The Hole (1998)

directed by Tsai Ming-liang

Jenny Wu

The year is 2017. I go out in my backyard at night—it’s around ten o’clock—to find my mother sitting on a lawn chair.

“Do you hear that?” she says.

“No,” I say.

“It might be termites,” she says.

She describes a persistent gnawing noise that she hears at night. For five nights she sits outside on the lawn chair trying to figure out what is making the noise.

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I’ve always been obsessed with films in which nothing much happens, particularly if the film features a woman staying inside her house.

I say that facetiously, of course, as a lot often does happen in these films I’m talking about, correctly termed “slow cinema,” in which the director purposely lingers on mundane moments in ways that make the passing of time palpable.

Tsai Ming-Liang’s 1998 work The Hole is one such film, though not his slowest. In The Hole, an unnamed contagion has spread across Taiwan. This contagion has left an apartment complex deserted save for an unnamed woman (played by Yang Kuei-mei) and an unnamed man (Lee Kang-sheng), her upstairs neighbor.

For the majority of the film's 95-minute running time, the two characters don't meet. They meet only in a couple of campy fantastical musical interludes and once in the “real” world to settle the matter of a hole that's formed in the woman's ceiling. In keeping with Tsai Ming-Liang's signature style, the film takes place amid an endless downpour.

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Although Tsai Ming-Liang has been called a “poet of solitude,” I find The Hole overwhelmingly tender. Perhaps because the survival strategy maintained by the unnamed woman in the film, the way she furiously attempts to fix her dilapidated apartment, in which she lives alone, reminds me of my mother. The film calls up an entire childhood colored by my mother’s compulsive cleaning and agoraphobia.

My mother came to the United States in the early nineties and held a smattering of part-time jobs that didn’t require much speaking. She has never had confidence in her English and, by extension, in her ability to relate to others.

I believe that my obsession with stasis started in childhood, spending days indoors with my mother, who was afraid to drive and afraid to let me go to other kids’ houses. Oddly, she was also against me doing housework, lest I burn myself with hot water or slice my finger with the fruit peeler.

During my more rebellious phases, I would say to her, “You’re afraid of everything, but you don’t know anything,” and she would reply, with wounded resignation, “I’m afraid of everything precisely because I don’t know anything.”

*

I have, to a lesser degree, some of my mother's tendencies: social anxiety, like anyone, and, sometimes, fear of change. These tendencies manifest in my relationship to my living space more than anything. I remember once, as a teen, going away to camp for six weeks, during which I never unpacked; while my roommate had put up posters and fairy lights by the second day, I kept my belongings sequestered in my suitcase under the bed, never even using the drawers or closet space provided.

I’d done the same, unconsciously, upon moving to St. Louis for my MFA. Fresh out of college, I knew no one in the city. I went to IKEA and found a $49 bed, but I talked myself out of buying it. I’d been sleeping comfortably on two quilts and a yoga mat, and I thought to myself, I’ll probably move again in two years.

*

There is a scene in The Hole when the woman makes ramen and eats alone on an olive green living room set, with a chunky 2000s television reporting on the current state of affairs, and a square analog clock lies flat on a cabinet, as though having outlived its usefulness. The television and the cabinet are pushed against the coffee table on which the woman eats because the floor behind the television is flooded. If you take the scene out of context—if you forget that there is a contagious outbreak—what you have is a woman who has let her surroundings fall into a state of disrepair.

When I compare the state I was in, living alone, to my mother’s, I begin to see our differences. I, for one, tend not to notice when my surroundings fall into disrepair, until it is much too late (one negative side-effect of glorifying “stasis”). My mother, on the other hand, is sure to notice when any small thing is amiss.

In part due to her past experiences in Maoist China, my mother has always lived in a perpetual state of crisis, with her defenses up, even after her life had reached a level of safety and security. In other words, she would be sitting at a quiet kitchen table and feel like the roof was falling down. For this reason, I see my mother so clearly in the world of The Hole, stockpiling household goods, crawling on her hands and knees to reattach peeling wallpaper, and ultimately doing so while alone with her thoughts.

Around the time my mother is listening for termites in the middle of the night, she is experiencing frequent anxiety attacks. Our family physician suggests therapy for her, but clearly balks and chuckles to himself, saying, “It'll be hard to find one that speaks her language.”

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In The Hole’s third musical number, the unnamed woman performs the song "我要你的爱," the Chinese version of Louis Jordan’s “I Want You To Be My Baby.”

On one hand, despite the woman's solitude and dire situation, the viewer catches glimpses of her wild inner life, in which she sees herself as a lover, a singer, and a dancer.

On the other hand, the campy interludes break so drastically from the established world of the contagion-ridden apartment complex that the viewer cannot enjoy the lush musical performances without melancholy seeping in the edges.

At the very end of The Hole, the woman either succumbs to the contagion or reacts psychosomatically to the stress of her situation and begins imitating the symptoms of the illness, crawling on her hands and knees straight into the hoard of household goods she has piled in her living room. Then, something remarkable happens: her upstairs neighbor extends his arm through the hole and, taking her hand, pulls her up through the hole.

While this scenario is one that can be dreamed about, it is decidedly unreal and a product of magical thinking. I’ve accepted that I will never be the uncanny hand that reaches down to pull my mother out of herself, nor do I wish to be rescued in this way. But the ending of The Hole remains strange to me, not just because I can’t decide which part to understand as reality and which part to understand as fantasy, but because the confined space in which the film is set begins taking on a new significance, all through a simple gesture.

The apartment transforms from a site of ruination into a space where anything can happen.

Jenny Wu lives and writes in St. Louis. Her work has appeared most recently in BOMB Magazine and The Literary Review. She edits REMAKE: a journal of first-year disruption.