‘Heads or Tails?’: A postmodern postmortem

With the staging of Meng Jinghui’s “Heads or Tails?,” the Tufts community was called upon to react to the abstracting force of “non- traditional” art. Which is simply to say that the call for meaning’s production was conspicuously sounded — a conspicuity opposed to the subtler message harbored in the contradictory crannies of ostensibly sensible, “traditional” art that seems to serve meaning ready-made. Let us, then, put forth one possible answer to the profound call to think deeply, and think the show apropos of one its primary threads: otherness and identity.

The pre-show Asian pop music trilling to the towering shimmer of Mao posters and alien advertisements situated us immediately amidst foreign art forms. Or did it? Wasn’t it rather that we experienced an uncannily different content of the forms with which we are all so well acquainted? There was a similitude of structure estranged by otherly material. Thus, before the performance formally began, we perceived familiar pop-cultural forms filled with foreign content. It was as though we peered into an anamorphic mirror that set awry our cultural reflection.

One could here insert the interestingly exponential case of Meng, who not only found himself, as guest, other to Tufts, but found his own show entirely other to itself, infused with different “stylistic and tone decisions,” to quote the Daily review [“Any way you flip it, it comes up ‘Heads,’” Apr. 5, 2006]. Where there might’ve been a neat, symmetrical inversion if he found him- self at home in his show, yet foreign to the campus-culture-content outside it, the opposite being the case for us, we find an added degree of distance in his case.

All these inferences of estrangement should be ringing certain German bells. Here we have a version of the Brechtian “Verfremdungseffekt,” the “distancing effect” whereby the ordinary appears strangely so that its character can be identified from a critical viewpoint.

In Brechtian theory, this critical stance serves to incite action against oppressive governmental regimes. But “Heads or Tails?” confounds this incitement to action by citing the trouble with our sight itself. Isn’t Chen Xiaolong’s pinnacle problem in the play, after all, that the whole world, including his own wife, can’t see him for who he is? In the flurry of excessive images accenting “late-capitalist” culture, isn’t the problem precisely that we can’t rely on our sight? Thus, when we see ourselves alienated, through a Brechtian move that potentially posits our actual identity, it is our sight itself that is askew.

Here we encounter the sharp irony of seeing ourselves “truly”: when we see ourselves from the privileged perspective engendered by “distance,” which takes on the problematic form of a paid-for spectacle, we see that we can’t trust our sight, which instantly calls into question that sight itself, and thereby threatens to dissolve reality altogether.

If meaning is associated with sight, after all, which it most definitely is in our presence-obsessed culture, which has to “see it to believe it,” then the obfuscation of sight precipitates the dissolution of meaning. Thus we read in “Heads or Tails” not the “any-meaning for any-one” ideology presented by the “official” Daily review, which is predicated on the fact that all meaning to be derived from art is finally subjective. (And need we point out that this “subjective” take on art has become but a clever and often com- munity-wide way of shirking the responsibility to think critically through serious and seriously perplexing questions?) Rather, we read the destruction of meaning itself.

If the sight-identity-meaning triad suffers a burn that leaves it — and thus us — faceless, as it were, ought we to “relax,” secure in our knowledge that “the ambulance is on the way,” as Meng advises in the play’s program? No. Isn’t it at the hospital, after all, where the faceless victim gets the faux lift that ruins the life — the identity — of Xiaolong? Isn’t the hospital where we find the manipulative technology and egotistical greed of doctors eager to get ahead in the race for the new face? The howling flash of the hospital box oughtn’t to relieve, but heighten our anxiety — if we believe in inherent identity. Which points us already to the play’s quasi-nihilist stature.

As a pastiche on identity politics, the play toys with “ER,” “Law and Order” and slam poetry — to name but a few of the cultural strains bleeding through it. Thus it would be wrong to designate the play “avant-garde,” as if though we could so easily encapsulate thereby a poetic-sci-fi-experimental-dramedy that is insistent upon the crossing of boundaries. This is a play above all resistant to identification.

It has perhaps learned the lesson of its main character, Xiaolong, who goes mad trying to prove his “genuine” identity. It isn’t simply that Xiaolong’s and Goalie’s relationship is a metaphor of the subject’s otherness to itself. It’s much more outrageous than that. Xiaolong’s identity can only exist through the other. It is the other’s (in this case, his wife’s) not recognizing him that effectuates his progressive madness, i.e. the progressive breakdown of his identity, which ends finally in an ambiguous death by poison.

The imperative point to derive from the enigmatic final act of the show is the symbol on the bottle of poison: X. Isn’t it the case that Xiaolong (X) finally found himself drained of human content, i.e. an empty subject, devoid of identity, and thus as an X in the sense of a pure placeholder, lacking any specified content?

The question everyone’s asking at this tenebrous point is that of love. Isn’t the play on one level a story of redemption through true love, love beyond all appearances? Hardly. If the ambulance of love is on the way, sirens a-wailing, beware. The oldest story in the book tells of the Sirens' lovely allure — it’s fatal. Our odyssey ends when we succumb to that sweet, sweet sound.

This isn’t “true” love as authentic-identity-assuring salvation — the love we ironically get fed through endless Hollywood images — this is love as poison. Here we have the ironic reversal at the show’s end, where we find nothing but the man, the lady across from him, and the poison. Identity, though so lovely, as death.