SOURCE: Zaller, Robert. “After the Revolution: Bertolucci's The Last Emperor.” Michigan Quarterly Review 28, no. 1 (winter 1989): 79–93.

The theme of this movie is change. Can a man change? The story of Pu Yi is a story of metamorphosis. From emperor to citizen … from caterpillar to butterfly. The extraordinary thing is that the film's story coincides completely with China today. China is changing, a big mutation is in progress. … The movie is somehow in synch with that.

—Bernardo Bertolucci¹

It is axiomatic that an artist's own words are the best guide to his intentions. It is not necessarily the case with his results. In The Last Emperor, Bernardo Bertolucci has succeeded in making a movie not about change but about immobility—the immobility of personality, and the immobility of history. In doing so, he has come full circle as well in a cinematic project that began twenty-five years earlier in Before the Revolution. The Bertolucci of that precocious masterpiece was a young man in search of personal and political transcendence, a way beyond the bourgeois, Freudian ego in which his class and time had trapped him. Through purgative madness and disgust in the manner of Artaud (Partner), absorption in the false collectivity of Fascism (The Conformist), temporal reversal (The Spider's Stratagem), and sexual privatization (Last Tango in Paris), Bertolucci had explored the avenues of rebellion and escape afforded by his culture, and found that they terminated in stasis, despair, and death.²

Yet each such terminus formed the point of departure for another utopian projection upon history, another quest for a politics of liberation. In 1900, the film that marked the crisis of his career, Bertolucci seized upon an idealized peasantry, whose comradeship in the struggle for social justice in twentieth-century Italy represented the closest approach to an achieved vision of communal and sexual harmony available to him, as the image of his own quest for a reconciliation of personal and social identity. But the image, despite its cinematic virtuosity, was knowingly false: false to history, which Bertolucci stopped in freeze-frame at the moment of the illusory triumph of the peasant-partisan forces in 1945, and false to the reality of desire, which, formed under class relations, could not transcend them in the absence of a revolution that is both the precondition and the result of utopian desire. The result of this was an egregious contrast between the “natural” fulfillment of sexual impulse among the peasantry and the degeneracy of desire among the landed elite. This too rang false, not only by virtue of exaggeration but because the depiction of liberated sexuality in the unliberated peasantry reduced itself to a combination of naivete and prudery that was scarcely more (and, often, perilously less) appealing than the perversions of the elite.³

The most retrograde element in this film was that it was made at a time (1976) when no one, least of all the urbane Bertolucci, could have taken the idea of a revolutionary peasantry in Italy seriously. Indeed, the disappearance of this peasantry had been a salient theme of Before the Revolution, the absence of a revolutionary class had been the political starting-point of his film career, and the tough-minded engagement with Italy's fascist past had been one of the strengths of his early work.⁴

After the debacle of Luna (1979), Bertolucci's most openly Oedipal romance, he made a partial recovery in Tragedy of a Ridiculous Man (1982), a film which returned him to the scene and scenario of Before the Revolution. Bertolucci's ridiculous man is Primo (Ugo Tognazzi), a small factory owner who knows that he is inauthentic, trapped between the memory of his peasant roots and the vision of a harmonious social order that he, as much as any, would gladly see lift the burden of historical responsibility from his shoulders. Thus, he takes pride in the fact that his factory, which processes cheese and pork, is connected with the soil, while his fellow industrialists deal in “inanimate” materials. On the other hand, despite the proprietary satisfaction he takes in his plant, he muses that if it were a cooperative and he its manager he would be safe from the class hatred (and self-contempt) to which he is now exposed.

The convoluted plot revolves around the staged abduction of Primo's son, Giovanni, by a revolutionary group to which Giovanni actually belongs. As Primo's suspicions about the abduction grow, his solicitude for his son turns to cynicism, and he accepts the report of Giovanni's death with alacrity, deciding to use the ransom he has raised to recapitalize his business. The story, whose details need not detain us here, quickly reverts to the familiar Bertoluccian themes of generational substitution and Oedipal conflict. Primo is a father who is not really looking for his son (as Athos, Jr. in The Spider's Stratagem is a son not really looking for his father); each is willing to betray the other, Primo to turn his son's reported death to profit, and Giovanni to use revolutionary politics as a pretext for stripping Primo of his fortune. The corruption of all relations within the capitalist order, especially those of its proudest product, the bourgeois family, is foreordained, and the truth about the terrorism of the Red Brigades is the same as that about fascism—they are both degenerative aspects of the same order.

Such a reading, however, suggests only half the issue. As Bertolucci's project has been the attempt to reconcile the individual and the social—posed most starkly by the warring visions of Freud and Marx—so, in the best of his work to this point, he had withheld judgment on the ultimate primacy of the personal or the political. Such a suspension had been possible as long as Bertolucci's films themselves remained fables of bourgeois revolt, fixed within the unsurpassable limit of the capitalist order. But this was an impasse for Bertolucci too; like his heroes, he was fated within that order to repetition, and while the tension of an unresolved quest had given vitality to his art, it also threatened its further development. The constriction of the political situation in Europe had led a number of directors, including Louis Malle and Wim Wenders, toward American subjects, and Bertolucci, declaring his interest in Italian society exhausted, attempted to revive a long-standing project to film Dashiell Hammett's Red Harvest.

In the event, Bertolucci's next locale was neither Europe nor America, but the People's Republic of China, and his subject neither Hammett's novel nor (his own first preference for a Chinese project) Malraux's Man's Fate, but one urged on him by his hosts: the life of the last Manchu emperor, Aisin-Gioro Pu Yi. What the Chinese hoped for in promoting a film treatment of Pu Yi can perhaps best be gauged by the title of his exemplary autobiography, From Emperor to Citizen. What Bertolucci found instead was the tragedy of a truly ridiculous man, the epitome of his film heroes, and the clearest—perhaps the definitive—expression of the political irony that has been implicit in his work from the beginning.

The film pivots on its opening scene, which depicts the return of a trainload of Russian-held Chinese collaborators and war criminals, including Pu Yi, to the Communist authorities of the newly victorious People's Republic. From this moment, it proceeds backwards in a series of extended flashbacks from the presentation of the three-year-old Pu Yi at the Manchu court, and forward from the point of his arrival at the Chinese internment camp—a very different presentation at a very different court—to his rehabilitation as a citizen of the new order. No doubt Bertolucci's Chinese hosts found this opening highly appropriate, as marking the beginning of Pu Yi's rebirth. For the viewer, however, adopting the perspective of the still-unreconstructed Pu Yi, this narrative choice, centering the film in Pu Yi's memory, makes the long flashbacks a kind of remembered dream, the return to his captive present a living nightmare. It is only as the film turns slowly on this axis that the ends of the dream knit together, and are shown to enclose a single image.

That image is given in the film's first moments. The train bringing Pu Yi to the internment camp pulls into the station where a detachment of soldiers waits for it. The image is doubly ironic: it brings Pu Yi “home” to his native soil, but as a prisoner; and it provides him with a “guard” that will recall the imperial guard that prostrates itself before the boy-emperor, but which leads him instead to a cell. Above all, however, the image of the train itself commands: smoke-wreathed, photographed from a variety of elevations, thrusting itself majestically between the motionless ranks of men. Yet this image belies itself more than any other, for the train's motion is ultimately illusory: shuttling back and forth on its track, it paces and repaces its own steps, like a prisoner in his yard: it can “go,” ultimately, nowhere.⁵

The film unfolds this image with endlessly fertile variation, but, in essence, never departs from it. The sequence continues as Pu Yi alights from the train, is recognized by four men who prostrate themselves before him and are driven off by the soldiers, and attempts suicide in the dingy station washroom by slitting his wrists. The blood filling the basin has the effect of a Proustian Madeleine: it prepares us for the flashbacks that establish Pu Yi's past.

What Bertolucci finds in the story of Pu Yi's childhood and infancy is the perfect Oedipal paradigm, the bourgeois child's fantasy of omnipotence lived out as historical reality. The child-emperor, crowned at the age of two, lives in the hermetically sealed world of the Forbidden City, in which his every wish is, literally, law. He lives without sibling or rival, for there are no other children in the Forbidden City. The eunuchs who are his servitors and companions are nonthreatening fathers, for it is they and not he who have been castrated, and no other male dare approach or even gaze upon him. As the Son of Heaven, he is, indeed, fatherless from the beginning. When the wizened Dowager Empress announces to the infant Pu Yi, “The Emperor is dead,” and designates him his heir, she makes him symbolically an orphaned son. A crisis occurs when Pu Yi is visited by his younger brother, Pu Je. Pu Je is not only a reminder of the real continued existence of his father (and his continued potency as well), but of a world outside the Forbidden City which, after the republican revolution of 1911, no longer recognized the throne. Pu Yi, shocked by this challenge to his childish omnipotence, seeks to reaffirm it by forcing his elderly chamberlain to drink a tray of ink. It is the most horrific moment in the film, and perhaps the most personally charged one as well: Bertolucci began his own career as a writer, and his father is a poet.

But Pu Yi's father, in his own domain beyond the walls of the Forbidden City, possesses something else that mocks Pu Yi's omnipotence: his mother, from whom he has been separated since entering the Forbidden City. Her place is taken by his amah or wet nurse, to whom he has transferred his maternal needs and affections, without, however, forgetting her absence. Pu Yi's compensation for the loss of his mother is the exclusive possession of her surrogate, by whom he is suckled until the age of eight. Since the amah is the only nubile woman in the palace, this sense of exclusivity is strengthened. When, however, the late Emperor's former consorts, who never approach Pu Yi but observe him from a distance, see that his caresses have become exploratory, she, too, is summarily removed. Pu Yi chases after her, yelling helplessly, while she in turn begs to be allowed at least a farewell: “He is my child!”

In contrast to this anguished scene, the subsequent news of his mother's death leaves Pu Yi seemingly indifferent. When his tutor, who alone among the eunuchs exhibits some sympathy toward him, offers condolences, Pu Yi spurns them. But this event is decisive, for it reveals to him that the Forbidden City, with its promise of omnipotence, is a fraud, since it has withheld from him the one object he truly desired. He attempts to escape, only to have the portals of the City closed in his face. Climbing the roof of the palace, he threatens suicide, only to be rescued by a human chain of eunuchs. These are the only genuine acts of revolt in his life. They serve merely to reveal his true situation as a prisoner.

The now-adolescent Pu Yi is placated by another surrogate. The eunuchs engage him to the sexually assured Princess Wan Jung (Joan Chen). According to imperial tradition, he is also provided with a no less attractive Secondary Consort, thus affording him substitutes for both mother and nurse simultaneously. In a surpassingly erotic scene, Pu Yi takes both women to bed, and the three disappear under a rippling silk sheet where identities as well as bodies merge.

This idyl is menaced both by the ongoing revolution outside the walls and the machinations of the eunuchs within. The latter, who have systematically plundered the palace, set it afire to escape discovery. Pu Yi goes in fear of his life, but finds an ally in the Scots Orientalist, Reginald Johnston (Peter O'Toole), who is brought in to tutor him in “Western” subjects.

Pu Yi's relationship with Johnston puts the final impress on his character. The articles Johnston procures for him are symbolic as well as practical: spectacles for his poor eyesight (the eunuchs, it is intimated, would prefer him to go blind), and a bicycle, which gives him access to locomotion for the first time (though it does not enable him to leave the palace compound). But Johnston brings with him something far more precious: knowledge of the outside world, whose mastery is essential if Pu Yi is to achieve what has now become the ruling passion of his life: dominion in the great kingdom of his father. The first two questions he asks of Johnston are revelatory: “Why are you not wearing skirts?” (i.e., kilts); and, “Where are your ancestors buried?” In the presence of the first true male he has been alone with since entering the palace, and the first foreigner he has ever seen, what Pu Yi wants to know is, “Why are you not feminized?,” and, “Where is your father?” His anxiety about this latter question reveals itself further when he asks Johnston whether his predecessor had been assassinated. The Emperor Kuang-Hsi is his formal ancestor and, like him, a Son of Heaven, i.e., a son whose earthly father remains hidden. Dare he rule without incurring Kuang-Hsi's fate?

Johnston's replies are candid—another winning attribute in a house of lies—but he perpetuates in Pu Yi the most dangerous illusion of all, that he can in fact some day rule China. Pu Yi gives him his unswerving trust in part because he feeds this illusion, and the illusion is confirmed in part because of that trust.

Johnston's own political interest is obscure. When, while bargaining with the eunuchs for Pu Yi's eyeglasses, he is asked what he really wants, he replies, disingenuously, “The glasses.” Johnston “sees” through others in a double sense; he exposes the thievery and self-interest of the eunuchs, yet articulates no perspective of his own. In the end, he appears to be simply the medium through which Pu Yi passes to adulthood. These contradictions are reflected in O'Toole's performance, which goes for the butler manner, sacrificing in substance what it achieves in style. Yet Johnston's influence is pivotal. As the first male in the Emperor's mature life, he sets the pattern of his dependence on masculine authority figures. Pu Yi reveals himself in this relationship as a young man desperately in need of guidance, yet fixed upon achieving a single goal. As such, he will be easily manipulated by anyone who sees what he wants.

Pu Yi (played as an adult by John Lone) is finally not liberated but driven from the Forbidden City by the warlord Feng Yuxiang. Johnston urges him to take refuge in the British embassy, but he chooses the Japanese legation instead. While living through the late 1920s in Tianjin as a Westernized playboy—he and the Empress adopt the names of “Henry” and “Elizabeth”—Pu Yi falls increasingly under the sway of the Japanese, who appear to combine Western efficiency and strength with a hieratic vision of society governed by a feudal code. Despite the warnings of the Empress, he finds a new “tutor” in Amakasu (Ryuichi Sakamoto), a dashing Japanese diplomat and adventurer. When Japan occupies Manchuria in 1931, Pu Yi is easily persuaded to become emperor of the puppet state of Manchukuo.

Bertolucci's Asian fascists are in many ways a reprise of his Italian ones. For the bourgeois, he suggests,—and, under the swank, Manchukuo is very much a bourgeois court—the temptation is always fascism. We are once again in the Thirties, the decade before Bertolucci's birth that is the setting of The Conformist and The Spider's Stratagem, the period that is always before the revolution. Here, too, as in virtually all of Bertolucci's films, the personal commerce of sexual exchange and betrayal takes place on the dance floor. “Henry” and “Elizabeth” dance among jaded couples in silence; after the music stops, the consort, no less apt a pupil of modernity than her master, says, “I want a divorce.”

Pu Yi is able to hold neither of his women. His consort decamps, while Wan Jung drifts into opium and a spiteful, self-destructive romance with his female cousin, “Eastern Jewel,” who courts her on the dance floor and services her addiction. Eastern Jewel is Amakasu's mistress as well, and, despite her royal status, boasts that she is a “spy” for the Japanese. She offers herself with insulting casualness to Pu Yi, but her real function is to isolate him from any influence but that of his new mentors.

It is not a difficult task. As Pu Yi relapses into his childhood fantasy of omnipotence, he regresses to a prepubertal state as well. He rejects Wan Jung sexually on the pretext that she, like his mother, is an opium addict, thereby negating the most obvious of his imperial functions, the production of an heir. When Wan Jung announces that she has become pregnant for the sake of the throne, he responds with equanimity if not indifference. Shirking paternal responsibility and stigmatizing his marital partner with a taboo image of his mother, he is psychologically if not physically impotent, a eunuch in effect.

The other dimension of Pu Yi's impotence is revealed to him on his return from a state visit to his Japanese counterpart, Hirohito, whom he fancies as a “brother” emperor. This meeting, like the one with his real brother Pu Je in the Forbidden City, results in the discovery that his power is an illusion. In his absence, his personal guard has been disarmed, and his chief minister sacked. Amakasu presents a decree giving the Japanese plenary powers, and demands his signature. This time the tray of ink is Pu Yi's to swallow. Amakasu also informs him that he cannot allow his honor to be stained by the Empress's infidelity. Her lover—Pu Yi's chauffeur—is summarily executed, her baby is given a fatal injection, and Wan Jung herself is spirited off to a “clinic.” Pu Yi chases after her limousine, only to have the palace gates closed a second time in his face.

Bertolucci bypasses the war years, pausing only over the final collapse of the Japanese occupation and Pu Yi's capture by the Russians.⁶ The film returns to the narrative present of his captivity in China. The former Son of Heaven is forced to clean his slops and to write his name on the floor. At the age of forty-four he must learn to tie his shoelaces, and—he whose feces were once sniffed and sifted like treasure by his eunuchs—to urinate into the communal bucket at night without waking his cellmates.

At first, Pu Yi adamantly maintains that he had been abducted by the Japanese and forced to assume his puppet throne. A propaganda film showing Japanese atrocities appears to shock him for the first time into realizing the nature of his collaboration. He responds, characteristically, by assuming full blame even for events of which, as his exasperated captors point out, he could have had no knowledge. For Pu Yi, the question of actual responsibility does not exist; there is only absolute innocence or absolute guilt, just as there is no question of actual political power, but only of impotence or omnipotence.

Pu Yi finally accepts a new tutor in the camp's governor (Ying Ruocheng), who assumes personal supervision of his case. In a crucial scene, the governor confronts him with passages from Johnston's memoir, Twilight in the Forbidden City, which contradict his account of having been abducted by the Japanese. In reading Johnston's words, the governor symbolically assumes his mantle, patiently leading Pu Yi to the new “truth” he must learn. He adopts the trade of gardener, and habituates himself to his surroundings. After nine years, he is unexpectedly released. The governor calls him forward at a camp assembly, and, like a school principal graduating his prize pupil, gives him his freedom. “You see,” he tells Pu Yi, “I will end up living in prison longer than you.”

The governor's remark soon gets a grim twist. In the following scene, an elderly Pu Yi, now employed in the botanical gardens that were once part of the imperial grounds, is overtaken in the street by a troop of Red Guards brandishing posters of Mao and leading a group of shackled prisoners. Among them, to Pu Yi's horror, is the governor. Prodded by his captors to confess his guilt, he obstinately refuses, upon which he is forced to his knees in a parody of the kowtow. Pu Yi tries to intercede, telling the Guards that they have made a mistake: “This man is a good teacher!” But he is pushed aside, and history goes its way.

For Pu Yi, there is nowhere to go but home. The film's penultimate and climactic scene shows him in front of the ticket window of what could be taken at first for an afternoon movie. It is instead the admission gate to the Forbidden City, now open to all, but, at this moment of China's history, visited by none. Pu Yi wanders alone through the grounds and the palace. Coming upon his former throne, he begins to mount it. He is stopped by a young boy cadet, who seems to materialize from nowhere, and tells him that no one is permitted to climb the throne. Pu Yi explains that this was his chair, and, to prove it, he retrieves from behind the throne a tiny case containing the cricket he had sequestered there six decades before. The cricket crawls out slowly, brown with age but miraculously alive. Pu Yi turns with a smile, and shows it to the boy.

It is a magical moment—reminding us, among other things, of how much Bertolucci owes to Fellini—and one that brings the film to a conclusion that is as artistically gratifying as it seems politically problematic. In The Last Emperor Bertolucci at last lives through the revolution, and comes out on the other side to discover that, although everything has been turned upside down, in a fundamental sense nothing has changed. In Pu Yi, the emperor who is also a revolutionary Everyman, the man who lives the most singular childhood of the twentieth century to become the most anonymous of adults, the extraordinary nonentity who passes, with classic Marxist rigor, from feudal monarch to bourgeois dandy to Voltairean care-taker of what, in Mao's dystopic nightmare, is no one's garden, Bertolucci has found a perfect political analogue for the Freudian human comedy of which, for him, the social order is ultimately a projection. In the end, the emperor has no more escaped his cage than the cricket has; and yet, by the same token, he has always been safe in it. In the palaces at Beijing and Manchukuo, in the Villa Chan in Tianjin, in the Russian and Chinese camps, and, finally, in the open-air prison he shares with a billion fellow Chinese, he is always in confinement: too sacred to be given freedom, too indispensable to be harmed. Whether worshipped by millions as the Son of Heaven or the relict bearer of an identity all but forgotten even by himself, he retains the aura of the last man on earth who has ruled by divine right. It is true of course that this aura is a tinsel absurdity, a fraud; it is enough that Pu Yi believed in it once, and, in his heart of hearts, believes it still.

“May the Son of Heaven live ten thousand years!” This toast, with which Pu Yi is ritually greeted on state occasions, symbolizes the immortality of the dynasty and the empire of which the emperor is the mortal representative. By comparison, the face of Mao, bobbing up and down on a stick in the arms of the Red Guard, seems a precarious parody. Mao is omnipresent, and his retouched image has a counterfeit softness, like an icon worn smooth by generations of worshippers; yet the revolution that has so quickly devoured its “teachers” seems destined not to last. One recalls the moment when Pu Yi rises during the indoctrination film that depicts the Japanese occupation. Hirohito announces Japan's surrender as the camera pans over its devastated cities, and the commentator notes that this was the first time his voice had ever been broadcast. Pu Yi's face seems to register the fact that his brother emperor, too, has been a man in a cage; and yet, at the same time, the film seems to acknowledge that only the emperor has the power of surrender: his voice alone can command where all other authority has failed.⁷

Such implicit comparisons might seem paradoxical if not perverse, for of course there can be no substantive equation between the world-historical figure of Mao and the figurehead Hirohito. It is striking as well that, in a film ostensibly concerned with the greatest peasant revolution in history, not a single peasant appears; and still more so when one reflects on the glorification of the revolutionary peasantry in 1900. The very essence of fascism in Bertolucci's early films is bad faith and betrayal; but how are we to take the portrayal of a socialist revolution whose only sympathetic representative is degraded for his pains? It is not difficult from this perspective to understand Bertolucci's sudden respectability in Hollywood; the reaction of his Chinese hosts and of his colleagues in the PCI (Italian Communist Party) is likely to be more equivocal.⁸

In the end, the panorama of Chinese history, as of Italian, serves Bertolucci as a backdrop for his continuing exploration of the Freudian romance. It is not Pu Yi's presence in the history of his time but his exclusion from it that constitutes the real premise of the film. The very richness of Bertolucci's effects belies the claustral nature of his vision. The camera remains almost entirely within Pu Yi's physical perspective; a few brief scenes excepted, what he sees is what we see. The result is a revolution shown not through its heroes and leaders but its jailers, whose fate is to be jailed in their turn, and who are perceived through the eyes of a man born to perpetual imprisonment.

The nature of Pu Yi's condition necessarily makes him the revolution's most intrinsically hostile witness. Yet, while confining himself within Pu Yi's construction of reality, Bertolucci refuses to ratify it. The result is an all-pervasive irony. What Pu Yi might see, if that irony were relented, is a man destined to confinement under every regime and dispensation, a man in a cage who can see nothing but a change of uniform in his guards. But Pu Yi is vouchsafed nothing of the sort. He is a captive who fantasizes his condition as omnipotence, drawing out the universal infantile fantasy of Everyman into the make-believe supremacy of his imperial fortress, a delusion separated from madness only by the conspiracy of those around him to support it.

This “conspiracy of the elders,” Bertolucci suggests, is all that we, as historical subjects, can know of reality; it is the world we are given but are powerless to make. Pu Yi's fantasy of omnipotence is both the measure of his concrete powerlessness and, as for childhood everywhere, its sole consolation. We do not, of course, remain children; we move forward in time to meet our fate, aided by that last illusion, freedom. What we discover, as our fathers pass, is that our history is no more ours to make than it was theirs; we, as they, are condemned to repeat it. Such is the vision The Last Emperor offers. When Pu Yi turns to show the cricket to the boy cadet who is both China's future and his own ageless self, the child in the palace untroubled by the passage of years, he affirms his own sovereignty, passing the scepter of a common destiny over the heads of the generations, the mandate of heaven itself.

It is too rich a gesture to be consummated; Pu Yi turns with his smile, and then disappears. The smile remains, like a Buddha's, fixed in historical memory. It leaves the mystery of authority, which so often abides in the most perfectly powerless, and which can never be quite renounced by those whom it has possessed.

The film ends, then, where it began, with the ancient imperial throne of the Middle Kingdom; and it ends, too, for all practical purposes, with the last emperor beckoning a child to climb it. It is a gesture of renewal, but also one of repetition; a new reign is about to begin, with or without an acknowledged emperor, for what the figure of the monarch symbolizes is the identification of the cycle of history—the collective destiny of all—with the life of one. The absence of monarchy, the overthrow of the old regime, is not, as modern revolutionaries have sometimes naively assumed, the overcoming of the cycle, but only the displacement of its image. The vacant throne, shown in the film's final scene to a tourist group, reminds us silently of the ineluctability of myth.

But Bertolucci does far more than to evoke the commonplace association between the ruler's life span and the historical cycle. By reflecting modern China's history through the man who was its most isolated and yet symbolically implicated figure, and by emphasizing the Oedipal drama as the central theme in that man's life, he offers a strikingly Freudian representation of historical process. Pu Yi signifies the collapse of history into Oedipal fantasy, a fantasy which, since it is shared by all, is retrojected onto the stage of our common life, and symbolized by the figure of the emperor, the immortal child-father of his people.

This representation is all the more effective because it avoids the reductiveness of psychohistory; it offers analogy and metaphor, not explanation. Pu Yi is no Hitler, writing his delusions large on history; his personal life had perhaps less effect on events at the level of agency than that of the humblest soldier in Mao's army. It is, indeed, his very isolation from the historical contest that offers Bertolucci the freedom of analogy. The private and the public realms both retain their autonomy, and no determining reality is accorded either.

In this sense, Bertolucci does not make a “choice” of Marx or Freud in The Last Emperor, but continues to search for ways of evoking the transcendent reality that embraces the vision of each. If what lies hidden in what Arthur Miller calls the “comradely promise” of Marxism is parricide, then the alienation of the Marxist subject of history and the anxiety of the Freudian subject of culture may have a common root too. What is rejected is the millennial aspect of revolutionary Marxism as the final and perfect resolution of history. If it is cynicism to accept the mere historical given, it is folly, Bertolucci now suggests, to attempt the transcendence of history as such. The permanent revolution can only be a revolt against mankind itself.

To maintain one's footing among such issues is no small accomplishment, and to depict a Pu Yi without slipping into bathos or condescension, to render both the crippled human being and the indefeasible symbol, is artistry of a special order. The Last Emperor is perhaps not a great film, but it is an important one. It signifies a new maturity in Bertolucci, and suggests, in its ability to reconcile the tragic and the ridiculous, what may finally be the making of a major comic artist.

Notes

1. Quoted in Tony Rayns, “Bertolucci in Beijing,” Sight and Sound, 56, 1 (Winter 1986/87), p. 38.

2. For more extended comments on Bertolucci's early work, see my “Bernardo Bertolucci, or Nostalgia for the Present,” Massachusetts Review, 15, 4 (Fall 1975), 807–28.

3. Cf. Robert Burgoyne, “The Somatization of History in Bertolucci's 1900,” Film Quarterly, XL, 1 (Fall 1986), 7–14, for a perceptive discussion of these issues.

4. 1900 also marked the beginning of a disturbing tendency toward self-piratization in Bertolucci's films. The film opens with a young partisan who has assumed the name and identity of its martyred hero, Olmo, confronting the villainous padrone, Alfredo, at the moment of liberation. This scene precisely inverts the plot of The Spider's Stratagem, whose hero, Athos, journeys backward in time to discover that his heroic father was a traitor and a fraud. The partisan is permitted to keep his illusion in 1900; thus, what was emplotted as satire in The Spider's Stratagem returns, unmediated, as romance. Similarly, as Pauline Kael has pointed out (The New Yorker, November 30, 1987), the brutal squashing of the cat in 1900 is replicated in Pu Yi's squashing of his pet mouse in The Last Emperor. Bertolucci's work abounds in self-reference and self-quotation—inevitably, perhaps, in a project such as his—but the manipulation of symmetrically transposed images, symbols, and situations for radically different ends raises serious questions of control and integrity.

5. Cf. the association of trains and terminals with circularity, immobilization, and temporal regression in The Spider's Stratagem. Trains figure prominently in The Conformist and Last Tango in Paris as well.

6. Pu Yi's abortive attempt to escape by plane in this scene (the Russians, who descend by parachute, swarm aboard and capture it) underscores the symbolic significance of the train which brings him into captivity—chronologically the next scene in his life, although not in the film's narrative order.

7. A similar point is made earlier when Amakasu presents Pu Yi with the decree that strips him of his power. Pu Yi has no choice but to sign it, of course, but Amakasu himself wears a pinned sleeve: he has lost an arm. On one level, the scene foreshadows the ultimate collapse of the Japanese empire, but in another, it underlines the ironic dependence of even the most brutal power on even the most spurious legitimacy: Amakasu directs Pu Yi's pen, but it is the emperor's hand alone that can effect the “transfer” of even a power he never possessed.

8. The Chinese had rejected Bertolucci's first project, Man's Fate, on the grounds that it portrayed the revolutionary struggle too negatively.