ABSTRACT
As previous chapters in this volume have shown, Ang Lee’s Lust/Caution was given a relatively quiet reception in America; yet across the Pacific, the film has been plagued with controversy akin to a massive civil war, and Ang Lee has been branded by China’s ultranationalists as the nation’s foremost ideological pariah. But this is not the first time that Lee has challenged a dominant ideology and found himself facing a lethal backlash. Another example is what Lee faced in making Ride With the Devil (1999), given his critical position on the standard historical reading of the American Civil War as having been fought “to save the slaves.” The film was swiftly “dumped” by Universal Pictures, the American studio that financed it but failed to understand it (Michael Berry, 2005, pp. 338–9). Born into a diasporic family scattered by the Chinese Civil War (1945–9) to the “renegade” province known as Taiwan, Lee is keenly aware of the pain of losing one’s socio-political rootedness. This has led to his “self-absorption with the loser” (Leo Ou-fan Lee, 2008b, p. 226) that finds its expression in Ride With the Devil’s tendency to “sympathise with the ‘wrong’ side” (Whitney Crothers Dilley, 2007, p. 122). It is as if Ang Lee were Jake Roedel and Daniel Holt combined: Roedel, a straggler from his “Lincoln-loving” German kinsfolk, and Holt, a freed slave, both join the war against the North because their southern “Bushwhacker” friends do so. Once these friends are killed, the two men drift into an interim identity: veterans, survivors, or – what they hope for but cannot quite aspire to – civilians. In the long journey of their dubious becoming, they are stuck in the limbo of being that can be called by only one name: “losers.”
