Queering Bodies: “Becoming-unrecognisable” in Wong Kar-Wai’s Happy Together

Abstract This paper is interested in the cinematic apparatus’s potential to produce affect which defamiliarises the visible presence of star-bodies in Wong Kar-wai’s Happy Together (chunguang zhaxie, 1997), thus invoking non-normative and new modes of thinking about queer identification and representation. By close reading the mise-en-scène of the two Iguazu falls sequences, the on-screen star bodies of Tony Leung and Leslie Cheung are defamiliarized when they produce Gilles Deleuze’s affect and “become-unrecognisable” as on-screen subjects. Through this, the encounters with the Iguazu Falls allow us to queer heteronormative and linear narrative time that is associated with (a movement towards) futurity. This inability to pass judgement, I argue, is the ethics of sexual desire which Happy Together proffers when we understand the body that queers and becomes unrecognisable through productive affective assemblages. Instead, we move through the transsensorial potentials for the cinematic assemblage to rethink modes of queering normativity and to redefine bodies in terms of plurality and multiplicity. To that end, this paper presents a new way of thinking about how film stars, familiar tourist spots and even a classic text like Happy Together may be defamiliarized through productions of affects, new-sensations, to provide more ways of revisiting and regarding the film anew.