Politics & Power Quote by Ang Lee

Ang Lee’s pull toward the American West isn’t tourism; it’s an admission that landscape can function like a camera trick. “Romantic” here doesn’t mean hearts and flowers. It means a place preloaded with myth, a genre you can step into. The West is one of America’s most aggressively marketed emotions: freedom, danger, reinvention, moral clarity. Lee’s phrasing makes that attraction feel almost suspiciously clean, as if he’s naming the hook before we notice the line.

“The desert, the empty space” is where the subtext lives. Emptiness isn’t neutral; it’s a canvas that makes small gestures look monumental. In film, negative space is narrative pressure. A lone figure against a flat horizon reads as courage or loneliness before they even speak. The “drama” he mentions is partly meteorological - light, wind, distance - but it’s also cultural: the West as a stage that amplifies conflict into legend.

Context matters because Lee is an outsider-insider, a Taiwanese-born director who’s repeatedly taken “American” stories and found their seams. When he approaches the West (most famously in Brokeback Mountain), the romance becomes a tool to expose what the myth refuses to show: repression, class constraint, emotional illiteracy. He’s attracted to the West because it promises epic simplicity, then he uses that promise to make the complications hurt more. The romance is the bait; the empty space is where the truth echoes.