The End of the Game: Flowers of Shanghai, Organic Community, and Transmodernity

Adapted from Han Ziyun’s The Sing-song Girls of Shanghai (1894), Hou
Hsiao-hsien’s Flowers of Shanghai (1998) seems to portray a world which is
both temporally and spatially remote from Taiwan society. Why did Hou
make this film, which apparently departs abruptly and considerably from his
former realistic style and socially minded themes? By means of meticulously
reconstructing the world of the novel, Hou in fact holds up a mirror for the
audience of Taiwan to reflect on their own society which, increasingly seduced
by nationalism, is gradually absorbed in a self-hypnotizing, close-circuited
“game of love.” Much like the “community of love” created in the late 19th
century Shanghai by the prostitutes and their customers, the “community of
love” in the film is but a “community of interests” because what props up the
community is not “love” but “lust.” Using “lust” as a metaphor for obsession
with neoliberal globalization, the film critiques neoliberalism, which by hardselling
its values, makes a swath of the world, not least Taiwan, blindly submit
to “imperial cosmopolitanism” at the expense of “critical cosmopolitanism,” its
progressive counterpart. By means of the film, Hou admonishes that it is only
through “re-creating” traditional cultures, which are “exterior” to modernity, in
the way Enrique Dussel suggests, that we can hope to arrive at “transmodernity”
to overcome the pitfalls of neoliberal globalization.