Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon was well received in this country, and was particularly appreciated for the balletic athleticism of the characters as they engaged in graceful martial arts movements. Many people particularly spoke of the “flying” as being very appealing. The film leads us gradually into a fantasy of flying, beginning with characters who take great, graceful leaps along rooftops, then launching themselves from the sides of buildings, like wrestlers diving from the ropes, and finally seeming to fly through the air or balance upon thin swaying branches.
The flying, which we see as being graceful and assured, takes a nasty turn at the film’s end when an adolescent girl dives off the side of a mountain, seemingly flying into the mist below. Her stated intention is not suicide. She is trying to gratify a wish promised by legend. “Anyone who dares to jump from the mountain, God will grant his wish.” According to the legend, a boy once jumped from a high mountain to gratify the wish to save his parents, who were ill. The girl, Jen, has just asked her lover, Lo, his wish. His answer, just before she leaps, is “to be back in the desert together again.” She dives off the mountain to return them to an earlier time of pleasure together.
Nevertheless, with all the film’s reassurance about flight and wishes, we are left with uncertainty about what we are watching. Is Jen floating in air to return to the desert with her lover or are we merely watching a moment in time that we complete in our minds with her tragic suicide. Associations naturally lead to the similarly ambiguous ending of Thelma and Louise, in which the film’s heroines drive a car off a mountain to certain death, but are stopped in a moment of ecstasy as the car flies into the air taking them to freedom. We could also reference Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid which ends with Butch and Sundance caught in a moment of aggressive defiance, firing their guns at a virtual army of Mexican soldiers in the moment before their deaths.
Neither of those films flirted with the magical realism, particularly present in the defiance of gravity, that we see in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. The film takes place in a distant, perhaps fantasied time in China. We are not sure what version of reality to apply to the conclusion of the scene. The ambiguity is presumably intended. Before we can attempt to understand it’s complex psychological meaning, I must leave the reader suspended in the clouds with Jen to go back to the story and its psychological meanings.
The story focuses around three generations of women, each struggling in its own way with ambivalent relationships to men. Jen is the youngest. She is the daughter of the new governor of Peking. She is to be married to a young nobleman, but she can accept neither the marriage, nor her assigned role as a dainty woman, skilled in calligraphy and the tea ceremony. She dreams of being a martial arts fighter and of marrying her lover, Lo, a bandit from the mountains to the west. She and Lo are separated both by convention and by her ambivalence to her role as a woman.
Shu Lien is an established woman, a hero to young Jen, who envies her her storied adventures with her long time companion, Li Mu Bai, the greatest warrior trained at the monastery on Wudan mountain. Shu Lien has inherited her father’s security business. She and Li have been kept apart by ties of loyalty from their youth. As she tells Jen early in the film, she had been engaged to Li Mu Bai’s “brother by oath” who was killed in battle by Li’s enemy. To be open in her love for Li Mu Bai would dishonor the dead man’s memory.
Jade Fox represents the older generation. She is not a sympathetic character—she is the one force of evil throughout the film— yet we can feel sympathy for her original wound. In her words, spoken to Li Mu Bai, “Your master underestimated us women. Sure, he’d sleep with me, but he would never teach me. He deserved to die by a woman’s hand.” Jade Fox poisoned him and stole the Wudan manual to teach herself its secrets. She seems less tragic a figure because we see her live and die in bitterness, but she is also a female Prometheus stealing the male fire.
The story begins with the middle couple. Shouts of joy greet the arrival of Li Mu Bai at the compound of his friend, Shu Lien. She welcomes him with eagerness, but immediately tempers her enthusiasm, seemingly afraid to express herself. Her joy is further tempered by his depression.
Shu Lien asks Li Mu Bai about his meditation training at Wudan Mountain, telling him that she envies him the quiet time. But Li Mu Bai has interrupted his training. Shu Lien is concerned. She reminds him that he is a “Wudan fighter” for whom training is everything.
Li Mu Bai tells her, pain in his face, “During my meditation training I came to a place of deep silence. I was surrounded by light. Time and space disappeared. I had come to a place my master had never told me about.”
Shu Lien, while showing concern, still attempts to put a positive light on what she is hearing. “You were enlightened?”
“No. I didn’t feel the bliss of enlightenment. Instead I was surrounded by an endless sorrow. I couldn’t bear it. I broke off the meditation. I couldn’t go on. There was something pulling me back.”
“What was it?” she asks.
He looks at her directly. “Something I cannot let go of.”
We will only learn with certainty at the end of the film that it is his love for Shu Lien that he can not let go of. For now, they both characteristically allow it to remain in the shadows.
Mi Lu Bai is a Hamletic character, devoted to his calling and his training, duty bound, but sorrowfully aware that the most important thing in his life is his love for Shu Lien. Like Hamlet, he is powerful, capable of controlling the action around him, yet reserved, hesitant, unable to act.
He asks Shu Lien to take his prized sword, “The Green Destiny,” to a common friend and benefactor in Peking, Sir Te. In keeping with his mood, he tells her that “too many men have died at its edge. It only looks pure because blood washes so easily from its blade.” She suggests that they go together to Peking, “like old times”—these two also have memories of a better time together—but he says that he must first go to his master’s grave to ask forgiveness for “quitting” without having avenged his master’s murder at the hands of Jade Fox. The happy reunion ends in a somewhat sad parting. Li Mu Bai and Shu Lien wish to come together, but they are kept apart by duty and tradition.
Sir Te is sensitive to Li Mu Bai and Shu Lien’s feelings for each other and straightforwardly describes their silent conflict.
“Li Mu Bai giving up his sword and his warrior days, maybe he’s trying to tell you something.” She smiles and says, “I don’t know.” He is direct with her. “Don’t be coy. I’ve always known about your feelings for each other. All these years, it’s a shame neither of you is brave enough to admit the truth to the other. You’re both wasting precious time.” She protests that they are not cowards, but with a little laugh he tells her that “When it comes to emotions even great heroes can be idiots. Tell me if Li Mu Bai is not more open the next time you see him. I’ll give him an earful.”
Li Mu Bai is deeply conflicted. In a quiet interval together with Shu Lien, he takes her hand and holds it lovingly to his cheek, saying, “Shu Lien. The things we can touch have no permanence. My master would say there is nothing we can hold onto in this world. Only by letting go can we truly possess what is real.” She argues that not everything is an illusion. Wasn’t her hand real? “Your hand, rough and calloused from saber practice, all this time, and I’ve never had the courage to touch it. Giang Hu is a world of tigers and dragons, full of corruption. I tried sincerely to give it up but I have brought us only trouble.” She answers with analytic knowledge, “To repress one’s feelings only makes them stronger.” He answers, “You’re right. But I don’t know what to do. I want to be with you just like this. It gives me a sense of peace.”
Shu Lien and Li Mu Bai are kept apart by duty and their heroic lifestyles. They waste nearly all the time they have, staying apart until Li’s last tragic minute of life when, poisoned, he chooses to express his love for Shu Lien rather than die attempting to conserve his strength while waiting for an antidote. He tells her that he has only one breath left. She urges him to use it to meditate to free himself from this world rather than waste it on her. He tells her he has wasted his entire life, that he wants to tell her with his last breath that he has always loved her. As they embrace and kiss, he tells her he’d rather be a ghost drifting by her side than enter heaven without her. “Because of your love, I will never be a lonely spirit.” In a paradox that matches the film’s ending, these two lovers come together at the moment of their final parting.
Shu Lien and Li Mu Bai have been kept apart by custom and loyalty; yet, Shu Lien tells Jen, who is struggling with her own unwanted betrothal, to “respect a woman’s duties.” Jen is the daughter of the new governor of Peking. She has been promised in marriage to the son of a rich and powerful family; but, Jen does not wish to be ruled by custom. She has found a lover while her family lived in the desert to the west, a rough, yet sensitive young man, Lo, who has become a feared bandit leader, known as “Dark Cloud.”
Jen is in secret rebellion in other ways that are more basic. She will not accept the traditional role of a woman. On the surface, she is a petite, well mannered noble girl. In hiding, she has studied the stolen Wudan manual of martial arts. Her rebellion against the role and limitations of women takes on symbolic form when she uses her skills, dressed in black with her face hidden, to steal Li Mu Bai’s sword from Sir Te’s compound. It is this impulsive action that sets the plot in motion. It is not accidental that the story is moved by a woman stealing a man’s phallic symbol. In this story, the energy that pushes for change comes from what might narrowly be called penis envy, but probably is better characterized as female envy on many levels
Jen’s introduction into Wudan training comes from her nanny/servant who is actually the villainous Jade Fox. Jen is a prototypical, perhaps borderline, adolescent with her ambivalence, confusion and impetuosity. Like many an ambitious youth, Jen seeks a teacher and role model, but resents anyone who might fill that role and gain superiority. She will have no one above her. When confronted by Jade Fox, who fears that Jen will expose her with her childish antics, she demonstrates to Jade Fox that she has gone beyond her in her studies of the Wudan manual. The older, lower class Jade Fox was apparently illiterate, having to learn from the manual’s pictures while the educated Jen went beyond her by reading the manual herself. Similarly, Jen repeatedly refuses Li Mu Bai’s offer to teach her and will fight with Shu Lien, whom she had admired as an older sister.
We all know from experience with adolescents like Jen that there is another side to her phallic narcissism. She is not merely desirous of power and control, she is also afraid. She expresses her fear quite directly at one point in the film. It is part of a sequence that speaks to an understandable paradox. Jen sneaks into Sir Te’s compound to return Li Mu Bai’s sword, but Li Mu Bai is waiting for her. He follows her and asks her where Jade Fox is. She attempts to duel with him, but he handles her with ease, giving her instruction and offering to be her teacher, explaining that he has always wanted a worthy disciple and that he knows she is good, deep down, not corruptible by Jade Fox. She runs away, saying “Wudan is a whorehouse. Keep your lessons!” Perhaps she is defending her mentor, perhaps her gender. She turns down the very offer that was denied to Jade Fox, leaving her vengeful.
When she returns to her room, she meets Jade Fox and shows her for the first time that she has surpassed her. “I hid my skills so as not to hurt you.” She tells Jade Fox, “I started learning from you in secret when I was 10. … But once I realized I could surpass you I became frightened. Everything fell apart. I had no one to guide me.” Jen is a powerfully talented adolescent, capable of great destructive power and terrified of her unguided desire. Ironically, it is fear of loss of control that powers phallic narcissism and phallic narcissism that causes her to reject Li’s offers of guidance.
But the story of Jen’s generation is not without hope. We learn through a flashback that she has met a young man, the bandit, Lo, who can both respect and overcome her phallic narcissism and envy. He is an adolescent boy who has through courage and wile become a feared bandit leader in the wild lands to the west. In a raid of her mother’s caravan, Lo steals Jen’s comb from her hand. She chases after him, successfully engaging several of his gang in martial arts, and then engaging him in a sado-masochistic ongoing battle. He teases her and fights with her while maintaining a good spirit. She knocks him out with a rock and then wanders off into the desert. He finds her, dehydrated, and brings her back to nurse her to health. Finally, she accepts his good intentions, lets down her hair and becomes his lover (with Jen on top as they make love), allowing herself to open her feminine side to this man who has accepted her aggression, accepted her as an equal and nurtured her in a mothering way. Perhaps it is that parental quality that allows Lo to understand why her father sends men out to find her. He tells her that if she were his daughter he would continue to search for her. With that gentle prod, she does leave him to return to her family, and to her phallic ambitions.
We can easily line up Jen, Shu Lien and Jade Fox to represent the arc of a woman’s life from adolescence through adulthood to old age. We see, then, a woman struggling with her role in a man’s world, ambivalent and rebellious in youth, secure, but more accepting and resigned to limitations in her prime and bitterly vengeful in old age. An optimist might turn this around to see a progression from generation to generation from an environment that ostracizes a woman who seeks phallic power to a middle generation in which a woman can succeed if she accepts some limitations to a new generation in which men and women can live as equals.
The phallic ambitions of these women is also represented in their “flying”. Shu Lien, Jen and Jade Fox, like Li Mu Bai, have carried their martial arts skills to the point of defying gravity. In the one comprehensive psychoanalytic paper on flying that I found (Wolff, 1982), a patient is described who bears a likeness to Jen. The patient, a petite young woman, dependent and insecure, pursued academic degrees and athletic excellence in such fields as karate to prove that she could “beat any man.” “She was certain that her father had wanted a boy—and believed ‘even’ her mother had acted as though being a woman was being a ‘second-class citizen.’” Her favorite fantasy character was Peter Pan, “a boy who flies, never grows old, and is always played by a girl.” She once described in analysis a flight on a small plane that flew low enough so that she could look down at the landscape, giving her a feeling of exhilaration and power at “‘being on top—looking down,’” which “she associated to being on top of a man … .”
The phallic strivings of these women tend to keep them apart from their men. We should also look at the more subtle force that pulls them towards a man. The central characters in this film all appear strong and independent. They literally fly through the air, wielding swords with great skill. Yet, in more subtle ways we feel the gently recurring themes of loneliness and a wish for reunion. Lo’s wish “to be back in the desert together” is subtly reflected in Shu Lien’s urging Li Mu Bai to accompany her to Peking, saying “It will be like old times.” At the end, what the great Li Mu Bai fears most is loneliness. He’d rather be a ghost drifting by Shu Lien’s side than enter heaven without her. “Because of your love, I will never be a lonely spirit.”
We can see very clearly Jen’s ambivalence over femininity and phallic power, the petite, well dressed caligrapher and the sword wielding, rooftop leaping mysterious black clad thief. But, within the same actions we can also discern her conflict over the safety and comfort of dependence and the power of wilful, rebellious independence. We see it in her relationship to her nanny, Jade Fox and to her potential teacher, Li Mu Bai; but, it surfaces more clearly in her relationship with her lover, Lo. He subdues Jen’s violence not through defeating her, but by mothering her. After she has knocked him out and gotten lost in the desert, he retrieves her and tames her, like a wild animal, while nursing her back to health.
Jen wakens to find her hands and feet tied. Lo speaks kindly to her. He gently pours water into her mouth and feeds her by hand. He prepares a bath for her, leaving the cave they are in to give her privacy, while singing in a soft voice so that she will know where he is. We finally see him helping to wash her. He is reassuring and calming, acting like a gentle mother. It is after she has received this reassurance and gratification that she can make love to him and be held by him. We see a reprise of this when Shu Lien holds, cradles, the dying, formerly powerful Li Mu Bai. Within the conflict over phallic power there is a conflict over maternal dependence.
With these two themes in mind, we can now follow the story to its ending in Jen’s dive from Wudan Mountain. Avoiding her dependent role and pursuing her phallic ambitions, Jen escapes her parents’ home to avoid the arranged marriage, once again stealing the Green Destiny Sword. This time she wanders into a village, disguised as a boy. When challenged by the men in the village, she puts on a ferocious display of swordsmanship and martial arts skill, damaging most of the townspeople and destroying a country inn. She finally seeks out Shu Lien, approaching her as a penitent sister, but rebels again when Shu Lien demands that she return the sword. They do battle in Shu Lien’s compound, but when Li Mu Bai arrives, Jen flies away with Li Mu Bai in pursuit. In her extreme adolescent behavior, Jen repeatedly seeks out and rejects parenting controls.
It is at this point that we see the most balletic freedom from gravity. Jen and Li Mu Bai confront one another while standing on thin, swaying tree branches. Li Mu Bai wishes to teach her, but she defies him. When he throws the sword into a river, Jen dives after it. We see her below the water, with possible associations to the womb. At this point, a figure flies by like a sea bird (in this context we could even think of a stork), and a limp, passive Jen is carried out of the water and taken away by Jade Fox. In Jen’s character, we can experience the intensely competing wishes to be phallic and powerful and to be passive and mothered like a baby. She defiantly attempts to fight Li Mu Bai, but unable to defeat him, she is pulled out of the water and carried away like a baby by her nanny.
In his paper on flying fantasies, Wolff speculates that there are oedipal and pre-oedipal origins for them. He goes back to “gravity games” first described by Freud, referring to the infant’s excitement at being thrown into the air or bounced on a knee as an early pre-oedipal prototype for the fantasy of flying.
We welcome the comfort and security of being held in the arms of a loving mother, but also fear the danger of being dependent upon a powerful, phallic mother. Jade Fox is ambivalent towards her protegee/child and tries to poison her into submission and ultimately death. Loewald (1951) has pointed out this other side of the maternal relationship. In this fantasy, seen in “Hansel and Gretel”, for instance, a father may be the child’s savior. Jen is saved by Li Mu Bai, who kills the viciously charging Jade Fox, warding off her poison darts with his sword … except for one dart that gets through. While Jen runs to get an antidote, Li Mu Bai says his loving farewell to Shu Lien and dies in her arms. When Jen returns, too late, she submits to Shu Lien, who curbs her anger and instead of striking her with her sword, sends Jen to Wudan Mountain to reunite with Lo, who has already been sent there by Li Mu Bai and Shu Lien.
Shu Lien advises Jen, in essence, not to repeat the mistake that she and Li Mu Bai have made, “Promise me one thing. Whatever path you take in this life be true to yourself.” This seemingly good advice is not so simply taken. To which self should Jen be true, her true nature to be phallic and competitive with men, pulling away from her lover or her true nature to seek the passivity of an infant’s relationship to mother?
The competing wishes that drive these characters and drive the film—to be powerful and phallic and to be in mother/child-like union with a loved one—are both expressed in the fantasy of flying and in the film’s final flight from the height of Wudan Mountain. The original legend that Lo told Jen was about a boy whose parents were ill, who dove off the mountain to wish them into health, a boy who sacrificed being with his parents in order to preserve them. As analysts, we knew all along that Jen’s flight into the clouds is a compromise that entails all of the fantasies it expresses. It is a suicide, a movement towards death, but towards a death that is a reunion. It encompasses the fantasy that death is a return to an initial state of blissful union. We have seen it moments before in Li Mu Bai’s death and union with Shu Lien. But Jen is not merely falling, she is flying. Her flight expresses both the phallic quality of flying, free as a bird and the passive “oral” wish to be carried through the air by a loving mother and the anxiety that such a trust will lead to loss of self.
If the film’s ending conveys both a sense of something comforting and something anxiety provoking, I think it is because it primarily leaves us with a fantasy of returning to the helpless state of a baby in its mother’s arms, something we both wish for and fear. The film conveys to us a sense of lonely people, trying to find one another, but kept apart by their ambitions and responsibilities; people seeking strength and individual power as well as peace and cradling comfort. All of that is conveyed in Jen’s final leap into the unknown. The clouds that she dives into look soft and comforting, but will they support her?
Loewald, Hans W. (1951) Ego and reality. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 32:10-18
Wolff, Emmanual C. (1982) Flying—Some psychoanalytic observations and considerations. Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 37:461-483.
by Herbert H. Stein
Published originally in the PANY Bulletin, Summer, 2003