Election Reactions — Jia Zhangke's "The World" — The 1897 Snowball Fight
Steve Kornacki needs a nap...
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Now Showing: The World (Shijie, 2004)
Chinese director Jia Zhangke tackles a massive, yet paradoxically small, subject in his 2004 film The World (Shijie). The story follows the lives of the employees of a suburban Beijing theme park which boasts small scale reproductions of global destinations ranging from the Eiffel Tower to the Pyramids. Shot on location in the real-world Beijing World Park, the film simultaneously follows the daily toil and struggles of the performers and security guards in the park while commenting on impacts of globalization and urbanization on China in the late 20th and early 21st century.
The World centers on Tao (played by Tao Zhao who stars in many of Jia’s films), a dancer in the various “national” performances in the park, and Taisheng (Taishen Cheng), a security guard who moonlights as a crony of a small-time gangster. Both hail from a small, rural town and came to Beijing as part of a mass migration of young people seeking better opportunities away from their familiar farms. The two are in a fraught relationship. Tao is dubious about Taisheng’s intentions, and indeed, he almost cheats with the owner of a factory that produces knock-off leather goods, until she gets a visa and is able to travel to France to live with her estranged husband who immigrated there (illegally it is implied) a decade prior. Toa’s only real friend is a Russian woman who was trafficked into China, initially as a performer in the park, and later as a prostitute at a karaoke club.
The story takes its time to develop, and most of it takes place within the confines of the park, with its rundown imitations of famous global sites and its sad, rickety monorail. None of the employees—nor the tourists even—have ever been to any of the real places portrayed in the park. Rather, it becomes a sort of alternate reality for them. One of the security guards shows-off a pond-bound model of Manhattan which still boasts the Twin Towers. He proclaims, proudly, while New York City’s buildings were destroyed in 2001, The World still has the World Trade Center.
Jia is a deeply political filmmaker, beginning his career on the Chinese government’s blacklist. Thanks to a slow liberalization in the film industry, The World was his first feature made with the approval of the government and the first to actually screen in Chinese theaters. There’s also a sense that the low-grade gangster plot is a way of subtly veiling the director’s neo-realist approach to talking about poverty and globalization in modern China. The riches of China’s expansion, and even something as small as a passport, are always just out of reach of the employees in the park. Yet every time one of them begins to gain an emotional connection, the forces of globalism seem to sever it. From the factory owner finally going to France to Tao’s ex-boyfriend getting a job in Mongolia, the film is filled with departures, even as the protagonists seem frozen in place.
Jia’s visual and sonic style is unmistakable and stunning in its ability to wash over the viewer, but he adds another unusual immersive technique in The World. Key events throughout the film are punctuated by computer animated cutaways intended to illustrate the unspeakable—or incomprehensible—emotions the characters experience. These interludes lend the film a rhythmic quality while underlying the centrality of artifice in the modern era—from the theme park to text messages to the very concept of “globalism” itself. Watching The World almost 15 years after its initial release, when the U.S. and China are mired in renewed debates over free trade, immigration and globalism wrought large, a contemporary audience may similarly experience a feeling of being frozen in place. The world can be reduced to the size of a theme park, but our lives paradoxically shrink down to scale as well, in ways that are almost impossible to recognize at the time.
The World is streaming on Criterion.
Three 2020 Election Reactions
There’s going to be a lot of ink spilled about the 2020 presidential election in the weeks to come, and we may only be at the beginning of an interminable legal battle by the Trump campaign against reality and numbers. However, there are a three key takeaways that I think it will be important to remember as we enter what may be a new—and unpredictable—political era.
It’s quite possible the Trump presidency was basically a long con for him to get his own cable network or block on Fox News. Indeed, Jared Kushner has reportedly been promoting the idea of a Trump-branded network for months, an idea which he first floated as far back as 2016. It makes sense. Trump has always fundamentally been little more than a narcissist, a carnival barker, and a product of cable TV, and there seems to be a clear pathway for him from the White House to the studio. Fox may not want him at this point, but with ranks of media savvy supporters ranging from Steve Bannon to Alex Jones, Trump should have no problem finding a platform and an audience. If this is indeed what happens, he could be a gadfly for years to come, promoting new politicians and conspiracy theories and enflaming his followers on a daily basis. Point is, this is a guy who tends to fall upwards when he loses, so he’s probably not going anywhere unless the loan sharks start circling.
If he prevails over Trump, the honeymoon period for Joe Biden may be short, short, short. Biden’s been dealt a terrible starting hand by the Trump administration, and the left wing of the Democratic party is restive, despite a resent detente with the center. They’re not looking for quiet policy wins or compromises either. Biden is a long-time bipartisan deal-maker, and the pressure on the likely President-elect to promote progressive policies will be acute, even as he embarks on a process of national healing. It’s quite possible that the left flank of the party may swiftly turn on him for any perceived missteps—and never be happy with any compromise—on everything from health care to jobs to the environment. If this is the case, expect gridlock in Washington, and not just because of the GOP. If he’s ultimately elected, Biden will have to move carefully, seek to promote compromise within his party as well as across the aisle, and be sure of his allies in Congress before launching major policy initiatives.
The dominant mode of political thought will be conspiracy theories going forward. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Republican QAnon conspiracy theorist, won a seat in Congress, and now that Trump, Giuliani and the rest of their cronies are promoting the idea of a stolen election, there’s going to be more fuel for the “deep state” frenzy. Dismissing this mode of thinking as pure craziness—even though it is—will be a perilous strategy. It’s incumbent on elected officials, journalists and political activists to seek to understand why so many people are drawn to this sort of thinking for there to be any hope of inoculating against it. No matter what, it’s going to be key to put facts first and avoid being drawn into arguments with no basis in reality.
All of that being said, things are looking up in the USA! There have been no major episodes of political violence, it seems like a Biden presidency is in the offing, and we had record voter turnout, which is always a good thing. The more voters are engaged, the more responsive the government will have to be—at least in theory—and that’s the whole point of democracy. So three cheers to the election! Now, if only we could get the counting over with and pop the champagne already.
Reading List:
There’s a great piece of film criticism in The Times about the rise of the “supercop” in film in the 1970s. Well worth a read.
Also in The Times (killing it this week on their film criticism) is a look at a colorized, smoothed Lumière Brother’s clip of an 1897 French snowball fight. Perplexingly, the author didn’t include the video in the article, so here it is with some soothing jazz thrown over the originally silent film.