Reconsidering "The Hole"

The Hole is director Tsai Ming-Liang’s cinematic inauguration of the new millennium. Filmed on the cusp of the twenty-first century The Hole captures a unique historical moment for global humanity, and the specific impacts and activities of this moment’s becoming on Taiwan. While it is emblematic of Tsai’s efforts to return to a representation of the common, and everyday experience of working Taiwanese it also addresses the acute millennial anxiety of the time. The Hole is filled with prophetic ambience, and messianism that so captivated the earth’s inhabitants for a few years, and the very anxious eve of the year 2000.

Filmed in various sections of one of Taipei’s apparently labyrinthine and extensive quasi-slums, the driving narrative of The Hole is the interaction between two neighbors. Living on top/below one another in what looks like a public housing project, abandoned by the authorities (tenant’s rights aside) they meet as witnesses and victims of the shared destruction of their home. Early on in the film, a plumber barges in to the upstairs neighbor’s room demanding to service leaking pipes. When the neighbor returns later that day he finds a crater and rubble, exposed piping, and a hole connecting his room with the downstairs neighbor’s. In the mean time, the downstairs neighbor struggles to slow a leak from a burst pipe in her wall as the water in her apartment rises higher and higher. Her sopping wardrobe piled on the floor as a makeshift levee proves ineffective. Beaten down by endless rain, plagued by the mysterious “Taiwan Virus”—a syndrome that provokes its hosts to exhibit cockroach like behavior—and left to make a home of saturated rubble, the neighbor’s story addresses themes at this point common to representations of city life. Loneliness, drudgery, and the exhaustion of urban repetition afflict the characters of The Hole.

Apocalyptic aside, the decay and turmoil that surrounds these Taipei characters reflects a terror less fantastic than disturbing viruses, and the possibility of the overnight collapse of technological society. The Hole is in many ways a portrait of those figures swept up by rapid development, and fireworks like economic boom, definitive of the “Global South” in the late 20th century. The neighbors in The Hole live with utter abandonment. On a structural level this means that their government cannot or will not intervene to protect its citizens living in places deemed invaluable. As a virus ravages Taiwan’s populace—we learn in the beginning of the film through a news clip audio-montage—the government’s chief strategy has been evacuation and quarantine. The histories of the main characters in this film are not entirely revealed, but for whatever reason, they chose to stay in the homes they have made. (A comic irony throughout the film is the downstairs neighbor’s frequent calls on the plumber to fix a variety of water problems in her apartment, from burst pipes to leaky toilets. This while the water company plans to shut off the supply at the break of the New Year). Whatever the reason the characters stay in their crumbling home we can reason out the decision to risk illness and death over dislocation and displacement.

Taiwan may not be the location to best exemplify the destructive impulse in this global trend in too-fast development. I mean this only in the sense that Taiwan’s government (outside of the national question with China) is stable, and enjoys a vital democratic sphere, and relatively high standard of living. In this way director Tsai Ming-Liang’s film is both a testament of the times, yet in its specific choice of location ahistorical. But this is the power of the film; The presentation of social ills that are both fantastic (comical/disturbing bug viruses, and the end of the world), and visceral in their reality (mass evacuation, dispossession, government neglect) creates a fictitious narrative that is both alive in imagination and easily transposable with many different geopolitical spheres.

There is no time to wait.

As we are dragged pitilessly into the unknown future youth comprehends itself at the moment that it begins to slip out of our hands. A fleeting transitory pause at the cusp of adulthood gives us an adult perception, the cursed blessing of retrospect, of our pre-adult selves. For a few short years we can appreciate, and be conscious of the full energy, ambition, and potential we embody in youth as we still contain it within us, but as time presses on we must account for ourselves. The experience of noticeable decay, sloth, tiredness, lethargy-most of all boredom with the repetitiveness of all actions, all formerly exciting, inspiring phenomena, demands a response; some kind of counter assault on aging.

But was does this mean exactly? There are visible trends that attend to preserving the life of the aging. There are predominant methods the old use to make themselves appear full of life. Construction and accumulation are the most known. A massive edifice, it is assumed, built up around the living person ascending in years can create the illusion of permanence. This cumulative project - the bringing together of objects to create a world of one's own, a vast array of instruments of pleasure and leisure - can at most be a location of the enactment of life. The space on its own has never, and will never contain life equivalent to the will of human consciousness. But as the aging person sinks lower and lower into the depths of their architectural security, is there a point at which they are no more than the instrument of their own leisure?

The key illusion here is that permanence is synonymous with living. This mistake is the result of a flirtatious, un-serious engagement with the prospect of dying; the immediate result of such a flirtation is the understanding that "I will die" and its subsequent fear of death. But where does this leave the living person interested in preserving life in the face of the relentless and unsympathetic passing of time? The living person looks toward the unchanging, the timeless. They look toward those things utterly and entirely indifferent to the passing of time. But this is an inhuman response to a strictly human problem. What object, by virtue of being an object and indifferent to the passing of time, seriously considers its own life? None. Because if the object in question were to contain some kind of biological life, it is still human life alone which has true consciousness of its own finite temporality, its own linear biography jutting out from the endless cycle of (non-human) natural life. Permanence is an inadequate response to human considerations of aging.

So then, how to live, more importantly how to be young? It would seem that action is the only thing; Continued action engaging with others. Speaking, playing, running, fighting, violence if need be, so long as a person's life is made to account for the value of itself outside itself. Life demands a child's curiosity always, a child's indifference to consequence, a child's lack of consideration for risk, all things that throw a person into complex circumstances with other people. All things that, if anything, disregard the point of no return forever placed in our futures. This is a plea to all those who have taken first steps through the iron door of adulthood and with varying responses - mostly complicity - resigned themselves to letting the future's promise of nonexistence become them. Give and take with the living and you embrace life.

You have a choice. Others will know you if you let them. Inflict. Demand. Scour the living for the last vestiges of youth endlessly hidden from view by courtiers who preach deservingness and thieves promising death.