Tear My Life Apart: Truth Through Queerness in The Handmaiden

This paper compares two related sequences in Park Chan-wook’ 2016 film The Handmaiden using a theoretical lens that reconciles the writings of two preeminent scholars in the field of queer studies. At the start of this film, neither Tamako nor Lady Hideko understands the web of manipulation and lies in which they are entrapped. Both have some key knowledge, but the film’s male characters work hard to safeguard the gates of their knowledge in a desperate bid to prevent females from attaining agency. Yet by the film’s conclusion, it’s the men who realize their hallowed knowledge allowed them to glimpse but a shade of the women’s true capabilities. Thus, when Tamako and Lady Hideko finally embrace queerness to access the truth of the world around them, they also tear down the superficial facade of knowledge that the film’s male characters passed off for truth, even as they build their own identities anew.

The film introduces its audience to the gates of male knowledge very early on, around the twenty minute mark when Tamako stumbles upon Lady Hideko and Uncle Kouzu studying in the latter’s beloved library. The first moments of this sequence shows a profile of the opening door, letting the audience watch as it brings the light of knowledge to a previously blacked-out scene. We see Tamako open yet another door, as if peeling back superficial layers to discover something deeper within. And as she shuts the final door behind her, discover she does. The cinematography gives us a track shot that seems to follow Tamako’s gaze in slow motion. At the beginning, the dark bookshelves form a sort of tunnel, focusing the audience’s vision on the scene in the center of the library. As the camera tracks forward through the corridor, Lady Hideko and Uncle Kouzu grow closer and closer. The camera stops upon arriving just above the point in the library’s center where the two characters are sitting. This prolonged track emphasizes the vastness of the room, which is then contrasted by a reverse shot of Tamako looking very small in the entrance.

The mise-en-scène further develops upon this implied power dynamic. Though both Lady Hideko and Uncle Kouzu sit at the heart of knowledge (for now), the fact that Uncle Kouzu sits at the table while Lady Hideko is relegated to the floor leaves no room for uncertainty concerning who’s really in power here. Not only is Uncle Kouzu higher up in the shot, but he’s the only character with a book in front of him, demonstrating a refined connection to knowledge that indicates a power of its own. However, Park also performs the age-old trick of dressing the moral character in white and the immoral one in black, sending a clear signal to the audience that though Uncle Kouzu is in power here, he’s nobody’s friend. In the next shot, alongside an ominous roll in the extradiegetic soundtrack, Lady Hideko introduces Tamako to Uncle Kouzu as her new handmaiden. As Tamko walks forward to approach them, several things happen very quickly.

First, Uncle Kouzu practically leaps out of his chair, filling the entire shot with his blackness as he yells a warning to Tamako: “the snake, the snake!” Both the sudden noise and the abrupt switch from a serene shot composition to frantic activity are designed to catch the audience off-guard, instilling within them the same sort of panic Tamako must feel in that moment. Tamako gives a little start, then looks down and leaps backwards with a startling scream as we get a quick shot of a decorative metal cobra planted in the middle of the floor just in front of her. Then, we see Lady Hideko pull a lever, and a gate slams shut, startling the audience once again with another bang and matching scream from Tamako. All of this happens in the space of a few seconds, and then Park returns to the wide shot of Tamako in the entryway, except this time, the wrought-iron gate has completely blocked her off the precious knowledge that lies beyond.

But why? There’s always the obvious answer: women with the power of knowledge at their disposal constitute a threat to patriarchy. But that just begs the same question; what makes smart women such a threat to male agency over others? Even if Lady Hideko suddenly realized that she didn’t have to put up with Uncle Kouzu, she’d still be unable to escape his clutches alone—such is the vastness of his masculine power and web of connections. And why does he seem to fear Tamako entering into his sanctum of “truth” but not Lady Hideko? One way to definitively answer these difficult questions is to consult the writings of Lee Edelmen. On pages six and seven of No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, he explains the following: 

Queerness exposes the obliquity of our relation to what we experience in and as social reality, alerting us to the fantasies structurally necessary in order to sustain it and sustaining those fantasies through the figural logics, the linguistic structures, that shape them.

So let’s start with the easier question and work backwards. Uncle Kouzu fears having Tamako in his library because she’s capable of queering it. Of course, he doesn’t know she’s gay, but in this context, her gayness is merely a symbol for her ability to queer things, to harm the fantasies that prop up his social reality. He certainly does recognize this. In other words, Uncle Kouzu sees Tamako as an outside contaminant. Lady Hideko has been strictly raised since girlhood to accept patriarchy at face value. At this point she’s still fully under Uncle Kouzu’s control, so she poses no threat to his masculinity. But Tamako… who knows where she’s been? As a free agent from the outside world, she must know some things that Uncle Kouzu doesn’t. This assumption inherently contains the potential for Tamako’s knowledge to leak into the environment Uncle Kouzu’s so carefully curated, queering it through the introduction of outlandish perspectives that threaten the pseudo-enlightened Japanese worldview he pushes on his household.

Unfortunately for Uncle Kouzu, Tamako does one better than queering the intellectual space around his precious Lady Hideko; she queers Lady Hideko herself. This is where the other definition of queerness comes in. Through Tamako, Lady Hideko’s identity finds a way to slip out of the mold Uncle Kouzu forced it into, and the new form it takes contains an ingredient incomprehensible to the film’s male characters: lesbianism. In a roundabout way, this answers the other question I posed; patriarchy must fear smart women not because one smart women can bring it down, but because one smart woman tends to create more smart women, allowing a sort of chain reaction through which ever-increasing numbers of women are able to construct an identity outside the vocabulary and comprehension of even the most eloquent patriarchy simply by following the example of women around them. All throughout the film, both male leads remain completely oblivious to the girls’ love that’s subverting their modes of control right under their noses.

Now, I believe that the last step towards making this conjecture salable is to explain how exactly living out her queerness changes Lady Hideko’s identity so much that she becomes incomprehensible to men. After all, it wasn’t her choice to be gay; when I say that Tamako “queered” her, I mean that she helped her realize a previously latent identity that changed how she saw the world, not that she somehow “converted” her to homosexuality, as the tired dyadic-cisgender-heterosexual narrative goes. Such an explanation can be succinctly offered through an examination of the writings of Teresa de Lauretis on precisely the topic of identity construction. In The Technology of Gender, she states that “the representation of gender is its construction” (De Lauretis 3). So, when Lady Hideko began living out her gayness, she was at the same time changing how she represented her gender. Since lesbianism isn’t one of patriarchy’s limited options for expressing femininity, her gender was consequently pulled off patriarchy’s railroad tracks and into the world of the expanded possibilities provided by queerness. And as De Lauretis tells us, the mere fact she was representing her gender outside the bounds of patriarchy meant that she was starting to build up a new gender, and thus identity, in that negative space too.

We see the result of this late in the film, the next time Lady Hideko and Tamako return to the gate of knowledge that Uncle Kouzu had once prevented Tamako from accessing. This sequence starts with a shot of the two women sitting across from one another in the library. Both characters are dressed in dark colors, but this time, the evil that’s connoted isn’t a moral judgement, but rather a recognition of the women’s status as enemies of (patriarchal) social order. The Uncle is not present; through queerness, the women found a way to thwart this guardian, leaving the gate open. The knowledge he’d tried so hard to keep Tamako from accessing and Lady Hideko from appreciating, for fear of what they might do with it, was now theirs for the taking. But as Tamako flips through one such book at around the hour and fifty minute mark, she’s horrified by its depictions of women as two-dimensional sex objects. Tamako thus realizes the extent of Lady Hideko’s suffering and watches tears start to form in her lover’s eyes.

In that moment her mind’s made up; if this is the “knowledge” of patriarchy, then we don’t need it. We’re beyond it, and now that queerness has opened our eyes, there’s no going back. And so she went the route of Lee Edelmen. Destroying books is widely perceived as a crime against future generations, but “fuck... the Child in whose name we’re collectively terrorized” (Edelmen 29). The scene is silent except for Tamako’s barely-controlled emotions and the tearing of paper as she rips into the book she’s holding. The editing gives us a series of quick shots with erratic, shaky cinematography that emphasize the emotionality of the action. We also get brief shots of both the astoundment in Lady Hideko’s eyes and the determination in Tamako’s as she prepares to battle the knowledge of patriarchy to protect her girlfriend.

As Tamako storms off towards the imposing bookcases, she’s only a small figure in the mise-en-scène, and when she reaches her target, she’s at first able to do little more than throw the books harmlessly onto the floor. But by now a quiet, extradiegetic theme has also entered the scene, its combination of piano and low strings (likely double bass and cello) setting a dramatic mood that’s both resolute and emotional. It starts off so faint it scarcely registers in the audience’s periphery, but as it gradually crescendos to a pulsing forte, Tamako’s actions become more and more aggressive. We see her shred books and scrolls with her bare hands, rip into them with a knife, and eventually cast entire shelves to the floor and level display cases. Just like the force multiplier of women teaching each other how to build a female identity outside of patriarchy, she starts out slow, but she steadily increases her momentum and damage with all the inevitably of a mounting revolution.

The shots here come quickly and from different perspectives, offering a queer resistance to the smoother, less visually emotional narrative the audience is likely used to. Sometimes Park skips ahead through time, and other times, he does a quick cut that covers the space of scarcely a second, adding a further intentional disjointment to the moment. And through all of it, Lady Hideko follows Tamako, watching events unfold in emotional awe—until she decides to help. In a wide shot, we see her kneel down beside Tamako as she helps to dislodge a floor panel covering a small pool of water. The colorful books that Tamako has cast down are piled up around them, and in subsequent shots, Tamako sweeps them into the water with such force that it inspires Lady Hideko to truly fight back. With clear apprehension, she casts red dye onto the drowning books, finally breaking free from the notion that the patriarchy they referenced was an unchangeable part of her life. But once she’s rebelled in this small way, her confidence blossoms and she joins Tamako in stomping the books into the water, the red dye giving the teachings of patriarchy the illusion of bleeding out under a storm of remorseless blows from a queerness too long denied.

But Tamako realizes that there’s one more thing to be done to break the influence of this curated truth once and for all. Park gives us a close-up profile of Tamako’s lower body that tracks her on a path parallel to the one she’s walking. In the center of the shot, and thus of the audience’s attention, is the dull-gray edged rod she’s clutching in one hand as if it were a sword. As Tamako walks, Lady Hideko reenters the scene through an extradiegetic voiceover, referencing Tamako as “the savior who came to tear my life apart” even as the latter stops before her goal. The camera first zooms in on Lady Hideko before cutting to a floor shot that centers a familiar object. Through the camera, which is slightly canted upwards, we see Tamako raise her blade above her head, then bring it down, beheading in a single blow the metal snake that had once marked the boundaries of her knowledge.

“Truth, like queerness, [is] irreducibly linked to the ‘aberrant or atypical,’ to what chafes against ‘normalization’” (Edelman 6). This is the lesson that Uncle Kouzu, trapped in his hyper-curated world of regularity, never learned, as well as the reason why Tamako and Lady Hideko were not content simply to obtain the knowledge he’d been holding back to repress them. While that may have been the intent that initially motivated their search for agency, the search yielded a far more valuable result: a new way of representing their gender so powerful that it tore off the illusions of patriarchy, revealing it to be only a shadow of a greater verity that dwells beyond the comprehension of any misogynist. Thus, for these two women, queerness brought more than freedom. It brought them truth, both the truth of what’s important in the world and the truth of the agency they now hold over the representation of their genders and identities.

—

De Lauretis, Teresa. “The Technology of Gender.” In Technologies of Gender: Essays on Theory, 

Film, and Fiction, 1–30. Theories of Representation and Difference, edited by Teresa de 

Lauretis. Indiana University Press, 1987.

Edelman, Lee. “The Future is Kid Stuff.” In No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, 1–31. Duke University Press, 2004.

Park, Chan-wook, dir. The Handmaiden. 2016; Santa Monica, CA: Amazon Studios, 2016. DVD.