Deleuze and Hou Hsiao-hsien's ‘mosaic’ in Good Men, Good Women (1995)

Abstract

As the last and arguably least discussed film of Hou Hsiao-hsien's Taiwan Trilogy (starting with A City of Sadness [1989] and The Puppetmaster [1993]), Good Men, Good Women (1995) portrays 100 years of traumatic Taiwanese history spanning colonial Taiwan, the Second Sino-Japanese War, Nationalist rule and the ‘White Terror’ (1949–87 under martial law), through to the urbanized era that closed the twentieth century. Corresponding to the complex historical and geopolitical contexts of its setting and Hou's own multiple identities, the narrative appears intentionally confusing and convoluted. It defies linearity via a labyrinthine structure that meanders between different character perspectives, spaces, time frames, and ‘virtualities’ (‘virtual realities’, in the Bergsonian sense of the virtual), in what I call a ‘mosaic’ form. This visual and spatial model of a multiplying multidimensional mosaic provides a useful concept for approaching complex films such as this, by accounting for the narrative's projection of different historical settings, and its complex relationship with an embedded film-within-the film (which is also rather confusingly called ‘Good Men, Good Women’). This model is assisted by Deleuze's interrelated concepts of the ‘time-image’ (in particular, the crystalline oscillation between virtual and actual states of time) and the ‘any-space-whatever’ (a space that leaves inhabitants unsure of how to react to their surroundings) to recuperate the way in which Hou's film contemplates Taiwanese history and demonstrates transnational aesthetics. This approach offers a way to move beyond dichotomous critical positions regarding how appropriately the film portrays the collective traumas of the Taiwanese throughout the twentieth century, which are the Nationalist mainlander perspective (those who moved from the mainland to Taiwan after the Sino-Japanese war) and the nativist Taiwanese perspective (those whose family was rooted on the island for a couple of centuries before the mainlanders’ arrival).