Last night, my Taiwanese wife dragged me to the theater to see the movie Detention (返校)that she said all her students and colleagues at the university have been talking about for weeks. I did not want to go to that movie. I am an American. I do not know the history of this island nation, or even its language.
My wife does know the history, and is concerned at a time when Hong Kong is undergoing its own distress at the hands of the Beijing control freak, that a single early-morning tweet by unhinged US President Donald Trump could doom Taiwan once again to Chinese tyranny and a renewed period of White Terror.
No sooner had the film gotten under way than I was put off by its horror genre. I hate horror films. However, by the time the movie had ended and the overhead lights in the theater flashed suddenly on, I had come to understand its use of nightmare as an apt metaphor, and felt ripped away too suddenly from the characters I had come to care for and admire.
What touched me most deeply was their innocence, purity of heart and tenderness — a dedicated young teacher and that small cluster of literature-loving students he gathered around him to secretly read a forbidden work of that great Indian poet, Rabindranath Tagore, one of my favorite writers.
What a shock it was when we rose to our feet and turned toward the exit, to see every single one of the young Taiwanese high-school students, who for some reason filled the theater that evening, with their cellphones already out, and their eyes on those little screens.
Masterpiece films like great works of literature are not over when they end. No. They leave something of themselves inside us, still happening. In me this was very much the case, but in these cellphone-addicted youths, still seated in the rows all around us, it was apparently not.
How different they were in kind from those youths the film had just embedded in my heart, lovers of books bravely risking their lives for truth. Like smokers, deprived too long of a cigarette, these youths seated all around us in the theater had grabbed reflexively for their cellphones.
Detention was all about remembering. It made me remember who I had once been in the innocence of my adolescence, growing up in Communist Cuba, and it made me know that was who I still am at heart, even in my old age. Like only a great work of art can do, the movie took me back, not just to those years of mine in Cuba or to Taiwan’s history of military repression — but back to myself.
The censored films that the big bullying Communist China on the mainland puts out cannot do this. They celebrate the greatness of the empire and its history. But some of the movies enterprising little Taiwan puts out, this one in particular, can do it. And they do. The world is so much better off for this.
What I remember the most after this film is how great the Taiwanese people are, and what a special place in the world they have. Thanks to a new law that has been recently passed, I am soon to become a citizen. I have to confess, this real masterpiece of a film makes me so proud.
William Stimson is an adjunct professor at National Chi Nan University and has written a book, Dreams for Self-Discovery, about the nightmares of Taiwanese.
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