A System of Cracks and Leaks: Reticence, Marginality, and Social Conventions in Tsai Ming-Liang's <i>The River</i>

This thesis examines director Tsai Ming Liang’s 1996 Taiwanese film The River and its connection to the Taiwanese queer rights movement and works of queer theory. Centering the work of prominent Taiwanese theorists Josephine Ho, Ding Naifei, and Liu Jen-peng on heteropatriarchal and reticent social conventions, I analyze Tsai’s comparable critique of Taiwanese society within the film. The film follows closeted protagonist Hsiao Kang and his parents in 90s Taiwan, as he develops a debilitating neck pain and his closested father develops a ceiling leak between attempts to express their sexualities. During a trip out of town to get a consultation on Hsiao Kang’s neck pain, Hsiao Kang and his father visit the same gay sauna and unintentionally have sex. In the first chapter, I show how the beginning of the film establishes the repressive system of social conventions that Hsiao Kang and his parents are living within. In the second chapter, I show how the family’s non-conformity reveals the flaws of heteronormative systems through the metaphors of Hsiao Kang’s neck pain and the father’s ceiling leak. In the third chapter, I analyze how their attempts at conformity collapse when the mother is forced to fix the ceiling leak and the liminality of the gay sauna allows the father and son to accidently have sex and achieve the intimacy they have been craving. This system of construction and collapse allows Tsai to critique Taiwanese heteropatriarchy and leave space open for a new paradigm of identity and human connection.