Chekhov’s Gun,

Red Herrings,
and MacGuffins —
Modern Romance in the
Aftermath of Cinema
by Lee Weng Choy

The following text was written for the Open Studio

of Trương Quế Chi, When I Stop by the Cape, which
was curated by Chau Hoang and presented at Nhà
Sàn Collective from 28 October to 4 November 2017.
On the left is the diagram of the exhibition, and below
are two installation views; images courtesy of the artist.

1. Envy
Singapore artist Ho Rui An has written the essay that I have wanted to write for twenty
years. The title almost says it all: “From Gong Li to Ming Wong, or from the Face that Does
Nothing to the Face that Does Too Much”. [1] Rui An is a brilliant writer, and makes many
insightful observations about the work of compatriot artist Ming Wong and movie star Gong
Li, as well as moving images more generally. The essay I had wanted to write would have
been called, “Face and Film”. There are, I suppose, many reasons why I never got around
to writing it, but what’s relevant here is the fact that it remains unwritten. Why is it that we
often do not, or cannot, do the thing that we really want to do? And is this one of the
reasons why we feel envy of others? We envy not just their more attractive appearance,
their luck or greater success, but also their will to become who they want to be. This, of
course, is fantasy, even though it may be a constitutive one. In reality, the objects of our
envy also have failed at doing things they want. They also envy others — maybe not us,
but there is always someone.

The cinema, or rather the screen more generally, these days including computers and
mobile devices, is the modern classroom par excellence. I don’t know about you, but I was
raised and educated by movies and television — not that I watched either excessively. It
doesn’t take much to be shaped by them. Someday, when I find wisdom and peace of
mind, I might realise that I have been stuck oscillating between gazing at the face that
does nothing and the face that does too much. The former is the perfect expanse onto
which one can project any and every desire. While its counterpart, the face that does too
much, is also the quintessential foil for escapism or self-delusion — one is mesmerised by
the multiplicities, by its incessant becomings. Perhaps what I should have been looking for
instead is the face outside of film, in real life, as it were. If only it were that easy. Film’s
presentation of the face is unprecedented. It is arguable that more than landscape, action,
or any other sight or sound, it is the face that is the most important object of film’s gaze.
Indeed, there are classical shots of landscape that are also as much about the face as the
scenery — I’m thinking, for example, of a woman walking along an empty beach. We see
her back as she looks towards the horizon. What we don’t see is her face, and precisely by
not seeing it, its absence frames the meaning of the shot. We look at her looking, and long
to return to her visage to confirm how she apprehends the scene for herself. Moreover, it’s
plausible that since the advent of cinema, we have come to learn about faces less through
seeing them in actuality, than seeing them on screens, large or small. Film’s gaze has
become our gaze. Consider our most deeply felt emotions and thoughts: humanity once
thought these remained ineffable and mysterious, defying depiction. Literature was a stab
in the dark at making our interior life knowable. Today we seem to have conceded the
realm of privacy, surrendering to social media and its visuality and ubiquity, allowing the
drive for constant connectivity to wreak havoc on us, et cetera, et cetera … But, no, think
of a time before that — a century-long history of incredibly charismatic intimacies that film
has given us of faces falling in love. How can real life compete with that?

Although, perhaps it is less love than envy that the experience of cinema or any other art
form truly inspires. Because if you had to pick the one emotion that most writers feel
towards their fellow other writers, or artists towards their peers, it is not love — it’s envy.
And yet the problem is not so much that one artist envies another, or a wannabe envies a
celebrity, but, rather, how we live in fear of envy. We tend to think of envy as negative, as
an expression of hostility towards the person in question, and often these poisonous
emotions come out of fear. But if I may remind myself of the obvious, there are many
different registers of envy. And I like to think that there is a form of envy that comes from
gentler sentiments, like shyness or embarrassment, and that this form is but a nascent,
knee-jerk reaction, a kind of misshapen admiration, coming from someone who is still
uncomfortable coming out of their shell. We should embrace this particular feeling, and try
not to avoid it or feel guilty about having it. For it is this envy that will eventually pull us
towards our desire: to become ourselves, and to write the essay we have wanted for a
long time to write.

2. Intermission
I ask the reader to imagine watching a video of a man speaking all of this (the man is not
me — I hate to be photographed or video-ed). It is a moderately wide shot, and you can
see his full person and parts of the room. In the centre of the frame, he is sitting on a
simple wooden chair; on his left side is a louvred window and light is streaming in. The wall
behind him is blank. On his right is a low table, on top of which is a flowerpot with a plastic
plant. The man is speaking directly into the camera. What we have here is an actor, a
script and a scene. And what is at stake is not simply an essay but a performance. Rather
than the text, what may be more revealing of the true meaning of this performance is the
body-language of our hypothetical man in the video. Because the voice tells, but the body
shows. Writers are often admonished to “show, not tell”. However, I think the truth is we
should both show and tell. So let us have a little telling — an explanation of the terms of
the title of this essay.

Chekhov’s gun: the great playwright and short story writer believed in the dramatic
principle that each and every element in a story must be necessary to the plot. In the late
19th century, in a letter to fellow playwright Aleksandr Semenovich Lazarev, he wrote:
“One must never place a loaded rifle on the stage if it isn’t going to go off. It’s wrong to
make promises you don’t mean to keep”. A red herring, in contrast, is a misleading or
distracting plot element. The device is often used in film noir detective stories, where the
protagonist (as well as us, the viewers) finds a clue — a red herring — that leads nowhere,
or in the wrong direction. Somewhat different from a red herring, a MacGuffin is another
plot device, typically an object or person who plays an instrumental role in the beginning of
the narrative, but whose purpose does not get fully explained or justified by the end of the
movie. It is less important as a thing in itself, than in putting things into motion. In The
Maltese Falcon (1941), Humphrey Bogart’s detective is hired to find the eponymous small
statuette, but when he does, it turns out to be a fake.

Modern Romance: it’s not like I want to try and explain “modern” or “romance”, but the
combination of the two. Or rather, for me, what’s interesting is that we don’t use the word
modern, these days, when we talk about contemporary art — since the former denotes a
specific period in art history — yet I’m still inclined to say “modern romance” when talking
about the joys and afflictions of love in the 21st century. I’d never use the phrase,
“contemporary romance”. That sounds awkward and inelegant. But why?
3. Jealousy
La Jalousie (1957) is a novel by Alain Robbe-Grillet. The title, a play on words, can be
translated either as “jealousy” or a type of louvred window, “the jalousie”. Robbe-Grillet
was a literary theorist and a proponent of the Nouveau Roman. He argued that
conventional novels, with their focus on plot, narrative, themes and characters, were
outmoded. Instead, the ideal literary form, the Nouveau Roman, should focus on depicting
the objects and details of the world. In La Jalousie, the narrator suspects his wife is having
an affair, and spies on her through a window. As he obsesses, it becomes difficult to
distinguish between the moments he has actually observed from those that he only
suspects to have occurred. There was a time when I would read novelists like Robbe-
Grillet and be persuaded that the way to move forward in literature was to give up on
characters, their desires and motivations, as well as the larger themes we could glean
from their lives. These days, I’m partial to relatively conventional storytelling. I’d like to
think it’s not because I’ve become more conservative as I’ve grown older, but because I
still have remained somewhat of a romantic. Here the word does not simply describe
someone who enjoys certain kinds of stories, or clings to youthful idealism and optimism,
but the person who, notwithstanding all the evidence to the contrary, still believes in love.

Sabrina (1995) is a remake of the 1954 Billy Wilder film starring Humphrey Bogart, Audrey
Hepburn and William Holden. The 1995 version, directed by Sydney Pollack, features
Harrison Ford, Julia Ormond and Greg Kinnear. The plot is a classic love triangle. There is
a wealthy family, the Larrabees. Two brothers: David, the younger, is a fun-loving playboy;
the older, Linus, stern and serious, runs the family business. Sabrina is the daughter of a
widower, the chauffeur who has worked for the Larrabees most of her life. Since childhood
she’s harboured an obsessive crush on David, and would often spy on the Larrabee’s
lavish parties by climbing up a tree on their property. In the original, the Hepburn character
goes off to Paris and studies to be a chef. In the remake, Ormond becomes a
photographer. When Sabrina returns home, all grown up, David does not recognise her at
first, yet becomes immediately and utterly smitten. Linus decides to intervene before
Sabrina derails David’s engagement to another woman, the daughter of a potential
business partner. But, of course, in the end it is Linus who falls in love with Sabrina.

The reviews I read at the time said the original was much better. Who could top the
charms of Audrey Hepburn? However, I prefer the remake. When I first watched it, I
became instantly infatuated with Ormond’s Sabrina. Then when I watched it a second time,
I realised I had a “more intellectual” reason for preferring it. Let me try and explain. Both
Sabrinas are about the inadvertency of seduction and the metonymy of desire: Sabrina’s
object of desire shifts from David to Linus, as she transforms from the one who desires to
the one who is desired. Both films are also typical of modern Hollywood romances in the
way they use love as an alibi to elide class politics. But I think one of the critical differences
between the two versions is the new Sabrina’s chosen profession. While it only plays a
minor role in the plot, it is a key to the very structure of the film, which is knowing but not
overly self-conscious in its presentation of the full catalogue of modern-day fairy-tale
tropes — from the young protagonist coming of age, to the elaborate schemes, and the
climactic realisation by the two principals that they are actually in love with each other. The
early scenes of Sabrina in the tree looking enviously at the Larrabee party, or of her
peaking jealously through a window of the solarium as David makes his move on a party
guest, anticipate how she will eventually make a vocation out of her childhood longings
from a distance, by becoming, as a photographer, an adult observer of people. Watching
Sabrina, the first time, I thought I was imitating her. I too was caught looking longingly — at
her. But the second time I saw the film, I realised my misrecognition. It was not I who was
imitating her, but she, me. It is she who watches like the consummate movie-goer.

***

… After the man in the video finishes saying all of the above, he gets up from the chair,
turns and picks up the flowerpot from the table. He holds it for a second, looking into the
camera, then throws it on the ground — it smashes, though perhaps not as dramatically as
he would have liked. He tries to suppress a laugh as he leaves the room.

(October 2017)

Note:
1. Ho, Rui An. 2013. “From Gong Li to Ming Wong, or from the Face that Does Nothing to the Face that Does
Too Much”. In Corridors, No. 1: Solitude, ed. Michael Lee. Berlin: Künstlerhaus Bethanien.