There seem to be two responses to Bernardo Bertolucci's The Last Emperor. One is typified by a remark I overheard as I left the theater: “I loved it! And I learned so much about history too.” The other is characterized by a New York Times article which, in its obsession with verisimilitude, set out to prove the historical inaccuracy of the film.¹ Perhaps these concerns with the film's true-to-lifeness should not be surprising. With its extravagantly ornamental sets and multicolored costumed “cast of thousands,” The Last Emperor harkens back to Hollywood epics à la Cecil B. De Mille. Unlike De Mille, however, Bertolucci has openly rejected the ideal of historical accuracy. As Bertolucci remarked concerning the film's pre-production research: “We had to know the entire truth before we could choose to be unfaithful to it.”²

To focus only on The Last Emperor's verisimilitude is therefore misguided at best: a more interesting approach to the historical film is to examine its faculty of engaging the viewer in a game of belief and disbelief. As Jean-Louis Comolli has written, the historical film is a game, one which stretches the audience's belief in cinema's fictional apparatus to its utmost. Comolli writes, “The simulacrum does not fool a ‘passive’ spectator (there are no ‘passive spectators’): the spectator has to participate in his own fooling; the simulacrum is the means whereby he is helped to fool himself.”³ It is the foregrounding of this game of belief and disbelief within The Last Emperor which I would like to explore in this review—a game which, no matter how self-reflexive, ultimately does not liberate the viewer from the “shackles” of spectatorship nor move the film beyond the confines of a certain dangerous tradition of film history and orientalist historiography.

Past films by Bertolucci have shown an awareness of ideology as not only a set of political beliefs imposed from above, but as a way in which one experiences the world and perceives reality. The Conformist (1970) and The Spider's Stratagem (1970) implicitly critique the “naturalness” of film, showing it to be a cultural apparatus which constructs individuals as ideological subjects, fabricating a reality that appears unified and ahistorical.⁴ Like the protagonists Marcello Clerici (Jean-Louis Trintignant) in The Conformist and Athos Magnani (Giulio Brogi) in The Spider's Stratagem who are entrapped in the ideological screens of fascist history, the emperor Pu Yi is both subject of and subject to history. Although the narrative of Pu Yi's life is presented in a coherent, chronological form—beginning with his arrest in 1950, and then proceeding in flashbacks through his entire life—Pu Yi (John Lone) is also presented as an allegorical figure for the ideal film spectator, produced as a subject-effect, seduced by the fetishism of film.

Like another story about an emperor, Hans Christian Andersen's “The Emperor's New Clothes,”⁵The Last Emperor is a story about surface and the act of looking. In Andersen's fairy tale, the magical cloth does not exist. Instead the weaving is the story that the two swindlers tell the emperor, a story which becomes a veil: the emperor and his subjects see that they do not see but are afraid to admit their own “stupidity” or “incompetence.” Believing in the clothes covers the fear shared by both the emperor and his subjects of being caught “naked,” the fear that they cannot trust their own eyes. Like the film viewer who fetishizes the cinematic apparatus, the emperor and his subjects fetishize the “magical” cloth. The new clothes are both a sign of fullness and coherence, and a lie hiding a fear of inadequacy or nakedness.

Bertolucci's The Last Emperor is also a weaving, a story which embroiders upon theories of film spectatorship and fetishism. As a fabric, it too consists of a telling. Bertolucci's film exposes the fetishism of ideology and film spectatorship, constructed as the film is out of screens superimposed on screens, veils covering veils in rich brocaded clothes. The veils or screens exist not only in the court of the Forbidden City, but also later in the screens of ideology of Manchukuo, and of the Maoist re-education camp; they also parallel the screen onto which a film is projected. Like the ideal film spectator who both sees the fabricated nature of cinema and yet denies it at the same time in order to enjoy watching the film, Pu Yi deludes himself into thinking that he is master of his own domain, when in fact he is merely a symbol and puppet manipulated for the benefit of various political regimes.

The visual style and narrative of the film is composed of screens of ideologies, mirroring the way in which the relations of subjectivity, lack, and spectatorship are conceptualized by Bertolucci. The first screen is the billowing yellow canopy that fascinates the three-year-old Pu Yi, who runs out of the Hall of Supreme Harmony into the bright sunlight on the first day of his reign, and is suddenly greeted by thousands of kowtowing courtiers. A second screen is the long white sheet that prevents the eunuchs from touching the adolescent Pu Yi as they play together. These playmates appear only as shadows from the point of view of Pu Yi; the white sheet brings to mind both the movie screen and the wall in Plato's cave. A third screen is part of yet another game: Pu Yi and his two wives play hide and seek under a silk sheet—as we viewers only see their shapes while simultaneously an unseen fire, like the fire in Plato's cave, blazes in the Forbidden City's storerooms, set by the eunuchs who are afraid that Pu Yi will discover their thefts. The final screen is the crisp, red flag of Mao's Red Guard, waved by the zealous marching youth of the Cultural Revolution.

Pu Yi's imprisonment is a necessary component of his desire, since only within the prison can he be emperor. Like the fetishism of the ideal film spectator described by Metz, his desire is sustained by a game in which he oscillates between belief (Yes, I am emperor) and disbelief (No, I am not emperor). The psychoanalytic underpinnings of his desire are revealed in his fixation on returning to the mother and his search for origins, a return perhaps to the Imaginary: Pu Yi is seen repeatedly running after a fleeing mother figure, first his wet nurse, then upon his mother's death, and finally when his wife is forced to an asylum. Always held back by lackeys, his return to the mother is never successful, as indeed it cannot be: his overriding desire is to remain emperor.

Pu Yi's desire to be emperor, even a puppet emperor, is molded by the needs of the particular regime in power. Because Pu Yi is an emperor, he must abide by certain rules, akin to those of the model film viewer. His is a royal body that Pu Yi himself learns to objectify: he is rigid and impassive; he never uses the pronoun “I,” referring to himself in the third person or as the royal “we”; and as emperor he is supposed to see all, but no one may look at him. Like the film viewer who, identifying with the camera, comes to believe that s/he is in the position of the “transcendental eye,” Pu Yi thinks he is all-perceiving when in fact he is only allowed to see what his captors want him to see. Since no one may look at him, since no one else may wear the royal yellow, and since no other men are allowed to live in the palace of the Forbidden City, Pu Yi cannot see any representation of himself. He never sees himself in the clothes of another, or in the gaze of another, flattened as a representation within that gaze, just as the film viewer does not find his or her body reflected in the mirror that is the movie screen.

As the Lord Chamberlain tells the tutor Mr. Johnston (Peter O'Toole), Pu Yi is a symbol of great importance. As symbol, therefore, he not only figures for the textually produced viewer, but for the object of spectatorship itself. In every regime, Pu Yi is under a surveillance by a power that monitors and contains him. His first overseer is of course the Lord Chamberlain, with the eunuchs. The architecture of the Forbidden City moreover is conducive to voyeurism: doorways are framed by doorways, rooms lie within rooms, and the palace is its own mise-en-abyme.

Pu Yi's next important overseer is Johnston. He is also a voyeur: it is Johnston who watches Pu Yi play the screen game with the eunuchs and Johnston who photographs him before he leaves the Forbidden City, a neat trope for his particular objectification of the emperor. Johnston introduced Pu Yi to western education and western ideas of reform, and yet he keeps Pu Yi ignorant of the political realities of revolution. Instead Johnston encourages his passion for superficial reform like western fads, clothes, tennis, etc.

After his years of tutoring under Johnston, Pu Yi is forced to leave the Forbidden City by Jiang Jie-Shi's (Chiang Kai-Shek's) troops, but his blindness to the imperatives of political reform and to the fact that his monarchy is indeed obsolete is symbolized by his wearing of dark glasses, and his stumbling walk as he goes outside the palace gate for the first time. He thus leaves the first prison only to enter another one. The Japanese become Pu Yi's third overseers by convincing him that they will help him become emperor again. The sequences with the Japanese, reminiscent of the mise-en-scène of The Conformist, are replete with the signifiers of “fascinating fascism,” to use Susan Sontag's term, from the grey and black interior architecture of his new palace, combining sterile modernity and kitsch, to the playboy Pu Yi's smooth rendition of “Am I Blue?,” like a crooner in an Italian white-telephone film.

The new palace is another theater of shadows, a fascist prison for the deluded Pu Yi who refuses to perceive the imperialist motives of his puppet masters. The coronation ball is a dramatic metaphor for this new prison/cave: we see Amikasu (Ryuichi Sakamoto) directing cameramen as the harsh lighting used for filming creates a chiaroscuro world where the dancers cast large shadows. Only Pu Yi's wife, Wan Jung (Joan Chen) protests their imprisonment. Her self-destructive resistance is characterized by the sequence in which she eats lotus blossoms petal by petal as her husband greets the Japanese dignitaries, thereby calling attention to her and Pu Yi's role in Manchukuo as mere “lotus eaters.”

Just as Pu Yi came to know that he was not really Emperor of China in the Forbidden City, he becomes increasingly aware of his manipulation by the Japanese, but in both cases he is immobilized by his own desire to be emperor. Although the monochromatic khaki world of the Fushun prison, a re-education camp for Mao's new order, is a starkly different environment, it does parallel his earlier prisons. Once again we have a place of surveillance, this time tied to our own viewing of the film. Our voyeurism is pointed out by our identification with the point-of-view peephole shot of the governor watching Pu Yi having his shoes tied by his former valet. Like the governor, we too desire to learn the truth about Pu Yi.

In many ways, the governor seems to be the best of Pu Yi's overseers. As the governor tells the prisoners in his orientation speech: “We believe that men are good. We believe that the only way to change is to stare at the truth.” Yet Bertolucci subverts any idealist notions that man has the ability to see the truth. In one crucial scene Pu Yi is made explicitly into a cinematic spectator, viewing a film composed of newsreel footage of Japanese atrocities in China and Manchukuo. But it is only when Pu Yi sees an image of himself that he stands, entranced, staring straight at his own mass-produced portrait. This “moment of truth” is immediately undermined, since the next shot is of the hailing hands of a rally, as if to highlight the notion that ideology hails the subject, fabricates a unified reality, reminding one of Louis Althusser's statement: “All ideology hails or interpellates concrete individuals as concrete subjects.”⁶ There is no child to cry out that the emperor hasn't got anything on, because ultimately there is no royal body, no referent of truth but only clothes, its signs.⁷

The final screen is that of China during the Cultural Revolution. Instead of the chanting golden-robed monks of the Forbidden City, there are Mao Zedong's marching, bullying children. The aging Pu Yi protests to these children that the governor “is a teacher, a good teacher,” only to be ignored. The red flag waves, symbol of another blinding ideology; a group of uniformed girls in red arm bands march in a circle, to the accompaniment of accordionists lined up under a mural depicting the beaming face of Chairman Mao in the sun. In Plato's allegory the sun represented the light of truth, the Good; here the sun is just another propagandistic symbol of power. The movement of the girls in a circle with the red-flag-waving youth in the middle repeats the circular chase of the young Pu Yi and his brother Pu Chieh, and this choreographed use of screens is important because it represents the ultimate inescapability of ideology. Just as Marcello was caught in a swirling circle of dancers in The Conformist, Pu Yi never comes to any ultimate truth, but is always trapped within a circle.

So far in this review, I too may appear to be seduced by the visual splendor and conceptual sophistication of Bertolucci's latest work. I would like to argue now that although Bertolucci has created a film that exposes the woven screens of shadows and nesting boxes which constitutes both history and film spectatorship, at the center of the film is also a lack, an emptiness of a particular ideological nature.

To begin, the last screen of ideology which I discussed, that of the cruelty and theater of Maoist China, seems a little too transparent to me. What it reveals is another screen of ideology: that of the current Chinese government's support of the film through its granting of unprecedented permission for on-site shooting. The governor of the prison is even played by the actor and director Ying Ruocheng, Deputy Minister of Culture. A critical perspective on the Cultural Revolution is welcome to the present government with its program of economic reforms, and it is only because of these reforms that a western filmmaker like Bertolucci would be allowed to film in China at all. This unfavorable representation of Maoist China also reveals a shift in Bertolucci's stance as an Italian Marxist intellectual who at one point was sympathetic to Mao but seems now to have shifted allegiances.⁸

Secondly, The Last Emperor, which after all is a work financed by Western capital, must be posited within a tradition of Hollywood realism and the epic film, especially in the ways it reflects orientalist historiography. At the film's conclusion, the horde of western tourists who invade the Hall of Supreme Harmony reminds us that we too have been tourists in Pu Yi's life. The seamlessness of the film is ruptured here, and we are abruptly brought back to our own time. Yet for all its implied critique of the filmic apparatus, Bertolucci's film, as a narratival, chronological story of the life of one man, still constructs a classical subject-effect through the strategies of mainstream realist Hollywood cinema—witness the many marks of “authenticity,” whether it be the inserted titles of place and date, or the logic of the continuity editing. The self-reflexive foregrounding of the apparatus of film does not challenge the essential game of belief and disbelief: Bertolucci allows us to disbelieve, as if winking at us—yes, it is only a game—in order that we may believe just a little bit longer. The Last Emperor is an airtight box that only contains boxes within boxes (Pu Yi's life, after all, spans the history of cinema), and I find the ending to be an excuse for what is basically still a realist film.

Moreover, The Last Emperor simulates the Hollywood epic films—it is a simulation of a simulation—through its self-reflexive style of realism. The difference between Cecil B. De Mille and Bertolucci is that at some level De Mille invoked the rubric of historical accuracy as a marketing strategy for his films. But despite De Mille's efforts, the Hollywood looks and accents of his actors, of course, always gave the film away. Bertolucci, on the other hand, is aware of the impossibility of historical authenticity, and thus he highlights the surface of history. The problem is that in creating another film about surface spectacle and Orientalism, Bertolucci feeds into some dangerous myths about China. Perhaps the epic, the spectacular Hollywood historical film, may be characterized as a representation of a power struggle, usually an essentialist Manichean struggle for some kind of empire, some kind of hegemony—a battle of ideologies. In lavish Hollywood spectacles like those of De Mille, there are usually implicit or explicit struggles between East and West, the barbaric versus the civilized, with the civilized always winning at the end. Although The Last Emperor tries to subvert the De Mille style of representing history by containing within the film a self-reflexive critique of film, it does not escape from one major problem: colonialist attitudes. The Last Emperor's opium-dream-like oneiricism, although self-conscious, descends into old stereotypes about China and Orientalism: that is, Oriental cruelty, sensuality, and lack of rationality. The West has traditionally thought of itself as the site of substance and the Orient as one of surface; the fetishism of the film for dazzling silks, brocades, and embroidery still promotes an attitude that after all underneath the Orient's silky sleeves there is nothing there.

While Pu Yi was in his box of shadows, tremendous changes transformed China from the Middle Kingdom into the People's Republic of China. As the production history of The Last Emperor shows, moreover, the transformation continues, this time with the bourgeoisification of China. John Powers relates an interesting anecdote: in between takes of one scene, Chinese soldiers, hired as extras for the scene involving rebelling students, listened to disco and took pictures of themselves with cameras hidden underneath their costumes.⁹ May we then think of Bertolucci himself as a last emperor? The irony of the title The Last Emperor is that in trying to get away from looking for the referent, for truth, for the causes of effects—this is a film about the last emperor, the title has nothing to do with firsts, with originals—this film which tries to subvert the ideological apparatus of film ends up hiding behind an old ideological screen, and a pernicious one at that. If Pu Yi is a model for the ideal film spectator, we do not become the last emperors, aware of our production as subject-effects. Instead, the old empire continues, albeit under a new surface.

Notes

1. Richard Bernstein, “Is The Last Emperor Truth or Propaganda?,” New York Times (May 8, 1988), Cl, 33.

2. John Powers, “Last Tango in Beijing,” American Film, November 1987, Vol. XIII, No. 2, 40.

3. Jean-Louis Comolli, “Historical Fiction: A Body Too Much,” Screen 19, no. 2 (Summer 1978), 46.

4. Jodi Hauptmann has written an unpublished paper that explores the relation of the story of Plato's cave to The Conformist, entitled “Slaves to Shadows: The Allegory of Plato's Cave in The Conformist.”

5. Hans Christian Andersen, Eighty Fairy Tales, trans. R. P. Keigwin (New York: Pantheon, 1982), 64–68. For my interpretation of “The Emperor's New Clothes” I am indebted in part to Shoshana Felman's class lectures on the same fairy tale.

6. Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes Towards an Investigation,” trans. Ben Brewster, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (New York and London: Monthly Review Press, 1971), 173.

7. Ettore Scola's La Nuit de Varennes (1982) is arguably more successful in foregrounding the game of the historical film because of its playfulness. Scola does not show the body of the king at all, but shows us only the king's red inauguration coat, dwelling instead on the discourse centered around the king, the conversations held within the coach.

8. See Robert Philip Kolker's chapter on Godard, and Bertolucci's early politics in his chapter, “‘Versus Godard,’” Bernardo Bertolucci (London: British Film Institute, 1985), 11–35.

9. Powers, 40.