Asian Cinema Dancing in the Whites’ Blackpool
by Sheng-mei Ma
By sheer chance (or chances three?) did I arrive at the edge of what my fellow Haunted Shores Network blogger Alexander Hay’s post on, pardon my French, a “cesspool” churning with “violence, sleaze and grot.” The unfamiliar word “grot” to this nonnative speaker of English further estranges and turns grotesque Hay’s portrayal of Blackpool along the Irish Sea coast. When I revisited my own blog “Ontariorizing and Taiwanizing the Rust Belt: Fly or Fall,” I happened upon Hay’s “Hen Nights in Innsmouth” right above mine, published a week after mine in https://haunted-shores.com/blog/. Hay paints a picture of the seaside resort town entirely opposite to the idealized, romanticized symbol of Western elegance and classiness in the 1996 Japanese film Shall We ダンス?, which started a ballroom dancing rage in Japan. The Japanese word means Dansu, or dance in a Nipponized pronunciation. This film was my Plan B in the first session of this semester’s Asian film course started in early January 2024. I intended to show Yasujiro Ozu’s 1953 classic The Tokyo Story. But the classroom’s host computer kept crashing when I streamed the film online, compelling me to opt for the physical copy I brought with me in the event of such accidents. Since “Third Time’s the Charm,” I was subsequently struck by Brigid Cherry’s citation of David Cronenberg. In Cherry’s think piece “Fan Totems,” part of the reading for Haunted Shores Network Zoom gathering, Cronenberg likens the horror film The Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954) to “the dark pool of the unconscious.”
Blackpool tempts indeed as a site of Asian subconsciousness yearning for release from the highly stratified, routinized, and pressurized modern urban lifestyle. To further color in my blog title, shall we say “Yellow-ish (Off-White) Cinema Dancing in the Whites’ Blackpool”? After all, the film’s epigraph of sorts set in the Blackpool Tower dance hall finds pairs of middle-aged, grey-haired white dancers waltzing across the floor. When the camera pans up to the proscenium arch, it freezes on the inscription “Bid Me Discourse, I Will Enchant Thine Ear” from Shakespeare’s “Venus and Adonis,” all mythical whites, I believe, including the God-like bard (See Figure 1). A mise en abyme of endless citations unfolds: Blackpool cites Shakespeare, who cites Roman mythology. In turn, Masayuki Suo’s film cites Western ballroom dancing, which cites the invitation for a dance by the Siamese King (Yul Brynner) to Anna Leonowens (Deborah Kerr) in The King and I (1956). The Rodgers and Hammerstein musical adapts Margaret Landon’s novel Anna and the King of Siam (1944). When the Siamese King played by Brynner the yellowface reaches for Anna’s hand for the dance, pre-civil rights miscegenation titillates as a result of the transgressiveness of two bodies of different races touching each other. Touching intensifies in Richard Gere and Jennifer Lopez’s Shall We Dance (2004) where the Japanese reserve, despite longing for companionship, is eroticized via the Latin dancer Lopez who embodies the tagline “Rumba is a vertical expression of a horizontal desire.” The subtle, nuanced, repressed, and understated Japanese emotions manage to “get [itself] up,” pun intended, into the hot embrace of the white man Gere and the Latinx Lopez.
Figure 1: The proscenium arch inscription at the Blackpool Tower dance hall in Shall We Dance? (1996).
Any citation points to the ambiguity of togetherness and split. An author cites in order to nestle against or punch another, which already presumes they are apart, separated by unrequited love and/or irrepressible hate. Spatial and cognitive divisions split all the citations cited above. Shakespeare’s quote articulates a supplication for a command, the slave awaiting the master’s permission to enchant or enslave the master once s/he has the master’s ear. Dwelling exclusively in the auditory, sonic realm, the proscenium inscription montages with the visuality of waltzing dancers in Suo. All the other filmic iterations set in Siam, Japan, or Manhattan flirt with the paradoxical space, or the lack thereof, visible within “a part” as opposed to “apart,” yet a distinction without a difference to the ear.
To read the inscription at the dance hall, one has to lift one’s head. This raised/raced gaze inaugurates and drives Suo’s film. A salaryman Sugiyama dozing off on the subway train home, just as all his peers do, happens to raise his head at a train stop and gazes into the desolate, melancholic look of a dance studio instructor Mai gazing out of the top-floor studio window. A supreme dancer with the panache of a Western ballerina, Mai has been depressed and withdrawn after an accident at the Blackpool competition whereby Mai’s partner failed to “protect” her upon a fall. Both dejected loners project desire outward and upward into the beyond, be it Blackpool and Western dance, or the Westernized physique and forthrightness of Mai’s. Finding Sugiyama utterly maladroit on the floor, Mai believes that he is another of her wooers chasing after her with the excuse of private lessons. When Sugiyama does ask her for an after-class drink, Mai tells him off, an in-your-face brusqueness befitting Lopez in New York rather than a demure female in Tokyo.
Mai’s manly bluntness comes out in full force during dance lessons when she demonstrates the key first step initiated by the male dancer, a thrust forward that communicates strength and assertive leadership. Mai roleplays as the male, striding against the thighs of the “female” partner Sugiyama. Changing hands after the demonstration, a fellow dancer still finds Sugiyama “too rigid,” which triggers a guilty Sugiyama to arch his back and nearly curl up like a shrimp, apparently to veil an erection aroused by Mai’s masculine femininity. Should there be any lingering doubt, since Japanese etiquette of restraint precludes any close-up of his hard-on, a hunchbacked Sugiyama quickly puts his hands into his pants pockets to hide, conceivably, the bulge in the crotch. Mai’s masculine demonstration encapsulates her overall ballerina mannerism with a long, graceful neck, shoulders pulled back, a straight rod body, and, imaginatively, pointed toes upon which erects a phallic symbol. Far from Jack Halberstam’s LGBTQ-oriented Female Masculinity (2018), a phallic Mai assuages modern male anxiety of having the cake and eating it too.
Idealized female beauty in the West has long been sired, among other sources, from the ballerina’s pain, which is etherealized into the airborne, otherworldly flight: her mangled toes secreted in the pointe shoes; her body movement so at ease and spontaneous that it covers up muscular tension, stiffness, soreness; the dancer-viewer’s euphoric endorphins from the sensation/perception of pain. A male audience gravitates, sadomasochistically, to both the self’s pleasure of witnessing such idealized femininity and to the other’s pain through which said ideal is forged. A male audience repurposes Shakespeare’s slave-master beseech-command, begging for the mercy of being granted mastery. The film closes with this duality. Awakened by her student Sugiyama’s dedication and generosity to help with a fellow dancer’s dream, Mai returns to competition because she sees her errant ways of having danced “alone” to the exclusion of others, whom she once derided as “lounge lizards and showgirls.” Japanese togetherness rather than Western individualism concludes the film, yet still with implicit, irreconcilable splits.
Compare Sugiyama’s teenage awkwardness at the dance studio, including an involuntary stiffening, with his master-of-the-house presence at home. Mai brings out his repressed, intense longing, whereas his giggling, at-home wife is dismissed off-hand, despite the wife’s plea that he carry on with his hobby. It takes their teenage daughter who drags the parents into the yard, insisting that he should “dance with mom,” “dance for me.” This daughter is the one who earlier shouts “Dad” from the bleachers of a contest, unbeknownst to the father, thus breaking the “spell” the father’s dancing self has come to inhabit. The “zone” in which the father cocoons himself is dispelled, pulling him back to the family circuit. At the daughter’s urging, stepping in sync in the night air, whispering apologies in each other’s ear, the dark pool of Asian subconsciousness sutures together a Japanese couple and family in this long-running East-West pas de deus across a maternal mere for the sake of the pater. The complex psychic footwork may simply be masculinity splitting and playing with itself. The male passion for Mai and her ungovernable Western-style power threatens yet ultimately returns to the male guardianship over traditional femininity and culture of the Motherland. Boyish dreams mature or metastasize into nightmarish patriarchy.
Sheng-mei Ma (馬聖美mash@msu.edu) is Professor of English at Michigan State University in Michigan, USA, specializing in Asian Diaspora culture and East-West comparative studies. He is the author of over a dozen books, including China Pop! (2024); The Tao of S (2022); Off-White (2020); Sinophone-Anglophone Cultural Duet (2017); The Last Isle (2015); Alienglish (2014); Asian Diaspora and East-West Modernity (2012); Diaspora Literature and Visual Culture (2011); East-West Montage (2007); The Deathly Embrace (2000); Immigrant Subjectivities in Asian American and Asian Diaspora Literatures (1998). Co-editor of five books and special issues, Transnational Narratives (2018) and Doing English in Asia (2016) among them, he also published a collection of poetry in Chinese, Thirty Left and Right (三十左右).