When Love Hurts
Disclaimer: This piece contains spoilers for the filmYour Name Engraved Herein.
Recently, more LGBTQ legislation and progress have been made in Asian countries, and though there is still a long way to go, LGBTQ representation in mass media has always been different than in America. The BL (Boys Love) industry and the minority of GL (Girls Love) media thrive in Asia, with mainstream movies and low-budget television shows being made. Your Name Engraved Herein is one of those examples, a blockbuster LGBTQ film that earned over $100 million in the box office.
Your Name Engraved Herein has also been distributed internationally through a Netflix partnership. The film bears inspiration from Call Me By Your Name and the aesthetics of Wong Kar Wai’s Happy Together, but isn't a problematic film with a predatory age gap dynamic from a pedophilic straight man. The film is written and directed by an actual gay Asian man, Kuang-Hui Liu, who isn't making wish-fulfillment gay romance films. Instead, Liu speaks from his personal experiences as a repressed and closeted boy falling in love with another boy during his high school years. He also experienced the false hope of marital law in Taiwan, a time period with no political parties, human rights, or free speech, ending in the 1980s.
During this period, the LGBTQ community was struggling for marriage equality and equal rights. Open LGBTQ couples weren't allowed, as they would face the consequences of martial law and police violence. Martial law and militarization became extensions of defined masculinity, working to exclude queerness, femininity, heteronormativity, and expressing emotions such as softness and being gentle. Your Name Engraved Herein, on the other hand, defines masculinity to be patriarchal and filled with violence. The titular protagonist, Chang Jia-Han, or shorthand, A-han, behaves in this manner. He struggles with his sexuality and the ensuing romance with Wang Bo Te, or, Birdy.
The film opens with A-han fighting with a patriarchal figure, his school priest, Father Oliver. The film cuts between this sequence and what transpires from this moment and after. A-han’s first encounter with Birdy occurs at the swimming pool, testing their lung capacity underwater and exchanging glances with one another. Water—not only in this scene but many others—becomes a recurring motif to characterize their relationship. This repetition manifests itself through showers, the ocean, and rain.
When the audience first meets A-han, he is loud, full of aggression, and hostile. He constantly yells and gets physical during his encounters with other men. Meanwhile, Birdy is boisterous and full of quirks that interest A-han. Both of them share their insecurities of being gay and only handling conflict resolution through violence. Violence is all they know. After all, violence is used against them to police and surveil their queerness by everyone else. Their homophobic classmates bully and terrorize one of their only gay classmates, even encouraing A-han to be an active participant, and they pathologize queerness to be an illness the way many did during the Aids epidemic. If A-han didn't participate in the violence, they would speculate him to be queer as they did with Birdy, who falls victim by protecting their gay classmate. For Birdy and many others, queerness invites homophobic violence and aggression to be inflicted onto them.
Cycles of violence operate to deter other boys from being open or proud of being LGBTQ. To protect themselves from this violence, LGBTQ folks are forced to participate in compulsory heteronormativity, yet the price of this inflicts psychological violence to their wellbeing and mental health. Compartmentalizing, denying queerness, and being in the closet can have irrevocable effects akin to violence. Heteronormativty operates by demarcating what are appropriate public and private interactions, which rules the interactions between Birdy and A-han. They skirt delicately between those lines as we see privately with Birdy sneaking to ask A-han for soap, A-han giving ointment for his wounds, or Birdy sneaking into A-han's bed. Publicly, a protestor challenges homophobic narratives through his sign reading "Homosexuality is not a disease,” but the protestor is violently detained by the police. Outraged and furious, Birdy has to be physically restrained by A-han to prevent Birdy from intervening. Throughout the film, they share these obligatory longing glances and stares at one another privately, yet are still hesitant to act on their attraction publicly.
Whenever the opportunity arises, A-han and Birdy are interrupted from consummating or confessing their romance, constricted by homophobia and heteronormativity from acting on their attraction. Their romance parallels a heteronormative teen romance in a lot of ways. When A-han wants his family to buy a scooter for him, there's some conflict with his father, but it gets resolved after his mother buys him the scooter instead. As the conversation proceeds between A-han and his mother, his parents become insistent on the language of heteronormativity and him finding a girlfriend in college. He counters with his own desires of love and romance, hinting at his longing for Birdy. A-han’s desire to have a scooter to impress Birdy is much like a boy’s desire to have a car to impress a girl.
A-han’s sexual and romantic attraction are intertwined, as he has no attraction or desire for women due to being unaroused by a woman's seduction. He is explicitly attracted to Birdy, even growing his hair out for him. Additionally, A-han goes out of his way to question the sexuality of his gay classmate, to which his classmate reassures him that his sexuality is natural and has been a part of him. His classmate tries to advance a kiss on him, but A-han stops his classmate with a threatening grip. The grip seems to indicate A-han is ready yet again for another act of violence, but it's also a gesture that he desires to get closer to Birdy as well. It is a contradictory and complex gesture of violence and intimacy, which are as close to one another as Birdy and A-han are. Violence wouldn't hurt as much if the perpetrator is a stranger, but intimate violence cuts deeper.
Tensions flare as women become introduced, and one of the girls, Ban-Ban, becomes a romantic interest for Birdy and a rival to A-han. With Ban-Ban spending more time with Birdy, A-han becomes jealous and helpless. He prays for relief at the church, and Birdy suggests that A-han should get a girlfriend. A-han enacts the same threatening grip on Birdy as he did on his classmate, and Birdy says they should stop spending time alone with another. A-han meets with a girl that he's seen before, and she tells him a way to profess his love over a pager. He sends the message, but Birdy doesn't receive it yet as he's out with Ban-Ban. Birdy tells him this information and invites him to hang out at night, but it's revealed to be a ploy for a love confession to Ban-Ban. A-han is upset and turns to an older man for comfort, who quickly sours the experience as he makes an unwanted sexual advance instead. Alongside addressing the struggles of the LGBTQ community, the film also tackles sexual assault and the problem of unwanted sexual advances between older men and younger LGBTQ men.
We then cut to A-han and Father Oliver's back and forth on sin and queerness. A-han has progressed in accepting his sexuality and feelings for Birdy and is looking for reciprocation now. He makes an intriguing statement about heteronormativity and homophobia: if all gay people went to hell or endured the worst metaphorical pain and suffering, maybe he would be understood more.
Suddenly, a tragic accident befalls on Birdy. A-han reassures him not to worry and helps him at the dorms when showering, spreading the soap on his body and touching him. They become intimate, but Birdy is hesitant and resists. Within this shower scene are issues of ambiguous consent—rightfully so with the other unwanted advances within the film—and how heteronormativity makes LGBTQ people question their desires. Heteronormativity and homophobia make desires, sexual attraction, and romance out to be disgusting, akin to an illness that has to be avoided or cured. There's no dramatic monologue between the characters arguing or breaking it down for the audience to understand because that's simply the conflicted reality of queerness.
Birdy climaxes and apologizes, for the past, the one-sidedness, the unreturned glances, and the future, breaking down all the artifices of masculinity and violence. They cry and embrace each other in one of the few moments of gentle tenderness. Brief as it is, the break from relief quickly ends, and Birdy disappears. Birdy's father arrives at school to fight him, and A-han tries to protect him, but they end up fighting each other. Eventually, the audience catches up to the opening of the film with A-han and Father Oliver. Father Oliver relates to A-han about his troubled youth and prays for him, but they're interrupted as A-han is told to go home where Birdy is waiting for him.
His parents are misinformed about Birdy's conflict with A-han, who wants to come out and tell the truth, but Birdy stops him. A-han wants to escape from heteronormativity, homophobia, and everything. He doesn't want to see Birdy, and he can only take out his frustration through screaming. Birdy asks him how far he could run away, and A-han replies however he can run. He's calmed by Birdy and they go skinny dipping together in the ocean. Laying naked on the beach, A-han kisses him softly, and Birdy kisses him back. Afterward, they don't see each other again. Birdy has moved away to study for university, and A-han confesses his love in the pouring rain in the phone-booth playing a song for Birdy.
Many years later at a class reunion, A-han tries to reunite with Birdy to no avail. A-han meets Ban-Ban, and she comments on how natural homosexuality is and how damaging heteronormativity was. A-han also meets the former lover of Father Oliver, and his lover wonders if he's in hell. A-han reassures him that Father Oliver was a good man and that he is in heaven. It's an interesting twist as Father Oliver had mentioned a past love, but the students assumed it was a woman. A-han continues to travel the world, and Birdy has run as far as he could from his grasp; yet by sheer happenstance or fate, they meet again at a gay bar. Birdy admits to using heteronormativity to deflect his feelings for A-han and hoping that he would have a relationship with a woman as he did.
Both of them have changed since their younger days. A-han's voice has become quieter, and Birdy is more open to admitting his feelings for A-han. They walk together and see their younger selves playing their song once more. The lyrics of their song recalls their present and a hopeful future. "I stand defiant against the world," they can be proud and open about their sexuality. "If I have another chance, I will surely love again," they meet again years later. "If I didn't do so, I wouldn't be able to live the rest of my life," speaking to the past regret and treatment of each other. "You fly away, leaving me stranded here," what Birdy has done to A-han. A-han missed Birdy and was able to remember him all these years. What kept their love was the memories they had. Now they are freed from the constraints of heteronormativity and are finally able to love each other.
Cover Photo by Joe Fang. Edited by Katrina Kwok.
