We now return to the beautiful in-car discussion between NJ and his son Yang-Yang that I wrote about in the first essay. This time, I want to take a step back from the content of the discussion and focus on the atmosphere instead.

It begins in the hallway of the apartment building, waiting for an elevator. Yang-Yang sees the neighbor Ms. Jiang waiting as well. She has her back to them, but Yang-Yang tries to peek around to get a look at her face.

When they get out of the elevator and start walking into the garage, NJ tells Yang-Yang that it was rude to look at Mrs. Jiang that way. Yang-Yang said he did so because he wanted to see why she was sad. NJ asks how did he know she’s sad and Yang-Yang says that he heard her in the argument the night before.

From here, in the car, father and son get into that discussion of perspectivism. And it’s obviously a wonderful demonstration of their relationship, very heartwarming in a way. But it’s not a perfect interaction.

Yang-Yang first makes the point about seeing only one side of a person and NJ uses this as an opportunity to sway the conversation towards his offering the camera. It’s a perspective on the conversation — and one that will be useful to Yang-Yang in the long-run — but not exactly what he had in mind.

Then Yang-Yang elaborates on how we only see one side of everything, we never really know everything that is going on with people. NJ doesn’t directly respond to this either, he marvels that Yang-Yang has a lot of questions this morning and changes the subject — what can we do this weekend to cheer mom up?

That shift in the conversation is tone deaf for a couple reasons. First, it doesn’t satisfy the question Yang-Yang raised, it ignores it without promise to return to it later. And second, it underscores the misunderstanding NJ has about his wife. Min-Min is not just sad in this moment, she’s distraught and adrift.

Conventionally, stories offer us protagonists and antagonists. Even when the ultimate message of the film is morally ambiguous, the ways stories progress requires the tension between characters trying to achieve something good and useful and some force preventing it. Plenty of contemporary filmmakers challenge the traditional structure — but Yang takes it a step further. He rejects the standard narrative tension even at the scene or beat level. Yang’s scenes unfold in an ambiguous fashion that we can see simultaneously as heartwarming but disconnected, vulnerable yet misunderstood. And this complexity does not give rise to failure, but to a kind of success — ultimately — that might not have been possible if the scene fit our narrative expectations.

NJ in these last two scenes is both succeeding and failing. He’s present in both and that counts for something. But he’s also, through his struggles, giving the people in his life the necessary space they need. He’s giving Min-Min the freedom to experience her spiritual crisis without a sense that her husband can somehow fix it. Even though he is offering lame ways the situations can be fixed, his failure is helpful to her, it helps her recognize that she must take this step alone.

It’s the same with Yang-Yang. His father is not going to explain the world to him — he’s only going to offer a camera. Because of this, Yang-Yang will have to figure things out for himself, and that’s vital to his personal growth.

Edward Yang wants us to think of every character in his film as being equally important — and wants them all to be considered ultimately good. We may question their actions and their motives, but we don’t question their sincerity and the necessity of their quests within the limited frame of the film’s time structure.

We do not see all of these characters across a lifetime. We are seeing how one family event — the sickness of the family matriarch — affects them in completely unique ways.

People are complicated. And what Edward Yang is telling us is that the hard work of life is to sit in the discomfort caused by that complication. No one is as good as they seem to be when we idealize them, and neither are they as broken as we believe when we devalue them.

To find the kind of wisdom about the world that Yang-Yang seeks, we need to not only understand that there are competing perspectives, but we need to accept all of these perspectives as true, even when they contradict.