Young Kaige Is Really Hurt: Does Director Chen Kaige Have PTSD?

This episode, I want to talk about a very controversial director—Chen Kaige.

My guess is that Director Chen Kaige may have post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Looking at him through the lens of PTSD makes it surprisingly easy to explain some of his more controversial behavior, as well as many distinctive features of his films. That’s what I want to talk about today.

The Hurt Young Man

The reason I suspect that Director Chen Kaige may have PTSD is that most of Chen’s work seems to conceal a shared theme: a young man experiences something deeply traumatic, and as a result he is badly hurt, heartbroken, and disillusioned.

In Legend of the Demon Cat, young Bailong’s goddess, Yang Guifei, dies a gruesome death, leaving the boy hurt and disillusioned;

In Together with You, young Liu Xiaochun discovers that the man he thought was his father isn’t his biological father, leaving him hurt and disillusioned;

In Saving General Yang, young Zhao Wu also discovers that the man he thought was his father isn’t his biological father, leaving him hurt and disillusioned;

In The Promise, young Wuhuan is tricked out of his steamed bun, leaving him hurt and disillusioned. He becomes psychologically warped, eventually setting off a bloody case in a circular-loop amusement park.

Besides these “real young men,” Chen Kaige’s work contains quite a few characters who are “oversized young men”: adults in age who retain a boyish nature—in other words, big boys who are simple-minded (childlike), innocent, and convinced that the world is beautiful. The fates of these young men in quotation marks follow the same pattern, too.

In Caught in the Web, the goddess of the oversized young man Yang Shoucheng, Ye Lanqiu, dies a gruesome death, leaving him hurt and disillusioned;

In Forever Enthralled, the oversized young man Qiu Rubai discovers that his male idol, Mei Lanfang, has lost his way, leaving him hurt and disillusioned;

In Farewell My Concubine, the oversized young man Cheng Dieyi discovers that his male idol, Duan Xiaolou, has lost his way, leaving him hurt and disillusioned;

Seen this way, “a young man gets badly hurt” is probably the greatest common denominator in Chen Kaige’s work.

So it’s hard not to make a connection: Director Chen Kaige seems to be mired in some traumatic experiences he went through as a young man. Perhaps he never really emerged from those traumas, and keeps reenacting them in his work, over and over again. The films I just mentioned all look like a kind of commemoration of the traumas Chen himself once experienced.

Being repeatedly mired in traumatic experiences and unable to pull yourself out of them does sound a lot like PTSD.

Half a Good Movie

From the perspective of PTSD, some of Director Chen Kaige’s strange behavior suddenly becomes quite easy to explain.

For example, one feature of PTSD is “compulsion”: like someone with obsessive-compulsive disorder, a patient repeatedly recalls the traumatic experience, and cannot control these memories and acts of remembrance through sheer willpower. This might explain why the plot of The Promise falls apart so spectacularly. My guess is that, while building the screenplay, Director Kaige compulsively insisted on constructing the story around a young man experiencing trauma. But the screenwriting team, lacking experience with fantasy, had no way to come up with a sufficiently plausible reason for the boy’s trauma in such a purely imaginary setting. And so it collapsed into “The Bloody Case of One Steamed Bun.”

Another feature of PTSD is that it can “hijack” you. During an episode, the patient’s emotions are completely hijacked by memories of the trauma, leaving them sunk in sadness and depression with no way out. This might explain why Chen Kaige is always making “half a good movie.” The first halves of Legend of the Demon Cat, Saving General Yang, and Forever Enthralled are all excellent films when taken on their own—in fact, I’m very fond of the first half of Legend of the Demon Cat. But without exception, these movies collapse into a complete mess in the second half.

The simplest explanation for this split is that, in the first-half plots of these films, the young man just happens not to have encountered his trauma yet. In this half, where trauma is absent, Director Chen can keep a certain distance from the story and handle the plot with the restraint of a storyteller. But in the second half, once the young man in the story encounters trauma, Chen seems to transform from a narrator into the person who lived through it himself. From that point on, he seems to merge completely with his characters, sinking into the trauma alongside them. At that point, he can no longer maintain any distance, and he loses all restraint in handling the plot, throwing his entire arsenal into frantically dramatizing the young man’s heartbreak and disillusionment.

Legend of the Demon Cat is a classic example of this shift in mindset. In the first half, Chen is a storyteller, using remarkably deft pacing to tell a suspenseful detective story. But in the second half, he turns into a heartbroken young man, throws the narrative pacing out the window, and does nothing but lick his wounds at the screen.

Another important feature of PTSD is that, for many patients, the traumatic experience is a major event that changes the course of their entire lives. It carries enormous weight in their minds, so naturally they treat and think about it with extreme seriousness. Any mockery or satire directed at trauma is therefore a serious attack and injury from the patient’s point of view. This might explain why Director Chen Kaige is always so combative toward people who criticize or poke fun at his work, and why he resorts to extreme measures to respond—for example, suing Hu Ge, the creator of The Bloody Case of One Steamed Bun, or ordering an uploader on Bilibili who mocked his work to take down the relevant video. These somewhat extreme actions may simply come from the fact that, in the eyes of someone with PTSD, their own traumatic experience is absolutely not to be profaned.

What Doesn’t Kill You May Give You More “Inhibitory Control”

Many people have experienced trauma. Some are crushed by it and develop PTSD. But for others, the opposite happens: not only do they recover quickly after trauma, their mental health ends up better than it was before the blow. This is what is known as post-traumatic growth. Nietzsche’s famous line, “What doesn’t kill me makes me stronger,” is talking about post-traumatic growth.

So why does Director Chen Kaige seem to have fallen into PTSD, instead of gaining post-traumatic growth?

It may have something to do with an important human quality—our ability to control impulses.

In a 2018 study, psychologists found through an experiment that people who had experienced post-traumatic growth were better at inhibiting their knee-jerk responses. They were able to control their impulsive reactions effectively. For example, when deliberately told to answer questions backward—to say “no” when the answer was “yes”—people who had experienced post-traumatic growth could complete the task with ease.

This study hints at one possible mechanism behind post-traumatic growth: after experiencing trauma, some people may work hard to suppress the impulse to recall it. That effort to control their impulses has the effect of mental training, teaching them to control their own minds more freely. As a result, their mental state is not damaged by trauma; instead, it improves in some way, even surpassing where it was before the trauma. That is how post-traumatic growth emerges.

This inference also suggests that the reason people respond so differently after trauma may be that their ability to control impulses was already high in some and low in others. Those with stronger impulse control may be more likely to activate post-traumatic growth after trauma, while those with weaker impulse control are more likely to fall into a stress disorder.

Seen this way, the reason Director Chen Kaige seems to have fallen into PTSD may be that he belongs to the kind of person who was already relatively short on impulse control. He may not be very good at suppressing his impulses. And this, in turn, seems to be corroborated by Chen’s attacks on his critics and by the fact that he keeps making “half a good movie.” Director Kaige seems to have a hard time controlling his emotional outbursts, and that may well be a psychological trait that makes him especially vulnerable to PTSD.

Young Kaige

Having analyzed Chen’s possible tendency toward PTSD and why he may be vulnerable to it, normal narrative logic would dictate that the next thing I analyze—also the final and most important question—is this: what trauma did Director Chen Kaige experience as a young man?

But this most important question is one I don’t need to answer, because Chen himself provided the official answer long ago. That answer is Chen Kaige’s essay memoir A Young Kaige (Shaonian Kaige). If you’re curious about what Chen went through as a boy, read the book; I won’t retell it here.

And please forgive me for brushing past this answer so casually (just consider me possessed by Director Kaige, making a video that’s only half-way decent). All I want to say is that A Young Kaige (Shaonian Kaige) is one of the most astonishing collections of essays I’ve ever read.

In fact, it was precisely because I read A Young Kaige (Shaonian Kaige) that I thought of all those hurt young men in Chen Kaige’s films, which led to the speculations and analysis above. I titled today’s video “Young Kaige Is Really Hurt” because I originally wanted to tease Director Chen Kaige a little. But once I thought of the book A Young Kaige (Shaonian Kaige), I felt I wasn’t entitled to tease him. Because that book exists, no matter how many terrible movies Director Kaige makes, even if he makes another The Promise, I will always retain a measure of respect for him.

On the screen, Kaige’s young men are badly hurt, and their pain can sometimes be so melodramatic that it’s a little funny. But in real life, the pain of young Kaige should not be laughed at.

Afterword

All right, I’ll leave my speculation about Director Chen Kaige’s mental state there for now. Let me stress that all of this is speculation, not a psychological diagnosis in any clinical sense. If I’ve offended anyone, I hope Director Kaige will forgive me. The scientific knowledge and research information mentioned above are all included in the text description below the video, for anyone who wants to learn more. I’m Zhichao Wei, committed to using psychology to hitchhike across the entire world. See you next time.