Doctor Who, Argentina, and Wong Kar-wai’s ‘Happy Together’
Or, That Old Theme of Escape
The Many Crimes of the Doctor
A returning theme in the second televised coming of Doctor Who is the yearning for escape. In Rose Tyler, the show’s most compelling character, the housing project girl dreams of an exit from the grinding sameness of life in London’s lower middle class. I suspect this would be true even of the upper middle class.
When the Doctor and his TARDIS appear unannounced into her life, allowing visitations to dimensions and galaxies across time, this is a grander form of travel than going to Brighton/Lanzarote for a ‘wee bit o’ sun’.
We can empathize with Rose’s decision to abandon mother and boyfriend for Time and Relative Dimensions in Space, even if those characters can’t. This is a decision Rose revisits several times in the series, allowing the viewer to have an intentionally emphasized understanding of her problematic life choice. Previous ‘companions’ abandoned by the Doctor (or his earlier incarnations) confess to Rose of their jealousy and despair at being marooned back in the shallow puddle of their daily lives, condemned to be human at the pace of a day at a time. Eventually, this abandonment must happen to Rose too — because the Doctor lives forever. All humans die, much like pet hamsters.
As a theme, escape from Britain’s grey skies and its moldering middle class preoccupations fascinates the country’s writers. Other than the mostly Welsh screenwriters in charge of the second Doctor Who series, there’s Douglas Adams, whose Arthur Dent is plucked from his tweedy life working for the BBC to become something of a galactic adventurer. Tally ho. This sort of thing happens quite a bit in the fantasy offerings from the United Kingdom — the unexpected extrication into the exotic from a situation most dire: normal life.
To Escape or Not to Escape
Britain’s fantasy writers have tapped into an obviously universal theme, though the edge to such yearning to get away from it all seems more acute on that island than in North America. Whether the Continent has produced anything similar needs to be investigated.
Chances are though that if you are alive, you yearn to escape whatever it is you live in the present. Looking for the door leading out is the thing we do the most often after looking for the door in, i.e., leading to pleasures of contemporary life — consume, love, produce. But without our personal TARDIS, or doors opening into the ‘London Below’ (Neverwhere), we have more prosaic options for the door leading out. Some forms of escape are entirely internal: shut your eyes and dream. But for those after stronger stuff, there’s drugs (“open the doors of perception” as Huxley said — another Englishman). The more psychedelic the better. Sadly this escape lasts only so long, and then gets harder and harder to achieve. At the most banal level there is the escape of traveling for pleasure, i.e., vacationing.
My views on travel are known. Revisiting these views after my first true vacation in years (to Argentina), I find most aspects confirmed. Yes, we travel to experience the wonder in the natural and man-made universe; we find the pleasures of such wonder diminishing in proportion to the increase in the numbers of fellow tourists.
In this manner I was happiest when I had left others behind to find my own private space in Argentina; whether that was on a park bench or walking on a street in Buenos Aires, or walking in the hushed, almost impossibly beautiful coastal forests of Tierra del Fuego, having tramped ahead of my traveling companion.
The aspect of release that has to be confirmed, at least for me, is that I can be someone else in those moments. The item that has to be escaped most importantly is not the mundane day-to-day world that is left behind, in Washington DC or in the forever-England of the mind, but that self which lives and breathes in such places the rest of the year. In the clichéd sense, we want to escape ourselves.
So on to Wong Kar-Wai, then
Sometimes it takes years to escape oneself. In Wong Kar-wai’s Happy Together (1997), two gay men from Hong Kong arrive in Argentina to affirm their relationship by visiting the Iguazu Falls. Though they never get there together, their relationship continues in Buenos Aires till they are drawn apart by their different desires and personalities. Tony Leung’s character (Lo Yiu-fai) tries to forget the pain of his lover’s various betrayals by escaping, ironically, back into a form of normality in exotic Buenos Aires.
Living on the fringes of the city in a rooming house, he survives miserably — both in a moral and physical sense — by serving visiting East Asian tourists at various tourist traps around the city and cruising at public urinals for random sex. In a destination so far from his home in the guts of Hong Kong, Lo Yiu-fai finds comfort in ordinariness: playing soccer with Chinese staff from a restaurant; cooking Cantonese food in his rooming house, and smoking mountains of cheap cigarettes.
This doesn’t strike me as strange at all. The way we escape hasn’t been defined by any writer, even if the British have their take on it. Spacecraft won’t come for all of us. Neither will travel to exotic destinations or places of mythical beauty save us from the reckoning at the end of the journey — at the check-in counter, having your visa confirmed for the US, registering the cold fact that you’re now returning to the grind. Escape can only be real if we are to be Lo Yiu-fai and find tranquility in the everyday things in the middle of a cloud of pain/boredom. Ennui is a kind of pain.
Hence we need to confirm the validity of our dreams by experiencing any small form of them. If the taste of the morsel is sweet, then we can still hope. And hope sustains. In contrast, working too hard to achieve that dream, say by traveling 5,000 kilometers to the fictive Buenos Aires of our imagination, and having experienced it, then having to return: this extinguishes hope and requires a reboot. A new Buenos Aires, a new Argentina has to be imagined. Perhaps, finally do that trek through the highlands of Northern Vietnam? How about sailing across the Pacific?
In the end, we must dig inside to find the avenues of escape. Nearly at the end of the film, Lo Yiu-fai has saved enough pesos to return to Hong Kong. However, he does one thing before the Argentinian interlude ends — he travels to Iguazu Falls. One of the lasting images of the film, maybe its coda, is of the falls: vast volumes of swirling Amazonian water plunging in a curtain, with mist swirling from the bottom. A form of escape is to descend in your mind into the blue depths, traveling through time and all dimensions, into some perfect afterlife, where the dream doesn’t die by the bite, but is a long pure draught of everlasting hope.
