Post #96: Lust, Caution

17 Feb. 2024

     What a strange and awkward name for a film (based on a novella by Eileen Chang); but that is only the beginning. It looks much stranger still when one reflects that the story told is not in fact about lust so much as its more subtle shadow, love, and not finally about caution either, but its abandonment at the key moment.

     Let’s get the lust out of the way first. The film is often billed as highly erotic. I beg to differ. The first encounter is hideous, the subsequent ones are perhaps evocative, but not particularly pleasant to watch, not only because of the inherent difficulties in making copulating lumps of flesh look enticing (that can be accomplished, rarely), but more importantly because these scenes suggest as much about the dark powers lurking in passion (the Thanatos factor, one might say with a nod at Freud) than about the proper domains of Eros, who is a mischievous god, not a deliberately cruel one, as human beings are known to be. The anti-hero of the story, for one: Mr. Yee, said to be the police chief of the collaborationist powers in Shanghai during the Japanese occupation—their local torturer-in-chief, as it were. That all powerful human passions, the darkest no less than the brightest, can lend themselves to Eros, is no very recent discovery; enough said about that side of things.

     What is much more interesting is how the balance tilts, at the moment of truth, from lust to love, on both sides, and from a calculated game of caution to a coming out of hiding with fatal results. The stage is set by the heroine, who makes Yee turn around the car for a visit to a jeweler’s shop where there is a ring waiting for her. The business of the ring, too, is not very interesting in itself, only what is implied when Yee abandons his usual caution. The ring, in all its scandalous opulence (at the height of a vicious war, in the face of mass starvation), represents all the love he is capable of giving. Perhaps it is not much, but there it is, and the heroine sees it clearly.

     She has herself set the trap; she has been seducing Yee with this very moment in mind, for years, and it was she who made him turn around the car while her friends and accomplices were still assembled and ready to strike. Yet, at the last moment, she has a change of heart and whispers to him to run for it. He realizes in an instant what has happened, scrambles out, and barely makes it into his car as the bullets fly; he is saved, while she has just doomed herself, and her friends. By the usual moral calculus, what she did looks like an inexcusable moment of weakness, an inability to follow through, for which a terrible bill comes due: the heroine and her five companions get shot in a harrowing scene by the cliff-side of a quarry at night, and the better cause (or so we are to believe) suffers another setback in terrible times. The beneficiary is a man who has earned a violent death many times over; a human scourge, though one who is afraid of the dark and gets cold feet at night.

     All that notwithstanding, I would insist that the heroine’s decision was by no means a moment of moral failure, but of doing the right thing by a higher power, and a good illustration of why one should pick one’s allegiances very carefully in life. Yes, she betrayed her friends in that moment, and her cause, and gave her own life away; and yes, she did it for a man with few redeeming qualities, from what we are shown, and in the service of evil to boot. (The story could have been told with more nuance, but such are the terms in which it is presented to us.) What space does that leave for doing the right thing by saving him, not the worthier others, in the interest of a better cause? One reason, and one reason only: because what she would have needed to betray, by staying silent, was something in him, very rare, perhaps unprecedented, and therefore more precious than all other considerations: however bad a man he may have been, in that moment he was letting his guard down, he was trusting her as he never did anyone otherwise, and he was showing what love he was capable of, putting his very life, implicitly, on the line.

     Terrible as it was to break faith with her friends, to betray that other, even more intimate trust would, by some elusive measure, have been worse still. No utilitarian calculus will cover it; no deontology will validate it; no virtue ethics condone it (#76). I know, I know. And yet, I hold that she did the right thing, and not as a weak creature of passion, or as a slave of mere lust, but for a higher power altogether, for love itself (#55). I’ve wondered before whether there might be a soldierly convention against shooting someone on the other side when he has his pants down; it would gladden and console me to hear that there was. Even at the risk of sounding romantic to the point of delusion (or wooly-headed, or nefarious, or even irresponsible), I think it more evil than any political cause can be (deep breath over having dared to give voice to so shocking a thought) to use carnal seduction (of all things) for the ends of war, even if it is common practice for the darker branches of the world’s military establishments around the world to train their agents in this very abomination. And although a man like Yee, or his equivalent at other times and places, has no very good claim on anyone’s mercy or compassion, though he may be legitimately entrapped as he would entrap others, it is another thing altogether to betray him at the very moment when a better man comes, however dimly, for a moment into view. He put his life into the heroine’s hands at that instant, and although it may precisely when the hard-hearted will strike with the greatest relish, it is in that moment of betrayal that all the world is lost. Or so I believe anyway.

In a feeble attempt at protecting myself, I had asked the friend who recommended the film to me whether it was as heartbreaking as the premise suggested. I did not find it so, he answered, and perhaps the terms of his answer should have put me on alert more than they did. But no, I too let down my guard and went ahead, on to my doom. On one level, he was very wrong: it is a frightfully heartbreaking movie. But on another, he was perhaps not so wrong after all: think it through a little more, and a faint silver lining emerges. Blood-chilling as it is to imagine the guns firing by the quarry, while the clock strikes ten, or to attempt a glimpse into the frozen heart of Mr. Yee as he sits on the cold bed of the heroine’s guest room, remembering to whom he owes his worthless life, even this horror is still not half as heartbreaking as the moment of betrayal would have been if the lady had played the patriot’s and the killer’s part more consistently, kept her mouth shut, and thereby led a man to his death not for his countless sins, but for allowing himself to step away from them for a brief moment.