Book Review: de Villiers, Nicholas. Cruisy, Sleepy, Melancholy: Sexual Disorientation in the Films of Tsai Ming-liang. University of Minnesota Press, 2022.

Nicholas de Villiers’ Cruisy, Sleepy, Melancholy: Sexual Disorientation in the Films of Tsai Ming-liang (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2022) joins a long list of publications which explore the works of the internationally celebrated Malaysian-born Taiwanese director. Song Hwee Lim’s formally attentive 2014 study, Tsai Ming-liang and a Cinema of Slowness,¹ Lim, Song Hwee. <em>Tsai Ming-liang and a Cinema of Slowness</em>. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2014. is perhaps the apogee of Tsai Ming-liang studies, but the field from which this study arises is rich and vast. The first book dedicated to the study of Tsai’s work was published in 1999, and interest has only grown since then, resulting in individual articles, journal special issues, book chapters, and comparative book-length studies, investigating Tsai’s work from almost every imaginable angle. Such a wealth of scholarship reflects the depth and interest of the object of study. Tsai’s films are provocative, from their formal rigour to their sometimes lewd and always perplexing content, and they reward close attention. This is true of the films individually, but it is also true of his oeuvre; his frequent reuse of actors, themes, settings, and (anti-)narrative techniques suggests that his body of work forms a single object: each film a variation on an underlying cinematic score.

The chapters of de Villiers’ book themselves operate in a similar manner. Ostensibly, each chapter explores the concept of disorientation—sexual, spatial, temporal, national, emotional—as it relates to a specific theme (cruising, porn, migration, rented space) and in relation to one or two key films. But films, arguments, themes, and subthemes repeat across the chapters, a recursive quality which is sometimes frustrating but will make the book very useful for teaching. One can set a chapter with accompanying film, alongside the introduction, and be confident that students can grasp the book’s overall argument. This is, de Villiers states in the introduction, that Tsai’s films use the affects of melancholy, sleepiness, and what de Villiers calls (after Roland Barthes) “cruisiness” to construct a queer phenomenology of space, which is more attentive to the experiences of disorientation than the normative experience of orientation.

This is a fruitful angle from which to approach Tsai’s films, but I wish more had been done to draw out the distinctions between the different affects. I blame in part the use of the euphemism “cruisy” to name what I consider to be the urgent affect of sexual arousal (what I would call “horniness”), which scrambles space and time in a manner quite distinct from sleepiness and melancholy. No doubt they can overlap, but exactly how they do is underexplored. Sleepiness can certainly be coextensive with the other two in quite a simple manner, but in my experience melancholy and horniness, while often intertwined, are more in the Freudian vein of Fort/da. If Tsai’s films flatten the three affects into one experience of spatial disorientation (and I don’t think they do), this itself requires more theorisation than simply calling all three affects “queer.”

And it is queerness as disorientation, or disorientation as queerness, that proves to be the overarching argument of the book; the key affects of the title appear only in a rather scattershot fashion. The relationship between sexual and spatial (dis)orientation is explored directly in the first chapter, which looks at the resonances between non-normative sexuality and disorientations in space in the films Vive L’Amour (1994) and I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone (2006). The second chapter furthers this analysis through a close reading of Goodbye, Dragon Inn (2003), which draws on Roland Barthes to explore the double aspect of movie-going: There is the space and the reality on the screen, but there is also the real space and, most importantly in the context of cruising, the people around you. The term “cruisy” has some payoff here, de Villiers using Barthes to propose “cruising” as a kind of exploratory and open-ended interpretive style. But one feels more could have been done to draw out the specificity of Tsai’s perspective on these issues and how it might differ from that of Barthes, whose writing ends up feeling like a master key for understanding Tsai’s work. Chapter 3 looks at the way Tsai utilises the camp aesthetics of musicals and porn in The Hole (1998) and The Wayward Cloud(2005). This is followed by an exploration of the relationship between migration and temporal and spatial disorientation in What Time Is It There? (2001) and Visage (or Face, 2009). Both are set in France, and de Villiers uses this fact to open onto a discussion about not just the films in themselves but the context of their production, specifically French financing and its impact on cinematic practice in the Sinosphere (he looks also at Wong Kar-Wai and Hou Hsiao-Hsien). The final chapter looks at “rented space,” a theme already explored as a sub-theme in relation to cruising in Chapter 2, and concludes with a tangentially related coda on Tsai’s relationship with his collaborator Lee Kang-sheng.

Each chapter offers a comprehensive summary of relevant secondary literature, through discussion of which de Villiers develops interesting approaches to both individual films and Tsai’s work as a whole. His style is more exploratory than argumentative, drifting between different ideas and only occasionally offering any interpretive or theoretical conclusions. This is in some ways an appropriate approach, for conclusive arguments seem somewhat out of place in an analysis of films as open-ended as Tsai’s. Indeed, it fits in with de Villiers’ use of Barthes’ idea of cruising as a kind of free associative interpretive method. Yet, I found myself wanting a little more argumentation, particularly as it pertains to the idea of “queerness.”

Contemporary theory risks vacating this term of its historical specificity. No longer tied to particular experiences of exclusion and disorientation, queer is becoming, in the hands of some critics, simply an unthought catch-all for any and all non-normative experiences (while the “normative” remains basically untheorised). Villiers himself is not quite of this camp, though his use of the term is rather ambivalent. It is “not simply” because Tsai is gay, he says, that his films are “queer” but because they disrupt binaries of sexual and national identity. That “simply” does a lot of work, allowing Tsai’s homosexuality to legitimate the queer label while pushing the question of his identity into the background. Few people describe Robert Altman’s movies as queer, though they are undoubtedly disorienting. This is surely a matter of identification, and the way auteur theory guides our interpretations, leading us to see the work as an enunciation from the subject position of the director rather than, say, a product of subjectless desiring machines, or the economic base, or whatever.

Villiers offers no sustained discussion of auteur theory, its history, or how he is using it, and this makes his invocation of queerness feel sometimes arbitrary. Moreover, even if we accept the auteur approach, what is the justification for reading Tsai as primarily “queer”? Isn’t it as true, and as illuminating, to suggest that his exploration of the disorientation underlying queer sexualities is “migratory” as it is to say that the experience of immigration is somehow “queer”? Is inhabiting transient spaces really a queer relationship to the city? What about the dissimilarities in these experiences? Like in his discussion of his key affects, de Villiers seems mostly interested in resonance. The result is that however illuminating this book is, and as useful as it may be in the classroom, one feels the desire to quote King Lear, as Wittgenstein did when complaining about the simplifications of mid-twentieth century analytic philosophy: “Come, sir, arise, away; I’ll teach you differences.”