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

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.

KEYWORDS:

• Tsai Ming-liang
• queer theory
• queer cinema
• crip time
• interdependency
• care

Acknowledgments

My thanks to Usha Iyer and Jean Ma who were interlocutors throughout the development of this piece. I am very grateful for their mentorship. Thank you to SCMS’s Queer and Trans Caucus for their recognition of this essay with the Holmlund Prize. And thank you to Laura Stamm, Clara Bradbury-Rance, and Matthew Connolly for their enormously generative notes throughout the publication process.

Figure 1 and Figure 7 are made available by Unifrance: https://en.unifrance.org/movie/27792/i-don-t-want-to-sleep-alone. Accessed 16 Apr. 2024. The other figures are selected stills from the film.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. As Kai-man Chang notes, Tsai writes these characters as ‘unnamed (or unnamable), identified only in the credits as Paralysed Guy and Homeless Guy’. Kai-man Chang, ‘Sleeping with Strangers: Queering Home and Identity in I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone’, in Cinematic Homecomings: Exile and Return in Transnational Cinema, edited by Rebecca Prime, Bloomsbury Academic, 2015, pp. 256.

2. Here, I am of course thinking of Jean Ma’s recently published At the Edges of Sleep: Moving Images and Somnolent Spectators (2022).

3. Chang, ‘Sleeping with Strangers’, 251.

4. Dennis Zhou, ‘In Taiwan’s Mountains, a Director Works to Slow Life Down’. The New Yorker, August 28, 2021, https://www.newyorker.com/culture/persons-of-interest/in-taiwans-mountains-a-director-works-to-slow-life-down.

5. Robin Bernstein, ‘Dances with Things: Material Culture and the Performance of Race’, Social Text, vol. 27, no. 4 (101) (Dec. 2009): pp. 68–69.

6. I am thinking mostly about discourses surrounding camp, though many have taken up notions of excess and abundance in queer cultural production (as well as in queer theory) to critique capital and commodity fetishization. See especially, Judith Butler, ‘The Force of Fantasy: Feminism, Mapplethorpe, and Discursive Excess’ (1990); David Gere, ‘29 Effeminate Gestures: Choreographer Joe Goode and the Heroism of Effeminacy’ (2001); madison moore, Fabulous: The Rise of the Beautiful Eccentric (2018); and Joshua Takano Chambers-Letson, After the Party: A Manifesto for Queer of Color Life (2018).

7. Song Hwee Lim, ‘Tsai Ming-Liang and a Cinema of Slowness’, in Slow Cinema, edited by Tiago de Luca and Nuno Barradas Jorge, Edinburgh University Press, 2016, pp. 89.

8. Teng-Kuan Ng, ‘Pedestrian Dharma: Slowness and Seeing in Tsai Ming-Liang’s Walker’, Religions 9, no. 7 (2018): 9.

9. Ng, ‘Pedestrian Dharma’, 11.

10. I am particularly influenced by foundational writing in the field that centers phenomenology. See especially, Bert O. States, Great Reckonings in Little Rooms: On the Phenomenology of Theater (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985); Judith Butler, ‘Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory’, Theatre Journal 40, no. 4 (1988): 519–531; and Alice Rayner, To Act, To Do, To Perform: Drama and the Phenomenology of Action (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1994).

11. Ma writes that Tsai’s films ‘soundly reject the teleology of revelation upon which narratives of sexuality are commonly patterned – a teleology wherein stories resolve through a progression from secrecy to openness, and from repression to liberation […] The limitations of such a framework, with its universalist norms of identity and freedom, for other cultural contexts are well worth recalling in view of the critical lapses that mark contemporary discussions of gay and lesbian movements in the non-West – namely, the tendency to impose an epistemology of the closet rooted in the West as the single standard against which gay liberationist enterprises in other parts of the world are to be measured as inevitably retardataire and inadequate to the present [emphasis in original]’. Jean Ma, Melancholy Drift: Marking Time in Chinese Cinema (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2010), 119–120.

12. I am especially influenced here by the work of Mel Y. Chen on ‘animacy’: ‘Animacy activates new theoretical formations that trouble and undo stubborn binary systems of difference, including dynamism/stasis, life/death, subject/object, speech/nonspeech, human/animal, natural body/cyborg. In its more sensitive figurations, animacy has the capacity to rewrite conditions of intimacy, engendering different communalisms and revising biopolitical spheres, or, at least, how we might theorize them’. Mel Y. Chen. Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect. Durham and London: Duke University Press (2012), 3.

13. Peggy Phelan, ‘Dying Man with a Movie Camera: Silverlake Life: The View from Here’, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 2, no. 4 (1995): 388.

14. AIDS Epidemic Update: Special Report on HIV Prevention, December 2005. Joint World Health Organization and United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS), (2005), 38.

15. See note 3 above.

16. Chang discusses this in relation to notions of ‘strangers’: ‘Through recognizing the similarities and differences of each other’s desires, needs, and fears, Tsai’s strangers are able to offer one another help, thereby forging alliances that are situational, strategic, and mutually inclusive. Tsai’s fascination with the stranger revolves less around the question of what it means to be a stranger than what is required for a stranger to build a relationship with another stranger, or how strangers go beyond the boundaries of social norms to forge new alliances’. Chang, ‘Sleeping with Strangers’, 256.

17. Alison Kafer, Feminist, Queer, Crip (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), 34.

18. Rawang’s hold of the Homeless Guy’s hips also embodies a notion of crip/queer intimacies that Kafer addresses, as she notes how interdependency expands certain private/public boundaries belonging to normative ‘straight’ relations. Kafer. Feminist, Queer, Crip, 41.

19. Lim, ‘Tsai Ming-liang and a Cinema of Slowness’, 94.

20. Ng, ‘Pedestrian Dharma’, 14. Emphasis in original.

21. I am influenced here by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s journey with Matsutake mushrooms, as documented in The Mushroom at the End of the World (2015). Tsing writes, ‘If we open ourselves to their fungal attractions, matsutake can catapult us into the curiosity that seems to me the first requirement of collaborative survival in precarious times’ (2). Later, Tsing notes that the stakes of such curiosity are grounded in necessarily interdependent collaborations: ‘staying alive – for every species – requires livable collaborations. Collaboration means working across difference, which leads to contamination. Without collaborations, we all die’ (28). Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2015).

22. Anne Anlin Cheng, Ornamentalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), 22.

23. Nicholas De Villiers discusses ‘fishing’ in relation to Tsai’s depictions of cruising in his other films, but he does not mention the fishing action in I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone and its possible citation of cruising. Nicholas De Villiers, Cruisy, Sleepy, Melancholy: Sexual Disorientation in the Films of Tsai Ming-Liang (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2022), 8.

24. As in the etymological core of ‘theātrum’: ‘Theatre | Theater, n’., OED Online (Oxford University Press), accessed November 12, 2021, https://www.oed.com/view/Entry/200227.

25. Lim, ‘Tsai Ming-liang and a Cinema of Slowness’, 93.

26. William Shakespeare, Hamlet, edited by Abigail Rokison-Woodall (London and New York: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare 2017), l56.

27. In Alice Rayner’s influential elaboration of performance philosophy, drawing much inspiration from Hamlet, Rayner notes, ‘Death in particular can never be enacted or represented except as a performance because it is the ultimate “other” for life. Yet the reality of death, of nothingness, stands behind or within performance, guaranteeing only the truth of its own otherness and the absence of a substantive thing’. Rayner, To Act, to Do, to Perform, 30.

28. Lim discusses a ‘drifting’ sequence in Tsai’s What Time Is It There? (2001) as indicative of a ‘crossing of the boundary between the dead and the living […] represented through Buddhist-Taoist symbolisms in the film’s ending. Shiang-chyi’s drifting suitcase in the pool stands in for a floating lotus lantern which, in Buddhist-Taoist folk practice, is released on water to help the deceased cross from the realm of the living to the realm of the dead’. Lim, ‘Tsai Ming-liang and a Cinema of Slowness’, 93.

29. Lim, ‘Tsai Ming-liang and a Cinema of Slowness’, 96–97. Lim further cites François Lunel’s 2009 documentary on Tsai, whose title, Fleurs dans le miroir, lune dans l’eau, draws from Tsai’s discussion of jinghua shuiye.

30. Phelan, ‘Dying Man with a Movie Camera’, 388.

31. Kafer, Feminist, Queer, Crip, 42–43.

32. Zhou, ‘In Taiwan’s Mountains, a Director Works to Slow Life Down’.

33. Ibid.

Additional information

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Adin Walker

Adin Walker is a PhD candidate in Theater and Performance Studies at Stanford and received a B.A. in English from Princeton. Walker’s recently published articles include ‘Lulu “Works the Trapeze”: Producing the Modern, Western Sex/Gender System in Nineteenth-Century Aerial Arts’ for the 10-year anniversary issue of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, and “Shaping Life, Shaping Work: Julio Torres’s Queer Comic Labor” for a special issue on “Comedy and Embodiment” of Theatre Topics.