“Yes, his existence mattered.”: Emotional Resonance in Kogonada’s After Yang

Kishore Kalaichalvan ruminates on Kogonada’s film After Yang (2021), about a family living in a futuristic America that is faced with love and loss after their AI helper breaks down.

Kogonada’s 2021 science-fiction film After Yang acts as a meditation on loss, care and different familial connections. Set in a futuristic America, the film follows a nuclear family coming to terms with their “technosapien”, the eponymous Yang (played by Justin H. Min), malfunctioning beyond repair. Although Jake and Kyra (played by Colin Farrell and Jodie-Turner Smith) initially bought Yang to educate their young adopted daughter Mika (played by Malea Emma Tjandrawidjaja) on her Chinese heritage, he inadvertently becomes her primary care figure. While each family member reacts to his loss in different ways, we see the most radical shift in terms of an emotional connection – i.e., a sense of care one would have for a person with whom they have an established relationship – in Jake. He goes from treating Yang as a means to connect his daughter with her heritage and care for her, to moving towards a semblance of understanding Yang’s experience and wanting to learn more about him, eventually grieving him. Although the film does not explicitly engage with race, the film resists techno-Orientalist tropes of East Asians as intelligent but unthinking drones by showing tender moments between Yang – an android who looks East Asian – and the rest of the family. Kogonada’s use of montage and encirclement as narrative strategies places Jake in a sympathetic position, transforming his emotional relationship with Yang, and consequently his family, through loss.

When Jake finds out that a part of Yang’s body, which he had initially thought was spyware, was in fact a “memory bank” that allowed him to store short instances which he considered memorable, he decides to take a look through it. Through Jake’s perspective, we see an uninterrupted series of shots from Yang’s time with the family since Mika’s infancy to early childhood. The roughly two-minute sequence interlaces shots of interactions between the family members with shots of them alone, shots of nature and spaces within the family’s house. Soft lighting is used in the shots which, together with the extradiegetic piano score, lend the sequence a sense of tenderness. The sequence resonates with Soviet film director and screenwriter Vsevolod Pudovkin’s notion of montage as “a compulsory and deliberate guidance of the thoughts and associations of the spectator” (Pudovkin 10), where seemingly disparate images are laid in sequence to push a spectator into interpreting them in a specific way. The shots initially appear unrelated to one another, where Yang – as an android – could be read as an emotionally detached observer of his surroundings. However, in sequence, along with the earlier disclosure that these were instances Yang considered “memorable,” their significance is heightened. Both the spectator and Jake are guided into seeing these shots as a collection of moments, places, and people important enough to Yang to store within a tangible part of him.

The sequence merges the spectator’s and Jake’s eyelines, such that both see the family through Yang’s perspective. Robert Stam and Louise Spence’s concept of encirclement comes to mind here, where filmic point-of-view dictates who spectators sympathise with (Stam and Spence 759). How and where the spectator is positioned to view the action of a film determines whom they identify with, and thus whose values or goals they might favour. Encirclement manifests for the spectator and Jake in the sequence such that they see through Yang’s perspective, inadvertently identifying with him and trying to piece together meaning out of the moments we have been told he considered important. Leo Kim argues that Kogonada risks using Yang’s body as an ‘essence-less Asian body’ for Jake, a White man, to step into, but instead “uses the idea of a white man stepping into an Asian body to place the audience face to face with Yang’s delicate sensitivity, his unspoken histories, and ultimately, his impenetrable complexity” (Kim). Instead of stepping into Yang’s perspective to know and possess Yang’s body as an Other – a common trope in other science-fiction films – Jake instead bears witness to Yang’s previously inaccessible existence. More significantly, one of the final shots in the sequence before Mika snaps him back to the present is of her and Yang looking at him through a window in the house, which elicits a sense of both physical and emotional distance between Jake and the pair. Jake faces two realisations after accessing the memory bank: one, that Yang, despite being non-human, did have something akin to emotion that compelled him to store specific memories. Second, Jake as a father had been unable to look at his family with the same level of tenderness that Yang – a being he had considered a simple tool – was able to.

This is not the first time the spectator sees through Yang’s perspective, though; the film’s opening shot where Yang fiddles with a camera offscreen for a family portrait foreshadows the perspective positioning we later experience. A similar shot of the family posing for the photo, without Yang, returns later in the film as an image in his memory bank. While featuring the same subject matter, the two shots are composed differently: where the first shot remains unbalanced with some negative space to the right until Yang joins the rest of the family; the second shot, from Yang’s memory bank, is balanced, with Jake, Kyra and Mika occupying the centre of the frame. This suggests that Yang saw himself as an outsider within the family – in his perspective, his presence was disrupting the already-present balance in the family; when in reality, it was more unbalanced without him. This pulls the spectator and Jake into a more sympathetic view of Yang in the wake of his malfunction, as we read the way he saw himself in relation to the family.

Two flashback sequences in the film also highlight Jake’s changing emotional relationship with Yang. The first, intercut with shots of Jake in the present, shows the moment the family portrait was taken. Where the memory bank sequence temporarily encircles the spectator into Yang’s point of view, the flashbacks more explicitly place them into Jake’s perspective as he investigates Yang’s past. While the dialogue and action from the rest of the family are broken into fragments, the shots that come with unified sound and video are of Yang looking at the family from a distance away with the camera. As Yang in the past hesitates before smiling to himself and joining the family, the audience and Jake realise in the present that Yang was capturing an image of the family for his memory bank. Adriana Gordejuela points out that while flashbacks compress the gap in time between the past and present of a narrative, they sometimes allow the past and present to “co-occur, as when the narrator’s voice coming from the present is heard while images of past events are shown […] or, conversely, when an auditory flashback intrudes into the present” (Gordejuela 135). This rupture between past and present is observed in dialogue from the past bleeding into the present before the film’s discourse switches to when Yang was alive, or when dialogue brings characters out of reminiscence into the present. The relationship between the fragmentary cuts between past and present, and the two time-frames colliding with each other, aligns with another Soviet film director and screenwriter, Sergei Eisenstein’s notion of montage as a space of dynamic conflict, which he referred to as ‘synergy’ (Eisenstein 19), where “the collision of two factors gives rise to an idea,” and where conflict generates new meaning. The flashback itself is largely composed of fragmented shots and disjointed audio and video, with clips where the characters are speaking but with no audible dialogue. Some of the lines are repeated, like Kyra affectionately singing to Mika and observing Yang’s love for the camera. The conflict between the rest of the family’s apparent incoherence and the clarity in Yang’s presence heightens the significance of the moment for both the spectator and Jake. Meanwhile, the contrast between the hard outdoor lighting in the flashback rapidly cut with the dim lighting of the house further highlights the disjunction between the past and present – the latter of which has an air of grief – as Jake looks away from the photograph with a delayed understanding of Yang’s interiority.

The second, lengthier, flashback starts as Jake brews tea in the present, looking back at a moment when he and Yang discussed tea. Although the lack of diegetic music, both characters speaking in hushed tones, and the kitchen’s dim top-down lighting enhance the conversation’s meditative quality, the scene highlights the disjunction between them as Jake and Yang are never placed at eye level with each other. Jake is constantly positioned to look down at Yang, while Yang is largely out of focus or has his face obscured. This use of mise en scène to sporadically obscure Yang, while Jake remains in focus every time he speaks, suggests a subconscious hierarchisation; Jake remains the focus of his retrospect, while Yang occupies the periphery. The flashback sequences employ three-dimensional audio editing, such that lines of dialogue seem to come from behind or beside the camera’s perspective, away from where the characters uttering the lines are positioned in relation to the camera. Sound editor Kevin Bolen suggests a “risk of distraction applies for critical narrative dialogue when mixers are tempted to pan characters’ dialogue behind the camera, especially during perspective changes during conversations,” (Bolen 277). However, three-dimensional audio in the flashbacks makes them simultaneously dreamlike and unsettling, directing the spectator’s attention to the scene’s action – Jake assessing Yang in the past, and reassessing him in the present. The conflict between and within the various shots in the flashback in terms of framing and audio intensify the division between Jake and Yang, despite the scene ostensibly showing a rare moment of almost-familial intimacy between the two. The flashback ends with Yang expressing, to Jake’s surprise, his desire to experience life the way humans do, as opposed to relying on pre-uploaded facts about tea in China. Again, the dissonance between the pair manifests in how each being accesses the world around them, as Jake had an organic experience with tea while Yang relied on ‘inorganic’ data. In returning to the present, spectators witness how Jake’s understanding of, and subsequently emotional connection with, Yang transforms over the course of the film.

As seen through the use of encirclement and montage as narrative strategies in After Yang, Jake’s perception of Yang radically changes from viewing him as a mere tool, useful only as an educational and caregiving figure for his daughter, to seeing him as a being with a rich inner life that he barely scratched the surface of. Flashbacks also inform the spectator of how Jake’s changed understanding of Yang alters his perception of earlier events in the narrative and how previous interactions continue to alter his perception and memory of Yang. Overall, this facilitates a process of coming to terms with loss not just for Jake, but for the rest of the family, where they are able to remember him together. Kogonada, in framing After Yang as a resistance against orientalist and white-saviour tropes in science-fiction films, says:

“[Jake] was the one who was lost and disconnected, and it was going to be Yang who was fixing and saving the father.”

(qtd. in Kim)

The film shows how grief and memory can alter present experiences and relationships which constellate with one another. As such, it presents the spectator with the possibility of seeing the potential for emotional depth within another being, even where they might presume there is none, by trying to assume the latter’s perspective. It is ultimately perspective, and the ability to look through another’s ‘eyes’ before looking back at one’s own memories, which enriches the film as a long, although fragmented and multifaceted, look at a singular life.