Is It The Idea Of It?

Photo by Florian Wehde on Unsplash

In one of the final scenes of the 1994 movie, ChungKing Express, the character “Cop 663” is at a Hong Kong bar called California, waiting for Faye, a girl he met while she’s been working at her cousin’s takeaway shop. 

He’s been recovering from a break up and Faye, who’s trying to figure out who she is and what she wants in life, becomes enamored with him as he stops by every night for something to eat or drink. It's an unspoken (and somewhat strange) flirtation, until he finally asks her out on a date, asking her to meet him at California at 8 pm the next night, to which she agrees. 

But she never shows up. Instead, she leaves Hong Kong to find herself in the real California (and beyond).

I watched this movie (the first time) back in 1995 and then again, a few nights ago. I’ve often wondered why, after her obsession with him, Faye doesn’t turn up for their date, leaving him to deal with another heartbreak just as he’d learnt to deal with his first one. After all, she was the one who sought him out as he ate lunch at nearby stalls, who obsessed over his things when she broke into his flat day after day (you have to watch it to understand this). 

The explanation I tend to come back to is that she was searching for herself, trying to figure out who she was and what she wanted, in the midst of the incessant noise of a claustrophobic, everyday urban life, and, in Cop 663, saw an opportunity to escape her humdrum existence, to feel, to emote, and to capture an experience of humanity that she felt was missing.  

In other words, I think, at the end of the day, she was more obsessed with the idea of a relationship with Cop 663, than an actual relationship with him. Cop 663 represented an escape, a break from her current reality, a change. And when the rubber met the road (i.e. the date at 8 pm the next night at California), she realized that wasn’t what she really wanted, and that she needed to leave and really go find herself. 

I think that’s something we’ve all grappled with - the obsession with the idea of something as opposed to the thing itself. Maybe not (hopefully not!) in the obsessive (fairly creepy but, in the context of the movie, strangely acceptable) way that Faye did, but we’ve grappled with such things nonetheless. 

It could be through what we think we really want to do as a vocation, how we’d like to look and dress, or the people we want to be with. We idealize and romanticize the greener grass in all of these ‘other’ areas of our lives. Sometimes appropriately, but often without real underlying thought and consideration for what we’re truly after. 

That is, we think it’s one thing - and that it will result in a desired end state - when it’s really something else, possibly a diversion, or a displacement of what we’re really looking for, or think we want. The point, in those situations, is that it’s not this, and getting away from this, feels like the most important thing in the world to us at that point in time.

Except that it’s quite possibly not, and that it won’t solve all of our problems, not in the way we think it might anyway. 

And that perhaps the answer isn’t this or that - our current job versus that ideal job, our current mate versus that seemingly perfect person over there. 

Rather, it’s that we need to be clear as to what’s really missing and what we need to do to find it. Because the answer might well be something or somewhere else. 

But it might also be much closer to home than we think.