In this blog post, I will analyze the emotional structure of melodramas and the narrative of love and memory depicted in Wong Kar-wai’s ‘2046’ through the lens of genre film conventions.
The Melodrama Genre
When people think of “genre,” one of the first terms that comes to mind is “melodrama.” To be precise, “melodrama”—this genre is not limited to film but is widely used across the performing arts, including TV series and theater, and is even used in everyday language with a meaning similar to “shinpa.”
The term “melodrama” refers to narrative forms that combine music (melos) and drama. Here, “drama” refers to a play adapted from a literary work for the stage; consequently, a play is also called a drama. Drama is the dramatic manifestation of a narrative literary work (text).
Regardless of this terminological interpretation, melodrama is generally imbued with tragic sentiment. Music can be as joyful and cheerful as one likes, and drama can also be a comedy. However, when music and drama come together, there is a tendency for tragic stories to emerge. This can be understood by recognizing that ancient Greek tragedy is the origin of today’s melodrama. Originating from ancient Greek tragedy, melodrama became more deeply embedded in our daily lives through the French Revolution. With the rise of the bourgeoisie, the “tragedy” of the ruling class descended into everyday life.
From a modern perspective, melodrama can be defined as a “sad story that stirs the emotions.” It can be viewed as a style-driven film genre that places great emphasis on emotion, and this emotional stimulation is often exaggerated. The narrative’s sad and tragic structure serves as the root of this emotional stimulation. Based on the previous terminological interpretation, it can also be defined as “a dramatic narrative in which emotional effects are musically structured.”
Thomas Schatz defined melodrama as “a popular love story in which a pure individual (usually a woman) or a couple (usually lovers) is victimized by an oppressive and unequal social environment related to marriage, career, and nuclear family issues.”
While definitions of melodrama are diverse and complex, the image of melodrama as perceived by the general public is clear even without delving into specific definitions. For me, melodrama was a blend of associations such as “a story about love,” “sad music,” “a film genre perfect for couples,” or “a feminine genre that women enjoy.” The perception of the average audience is likely not much different.
However, if you look around, there are quite a few people who view melodrama as the exclusive domain of women or who shy away from sad stories. Nevertheless, the popularity of melodramas remains unchanged, and their position as a genre is solid. So what is the reason for this?
Why Melodramas?
Usually, when two or more men get together to watch a movie, they tend to seek out genres generally considered “masculine,” such as action or thrillers. They may believe these genres offer fun and stress relief, or it could be due to the vague notion that melodramas aren’t worth the money to see in theaters.
Secondarily, most melodramas are told from a female perspective or center on female characters. Groups of women who go to the movies are drawn to melodramas in greater numbers than men because they can derive vicarious satisfaction through emotional identification. Setting aside these stereotypical reasons, when you dig deeper, you’ll hear answers like, “Watching a melodrama with friends of the same sex is depressing,” or “You have to watch a melodrama with a romantic partner to really feel the emotion.” However, this doesn’t mean they never watch romantic dramas at all. It’s just that the unspoken convention that “romantic dramas should be watched with a partner” is deeply ingrained in the minds of audiences.
Even at this very moment, there are likely people everywhere shedding tears while watching romantic dramas alone in front of their computers or VCRs. I really enjoy watching movies. I prefer seeing films in theaters to renting videos, and while I usually go with friends, I sometimes go alone when our tastes don’t align.
One more thing: I really love romantic movies. Thanks to that, I’ve come to understand a lot about how my friends feel about romantic dramas. Sometimes I’ve watched them with friends of the same sex, and other times I’ve watched them alone or rented them on video later. During this process, there were often questions and probing remarks about why I wouldn’t watch them. The important thing is that people like melodramas and enjoy watching them. While it may be somewhat difficult to attract single viewers, considering the number of couples filling the theaters, this isn’t a problem from the perspective of movie studios or theaters.
So why do people like melodramas? First, it’s because they experience vicarious satisfaction through the characters in the story. However, this isn’t unique to melodramas. In any genre, if viewers find common ground with the characters or empathize with their backgrounds and personalities, they feel vicarious satisfaction through emotional identification. What’s important is the specific emotional keyword that can only be felt in melodramas.
That keyword is “love.” It is that force that feels like an eternal challenge in human life—sometimes appearing as an unknown, dreamlike world, and other times as the crystallization of fiery passion and desire, only to drift away. Just as every relationship involves meeting and parting, love also involves meeting and parting, as well as happiness and pain. Melodramas focus on the pain within this spectrum. Pain strikes more intensely than happiness, and it is particularly intense for oppressed modern people.
The internalized pain stemming from various sources—my work, family, friends, and love—manifests as neurosis or delusion through a desire for exclusion and denial. For this reason, the theme of “love” serves as the most powerful draw in the melodrama genre. At the same time, it is also the most powerful temptation.
The first form of this temptation is vicarious satisfaction, epitomized by masochism; the second is the genre’s function as a tool that can lead to reality. This is founded on “fantasy or fiction.” People nurture their desires through fantasy, and those desires can ultimately lead to action. The moment they obtain what they desire, that desire may vanish. That is why people dream of unrealistic love and are often seduced by it.
The grander the fantasy, the greater the desire—but the lower the likelihood of its realization. The more intense the desire, the more people dream of unrealistic love, and ultimately, those who dream of such love end up suffering. In extreme cases, this can even lead to death. Paradoxically, however, death or suffering can leave behind a sense of desire, even elevating it to an aesthetic level. People experience these emotions through movies. In fact, many melodramas embrace this narrative, beckoning to audiences and offering them solace.
If we view films as fantasies based on the fictional nature of the medium, even audiences without any personal experience or memories can nurture their desires through movies and take action to make love a reality. Of course, in this case, most would likely dream of a happy ending, such as in a romantic comedy, rather than a tragic love story. While some might secretly yearn for tragic love, it might be more desirable to create their own ending from scratch.
As I pondered this, I realized that my fondness for melodramas might not be entirely healthy. Ever since my teenage years—when I had yet to experience romantic love with a partner—I’d watched countless melodramas filled with tragic love stories, becoming ensnared in absurd fantasies. Blinded by sad music and lavish cinematography, I even found myself yearning for the protagonist who, shot and bleeding, dies in the arms of their lover.
Driven by the desire to become a protagonist in a melodrama, I even dreamed of sad, unrequited love. In this way, I sank deeper and deeper into the world of melodramas. Even when I finally managed to have a relationship, what made that relationship so painful was likely the extension of my life into the world of movies. Looking back now, extending my life into the world of movies seems, at least for me, to be a very dangerous thing.
‘2046’ Viewed Through the Lens of Genre Film Grammar
I examined director Wong Kar-wai’s film “2046” using Thomas Schatz’s theory of genre film grammar.
First, unlike in typical melodramas, the iconography (images and meanings) was not clearly revealed. It is also difficult to find conventional iconography. If I had to point to one, it would be the scene where the protagonist falls asleep leaning on his lover’s shoulder in a car. While this scene is a repetition of an image seen in the prequel, “In the Mood for Love,” it is also an iconographic element easily found in other melodramas.
Second, there is the issue of the characters and setting—that is, the community in which the conflict unfolds. Unlike typical melodramas, this film centers on a male character, Chow (Tony Leung). While the narrative appears to be male-centered on the surface, in practice, the female perspective often takes center stage when watching such films; however, in “2046,” Chow appears as the narrator at various points, making the male perspective more prominent. Therefore, this work can be understood as belonging to the “male melodrama” genre, which deals with a man’s love story.
This characterization becomes even clearer when examining the social context and the characters’ conflict structure. The film unfolds against the backdrop of the era, including the Cultural Revolution in Hong Kong in 1966, and the director occasionally inserts documentary-style footage depicting that period. However, the conflict structure stemming from this social context is not particularly prominent. Only a few traces of this are revealed through Chow’s career changes and his first-person narration, and such indicators are scarcely visible in the female characters. Moreover, this social context does not significantly influence Chow’s love story and thus does not serve as a major factor.
Su Liqian (Gong Li), a female gambler nicknamed “Black Spider,” struggles with her past and breaks up with Chow. However, the signs of this conflict are not clearly revealed; rather, it suggests that Chow’s internal conflict—his tendency to equate the married woman he loved with “Black Spider” Su Liqian—played a more significant role.
The female character whose conflict is most clearly structured is Wang Jingwen (Wang Bi), the hotel owner’s eldest daughter. She falls in love with a Japanese man she meets in Hong Kong but faces her father’s strong opposition. While her younger sister runs away from home to be with a drummer in a band, Wang Jingwen, with her timid and relatively submissive nature, cannot easily defy her father’s will. Although the man urges her to return to Japan with him, Wang Jingwen cannot accept this and they communicate only through letters. The conflict centers on the national difference between a father who hates Japanese people and a daughter who loves a Japanese man. Zhou helps resolve the conflict between Wang Jingwen and her lover, but at the same time, this creates a new conflict between him and Wang Jingwen, who has fallen in love with him.
The conflict with Bai Ling (Zhang Ziyi)—the woman with whom Zhou has the most dialogue in the film—appears to stem from Zhou’s personal inner conflict. Bai Ling and Zhou desired each other, but what they wanted was different. Bai Ling sought a spiritual connection, while Zhou desired Bai Ling’s body. This is where the conflict between them began, leading them to drift apart. While it may not be entirely due to Chau’s psychological conflict, the seeds of that conflict become more clearly evident in the scene where Chau rejects Bai Ling when she seeks him out again several years later.
Third is the plot structure—specifically, the way the story progresses from conflict to resolution. Let’s examine through the plot how the conflicts mentioned earlier ultimately converge.
The romance between Chau and Su Li-chen ends unfulfilled. The early part of the film presents a condensed version of their breakup, while the latter part depicts in greater detail the events leading up to their final parting. Although there is a significant time gap between these scenes in the film, they are all merely flashbacks to a past that has already slipped away. There is a scene set in the present where Chau travels to Singapore to find Su Li-chen, but he ultimately fails to locate her.
As for Wang Jingwen, thanks to Chau helping her resolve her conflicts, she ends up marrying her Japanese boyfriend. Even her father, who had strongly opposed the marriage, leaves the hotel with a happy expression upon hearing that his daughter is getting married in Japan, and her second daughter, who had left home, also returns. Thus, Wang Jingwen’s family resolves all their conflicts and reaches a relatively happy ending.
After leaving Hong Kong, Bai Ling returns to find Chow, but he does not accept her love. She bursts into tears, and Chow turns away abruptly.
The film’s ending is not a happy one. Although Chow met many women, enjoyed the nightlife, and spent time with friends surrounded by alcohol and women, he ultimately ends up alone. From Chow’s perspective, Wang Jingwen’s marriage is merely an episode that makes him appear even more pitiful and sad. Although he had the married woman Su Li-chen (a character briefly recalled in the film through the “In the Mood for Love” storyline), the “Black Spider” Su Li-chen, Wang Jingwen, and Bai Ling, the seat next to him remains desolately empty in the film’s final scene.
My Experience with ‘2046’
My first encounter with director Wong Kar-wai’s films was through ‘Fallen Angels’. I was young back then and didn’t know much about movies. My only criterion for distinguishing between good and bad films was “entertainment value”; what mattered was whether the protagonist lived or died, and whether the film featured Chow Yun-fat, Jackie Chan, or Jet Li.
For someone like me, ‘Fallen Angels’ caused an unexpected sensation. The rainy streets and the red-tinged visuals captivated me, and to my surprise, it was even entertaining—I cheered to myself. I watched ‘Chungking Express’ and ‘Ashes of Time’, and the fact that I had actually tracked down the film reels myself—rather than just renting a video—made me feel like a more ardent fan than others. However, when I watched ‘Ashes of Time’ and ‘Ashes of Time: The East Is Red’ next, I began to feel increasingly limited.
Because of the sense of disillusionment that peaked while watching ‘Ashes of Time: The East Is Red’, I stayed away from Wong Kar-wai’s films for a while. I wondered why I had liked his work in the first place, and I even thought it would be better to watch other movies starring Jet Li during that time. However, when ‘In the Mood for Love’ was released, my heart was moved once again. As the red imagery I’d felt in ‘Fallen Angels’ blended with the static visuals, a tinge of bittersweetness stirred in the corner of my heart.
Though I was still young and couldn’t fully understand middle-aged love, I was captivated by the director’s mise-en-scène, which artfully blended music and exquisite cinematography to create a unique atmosphere. Because of that, I eagerly anticipated his next film, “2046,” and rushed to the theater to see it as soon as it opened. The even deeper sense of poignancy shook me to my core, and even now, long after its release, a scene that occasionally comes to mind—the one where he peers into a hole in the center of a large golden object—compels me to watch the film again. That hole felt like the 2046 version of the hole that held secrets in the previous film, “In the Mood for Love,” and it seemed as though it contained the film’s secrets as well.
The film’s title, “2046,” represents both space and time—it is the space of Room 2046 and the time of the year 2046. The year 2046 marks the 50-year period following Hong Kong’s handover, during which its autonomy was to be suspended, while 1966 was the period when the Cultural Revolution was taking place in Hong Kong. The director divides Hong Kong’s history into periods before and after 1966, and similarly divides Chow’s story into the past and the future based on that same point in time.
The story set from 1962 to 1966 corresponds to ‘In the Mood for Love’—a love story with the married woman Su Li-chen. While ‘2046’ briefly revisits that era through flashbacks, as the title ‘In the Mood for Love’ suggests, these are times filled with indelible memories of love for Chow.
At the same time, 2046 is also an unknown space from which there is no return. Many people set out for 2046 in search of lost memories but never return. Room 2046 also holds significance as a space of the unknown. Room 2046 holds memories of Li-chen, whom Chow once loved; his old friend Lulu meets her end there; and Wang Jingwen, stricken by illness, ultimately leaves Chow’s side. Bai Ling also parts ways with Chow. For Chow, it is a meaningful space filled with cherished memories, but at the same time, it is a frightening space that creates new memories and causes pain. It may not be mere habit or coincidence that he ended up staying in Room 2047. Perhaps Chow had already begun to fear Room 2046.
The Time of 2046 and the Novel
From 1966 to 1969, Chow’s new love story unfolds around the space known as “Room 2046.” Christmas Eve sits at the center of nearly every episode, without exception, and as time flows in one-year increments, the women by his side also change. At the same time, he writes a novel titled “2046,” moving back and forth between the future and reality; the film alternates between scenes from the novel and the lives of the actual characters. Although the story in the novel is set in the distant future, Chow incorporates himself and those around him into the narrative, infusing his own emotions into it and transforming it. In other words, the story of the novel within the film is revealed as a transformed blend of Chow’s inner world and his real life.
The story within the novel also takes place in a time other than the present, yet it is not vastly different from reality. Even when time becomes entangled, individual memories still exist, and those memories—rather than being tangible entities in the real world—exist only within the present inner self, based on each person’s experiences. In that sense, while it differs from “delusion,” the question remains: what distinguishes the 2046 and 2047 written by Chow? Wang Jingwen liked ‘2047’, which Chau had written with himself in mind, but she wanted him to change the tragic ending; however, Chau ultimately could not alter it. While the past that has passed can be changed at will—whether in a novel or in one’s mind—the tragedy etched into the novel, which captured the present imbued with his own desires, could not be altered. Later, when Chao recalled the moment he had leaned his head on Su Liqin’s shoulder in the backseat of the car, the image that came to mind included not only Su Liqin but also Bai Ling. In this way, memory is no different from the novel for Chao; at the very least, they are identical in that memory can transform his desires.
Cinematography and the Instability of Memory
The characters in the film grieve and suffer because of memories of past loves, yet they do not wish to lose those memories. There is a limit to what they can forget, even if they try, and so they attempt to complete the picture of their memories by painting over and filling in the blurriness. The director maximizes this forgetting, manipulation, and ambiguous past through cinematographic techniques. In over-the-shoulder shots, the person the speaker is addressing is mostly obscured or blurred, visually expressing the haziness of the present—which will eventually become a memory.
Furthermore, in many scenes, more than half of the frame is obscured by darkness or dark-colored objects, revealing that the characters are in a state close to oblivion and highlighting the anxiety they feel. Compositions that suggest someone is peering in are also frequently used; for example, when a character makes a phone call in a hotel, the shot creates the impression that someone is watching from inside, causing the audience to remember the characters through their own eyes. Separately, images are imprinted in memory through scenes where Chow actually spies on other characters. This involves gathering partial images—such as a skirt or a foot—that are later repeated. These techniques create a stifling and anxious atmosphere throughout the film, serving to transfer the anxiety the characters feel as they oscillate between memory and oblivion to the audience as well.
The Meaning of Love and Memory
I would like to rephrase the saying “Life is short, art is long” as “Love is short, memory is long” when referring to this film. The love stories of people living today are also Chao’s stories. Many wander aimlessly in search of “love,” and in a modern society filled with deprivation, we all live as if we were masses of emptiness. We want to fill that void, but if it were easily filled, it wouldn’t be a void to begin with.
And the spaces we painstakingly fill are bound to be emptied someday. Space shifts, and time flows. We continue to live, leaning on our meager and fragile memories, until that space is filled again. We never stop longing for the memories of love and the times when our souls were rich. Desire dominates even our memories, and at times, memories feel like nothing more than fabricated recollections. Perhaps Chau didn’t fear 2046 because he knew this. That may be why he left Bai Ling, but perhaps he was simply someone who loved everyone with all his heart.
Realizing that beautiful times can one day turn into pain, Chow leaves memories to remain purely as memories and moves toward a future that is uncertain but still holds hope. While others went to 2046 to recover their lost memories, he ultimately left 2046 in this way.
