英文摘要 |
Adapted from Han Ziyun’s The Sing-song Girls of Shanghai (1894), Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Flowers of Shanghai (1998) seems to portray a world which is both temporally and spatially remote from Taiwan society. Why did Hou make this film, which apparently departs abruptly and considerably from his former realistic style and socially minded themes? By means of meticulously reconstructing the world of the novel, Hou in fact holds up a mirror for the audience of Taiwan to reflect on their own society which, increasingly seduced by nationalism, is gradually absorbed in a self-hypnotizing, close-circuited “game of love.” Much like the “community of love” created in the late 19th century Shanghai by the prostitutes and their customers, the “community of love” in the film is but a “community of interests” because what props up the community is not “love” but “lust.” Using “lust” as a metaphor for obsession with neoliberal globalization, the film critiques neoliberalism, which by hardselling its values, makes a swath of the world, not least Taiwan, blindly submit to “imperial cosmopolitanism” at the expense of “critical cosmopolitanism,” its progressive counterpart. By means of the film, Hou admonishes that it is only through “re-creating” traditional cultures, which are “exterior” to modernity, in the way Enrique Dussel suggests, that we can hope to arrive at “transmodernity” to overcome the pitfalls of neoliberal globalization. |