Goodbye, Darling was an example of seventies "Healthy Realism" but with an unprecedented frankness. It starts with the ingenuous moral, "People like Ah-lang are a thing of the past, just like pedicabs and illegal buildings." If the film tries not to indulge Ah-lang with a single redeeming quality, he is a compelling figure nonetheless: a symbol of blind, frustrated protest against a society in which he has no place. In his obstinate truculence lies a certain dignity, that of a wild beast. Is he to blame if he is not domesticable? If his habitat is disappearing along with the pedicabs and illegal buildings of a modernizing Taiwan? Considering the paternalistic era in which it was produced, the bleak, sweaty realism of this film stands in such sharp contrast to its evidently phony premises and moral that one suspects it is being deliberately subversive. While director Pai Ching-jui was certainly no revolutionary, the film set a precedent for the "New Cinema" that was to emerge at the end of the decade.