"Ecstasy of Difference": Bertolucci's "The Last Emperor"

Abstract

The Sino-Italian connection has long history, beginning with Marco Polo, Venetian who first revealed to West. As Zhang Longxi points out, has furnished West since that time with a better reservoir for its dreams, fantasies, and utopias.' Antonioni's documentary film on China, Chung Kuo, but one expression of Italy's continued fascination with China. In his discussion of Antonioni's film, Umberto Eco emphasizes the search for as potential utopia by frantic, neurotic West.2 Similarly, Bernardo Bertolucci, first Western director permitted to shoot in Forbidden City, traditional capital of Chinese emperors, has said that China had become front projection of our confused utopias.3 Bertolucci's The Last Emperor, thus, invokes problematic image of as myth and symbol of difference and as ultimate Other/double of West.4 Emperor, like Bertolucci's other films, about revolution and utopia. The focus of Bertolucci's meditation on fate and prospects of revolution in our time has evolved from an revolution (as envisaged in 1900) to real one which, however, in Longxi's words, is obviously not concerned with per se but with learning about self in West.5 Yet The Last Emperor's utopian vision implies expulsion of feminine from new and improved society. Toward end of movie, no women remain in it. Women (except perhaps in 1900) are excluded from communist utopia envisaged in most of Bertolucci's films, but Last Emperor goes one step further and banishes them from text. The annihilation of women in this film enacted through film's dialectics of interior/exterior, darkness/light, which ultimately assumes orthodox Freudian binarism of feminine/masculine and Lacanian division of imaginary versus symbolic.6 In Emperor, both protagonist's desire and text itself follow an Oedipal configuration generated by search for father-tutor and by repudiation of mother. This configuration entails acceptance of Lacanian symbolic and rejection of imaginary, latter being articulated through infant's dyadic relationship with mother. Whereas The Last Tango in Paris (1972) demonstrates attachment to Lacanian imaginary