Spectacle of Violence and the Beiqing Masculine: Post-War Structure of Feeling in Taiwan Pulp

Abstract

Taiwan Pulp, also known as the Taiwan “Social Realist film,” is a group of crime-related exploitation films produced from the late 1970s to mid-1980s in Taiwan that capitalizes on the growing consumerism, the global exploitation film mania, and social unrest that arose towards the end of the country’s martial law period. This article examines The First Error Step, aka Never Too Late to Repent, which detonated the Taiwan Pulp frenzy, and how it cinematized the multi-layered power relations in Cold War Taiwan—the legacy of Japanese colonial rule, the KMT’s authoritarian regime, and the nativist history of Taiwan’s islanders—by reinventing a place-based masculinity rooted in the pathos of sadness ( beiqing) adopted from the taiyupian tradition.