Song at Midnight

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Finally, months after I advised one of my students on a project to write about the 1937 film Song at Midnight 半夜之歌, I watch it myself. The sensitivity of the writer for the film s/he is writing about is best made evident to the reader if the reader has also seen that film. That doesn’t mean I didn’t do a good job grading my student’s paper without seeing the film; it does mean that if I had watched the film I could do better. I realized my student was a sensitive reader early on in the project and recognized this in the final paper; now after watching the film I realize more deeply how and why the student reacted to scenes in the film. It’s better if you watch the film. So to help me remember that in the future, and to pay homage to my student DZ, I offer the following as a response to both the film and DZ’s work.

Song at Midnight is a fantastic dream of a modern Chinese tragic hero. As a youth he learns the great art of speech, figured here as song. He also learns to be moved, the value affect, emotion, connection: love. But love and song and his very being are attacked! Who, what, why? Recovery seems an option, but then...oh horror! Oh desolation! How could it be? My face, my face in the mirror is not human any more. Like Sima Qian, who faced the (possibly worse) abjection of castration, the hero here is willing to find his humanity again after a terrible trauma: 我愿意学那 “刑余的史臣” I am willing to study that "History minister who was the remains of his punishment."

How to do this? First, tell your story. The phantom must find a supporting character to offer an autobiography. Life, song, love, tragedy: aren’t you moved? Can’t you join with me? But the attachment is not strong. The phantom thus finds the strength to stand again on his own. He meets his enemy, and destroys him. But the society that nurtured his enemy now turns against him, and he is destroyed by the crowd. As with Iranian film, this film features scary, violent crowds of people in scene after scene: humanity as swarm, flock, feeding frenzy.

So Song at Midnight, like Phantom of the Opera, gives us a misunderstood martyr, a tragic hero whose ending shows up the cruelty inherent in us as a society that cannot welcome difference. It is a sad meditation on the difficulty of revolution, change, difference.

But it is also a beautiful picture of failure. Stylishly ugly, the phantom is the original emo, as A. says. I shall wear all black. Nobody likes me, so I will stay over here in the dark. I will sing my song, alone or to one person who just might understand. Oh, my woe! My tragic woes!

A. had another insight worth noting, as well: since this version of the phantom story pushes the female lead from second to third place, and introduces a second male character who forms a strong homosocial bond with the protagonist phantom, then the whole story becomes excessively involved with what DZ properly calls “the male gaze.” Much better to have filmed the entire film from the point of view of the unwitting female character, with whom we would have no trouble identifying as she faces first the horror of hearing of her lover’s death, then the strange songs, meeting his doppelganger, and final revelation of his tragic injury. That would make for a very different movie experience, but one that also emphasized the perplexing feeling that modern life so often leads us into, especially in such historical turning points as Shanghai in 1937.