'I Revolt, Therefore We Are to Come'': Imaginary M/Other in The Assassin and The Grandmaster

'I Revolt, Therefore We Are to Come'': Imaginary M/Other in The Assassin and The Grandmaster

This study puts forward a critical investigation oftwo chivalrousswordswomen, Nie Yinniang in The Assassin(2015) and Gong Er in The Grandmaster(2013), applying Julia Kristeva’s writing on “intimate revolt,”a psychoanalyticconcept that deals with a revival of inner psychic experiencebased on timelessness.In the triadicrelationship of female subjectivity among the self, mother,and imaginary father,thecharactersconstantly question themselves while facing life-and-death dilemmas. Their self-questioning reinvents heterogeneous visual images of the maternal to create the strengthened vitality of female empowerment. Yinniang’s “multiple maternal identity”disorderis tinged with Asperger’s syndrome, but the spell of difficult verbal communicationis eventually broken through her inner probingof the archaic pastthat triggersarenewal of her psychic life. Lacking accesstomaternal care, Wong Kar-wai’sGong Er identifies with the imaginaryfather. Coupledwith her fatherGong Baosen and his successor Ip Man, she doublesherself as a father-motherconglomerateand reclaimsher father’s name. Whereas Yinniang’s external-and-internal transformationsilently redirects energy from external maternal figures that are reborn from the interior, Gong Er’s internal-and-external maternal eroticism is reproduced from the insideto contend with the paternal hegemony.They both, however, retrieve the forgotten zone of the body in lost time to find their future recalled by the imaginary father/other.Finding anarchaic inner world of the mother andsearching for a futureimaginary fathershape retrospective temporality and future expectation tocreate a female heritage.