Film Analysis on Farewell, My Concubine Farewell, My Concubine: Lies that become realities

The film Farewell, My Concubine uses the lens of two men's lives to chronicle the political and social upheavals that gripped China first during the communist and then during the Cultural Revolutions. These men are extraordinary and unique: they are actors in the famous, traditional Peking Opera. However, the film argues that the artifice they are forced to use in their art parallels the masks all Chinese are forced to wear in the face of a series of oppressive government systems. Eventually the masks replace 'truth.' Although this is the case to some extent for all Chinese, it is particularly true of Chinese persons of the female gender. Both pre-communist and communist China, for all of its efforts of becoming radical and creating a more equitable relationship between the social classes, were equally patriarchal. Certain bodies (bodies sexed both male and female) were forced into the subordinate feminine role and then condemned for fulfilling the dictates of this status.

The idea of 'gender as a performance' may be true of all societies but the conceits of the Peking Opera render this truth much more starkly. In this Chinese art form, much like Elizabethan theater in the West, men traditionally take female roles. This conceit becomes the source of the comparison between the two main characters, poor young boys who are conscripted into the Opera before the communist revolution. This is based upon their talent, but the rigors they undergo are no less than soldiers endure in any army. Chen Dieyi (given the stage name Xiao Douzi) and Duan Xiaolou (stage name Xiao Shitou) are transformed by their occupations from impoverished, anonymous children on the streets of China into famous and beloved actors. One of the boys, Douzi, is assigned to play the transvestite roles; the more stereotypically masculine Shitou is allowed to play male roles. However, they are brutally treated as they are molded into these artificial social identities, forced to endure bricks on their legs to master splits, subjected to grueling acrobatic training and, particularly in the case of Douzi, forced to undergo a complete dissociation from their old identities. Before Douzi identified as a male; he is forced to 'become' as well as impersonate a female and this status is literally painted on him with his training, not something natural to his perspective.

In many Western films, the idea of someone who is not heterosexual 'finding' their true self through dressing as a woman is a common one. However, Douzi's gender journey is far more ambiguous given the context of the society in which it takes place. In the beginning scenes of the film, when the boys are suffering through their training, they are depicted in one scene nearly naked, comforting one another, in an ambiguous fashion. Douzi is brutally 'socialized' to identify as a female, his sensitive temperament being 'read' as femininity by society.

At one point early on in the film, Douzi is forced to sing that he is "by nature" a girl, not a boy, which he resists. Eventually, the fate of the opera hanging in the balance, Shitou tries to convince his friend to sing the 'correct' words to the opera (which Douzi regards as false). When Douzi still resists, Shitou shoves a pipe down Douzi's throat, symbolically raping him or castrating him, taking away his masculinity. The expression on Douzi's face is hurt and brutalized at this action of his friend but as a result he eventually agrees to sing the words in the 'correct' way, that he is by nature a girl, even though this is counter to what he truly believes.

The scene in which he must do so is laden with irony: during the context of the opera, the song is supposedly sung by a young girl who has shaved her hair off to become a nun and thus resembles a young boy: yet she proudly proclaims that she is a girl. However, Douzi is forced to undergo the opposite trauma. He is has been symbolically 'raped' and penetrated by his friend, the man who will grow up to play the masculine roles against his feminine roles, and is forced to resemble a woman in the traditional, gendered casting assumptions of the opera, even though his true nature is that of a fully sexualized male.

It is interesting that his model of gendered socialization in the context of the theater is very different from the conventional narrative of 'coming out' in most Western films. Although Douzi is seen as more effeminate than Shitou, it should be noted that he does not self-identify as gay until much later in the film. Also, assuming the role of a stereotypical female...

And Douzi does not view this sexual role as a female to be positive or something to his innate desire at all, which is clearly illustrated as blood pours from his mouth as he sings the 'correct' words according to rote as a boy.
Interestingly enough, after both men become adults, Shitou says to Douzi that although he plays a king Douzi 'is' the concubine of that king he plays in the opera. Although this sounds like a compliment to Douzi's acting it also is a reflection of how much Douzi has been distanced and socialized away from his core sense of self. The extent to which Douzi has been robbed of his true nature is most poignantly dramatized at the end of the play when, in his final performance, Douzi literally commits suicide on stage while playing the concubine, blurring art and life. The film is bookended by the death of Douzi. It is the first scene and the last scene, the alpha and the omega of the film. The acting is static, mannered, and highly traditional in nature as Douzi begs the king to give his/her sword so she can commit suicide. Then, suddenly Shitou screams with horror the real name of his friend when he realizes that Douzi has actually used the sword to commit suicide.

The reason for Douzi's initial resistance to femininity is rooted in the negative associations with femininity in Chinese society. "Chinese culture places man at the center of social domain: he is the master -- the source and end of social norms, moral meanings, and political order. In the 'old society' of China, a man's masculinity as well as his social status is often indicated by the number of his concubines," in the case of Shitou his on-stage concubine as well as his 'real life' wife (Zhang 102). A woman is defined absolutely in her relation to men.…Chinese culture treats women as 'belonging' to/of men, and femininity has no independent status" (Zhang 102). Without a male to support her socially, a woman is a virtual nonentity -- when Shitou disowns his wife, she commits suicide; when Douzi feels that he has lost Shitou, this eventually results in his death in the role of the concubine of the king played by his friend.

Being physically forced by his friend and former protector to sing the role of a woman completes the brutal socialization process of Douzi into the Opera -- born with six fingers, so he would be accepted as 'normal,' his mother cut off his extra digit with her own knife. Shitou's enforcement of the social order upon his friend will much later be paralleled by his denouncement of his friend as a homosexual and Douzi's denouncement of his friend's wife as a prostitute during the Cultural Revolution. Shitou, even though he is an actor, is still the stereotypical enforcer of male identity and male constructs, partially given the roles he is compelled to play although he does so with greater willingness than Douzi, given these roles are accorded more social power and higher perceived social status, both within the scenes of the Opera as well as within real life.

As both men take on stage names and stage identities, these become parallels for the identities people take on during the Cultural Revolution, where people can be condemned under the slightest pretext and where they must take on false identities simply to survive. This could also be seen as a parallel with how gay people must often 'pass' in straight society. When the film was initially released, it was praised because of the fact that it highlighted aspects of Chinese culture, specifically homophobia, which had not been brought to light before. "Circulated in Chinese society as a 'love story for thousands of years, Farewell, my Concubine is transformed into a cultural discourse invested with male dominated values, which discriminate against not only women but also effeminate men" (Zhang 103).

However, the true nature of Douzi's effeminacy is indeterminate, given the extent to which it is imposed upon him by society. It is not clear…