Globalization’s bottom: Subtitle and switch in Wang Yu-Lin’s Taiwanese dialect films

A large number of contemporary Taiwan films deploy, principally, the Taiwanese dialect (Minnan yu or southern Fujianese) in their multilingual presentation of the island. These Taiwanese-speaking films draw consciously and anti-hegemonically from Taiwan’s subculture and folkways in the countryside, distancing themselves from urban, metropolitan conditions. For instance, Wang Yu-Lin’s Seven Days in Heaven (2010) is a black comedy structured on Taoist funeral services, night market bazaars and the mourning of the father. His Flying Dragon, Dancing Phoenix (2012) is Taiwanese go-ah-hi (folk opera) modernized, yet still based on traditional transvestite dramaturgy. Whereas Taiwanese dialect films present the dizzyingly chaotic, syncretic local palimpsest, the circulation into global cinema flattens and simplifies these films into a single rolling line of English subtitle at the bottom of the screen, about to sink into subconsciousness. Such flattening destroys Taiwanese dialect film’s local conditions, in particular multilinguality that constitutes the islander’s very identity, one that switches spontaneously and restlessly among Taiwanese, Mandarin, Hakanese, aboriginal languages, Japanese and English, the latter four often in the form of popular Nipponized-sinologized words and phrases. Taiwan becomes the codeword for switch on account of its colonial legacy and multiracial, entrepreneurial reality. Its magic lies in rhetorical sleight of hand, rhetorical in part because the island is so trapped politically. This article proceeds to analyse code-switching on the soundtrack and the accompanied subtitles in Wang’s films.