Flowers, concrete, water: care and precarity in Tsai Ming-liang’s I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone (2006)

Abstract

ABSTRACT Tsai Ming-liang’s I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone (2006) follows the life of a mattress as it traverses across the busy streets of Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. This transient mattress brings together three strangers – Rawang (Norman bu Atun), the ‘Homeless Guy’ (Lee Kang-sheng), and the ‘Coffee-shop Waitress’ (Chen Shiang-chyi) – into entangled encounters that necessitate intimacy and care as each lives in precarious conditions. The phrase ‘I don’t want to die alone’ hauntingly follows like a shadow to Tsai’s English-language selection for the film’s title, ‘I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone’. Looking toward this shadowy hauntedness, desire becomes situated as moving from aloneness in sleep toward togetherness in death. As the film follows a triangulation of desires among its three central characters, this article follows a triangulation among flowers, concrete, and water to analyze the film’s work of illustrating care in ways that enmesh humanity into the circulatory and transitory lives of things – and images of things. This article engages literature on Tsai’s Buddhist aesthetics and crip/queer theories of time and the body to read how flowers, concrete, and water perform the film’s meditations on interdependency. As cultural production increasingly addresses the climate crisis and the precarities flowing from it, Tsai offers a position for artists to take up: we must make time to think, to mourn, and to mentally prepare for death. These are painful acts of the mind to endure. But Tsai’s cinema provides the time and space to perform such acts in relation and with care.