The Allegory of the Gynoids in Wong Kar-wai’s 2046
Many films are about love, but Wong Kar-wai’s 2046 is about love in a deeper sense. It treats love as a philosophical problem. Like many films, 2046 tells love stories, namely, Chow’s (Tony Leung) affairs with Lulu (Carina Lau), Bai Ling (Zhang Ziyi), Wang Jingwen (Faye Wong), and Su Lizhen (Gong Li). Moreover, 2046 evokes love stories from the previous two films in Wong Kar-wai’s 1960s trilogy: Chow’s affair with another woman also called Su Lizhen (Maggie Cheung) in In the Mood for Love, and Yuddy’s love stories with Su Lizhen and Lulu in Days of Being Wild (the “cliffhanger” appearance of Chow in the last shot of that film anticipates that Yuddy’s lovers will later become Chow’s lovers in the next two films). 2046 also echoes the sentimental affair told in the second half of Wong Kar-wai’s “diptych” Chungking Express by casting Tony Leung and Faye Wong within a similar narrative pattern. Still, 2046 not only tells and evokes love stories, it also outlines a philosophical account of love by extracting a common pattern from them. The film draws on these stories to capture what they share, and it deploys that shared structure to explain why so many of them fail.
2046 does this through the science fiction novel 2047 that Chow is writing, which the film visualizes by turning Chow’s literary imagery into moving images. The novel tells the story of Tak (Takuya Kimura) and begins where the film begins, with Tak saying: “In the year 2046, a vast rail network spans the globe. Every once in a while a mysterious train leaves for 2046. Every passenger going there has the same intention. They want to recapture lost memories because nothing ever changes in 2046. Nobody really knows if that’s true because nobody’s ever come back except me.” Tak is traveling on the train that should lead him back from the “spatial” 2046 where memories are preserved, and time seems frozen to the “temporal” 2046 where time keeps going. That is a long and painful journey. Tak is the only human passenger on the train, while the cabin attendants are female androids, that is, gynoids. He falls in love with one of them (Faye Wong) and possibly also with another (Carina Lau), but loving these gynoids is hard because they malfunction: their affective reactions are delayed. As the film emphasizes through its poetic use of intertitles indicating time lapses, gynoids feel pleasure and joy only many hours after sex, and pain and sadness only long after breakups.
I interpret these malfunctioning gynoids as a philosophical allegory for human beings, since they magnify a constitutive feature of our affective life. To wit, affects are not just instantaneous evaluative responses, as cognitive science sometimes tends to model them, but rather temporally extended processes that may begin with a significant delay after the events that trigger them and last long after those events. The picture of the human mind that results from 2046’s allegory of the gynoids with delayed responses is thus more complicated than the basic cognitive view according to which affects evaluate the content of current perceptions in view of action. Affects have a temporal profile: onset, latency, and persistence. Hence, the mental space between perception and action is populated by a multiplicity of affects that originated in past, sometimes remote events but keep resonating in the stream of consciousness. This resonates with the film’s first intertitle: “all memories are traces of tears,” which appears between Tak’s opening monologue and the beginning of Chow’s vicissitudes in Singapore. This intertitle can be read as suggesting that memories are not merely informational records of past events but are lingering affects associated with those events, persisting as long as their traces persist.
The allegory of the gynoids with delayed responses ultimately sheds light on the other love stories told by 2046 and the previous two films of the trilogy, and even on the one told by Chungking Express. These love affairs fail not because the partners do not love each other but because their feelings are temporally misaligned. That misalignment can involve delayed onset, uneven duration, or the persistence of affects inherited from earlier relationships. This is the ultimate meaning of the sentence “love is all a matter of timing” that Chow utters in the sequence that links his telling of Tak’s story to his own sentimental vicissitudes. Happy love is not impossible in principle, and lovers often love each other genuinely, but finding the right timing that would align affects on both sides is so hard that unhappy love ends up being more widespread as a matter of fact.
But can gynoids love, at the end of the day? In science fiction it is often questionable whether androids really feel anything, and one might wonder whether the 2046 gynoids have real feelings. Perhaps what is delayed is not their affective life but only their apparently affective behavior. After all, the film depicts delayed smiles and tears, but there is no decisive evidence as to whether joy and sadness themselves are delayed. If the allegory of the gynoids is meant to reveal something about humans, this would threaten the reality of our affects, pushing toward the philosophical view labeled “eliminativism,” according to which the subjective perspective should be dropped from a serious, adequate conception of reality. But that is surely not the point of a film like 2046, which celebrates and investigates subjective affect rather than explaining it away. The philosophical picture suggested by 2046 is rather closer to the philosophical view labeled “epiphenomenalism”: subjective states are real, since we feel them, but they lack causal efficacy because they arrive too late to shape what we do. In that respect, the gynoids in 2046 resemble the subjects in Benjamin Libet’s famous experiments, which are sometimes interpreted as suggesting that our conscious sense of agency is a delayed effect of earlier physiological processes rather than their prior cause. The gynoids’ delayed affects are real as affects but causally inefficacious as delayed. If these gynoids are an allegory for humans, then human affect is likewise real but too late to be efficacious in the moment. This yields a further reason why loving is so hard: it is not up to one’s agency. It is something one undergoes rather than something one governs. The affective life, from this perspective, accompanies human vicissitudes just as film music, namely Secret Garden’s Adagio, accompanies Tak’s vicissitudes without altering its course. Affects, like film music, cannot make stories successful, only beautiful.
Enrico Terrone
Enrico Terrone is Professor of Aesthetics at the Università di Genova and Principal Investigator of the ERC project “The Philosophy of Experiential Artifacts.” He received his PhD from the Università di Torino and held research fellowships at the Institut Jean Nicod (Paris) and LOGOS (Barcelona). His philosophical research focuses on art, technology, and experience.
