution

This paper takes the 2007 film Lust, Caution by Ang Lee as its primary example to explore the ambivalent productivity of the “trans” in the current discourse on transnational cinema and global culture. The paper is divided into three parts. Part I takes the highly biased and provocative diatribes against Lust, Caution on the mainland Chinese internet as an intriguing cultural symptom for analysis, and finds in these angry reactions to the film not only an undisguised hostility toward collaboration framed in a paranoid rhetoric of nationalism, but also a new affective assemblage of “hanjian” (national traitor) and “the global man.” Part II shifts the focus to the cultural reception of the film in Taiwan and foregrounds the public shedding tears of Ang Lee and Ma Ying-jeou, the newly elected President of Taiwan, before and after the film’s world premiere: their emotional reactions are seen as being triggered by a new affective assemblage that seems to combine patriotic feeling with diasporic sentiment. A trans-historical linkage of two separate historical eras, those of World War II and the (post-)Cold War, is thus created to make “trans” less a border-crossing than a dynamic force of affective becoming. Part IIIfurther explores this affective becoming in light of the film’s major setting, Shanghai, in order to theorize a new concept of “homeland” that could be less a “single” spatial center than a “singular” temporal multiplicity. Therefore, the 1949 separation of Taiwan and China and subsequent cross-Strait geopolitical divisions can no longer be taken for granted for disparate responses; it is rather the trans as a new bloc of sensation variously affecting the audience members of Lust, Caution, creates lines of incongruity and incompatibility which form a new blockage of difference and differentiation across the Strait.