Goodbye, Dragon Inn: Slow Cinema and Overstimulation

By Milo Durrance

Goodbye, Dragon Inn (2003) is a film I am working on; not in the sense that I am actually working on it, it was directed by Tsai Ming-liang over 20 years ago in a country I’ve never set foot in. Instead, I’m working on it in the sense that I am trying to understand it. Goodbye, Dragon Inn challenges the idea of narrative storytelling. We live our lives in a world of narrative stories, so this is a challenging thing to grasp, to try to feel something and not try to understand it through the constraints of a beginning, middle, and end. I think we often understand ourselves through the idea of a narrative. Our memories follow a great arc, a hero’s journey, but on a day-to-day basis, there are millions of small moments that we never pay attention to. Ming-liang tries to capture those moments. While I have been known to (gently) berate those who do not understand slow cinema, it’s not a genre that comes easily to me either. I hate to admit it, but I am a notoriously distracted film viewer. We live in overstimulated times and it’s hard to step back. I spend far too much time on my phone and it bothers me. I want to read, I want to meditate, I want to slow down. Life is often boring and repetitive, and we try to escape that. Things happen, and they don’t. And so, in Goodbye, Dragon Inn, things happen, and they don’t. The movie is a microcosm of a changing world, but not much changes within the actual text of the film. It can feel like a ghost story at times. The Fu He Grand Theater is closing, but for this night things can be as they were, or we can pretend that they are. 

This story came directly from the real theater where the movie was being shot. While location scouting for What Time is it There? (2001), Ming-liang came across the theater that then became the center of Goodbye, Dragon Inn. Ming-liang did not intend to make the idea behind Goodbye, Dragon Inn into a movie, but he felt drawn to the environment of this dying movie theater. That’s also where the cruising element of the movie comes from. The theater being used as the location had also become a common cruising spot for gay men. Ming-liang plays with this idea of a documentary style within an artificial set-up. The scenario is real and constructed at the same time. The theater’s last showing is of Dragon Inn, a 1967 Taiwanese historical drama directed by King Hu. Dragon Inn represents the golden age of Taiwanese cinema. The movies are in conversation with each other. Two actors from Dragon Inn, Chen Shih and Miao Tien, appear in Goodbye, Dragon Inn watching their younger selves, so there’s a contrast of endless youth to the reality of aging, mirrored in the theater itself dying. Like I said, it’s a transition. To quote the director from a 2004 interview with Reverse Shot, “Film can keep something eternal. It saves the youthfulness, but it’s also dying as well. Whatever you film is slowly dying at the same time. Whatever you film is no longer there.” Goodbye, Dragon Inn speaks to this. After the night where the movie takes place, the space that these people existed in will be gone. We are living in the present, but we are always living in the past. Every second that passes will never exist again. Film captures those moments so they can exist in a limbo of existence and non-existence. Ming-liang often uses non-professional actors, saying “When I am working with actors, I wait for the moment when they reveal themselves in front of the camera.” It’s hard to be truly yourself in front of a camera, which Ming-liang fights against, but also embraces. The camera is a lens through which we see reality, and like all lenses, it distorts. Lee Kang-Sheng appears frequently in Ming-liang’s films. We see him here in his mid-30s, as he was over 20 years ago. But we can also see him as he was 10 years before that, in Rebels of the Neon God, Ming-liang’s debut feature. One day, everyone who worked on Goodbye, Dragon Inn will be dead, but the film will remain. That’s the power of art. We are continually looking into the past and into the future, but for 82 minutes, you can live in Ming-liang’s world and reflect on the beauty of the mundanity of the present.