After Yang, and encounters with the Other
What is it that we know of the Other?
The Other seems complete to us, appears whole. The Other’s warmth appears to grant us the possibility of a safe place to rest, yet its latent threat renders total trust, total relaxation in its company, perpetually out of reach.
The slippage between the other as object – something that can be fully known – and the Other as a vessel of oppositional secrecy – a subject – lies at the heart of After Yang.
The plot; the robotic sibling of a tea seller’s daughter becomes nonfunctional, sending the adoptive father in search of someone to fix him. We soon find out the son was harbouring prototype spyware – outlawed due to concerns for human privacy – by which his hardware recorded a moment each day that had triggered something within him.
At one point, an academic museum worker with designs on these recordings remarks that what the robot records reveals precisely what was memorable to that robot; it offers a glimpse into its psychological needs and desires.
Later, reviewing some of these memories through an ocular device, the father discovers a life far beyond what he knew this son to have been capable of experiencing. These memories reconstruct furtive glances, moments of self recognition, feelings of lust and longing. Through prying into these private memories, the father is able to recognise his son as a true individual for the first time; full of warmth and love, but also secrecy. But to have stumbled into knowing this Other, the father has trespassed its privacy, and its right to interiority, concealment, and private experience.
The central couple ponder the possibility that this robot sibling, who they treated as a second class domestic worker and tutor for their child, may have possessed an authentic humanity after all.
A scene between the mother and the robot son. “Is dishonesty a choice you can make?” she asks. “I’m not sure,” he replies, in the soothing tones of home AI, designed to soothe any operational friction or resistance. The status of the robot’s humanity – its potential to harbour an oppositional force – dances around the edges of the conversation.
Throughout the film the family regularly appear to each other as holograms, or as disembodied voices on a phone call. Communication is an act of mediation. Yet to appear to another person at all is always to be mediated through that other’s own consciousness.
A flashback to a scene between the father and the son. “Why are you so interested in tea,” the son asks his tea-seller father . “I saw a documentary about it,” the father replies, “where a German man claimed he can taste a damp forest morning within it.” The father and robotic son pour themselves a mug. The son express his wish for a greater experience of the tea than his condition allows. The father reluctantly admits he too is not sure he can taste the forest. The thesis of the film lies here; one thing is always the other, existing in a mercurial state between what we know it to be, what it might once have been in a prior time, and what it might yet become.
Is an ending really a beginning, the mother ponders, or rather, must an ending offer a new beginning for us to be able to access it? Perhaps, suggests the robot, the possibility of a true end provides both comfort and meaning to the something we currently have.
But have any of these characters truly experienced an ending, with its attendant promise of rupture and rebirth, or are they still stuck in a present moment that is continuous with the past? The protagonists of the film are moving endlessly forward, yet their futures are informed almost entirely by their backward glances. Traces of the robot’s zip-filed memories are revealed to have guided he actions of his final days. The father looks back over these memories, trying to feel closer to his son, all the while his son’s life is slipping further from grasp. Both long to repeat - or perhaps to right - past failures, and this guides them through their present.
The film is beautifully designed, soft and warm; all plants and exposed concrete and soft birchwood. But the tactility and snug surroundings of the film’s domestic idyll conceal a cynicism in their performance of bourgeoisie authenticity. The reassurance they hold - to be authentic, to be natural, to be apparently real, reveals the precarity of the homeowners’ sense of self, and longing to overcome their alienation. These beautiful objects provide a guarantee of their trustworthiness. The display their materials and thus can be trusted to be objects. The Otherness of their robot son, who they owned in life, and whose memories they own in death, upset this naturalised order between the object and the subject.
After Yang ends with a jarring final scene, which may hold the key to everything, or perhaps nothing at all; except perhaps a reminder that life’s great mysteries, the meaning of life and the people that fill it, always remains a little out of reach.
