Goodbye, Dragon Inn: A Conversation at the End of Cinema
Has cinema, in all its modernity, lost its body? Only today would we see such a phenomenon: a film produced without light ever hitting a film strip, spliced and assembled entirely in the virtual chasm of a computer, and disseminated through some plenitude of streaming services—never to be truly embodied within a physical theater. Yet, somewhere between the outset of cinema as a prototypical technology and the medium’s current, virtual apocalypse, Taiwanese director Tsai Ming-liang believes there was a shining, golden age: a time when communities would house central, single-screen theaters that served as their social nexus and that fostered a collective ritual of moviegoing.
Tsai would feel such a magnetism and nostalgia for this cinematic culture that he would go on to create a filmic elegy to it: Goodbye, Dragon Inn. Released in 2003, Tsai’s film laments the then-dying, now-fossilized era of truly physical cinema: a time when the word cinema conjured in our minds not only a medium, but a building, too. The plot of the film is remarkably simple. A local theater in Taipei is closing down, choosing to show one last film: the titular, 60s-era martial arts epic Dragon Inn. Alongside a troupe of odd characters, we are in attendance to bear witness to the theater’s swan song. Most notably among these figures are actors Miao Tien and Shih Chun—two stars from the original Dragon Inn, nearly 40 years older in Tsai’s film—who now return to bask in the metacinematic experience of watching themselves on screen.
As this final screening of Dragon Inn comes to a close, Miao and his grandson exit through the theater’s labyrinthine hallways. On their way out, they encounter Shih, who is staring wistfully at the array of movie posters on the wall of the lobby—perhaps he would have been featured among those posters 40 years prior. Only now do the two actors realize that the other was also in attendance, and they briefly exchange five tender lines of dialogue. They express mutual surprise at seeing one another, and the small conversation ends with a poignant statement by Shih: “No one comes to the movies anymore, and no one remembers us anymore.”
Both actors reflect on the death of the cinema as they knew it, as well as the death of their own eras of stardom. This death is further understood by the image immediately preceding this scene: a six-minute shot of the empty theater, its haunting vacancy and stark, bright lights lingering before the viewer. If a healthy, thriving theater is dark and crowded, then the desolate, illuminated cinema is unmistakably an image of death which underscores the truth of Shih’s final words in the film.
However, Tsai is not so quick to endorse this grim prognosis of the cinematic format at large. Following the close-up shot of the two men speaking, the film retreats to a wide-angle shot, and it is in this final shot of the characters that we see Miao’s grandson positioned between the two men. As they both gaze longingly at the wall, the young boy curiously looks around the room, even stealing a glance out of the theater and towards the camera itself, towards us. This conversation between Miao and Shih, to me, has always felt like a final gasp of air, an unequivocal acceptance of death. However, the last we see these two old men, they are framed with a young, vibrant boy between them. In fact, it feels as if the true focus and purpose of this wide shot is not the men, but the boy himself. Amidst a sprawling reflection on death, between two dying men, and within the corpse of a rotting building past its use, what can the boy represent if not the utterly sublime notion of new life?
One now arrives at the final shot in the sequence, the quiet encore to this meditation on mortality: we return to the abdomen of the theater, watching as the projectionist rewinds the film reel of Dragon Inn into its metal casing. Instinctively, this seems to be an act of burial, an entombing. Yet, I argue that it is much more appropriately read as a preparation: a kinetic, revitalizing symbol; in winding the reel, one potentiates it and bestows the film with the possibility of playing once more. There is a visible, undulating rhythm at work in this scene. Tsai Ming-liang shows us that for every old man past his prime, there is a young boy with a world ahead of him; for every empty, hollow theater, there is a casing of film refilling with images and emotion, waiting patiently to be released once more.
So, I ask again: has cinema lost its body? Tsai, though himself deeply nostalgic for a bygone era of cinema, doesn’t seem to truly believe so. What Goodbye, Dragon Inn shows us is that the body of cinema will never fully be lost, it will only take on new forms. It was Gilles Deleuze, the French philosopher, who once boldly stated: “If cinema does not die a violent death, it retains the power of a beginning.” Well, Goodbye, Dragon Inn is no violent film. What first appears to be a conversation at the purported end of cinema is, at once, also a conversation at one of cinema’s many new beginnings. Life works in cycles, and Tsai says that cinema does too; the elderly become the young, the past becomes the present, one image cuts to the next, and the body of cinema, albeit changing before our eyes, has no end in sight. Indeed, Goodbye, Dragon Inn is a 82 minute entombing of one of cinema’s bodies. Yet, Tsai Ming-liang leaves us with the birth of a new body, one that is neither enemy nor stranger, one filled with the possibility to carry cinema into a new life.